Growing Up in a Military Family in the 60s

By Cathy Tchorni


As I write this right before the 4th of July, I’m thinking about the positive differences I see in Cape May County, especially Wildwood, from the “body” of New Jersey. Appreciation for veterans is my example today.
November is about changing perspective as I age and grow in wisdom. In my early career years I worked for county government. I loved November because we got four “vacation” days – Election Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and the crazy Christmas shopping day after. Once I placed my vote, which took about five minutes, the rest of Election Day was mine to use. In the days before the internet, Veterans Day signaled going through my catalogs and completing order forms and checks for kids’ toys from Sears or Penneys.
Veterans are memorialized on November 11, never attached to a weekend except by chance. It should have held more meaning for me than it did. Unfortunately my parents and I were not close, so the fact that both of them served in the Army during World War II, made me feel intrigued and proud but at an emotional distance. My father had been part of the European drive to push up from northern Africa, into Sicily, north through Italy. He met my Army secretary mother in Livorno (Leghorn). They were both northern New Jersey kids, raised about 50 miles from each other. They married in Italy after obtaining, in triplicate, permission from the Army. The first months in the Army my mother was assigned to kp duty, peeling piles of potatoes – not exactly what she signed on for. Fifteen years after the War, I remember my mom ducking her head involuntarily when a plane flew low over our house. My father had contracted malaria in Africa, and I saw him huddled under a blanket, shivering and sweating uncontrollably.
Time and experiencing life’s difficulties of my own gave me an appreciation of my parents’ struggles as kids in the Depression, and the horrors they both saw during the war. I believe their personalities and outlooks on life were forever altered from those anxious 20 formative years.
Graduating high school in 1965, some of my friends and neighbors were drafted, a few volunteered, knowing for sure they were Vietnam bound. I wrote faithfully to a sweet guy younger than me, Fred Belcher, for whom the Army was a way to a better financial life. After about a year his weekly letters stopped, and shortly after I was informed of his death by his brother. Only now do I feel the losses of my high school friends; my best friend Kathy calling me from a pay phone at her dorm, sobbing that her patriotic high school sweetheart and my good friend, Bob Turnbull, had been killed.
I can pick out Vietnam veterans who have made Cape May County their home. I know some now, one joking to me, “I bet you were a hippie chick!” The physical and emotional pain has eased for some, but not others. How do they become reconciled to lives forever altered by their service to our country?
I walk slowly to the Vietnam Wall opposite the Wildwood Convention Center. 9:00 am on a blue sky morning in July, as tourists hurry past me with beach paraphernalia hanging off arms and backs. I sit on a bright blue bench to reflect. I experienced mixed feelings about war through the years — patriotism surely, loss, and pained nostalgia for a time when we were all younger. Our family and friends killed, maimed in body and/or mind in war, are still young in my mind as the rest of us faced trials and joys, growing older into our gray hair. I marvel at the vision and dedication of friends, families, organizations, and businesses that raised money to erect the Vietnam Wall among monuments honoring other wars and conflicts. Now I have another reason to love Wildwood.
When The Sun by the Sea is published in the middle of November, the sky may be blue if we’re lucky to have an extended second season, or it may be a cold, bleached out sky with an icy wind. Veteran’s Day will have just passed. Living here among veterans who haven’t always had easy lives since their service years, makes this spot all the more sacred, as I look up at our flag, feeling my inadequate tears.