My Dad’s Service — By Tommy Purser

My Dad’s service

As I left the office Monday to go to Veterans Square for the annual Memorial Day program, I began to think about my own father’s service during World War II.
My father, Carlton Miller Purser, served with the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific during the war. He served on an LST — LST 619 to be exact.
The Landing Ship, Tank was a wartime naval vessel that carried tanks and troops to enemy shores in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
The ship had a huge, hinged door that opened down onto the ground, enabling tanks to ramble off and onto the shore.
Dad was a Machinist Mate 1st Class and, as a machinist he spent his days in the ship’s machine shop doing whatever it was machinists did during wartime.
He didn’t go up top during engagements with enemy warplanes but he could hear the guns firing and bombs exploding during battle. While he didn’t face enemy strafing attacks, being below deck subjected him and his fellow below-deck shipmates to another danger — if an enemy torpedo were to make contact with his ship, they would be the first to feel the effect of the exploding torpedo.
Fortunately, his ship was never hit.
Dad was just a young man when he enlisted in the Navy back in the 1940s. Why he chose the Navy was probably because his father — my grandfather, Charles Clingham Purser — served in the Navy during World War I.
I never heard my grandfather — who went by Charlie …. or Red as he was called because of his red hair — speak much about his WWI service. And my father didn’t speak a lot about his service as well. But I recall bits and pieces of what he shared with me from time to time.
My father dropped out of school in the ninth grade. I’ve seen his report cards his parents, Charlie and Jennie — Nancy Virginia Purser to be exact — received during my dad’s younger days. They revealed he was an excellent student initially but, as time went by, his teachers’ reports became less enthusiastic. He became plagued by too many absences and a general disenchantment with school.
So it came as no surprise to learn that he dropped out of school in the ninth grade. I’m not sure what he did after dropping out of school but I do know that he met a pretty redheaded girl and fell in love. The two ran off and got married and the marriage survived despite the fact that his mother-in-law was not too happy with who her daughter had chosen for her husband. She was so unhappy that she tried to get the marriage annulled, a fact that resulted in a lifelong resentment my father had for my maternal grandmother.
The war came along when my parents were still newlyweds. So the wartime separation was painful for both of them.
When Dad was discharged from the Navy following the war, he left with a skill that served him well for decades. The Navy taught him to be a machinist. And he was a good one. Good enough to provide for his family and get his two kids through school and his son through college.
During my early years, my sister and I never had to do without. Dad’s machinist job with a couple of paper mills enabled us to live in the “upper-middle class,” my mother once told me. We were never rich but we certainly weren’t poor.
As children, both my parents spent a lot of time being poor — especially my mother — so life was good for them once Dad got out of the Navy and put his machinist skills to work.
Dad was proud of his service to his country. Proud that he did his part during the war. Proud enough to attend many of his ship reunions for decades later. He was so involved in his ship reunions that, in 1988, he served as reunion chairman and organized the get-together held in Williamsburg, Va. He didn’t attend the LST 619 reunion of 1988 — he died a month before it was held.
I went to that reunion in his place, got to meet many of his shipmates and accepted a request to say a few words in his absence.
I’m glad I went. I met some wonderful veterans and eagerly listened to their stories. Stories told with a sparkle in their eyes. For a couple of days, they relived their experiences from 40 years in the past, when they were just kids, really, fighting for their country.
There are no LST 619 reunions today. There aren’t enough of the shipmates left. That makes me sad.
But it doesn’t erase the memories of those few days, some 35 years ago, that I spent listening to stories told by members of this country’s Greatest Generation.