Tom and Jerry by Bonnie Le Hamilton

 

This past week Konnie posted on Facebook that she’d seen a t-shirt with the slogan, “Proud daughter of a Vietnam Vet,” then she went to say if she had a shirt like that it would say, “Proud daughter of a Vietnam Vet and wife of a First Gulf War vet who is the son of a Korean War vet.”

When I read that post, I stared at it for a good minute before I said to myself, I could say the same thing!

Now the fact that we are both daughters of a Vietnam Vet is a given considering that we were born in the same city, in the same hospital, on the same day to the same parents, we are clearly both daughters of a Vietnam Vet, and so is our big sister.

But let’s look at the rest of that statement.

We are both wives of vets of the First Gulf War.

Also true, since Konnie did not heed my warning and married a Navy guy even though I had been married to one for four years at that point and knew what a huge hassle it can be to be a military spouse and had told her so. That was her choice.

However, after that little tidbit, we get to the son of a Korean War vet part. And as much as our husbands have little in common other than falling in love with identical twins, this is surprising that we both married men whose fathers served in Korea when our own father served in Vietnam.

This is equally surprising because Konnie’s husband is only six months older than us and he’s the oldest child in his family, whereas my husband is not quite four years older than us, and he was the second born from his father’s second family.

Clearly, my father-in-law was a lot older when my husband was born than my father was when I was born. Don’t ask me the math on that, I have no idea. I do know he had two children from his first marriage, was briefly engaged to a woman who dumped him for someone else and then married the woman who eventually gave him six more children, the second of which was my husband.

Even without the failed marriage and the runaway fiancé, my husband was still his fourth child whereas I was my father’s, well, third, but the second one arrived a mere six minutes before me, and the first one was born only sixteen months before us. Let alone that Dad was only twenty at the time of our birth!

All this adds up to being weird that both Tom and Jerry are sons of Korean War vets.

And yes, their names are Tom and Jerry.

That’s another thing I warned Konnie about when she informed me, she was engaged.

Now let’s look at this rationally.

We have two men with vastly different backgrounds who happen to fall for identical twin sisters. Two men who also happen to be sons of Korean War vets, both of whom marry daughters of a Vietnam vet.

That seems pretty far-fetched to me right there, but I must point out that Tom is not quite four years older than Konnie and me, as his birthday is in August and ours is in July.

Please don’t make me do the math on Jerry and Tom. Jerry’s is exactly six months before ours. Other than that, I am not going to calculate it.

I can be precise on how much older Tom is from us. I know it exactly. He is exactly one month, two weeks, and five days shy of being four years older than us.

This, however, is not because I calculated it. No, that distinction goes to our big sister. Though she wasn’t calculating how much older Tom was than us. She was calculating how much older Konnie, and I were from our brother Bryon, who happens to have been born on Tom’s fifth birthday.

But let’s get back to Tom and Jerry.

So far what they have in common is Konnie and me, and their Korean War vet fathers. They are also members of our church. The similarity ends there because Tom didn’t serve a mission, but Jerry did. But then Konnie served a mission, and I didn’t.

Anyway, after all that they are as different as night and day.

Though I have to admit the biggest difference between them is their size.

Tom was exactly a foot taller than me.

Jerry on the other hand is lucky he found a woman shorter than him.

Their personalities are different too. So, I find it weird that they have anything in common at all beyond who they married and what church they attend.

Anyway, happy writing everyone!