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Military Burial Flag courtesy of Nick Smith

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“My father’s version of WWII was that he’d served in the army but it wasn’t anything very important because his unit had never actually seen combat or gone overseas.”

Nick is a librarian, a historian, and a professional storyteller. The requisite skills to tell stories definitely did not come from his father’s side of the family.

My father’s side of the family was terrible at telling family stories. One of my earliest memories is of them arguing about two parts of the family story. One is that they all agreed we had some kind of Native American blood in the family – but they couldn't remember what tribe, though they were pretty sure it began with a ‘C’ and it wasn’t Cherokee. The other is trying to figure out what the family name had been shortened from. They all agreed that the family name had been shortened from something. They didn’t agree on what it had been shortened from or when.

It wasn’t unusual, then, that Nick’s father didn’t have much to say about his time in the military — he hadn’t seen combat or gone overseas; the experience was barely noteworthy. Nick found it peculiar, then, when his father mentioned a newspaper article he’d seen detailing the reunion of his unit.

And I thought – ‘Well, that’s odd. A unit that never did anything special, never saw combat, and never went overseas was in the news for their reunion?’ And I looked up the issue of the newspaper he mentioned – and, yes, there it was in the Los Angeles Times.

Nick read the article, and realized that there was more to the story than his father had revealed.  

That was when I began to understand what this non-story was all about. You see, my father was part of the ground crew of the bomber unit at Tuskegee.

The Tuskegee Airmen were the first African-American aviators in the US military. The bomber unit did not see combat in World War II, in large part because of racial tensions brought on by segregation, culminating in the Freeman Field Mutiny (1945) in which black officers (or “cadets”) demanded entrance to an all-white officer’s club.

So, they never saw combat and they never went overseas. But the funny thing was that the actions of the officers of that unit were kind of like the Concord of the Civil Rights Movement because what happened was the men of that unit and their struggle to achieve their designated rights began to stir up a lot of people. But my father, as an enlisted man, and a draftsman, saw it as, ‘Well, we didn’t go overseas, and we didn’t see combat.’ So, there wasn’t a story.

Nick pieced the story of his father’s service together after his father’s death. He holds onto the flag from the military burial, on display here, and wishes that he knew more about his father’s experiences.

There’s a sadness that he never did tell the stories during his life. So much gets lost, and you don’t know your family’s history if you don’t hear the stories. You may know the facts, you may know the birth and death dates, but you don’t know the history.