My Dad, John Boeman, passed away in the summer of 1998. My Mom found him that Sunday morning at his computer at his desk in his tiny office tucked away in the corner of the basement. He had had a massive stroke. I don’t know what specifically he was working on, but chances are pretty good that it had something to do with the role our military played in preserving peace throughout the world. That was his life.
My Dad was a veteran of the armed forces of the United States, specifically the Army Air Corps and the Air Force. He served as a B-24 pilot during World War II and after a brief separation from the military served as a C-54 pilot during the Korean War and a B-47 and B-52 pilot during the Cold War, amongst other duties.
My Dad spent much of his military career and most of his time in retirement striving to preserve our freedoms and also the freedom of others throughout the world. After World War II, he saw the greatest external threat to those freedoms embodied in Communism as promoted by the Russian dominated Soviet Union. When others would say that the Soviet Union was not a threat, I had heard him reply many times that the Soviet Union had never given up their goal of dominating their neighbors and spreading Communism by force. On that he was sure.
Fast forward to February 24, 2022, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an event my Dad did not live to see. Gone was the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and the Communist ideology that had supposedly bound them together. What still held sway though from the Cold War was an aggressive Russian expansionist foreign policy. Left very much intact, and seemingly growing in strength, was the Russian conceit that their birth right granted them the privilege of dominating their neighbors by force and taking from them their freedoms.
The world today is certainly very different from the world my Dad lived in when he served in the Air Force. The size of the role that the United States, and by extension American taxpayers, should play in assuring the freedom of Europeans and others from Russian aggression and expansionism is certainly open to debate.
I can say though that I feel very confident that my Dad would be in awe of the courage and ingenuity of the Ukrainian people in successfully defending themselves against Russia’s aggression. He would be rooting for Ukraine’s David in their battle against Russia’s Goliath. He would be speaking out in favor of and advocating for Ukraine as they fought and sacrificed to protect their freedoms.
My Dad admired those who fought to protect their own freedoms, and even more so those who sacrificed to protect others.