INSULT TO INJURY: THE MANY SHAPES OF SERVING: PORTRAIT OF A RELUCTANT SAILOR

"They also serve who only stand and wait."

-- John Milton

His were the eyes of a frightened man who feared the prospect of going to war, of standing toe-to-toe with an enemy who was more ready to kill than to be killed, of braving the shrill cacophony of the battlefield to confront the real possibility of his own mortality. He was no fighter, nor ever would be.

When the war ended, he went quietly home to his wife and children. He had won no medals for bravery in the face of overwhelming odds. He had earned no ticker tape parades. He had saved no Private Ryans.

All he kept to remind him of the war were his old Navy uniforms and a large military cookbook with recipes for how to make Yankee pot roast or buckwheat pancakes for 100 hungry men.

No, my father, God rest his soul, was no hero.

And yet ...

Yet on the day of his funeral, an American flag adorned his casket, as well it should have. And when the service at the graveside was over, the funeral director, an old family friend, handed the folded flag to my mother and, on behalf of the nation, thanked her for my father's service to the country.

My parents had been married less than two months when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, propelling the United States into World War II. At first, Mom thought nothing of the news, Pearl Harbor being so far away, so distant from their lives. But Dad knew what it meant. Six months later, he joined the Navy.

Even though Dad was already 33 years old when the war broke out, he rightly figured that eventually he would be called up, like so many men. He assumed he would be drafted into the Army, and he had no desire to be in the Army, perhaps fearing he would be assigned to the infantry and sent into battle. So to avoid that possibility, the Navy.

He told my mother -- half-jokingly, she said -- that he had joined the Navy because he knew that if he were on a ship, he'd never go hungry. He had been hungry before and didn't want to go through it again.

My mother cried the day she took him to Kansas City to meet the bus that would carry him off to basic training. She was convinced he would be shipped off to the South Pacific where he would become the victim of torpedoes, Japanese bombers and sharks. She was certain she would never see him again.

She saw him again that night.

Dad had been assigned to a naval base in Olathe, Kan., 30 miles west of my hometown. He would spend the next two years there, hitching a ride home every couple of days or so. In that time, my two oldest sisters were born.

And then when the brass found out that my father spent the Depression working in run-down diners and cheap cafes out in central and western Kansas, they figured he knew his way around a kitchen. So they put him to work where he could serve best -- slopping chipped beef on toast to sailors-in-training, fighting the Hun with spatula and apron.

After two years in Kansas -- in my mind, a fate worse than death -- they sent him to military cooking school up north in Wisconsin. Eventually, he landed in Norfolk, Va., where he kept expecting to be shipped out any day.

He never left the States.

Seems that Dad was such a good cook that the high muckety-mucks in the Navy decided to keep him around the base. Mom always said that the officers were more concerned about their own stomachs than the welfare of the sailors. Dad never complained.

Whenever Veterans Day rolls around, I think of Dad, as surely I will this week. He was proud of serving his country even though in the eyes of many his contribution to the war effort was slight, even though the war ended for him not with a bang, but with a whimper.

There have been many through the years, like my father, who did their part no matter how small and insignificant it might have seemed to the people around them. Not heroes in the classic sense, perhaps, but proud soldiers and sailors nevertheless.

They also serve, I suppose, who only stand and cook.

~Jeffrey Jackson is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.