A Name Is a Thing You Owe

I was sitting on the porch this morning, watching the Lindqvist twins' dogs chase each other across the vacant lot where the old grain elevator used to stand. It's a sight that never gets old. Got me thinking about names. Not dog names, though that's a whole other story involving a dispute over what constitutes a proper name for a hound. Ship names.

Now, I'm no naval historian. The closest I've ever gotten to an aircraft carrier is the time I bought a used Ford F-150 from a man who claimed he'd helped build one in Pascagoula. Said he installed the plumbing in the galley. I've never verified this, and neither has the US Navy, to my knowledge. But it's a good story, and I've been telling it for fifteen years, so at this point it's basically historical record.

Anyway. Names.

Here's what happened. The Navy announced a new aircraft carrier would be named the USS Doris Miller. That's Dorie Miller, a Black man from Waco, Texas, who was working as a mess attendant, which was what the Navy called Black servicemen in those days, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He grabbed a .50-caliber machine gun he'd never been trained to use and shot down somewhere between four and six enemy planes. Then he carried his dying captain to safety. Then he went back and did his job, because that's what he did. He was awarded the Navy Cross. He died in 1943 when a Japanese submarine torpedoed the USS Liscome Bay. Two-thirds of the crew went with him. He was twenty-four years old.

They named a carrier for him. And now they're thinking about renaming it. For a former president.

I'm not going to pretend I understand Navy protocol or the chain of command. I got lost somewhere around "mess attendant" and never found my way back to the bridge. But here's what I do know.

There's a man down the road named Theodore Waters. You call him Ted. He's 83 and was a Marine at Chosin Reservoir in 1950. He doesn't talk about it. He doesn't need to. You can see it in the way he walks, which is slowly but with the kind of purpose that says I've had worse days than this.

Last month, the county commission voted to rename the access road behind his property in his honor. Ted Waters Lane. He didn't ask for it. He came to the meeting to tell them to stop being silly, there are other roads, worse roads, roads that needed naming. They did it anyway. They have the minutes to prove it.

Three weeks later, someone floated the idea of scrapping Ted Waters Lane and calling it something else. Something more modern. More marketable. "We can always name a road after Ted later," they said, the way you might say we can always put the screen door back on after winter.

You see the problem. Once you start moving names around, you stop being in the business of honor and start being in the business of real estate. And real estate doesn't honor anybody. It just sits there appreciating.

Aunt Vi says renaming something is the closest most politicians get to admitting they were wrong. They can't take the old thing back, so they put a new label on it and hope nobody remembers. But we remember. That's what we do here. We remember who was where and when and why. We correct the young ones when they get it wrong. "No, that's Lindqvist land, it'll always be Lindqvist land, even if the Lindqvists haven't lived here since '89."

Dorie Miller's story doesn't need embellishment. A cook. A machine gun. A captain carried to safety. Two more years at sea before a torpedo ended it. The gist is harder to fake than the details, and the gist of Dorie Miller is that he did more than was asked of him in a system that had already decided to ask less of him than it should have. That's the story. That's what the name carries.

And now they want to name the carrier for a sitting president. Well, no sitting president, they say. For this particular one. Who has, according to public record, made comments denigrating servicemembers. Including prisoners of war. Including the late John McCain. Including, I suspect, Ted Waters, if Ted were the type to seek attention, which he isn't.

Senator Mark Kelly, who is a retired Navy officer and also the husband of Gabby Giffords, which is another whole story, wrote publicly that this shouldn't happen. He's right. He's also a former astronaut, so he's seen things from a height most of us haven't. But from ground level in Chamberlain's Bend, it looks the same either way.

You don't take a name given to honor a man who gave his life and call it something else. That's not reassignment. That's erasure. And there's a difference, even if the paperwork looks similar.

Big Earl at the grain elevator said something last week that's been sitting with me. "You can't rename a thing without renaming the people who remember it." He said it about the grain elevator, actually, which is a different story. But it applies. It almost always applies.

The Lindqvist twins' dogs have stopped running. They're sitting in the lot now, watching something on the far tree line. I don't know what they see. But they're paying attention, and that's more than most.

A name is a thing you owe. You make it when you put it on a ship, or a road, or a piece of ground where somebody bled. You don't get to take it back because the wind changed direction and somebody wants the wall space.

Dorie Miller earned that name. The Navy gave it. That ought to be the end of the conversation.

---