The Two were pictured as part of our family picture, dressed in a real military uniform, my dad, and in a little boy's military uniform, my brother, Kendall.
My dad. Albin Fortney, was known in his agricultural family of ten for entertaining them with hypnosis and interpreting their drawings of trees. He grew up speaking Norwegian and later, English. He and his older brother, Henry, could converse in both languages.
Farming didn't really much interest him, though he did go to ag school, because he thought he had to. I figured that was where he attained his chemistry ability, while still having an artistic flair. Against his own father's will, he chose to go to college, and got a scholarship to Concordia College, and sang in the choir. He had a very deep baritone voice, much like his speaking voice.
His desire was to become a teacher, where he'd also been a basketball coach, and soon, principal. He had that kind of size and charisma.
Since teaching wasn't high paying, he boarded at the house of a couple called, the Rostads and their son. He was impressed with their meaningful Christian faith, which was the catalyst for his becoming a minister, and so was ordained in 1935.
He became Chief Chaplain of the Liberation Army, liberating Norway and receiving the Norwegian Medal of Honor by King Haakon. I witnessed him being given the Valley Forge Medal for preaching at 1st Lutheran Church on Whitehall Road in North Muskegon, Michigan, whose building he facilitated. He attributed his rich speaking voice to the use of his vowels.
My youngest brother, Kendall, six years my senior was an artist and a good writer. He came by it naturally, as Mom and Dad both engaged in oil painting. He drew cartoons for me and told tall tales of Paul Bunyan concurrently when I was young, But his artistry was more obvious to me when we lived in Northern Wisconsin, where his bedroom, adjacent to mine, became his art studio.
Instead of resembling his father, he resembled his grandfather, also a minister and professor at the Lutheran Bible Institute in Minneapolis.
When we lived in Stoughton, Wisconsin, I attended a play, "Caligula", cast with two of my brothers and was surprised to see that my more extroverted brother, Alan, was not as good an actor as Kendall, who was more reserved. Acting seemed to come more naturally to Kendall, and his movements were more fluid, as well. Perhaps, he and I could have been emulating our grandfather whom, my dad called, "an actor in the pulpit". Kendall, like my other brothers, became a University of Wisconsin graduate.
One college summer at home, my dad also told me about the attack at Pearl Harbor, where he was in a white Chaplain's military uniform, wondering why they were doing target practice on Sunday morning, in the distance. He became an almost perfect target, getting "strafed". Having survived that, he became graves registration officer, identifying the casualties.
I wrote to Kendall, of course, when he was sent to Viet Nam, and reread the letter much later, where he told me he'd passed my picture around to the guys and to "keep those letters coming".
I am back in college. I begin to receive the envelopes back, "return to sender", and I begin to suspect something is wrong This suspicion is clinched when the chief advisor and campus minister, want to talk to me, to tell me that Kendall is Missing in Action.
I am already cast in a play about someone missing in action, called, "All My Sons" by Arthur Miller, and have to go through that. But by performance time, where my parents are in attendance, Kendall is already identified as a casualty.
Apparently, at home, and concurrently, the family is getting edgy at not hearing from Kendall and write letters regarding their concerns. But the officer arrives to inform my mother, and my dad is also informed at work in Madison and drives home all alone with that dire news. My parents, later, when Kendall's death is confirmed, visit my eldest brother, Steven, at his classroom where he has been teaching, and he embraces them silently.
When I arrive home, and my brother's casket is delivered, I watch as my parents kneel by it, at the funeral home.
My father gets cancer and dies two months later.
So, these two, pictured in uniform, are those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, one almost killed by strafing, at Pearl Harbor, and the other directly, in the TET offensive, as a medic and conscientious objector, in Viet Nam.
My mother observed that those who had direct experience in war, oftentimes didn't live very long, thereafter.
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