Every idea I had for a column this week ran up against a mental brick wall, until it registered in the dark recesses of my brain that Veteran’s Day is coming up, and I’m working on a story for that. In turn, I thought about my father and two uncles who served in World War II.

My father, Jack Robinson, was drafted and left for Camp Haan in California in November 1942. He wanted to be a paratrooper, but because he was married and had a baby, they wouldn’t take him. So when they asked if there was anything else he’d prefer, he said airplanes.  

He waited and waited and waited, still in the U.S. A few months later, he finally asked why and was told that they were still looking for something to do with airplanes. He eventually became an intelligence non-commissioned officer in an antiaircraft battalion in the Asian Pacific Theatre of operations, where he participated in two major campaigns – New Guinea and Luzon.

We have a lot of his letters to my mother, but none refer to battles or warfare. He never talked much about his service years while I was growing up either, although he did say he liked New Guinea and Guam. He would have liked to return after the war, but taking care of a wife and growing family, that remained a dream.

However, a couple of hints popped up in his letters. One to my mother said she could learn more about the battle in Leyte Gulf on the radio than he could tell her in a letter. I think he referred to censoring. None of his surviving letters were cut up or blacked out.

The second letter was among items I discovered in some things I inherited from his sister. It was to their mother. He said he was in the second wave when the United States invaded Okinawa, toward the end of the war.

And a favorite family story is that when we went to pick him up at the depot (probably bus) after he was discharged in October 1945, I told him, “We have your picture at home on the pinaner (piano).” Most veterans I’ve talked to came home by bus or “riding their thumb” as they used say.

My Uncle John Mollohan served stateside. He was a sergeant in the Army Air Corps, mostly in Florida. His eyes were bad so he was an airplane mechanic. He served from October 1942 to November 1945.

And wrapping up the family’s service was my youngest uncle, Jack Mollohan. He had to wait a while until he could persuade his parents to let him leave school early and enlist in the Navy when he was 17. He got in on the tail end, from May 1944 until May 1946. He served on what he said was a troop transport, carrying military personnel across the Pacific.

I found one of his letters to his parents in which he told about transporting the Japanese submarine commander, who sank the USS Indianapolis, back to Japan after the war. He had been in the United States testifying against the captain of the Indianapolis. That was a big issue because hundreds of U.S. sailors died when the ship sank. 

Uncle Jackie brought home a huge barrel of memorabilia. As a kid, I remember some of the items in the barrel that sat in the hallway of the upstairs in my grandparents’ farm home. Two particularly stand out. 

The best was a fantastically beautiful blue silk kimono, with lots of colorful embroidery and white satin collar and sleeve cuffs. The other was coconuts. Brown, hairy, hard coconuts. 

My maternal grandfather, Ed Mollohan, was into his 40s when he registered for the draft in World War I, but it ended before he was called up. My father’s father, Tom Robinson, also registered for World War I, but never served.

Others in my family lineage began signing up to protect our country during the Revolutionary War. Leonard Morris of what became West Virginia, was my Grandmother Mollohan’s great-grandfather, and there is a chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution named for him in West Virginia. 

I’m pretty proud of them all. 

I hope you take time to think about the military personnel, male and female, who’ve served and are serving now, to keep our people and the United States safe and free. And not only on Veteran’s Day, but all year long.

And there’s an interesting story coming up later this week in the Telegram about another World War II veteran.