Jim Busby among ‘finest men and women that ever served’

The veteran foremost in my thoughts this week has been my father, Jim Busby, who passed away last month at the age of 83. My dad served in the military for 21 years, and it’s fair to say the Army contributed as much to his life as he contributed to the Army.

Raised in poverty in the hills of West Virginia and orphaned under horrific circumstances when he was 11, my father spent his teenage years with relatives in Baltimore. That segregated city was a rough place to live, much less learn, in the 1940s. My dad dropped out of high school, worked construction with an older brother, and got a job on the night shift at a steel mill. He joined the Army Reserve in the early 1950s before being drafted into that branch of the armed forces and deployed to help fight the Korean War. It was the first of two tours he completed in Korea (he served there again a decade later) and was followed by a tour during the Vietnam War, in the late ’60s.

The Army gave my father a real education. He earned a degree from the Milwaukee School of Engineering while stationed in Wisconsin, and eventually attained the rank of major. He was the first and only member of his family to graduate from college, and was proud of that achievement all his life.

Among the projects my dad worked on during his military career were an early version of laser-warfare technology, the first computer applied to government use (the size of a large room, it could calculate 10 equations per second, he recalled), and a then-cutting-edge surveillance device, dubbed “Stupid,” capable of discerning the shapes of tanks and troops from long distances. The technical education he received while enlisted enabled him to land a good job with Xerox in the early ’70s, but he never stopped learning. Among the skills he picked up in his 50s were skiing and piloting single-engine aircraft.

My father, Jim Busby, receiving a medal in the late 1960s; my mom, Emilie, is at right.

My father, Jim Busby, receiving a medal in the late 1960s; my mom, Emilie, is at right.

My dad had a good stock of funny stories from his Army days, and he told them often. But he rarely brought up his wartime experiences, and most of his late-career work at the Pentagon, for the Defense Intelligence Agency, was classified — a completely closed book, even to close family.

One anecdote I’ve never forgotten is his description of Soviet planes and subs routinely approaching the edges of our airspace and territorial waters during the Cold War — a daily cat-and-mouse game of which the American public was largely oblivious. I’ve long held strong anti-war views, but those opinions are tempered by the lesson my father taught me: the peace we enjoy is predicated upon our readiness to make war when provoked.

The only emotion I never saw my father express was fear. His integrity was impregnable, his convictions were fierce, and this strength of character was forged in the Army. He stood up to bullies and crooks all his life, from the wannabe mobster who tried to threaten him when he served on my hometown’s planning board, to the duplicitous developer of the golf community where he and my mom lived their last days. “I’ve been shot at by some pretty big guns,” he’d remark when a doctor or nurse delivered bad news this year. No damn cancer could scare him.

My dad’s most difficult wartime experience happened before he deployed to Vietnam, when he was assigned to inform the parents of a fellow soldier that their son had died in combat. It took my father and another officer three days to locate the family’s homestead in rural West Virginia. They crossed a footbridge over a creek and approached a man in his field. “Go tell Ma,” was all he said when they told him why they were there.

“Well,” Ma said to the two uniformed men on her front porch, “you took him, you killed him, now you’ll bring him back.” Strong as my father was, that story always brought tears to his eyes.

There’s one thing I want to tell all our recent veterans and active-duty soldiers: Major Jim Busby was deeply proud of you. He often remarked that today’s military is made up of the finest men and women that ever served.

He would know. He was one of them.

Chris Busby

About Chris Busby

Chris Busby is editor and publisher of The Bollard, a monthly magazine about Portland. He writes a weekly column for the BDN.