In Memoriam

As I gaze out my window at the clear blue sky on this lovely Memorial Day, my thoughts drift to my father. Seventy years ago, at the age of 17, he enlisted in the army. He volunteered because he believed that his country, which had been attacked at Pearl Harbor a few months earlier, was fighting a just war. He lied about his age. If a young man wasn't 18 yet, he had to have parental consent to enlist. My dad didn't know if his mother would object, and he knew it was easier to obtain forgiveness than permission.

He served in the Army Air Corps as a tailgunner. He was shot down twice behind enemy lines and was awarded a purple heart. Yet it was difficult to get him to talk about his wartime experiences. I thought maybe it was because he had been "shellshocked" - the old term for what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) - but I never quite figured out if that was so. I'm inclined to think it was really because, like so many others of his generation, he was just doing what he knew had to be done.

Many years ago I came across a lithograph of a scene from an air attack on the Romanian oil fields at Ploiești. It was in a box of old stuff of his, and I thought I remembered that it had once briefly been hung on a wall in his apartment. I asked him about it. I wanted to know if he had been part of that raid. He said he had, and he made it sound like it was no big deal. I thought maybe it was, because someone had thought it was important enough to make a very striking print of this scene of bombers in the sky over an oil refinery in flames. So I looked it up.

It was part of Operation Tidal Wave. It really was a big deal, from what I could tell. The Allies wanted to disrupt Axis oil supplies. More than fifty Allied aircraft were lost, and more than 600 servicemen were killed. Many years later I read Daniel Yergin's book, The Prize, and I learned much more about how important oil was as a strategic part of World War II. The only thing my dad would say about Ploiești was that the damage to the refineries was repaired in a matter of months after the raids, but maybe it gave the Soviets some valuable time to strengthen their forces in anticipation of a German invasion.

So much has been written about "The Greatest Generation," as Tom Brokaw called them in the title of his 1998 book. He characterized these Americans, the ones who had come of age during the Great Depression and fought WWII to make the world safe for democracy, as a generation willing to make sacrifices for the sake of their country and its ideals and for the future of the Free World. They did not do it for glory or because they wanted to be remembered with reverence. They did it because it was the right thing and because it had to be done.

So they went to war. Or they stayed home and worked in the factories to supply materials for the war. They endured shortages and rationing of things we take for granted, from gasoline to foodstuffs. If they ever complained, I was never able to find anyone of that generation who recalled hearing it.

I remember my high school history teacher, who had not been physically fit to serve, talking about how parents of the young men in his classes gave him gas ration coupons because they were impressed with his devotion to his students. (They knew he was courting a girl, who would become his wife, and they thought it would help if he could take her for a drive in the country on a Sunday afternoon once in a while. They'd been married 30 years by the time I heard the story.) He taught his students about Nazi Germany. The ones who enlisted in the service were very sure they were doing the right thing. He was embarrassed about being able to go for a drive that was purely for pleasure, but he thought it was important to get the girl. I don't know how his teaching of 20th century American history would have been different if he'd been able to serve in Europe or Asia. We certainly wouldn't have learned so much, from such a personal perspective, about the home front. But I also knew, when I was 15, that if he'd been physically fit to serve, we might not have been learning history from Mr. Soslow at all. That's a sacrifice he would gladly have made, but I've always been deeply appreciative of his not having done so.

Every year at this time we are reminded that this holiday is not about cookouts and barbecues, chili dogs and beer. It's not even about flying the flag and taking pride in what the United States has done in the last century to promote freedom and democracy across the globe. Rather it is a time to remember the sacrifices of those who died in the struggle for that freedom.

I've long felt a sort of special connection to the holiday because of a minor geographical coincidence coupled with an historical misunderstanding. I spent a good portion of my childhood in a neighborhood in Philadelphia called Logan, which shared the name of Civil War General John Logan, whose General Order No. 11 officially proclaimed Memorial Day in 1868. It was a long time after that connection first caught hold in my mind that I learned my neighborhood was actually named for James Logan, of whose plantation it had once been a part. That Logan had been an advisor to William Penn, the colonial founder of Pennsylvania (meaning Penn's Woods). But General Logan's idea was a good one. Those who have fought and died for their country must be remembered.

It is also important, I think, that they be remembered with gratitude whether or not we believe in the cause. As I mentioned earlier in this essay, my father believed WWII was a just war. He did not feel that way about Viet Nam, and he worried about the possibility that I might be drafted. I did not turn 18 until the end of 1975, by which time the draft had ended. But this man who had lied about his age to enlist in World War II said he would have personally transported me to Canada to keep me out of the Viet Nam War. I've always been glad neither of us had to have our loyalty to country tested in that way. Thirty-seven years after the fall of Saigon, with a little historical perspective, I think we made a lot of mistakes in Viet Nam, but I think we were there for the right reasons.

