Caught up in the late ’50s go-around of Pirates “Pennant Fever,” season tickets brought my father and childhood me to many games at Forbes Field. Remembered more vividly than ninth-inning comebacks was the gauntlet of disfigured World War II vets we fans filed past while entering the main admission gate. Amputees with wooden peg legs and single-hook hands, some resting stumps onto wheeled wooden carts. Faces etched and twisted by shrapnel and fire. Their cups and hats caught a sprinkling of quarters and the rare dollar bill thanking them for their service.
Decades later, after completing my long walk of sorrow and rage past the 60,000 names engraved on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, I gave final thoughts to the war’s other victims. A monument to the Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian war-killed would have soared above the Washington Monument nearby. Stopping for a beer decades later at a bar near Walter Reed Medical Center, I saw further evidence of lessons not learned: six vets of Iraq/Afghanistan seated adjacent — some blinded, all fitted with or awaiting prosthetic limbs.
War — lives ended or lives made much worse forever, not the stuff of gaming video clips and WrestleMania titling (Epic Fury? Operation Sledgehammer?) of Pistol Pete and his merry band of warfighters. And President Trump, never missing an opportunity to take something stupid and vulgar and make it even more so, now proposes taxpayers shell out $1.5 trillion for his things that go boom. Makes you wonder how China gets by on just one-fifth that amount.
Joseph Jamison
Greensburg