Bringing It All Back Home (2 page)

German's family left the South in the early 1940s, as part of the great African American migration to the North. They moved first to southern New Jersey, where his father worked as a sharecropper. The African American population in New York City had more than doubled from 1900 to 1920 and then doubled again in the 1920s. By 1940, African Americans represented 6 percent of the city's total population.
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They would make Harlem famous as a cultural enclave, but they also populated many other neighborhoods, like Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.

Eventually, the German family moved to Brooklyn. Ed's father got a job as a building superintendent there, and his mother did domestic work. German was born at 533 Halsey Street in Bed-Stuy. His father, born in 1916, had fought in both the European and the Pacific theaters as part of a quartermaster company, picking up some French and German language skills along the way. All his uncles served in the war as well. German has never forgotten learning about his father's service.

When I was a little boy living on Willoughby Avenue and my parents used to leave the house, we kids often would do what my mother and father [called] plundering. We'd just go up into their room and just looking at stuff, you know, opening doors and closets. And I remember one day I looked in my dad's closet, and I saw his old Army uniform. It was in a clothing bag. I unzipped it, and I looked, and I said wow. I was only about eight years old when I saw it. I saw the medals on the outside of it, and then I looked in the inside jacket, in the inside pocket of the jacket, and there was a little leather folder in there, and I pulled this leather folder out, and I looked in it, and his Honorable Discharge was in there.

After the discovery of his uniform, German senior began to share stories of his war experience. They left a lasting impression, especially the story of his war wound.

He got shot one day in the wrist. And he told us the story. He said while he was in Germany, I think, he said he had bought a new watch. I forgot the name of the watch, but it was a really stylish kind of watch to have at that time, and he said he bought a new watch. And he was driving the jeep and he had his left hand holding on to the top of the window of the driver's side window and he was showing off his new watch, you know, because he was—that's what he said, he said he was showing off his watch. And he was just driving along and a bullet hit him in his wrist. And he used to show us a small bullet mark on his leg, too. I don't know how he got that one. But he was over there from 1943 to 1946. He came home in 1946.

German would later write in his memoir: “I can see from all of this that he's been somewhere far away and done something important.”
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By the time German returned home from Vietnam in June 1969 with his own military discharge papers and the Purple Heart medal he'd earned for being wounded in action, the idea of the uniform as a symbol of pride had changed drastically for him.

The historian Joshua Freeman writes, “In the memories and memoirs of working-class New Yorkers, the neighborhood looms large.”
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This certainly seems to be true for the Vietnam veteran John Flanagan, who was born on November 6, 1946, in Brooklyn, New York. He recalls his home and the surrounding area with a degree of bitterness mixed with anger. In his memory, the block was mainly Irish, although there were a significant number of Puerto Rican families too, and the overcrowding was intense, with as many as four families sharing a two-bedroom apartment and adults sleeping in shifts.

I was the fifth child of first-generation Irish. All four grandparents came from Ireland. Most of the uncles worked “longshore” or became policemen … my father worked for the city in the Parks Department. We lived on Fortieth Street between Third and Fourth Avenues. It was my grandmother's house. My grandmother lived on the top floor. We had the second floor and the basement. We didn't have a lot of money at all. Money was tight, and I mean all the time. Having a grandmother living on the top floor who owns the house didn't make it any easier. She was a widow and always had one or the other of her sisters that were maidens that were living up there.

Since we lived in the house with her, we were always no good, and all of my cousins, since they didn't live there, they were always so good. So we were always being told how bad we were and how good they were.

Flanagan had two sisters and a brother, who was two years older than he was. Shortly after Flanagan's first birthday, his brother died.
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That sort of destroyed my father. He was just bitter, drank an awful lot, and we had some really terrible times with him. Although I recognize all of the things he went through—what I had to go through with him—I just absolutely hated him. I hated the house and to be there with him.

When they got the autopsy, they found that [my brother] had some kind of lead poisoning. It wasn't until my mother died [and] we were going through some stuff that I came across the letter from the doctor and the results of the autopsy.

I got a remembrance of the funeral; he was laid out in my grandmother's living room, my mother's parents. They lived above a delicatessen. I've got a memory of that—of seeing a baby lying in a crib and the baby not moving—from an angle of being real low, and later on I find out that when he died, they laid him out in their front room and it took two days to get a children's coffin in. So they in fact did lay him out in a cradle.

Immediately after his brother's death, his parents became very protective, but as he got older, the Flanagans began to loosen their grip a bit, and Flanagan participated in the kinds of urban street games that many children played in that era.

We were playing stickball all the time. You sort of watched them from the sidewalk forever, and then when you got old enough where they trusted you to count and keep score, you could be the scorekeeper, and then when they needed somebody on the outfield or something like that [you could go into the game]. So it was a lot of fun sort of growing up there. We played that and we played box-ball, you know, Chinese handball.

Eventually, a portion of Flanagan's street was removed to enable the building of the Gowanus Parkway. It cut right through a large swath of the Sunset Park, Brooklyn, neighborhood he grew up in. While the construction project is often blamed for devastating the neighborhood, in the eyes of a young Flanagan it opened all kinds of potential for fun. It became “Contractor Central,” as he calls it, with all its materials and equipment. Flanagan and his friends cleared out a big area, moving rocks and rubble so they could create their own urban baseball diamond.

While his father did not serve in World War II, Flanagan was influenced by other veterans who fed his patriotic pride.

I remember on Flag Day and Memorial Day having to help my father string a gigantic American flag from my grandmother's two top windows on the top floor that would hang down almost to the basement. I mean, this was a humongous flag and very heavy, too.

