To the Editor:

Father’s Day and Flag Day fall on the heels of Memorial Day and these three days are always especially poignant for me as they bring to mind my father’s death at my age of 13 and the end of my Army brat life. In 1950, early in the Korean War, I began a radically new chapter in my life with my widowed mother (age 33) and younger sister (age 9) in Southern California.

Adulthood, with all its advances and victories as well as its retreats and defeats, amount to the far steeper learning curve of life than I imagined as a child. Certainly, as a result, I never became either a perennial pessimist or a perennial optimist; rather as my dad used to say, “No matter how weird you may think the world is, it turns out to be weirder. Be open, always curious, read, think, be book smart and street smart, and try to see the world and people as realistically as you can.” 

He was a great dad from whom I learned much about character, self-discipline (and rear-end discipline, too), standing up to older and bigger bullies, fulfilling commitments, completing tasks on time, respect for elders, love of country, and the Boy Scout Law — trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. With Dad in mind, I earned my Eagle Scout award within a year after his death.

At his urging, I read widely in books from the Army base libraries (and National Geographic magazines with him), and expanded my vocabulary with the monthly Reader’s Digest.

From him, I learned something about a sense of humor and irony; loving and caring for a wife; Quartermaster Corps logistics and bureaucratic wrangling from listening at the family dinner table; haggling with Panamanian merchants; and appreciating people of differing cultures, races, and religions in our various postings.

As we walked away from Dad’s military burial ritual at Seattle’s Fort Lawton, on a cold and overcast December day, after the five-man rifle team firing off three volleys and my mom holding the folded flag, my maternal grandfather, put his arm around my shoulder and said to me:

“You are no longer a boy, Victor. Now you have to be the man in the family and help your mom and Valerie in the days to come in every way you can. Make Victor Sr. proud.”

And I have tried, yet with many ups and downs to be sure. And maybe, even at 82 years of age, with Mom now gone as well, I still am trying to make Dad proud at some deep level.

As I view so many members of the younger generations today, it saddens me that so many are caught up in “woke” protests, rioting, looting, getting high, pansexuality, illiteracy (historical, constitutional, and economic), identity confusion, logic-challenged thinking, and bibliophobic.

Many are so clearly lost in the swamps of mixed feelings, moral ambiguity, political collectivism, and anarchism that it causes me to be ever so grateful to God for growing up with the parents and guidance I had in my early years and for those men and women who fought and died to keep us free. I mourn for the younger folk of today, the children of the coming years, and America’s future.

Victor Porlier

East Berne