Our veterans deserve our deepest gratitude, whether they served in World War II, Korea, Viet Nam, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, or anywhere else the United States has put our servicemen and women in harm's way. I remember the way some returning Viet Nam vets were treated by war protesters when they returned. My sense of shame about that is as deep now as it was in the 70s. I hope that we never again allow our disagreement with the civilian government that decides where to send our troops to influence the way we treat those who have worn the uniform in the service of their country.

I know everyone who reads this has read and heard the phrase "Thank a soldier" dozens or even hundreds of times. I believe some of you still haven't done it. If you haven't, find an opportunity this week. If you have, thank you for doing it, and please do it again.

Read the Label! Nutella Has Ingredients

Most of the time when I sit down to write an essay for this blog (and apologies, to those of you who like reading it, for the three-week hiatus), I am indulging my belief that I have some worthwhile insights to share. Not this time. This is a rant, pure and simple.

As you know from reading my last entry ("Evil on the Back of Your Phone Book"), plaintiffs' trial lawyers are not my favorite people in the world. But what about the plaintiffs themselves? Some of them are every bit as outrageous - or worse.

Take the example of Athena Hohenberg, a California mother who initiated a class-action lawsuit against the makers of Nutella. For those of you who've never tried Nutella, I recommend you do so. It is a soft spread made from ground up hazel nuts (a.k.a. filberts) and cocoa. Do not take my advice if you are allergic to tree nuts, because if you do that and sue me, I will be forced to decide whether you should be drawn and quartered or boiled in oil. (Pick one: it really makes no sense to do both.)

Nutella's advertising suggests you can put this stuff on toast and have it as part of a good breakfast. The key words in that sentence are "advertising" and "part." If you don't know that advertising, by its very nature, includes claims that are exaggerated or misleading, then you have just arrived in Western society from God-knows-where.

Hohenberg was reportedly appalled when she discovered that the stuff she was feeding her four-year-old daughter was not the most healthful choice possible and decided to sue Nutella for deceiving her.

And the judge assigned to the case presided over a settlement that awarded some $3 million dollars, most of it to people who will make the effort to fill out paperwork claiming they were also deceived, just to get up to $20 back, but a nice chunk of money for Hohenberg, too. (I really hope she puts it in a trust fund to pay for her daughter's college, although if little Hohenberg has the smarts to get into a university in the UC system, she won't need it. But I digress.)

Nutella has agreed to change the product's labeling and its advertising. Specifically, they have agreed to put nutritional information on the front of the package, to assist those who have some sort of disability - I'm still researching this aspect of the case - that makes it impossible for them to turn the jar around and read the quite-large-enough print on the back that tells you exactly what Nutella's nutritional characteristics are.

Surely you've seen commercials for children's breakfast cereals that tell you the cereal can be part of a nutritious breakfast. You know, without even looking, that the first ingredient on the cereal box is sugar and that the nutritious part of what's in that bowl pictured on the box is the milk. (Yes, I know the vegans will disagree.)

If you had never heard of Nutella and believed, based on your knowledge of linguistics, that it is an intimate, diminutive nickname for a nutty lover ("Ah, Sophia, my little Nutella...."), you could still pick up a jar of it and tell, right away, that it's a far cry from All Bran. You see, the makers of processed foods have to list ingredients. And they have to be listed in order of how much of the product consists of them.

So if the first ingredient is sugar, that means there is more sugar in the product than any other single ingredient. I am reminded of a Peanuts comic strip. Sally says to Linus, "I don't know if we should eat this cereal. It's full of ingredients." But that list is your friend if you want to know what you're eating. And the Nutella label lists sugar, palm oil, hazelnuts, and cocoa before it gets to skim milk.

So if Athena Hohenberg was deceived, by marketing, into serving Nutella to her daughter for breakfast and was not dissuaded from doing so by the plain, simple information on the label, she doesn't need an attorney. She needs a tin foil hat to protect her from TV commercials and prayers from all of us that her daughter won't grow up to be just as ditzy as her mother.

Maybe she isn't really ditzy. Maybe she really did this out of a sense of social responsibility and the notion that the manufacturer of a processed food should be held accountable for the truthfulness of its advertising. Maybe it had nothing to do with greed on her part or that of her attorney. And maybe I will win this year's Nobel prize for outstanding contributions to the blogosphere.

Ditzy ... greedy ... or a social do-gooder. There really is no way to know. But what we do know is that we are fools if we expect marketing to tell us the straight story. If we are not skeptical enough to ignore the claims on the TV commercials and read the labels - and teach our children to do the same - then all the class-action suits the lawyers can dream up will not save us from our own stupidity.