Joey lived upstairs, and he didn't have a father. His father was killed during World War II. I thought that was just “Wow; he's got a hero father.” Plus, I had an uncle who was a tail gunner on a Flying Fortress that got shot down and bailed out over Germany. He and his crew, on the anniversary of the shoot-down, would do a conference call with all of the guys. My uncle Frankie and my uncle Herbie, they were in the Navy.

My father, he stayed home; so he didn't sit very well with me at all, because everybody else was a hero and my father is a turd sitting back. Later I found out that because he was the oldest son in the family, he had to go to work and support my grandmother because she was a widow.

At the same time, Flanagan recalls the anxieties of the early Cold War years. For him, patriotic pride mixed with a desire to participate in correcting the problem.

I vividly remember sitting on the stoop at my girlfriend's house on Fourth Avenue and Forty-Fourth Street. We listened to Kennedy talking during the missile crisis and having the sense that it's going to blow up; we're going to have a nuclear exchange, and that's going to be the end. We're going to die within two days. I remember those things and wanting to do something about it.

I was very happy to be an American and I understood what it meant and I understood the freedoms that I got. I ain't got much, but I got a lot of freedoms that other people don't. I could do the right thing, I could protect people, and I could eventually get married and have some kids and a car and maybe get a house on the island like my brother did. So that's where the patriotism came. Of course, growing up Catholic, every morning we said the Pledge of Allegiance and prayer; I mean, that's just the way it is. You waved flags; you went to parades; you were proud to see your uncles marching in the Veterans Day Parade, and that … patriotism is there.

However, given the family's relative poverty and what he describes as a constricted sense of his personal horizons, he didn't believe that he had much of a future to look forward to.

My goals were so limited. What I thought I was going to be able to do was nothing. I remember the view of my life that I had in my head; I could see a block of, you know, eight years, which is elementary school, and then the four-year block that's half the size as, you know, high school, and then it was just black. There was nothing—you know, nothing at the end; there was no mountain to go up; there was no “here's what I want to be when I grow up.” You take a look; your uncles are cops and that stuff and you say, “Okay; I'll probably end up being a cop.”

By 1965, the military seemed a natural and appropriate way out.

While the U.S. military sent advisers to Vietnam in the mid-1950s and there were more than sixteen thousand American personnel there by 1963, the American war effort significantly expanded shortly afterward. Following alleged attacks on U.S. Navy patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in August 1964, authorizing President Johnson to use force, at his discretion, to protect South Vietnam. As a result, the Selective Service began to conscript larger and larger numbers of New Yorkers. At the time, certain groups of young men, college students and parents of young children among them, were allowed to defer the draft. Those who had completed their high school education and had not enrolled in college (or perhaps had left college for one reason or another) were the first to be drafted.
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After Flanagan graduated from high school, his certainty that he would be drafted increased. As the war in Vietnam grew, some friends and co-workers of draft age were maneuvering to get into the National Guard and reserve units. He and his friends took a number of the appropriate civil service exams. Flanagan did well but was told he would have to work on his physical fitness, not something he was inclined to do. Instead, he and his buddies visited various recruiters, because they were told that the recruiters might be able to steer them into their preferred branch of service. After listening to all the pitches offered, and hearing repeatedly that he would need to sign up for four years for the more interesting service options, including officers' training, he decided to schedule a date for his induction into the military, effectively volunteering for the draft. As he writes in his autobiography, “This way I knew I was going to go soon, but that it would be only for 2 years.”
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Draftees served for two years; volunteers for three.

Postwar baby boomers were influenced by a generation that had confronted incredible challenges. In 1932, as a result of the Great Depression, one-third of the city's manufacturing facilities had shut down, and 1.6 million New Yorkers were receiving some form of relief.
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In a piece written in 1955, the
New York Times
writer Meyer Berger would describe a resilient city that had just gone through “the tensest quarter-century in her 302 municipal years. In that period,” Berger wrote, the city “struggled out of black depression's pit to her greatest opulence. She maintained her population lead and painfully let out her stays to prevent utter traffic strangulation. She tore down more slums in those twenty-five years than in any other quarter-century in her history; replaced them with airier housing set in green playgrounds and doubled her park space.” In this era, the Lincoln, Queens-Midtown, and Brooklyn-Battery Tunnels were dug, along with additional routes out of Manhattan. That quarter century also saw the construction of the George Washington, Triboro, and Bronx-Whitestone Bridges and the completion of the Sixth Avenue and Eighth Avenue subways. As the war removed the last vestiges of the Great Depression, it brought new tensions and fears, including worries about blackouts, threats of a water shortage, and a rise in delinquency.
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But there was work to be done and a hungry population willing to do it. Working-class New Yorkers labored in factories and served on the police force; they worked to keep the transportation systems running and the city sanitary. They would also become grandparents and parents, raising the generation that would eventually be asked to serve in Vietnam.

Edward Blanco, a retired government worker, was born in Manhattan but raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
My mother and father are from Puerto Rico
, he says.
They met here in this country
. His father arrived in New York City after completing his U.S. military service in 1946, and his mother arrived in the same year. During that time, there was a surge of immigrants from Puerto Rico into the continental United States, New York City especially.

Blanco lived on West Twenty-Ninth Street until his parents' marriage failed, when he moved with his mother and sister to the Sumner Avenue public housing projects, in Brooklyn, where he lived until he went to Vietnam. His mother worked in the garment district as a seamstress. Many first- and second-generation Jewish and Italian workers who had dominated the garment industry until that time had retired or left the business. This meant new employment opportunities for minorities, including Puerto Ricans, and African Americans, and women like Ms. Blanco.