George Andres Swars

George (Bud) Swars (father of George Andres Swars), December 17, 1918 - December 24, 2009 was an extraordinary sailor in the United States Navy. Bud served from June 1936 to January 1946. The whole length of WWII. From May of 1940 to October of 1945 this American Hero served on a ship of war. The heavy cruiser Portland. The Portland was one of the most combat-active ships in the Pacific in WWII. While Bud was on the Portland, they earned 16 Battle Stars.


After his discharge from active duty in the Navy at the end of WWII, Bud served in the reserve units of both the California National Guard, during the Korean War, and the active and inactive National Reserve. He retired as a Chief Warrant Officer in 1978. 1936 to 1978. 42 years of the most hazardous, life threatening, crippling service you might be able to imagine.
 
But you see things have changed. Today, the Portland herself is called a killer of her own crew. Haven't we all seen the commercials? The "non-lawyer" spokesperson imploring all of the Navy vets of WWII to "call us toll free, 24 hours a day" for an "assessment" of your case of  mesothelioma. You see if you served, even for a short time on a Navy ship in WWII you must have this disease according to the "non-lawyer spokesperson". The disclaimer is almost as offensive as the condescending way their transparent commercials approach those who may actually have the disease and are seeking help.

After listening to the endless litany of the lawyers, you'd think everyone who ever served on a ship must have some kind of disease....right?  Well, Bud's son told me that Bud did have mesothelioma. However he lived a long, healthy and productive life, departing port for the last time at 91 years of age.

So who do you believe? Was Bud a victim as the lawyers would have you think? Or was he simply a hero, who lived a long life and had a disease that did not seem to be able to bring him down until he was simply ready to call the game. I don't know. And this is not about Bud. This is about Bud's son, George Andre Swars. George suffered a far different hand in life than his father and they both deserve to be honored, so how better than to present them together in this obituary allowing us to compare the vast differences in these two sailors lives.

HM2 George A. Swars was born in 1944 and died in January of 2011. A fraction of the life that his father enjoyed.

George Swars was a Hospital Corpsman Second Class. He was an Operating Room Technician and a Certified Field Medical Technician. He was a Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Warfare medical technician. In Navy/Marine Corp speak his MOS (Military Occupational Specialties) were 8483-8404-0311. If you have never been there, take my word for it, because I have, that's a lot of specialties. Of course the 0311 is a rifleman in the Marine Corp. Not an "Official" MOS but certainly one he earned with time spent in actual "combat with an armed enemy force".  He was smart, alert and he loved what the United States of America used to be. No wonder. Just look at the family he came from.

George was a California boy. He love the sea and the mountains and the deserts. He was an avid, lifelong hunter and absolute expert in firearms. He was an expert in wildlife and loved to educate those of us who were lacking in the subject. He regaled us with the ways and beauties of mountain goats which he called oreamnos americanus (Rocky mountain goat) as well as a vast spectrum of other wildlife, that most of us had never heard of, much less seen. These were all things that he loved.

His desire to help wounded Marines seems almost paradoxical in retrospect, considering his never diminishing love of hunting. I don't know where the compassion came from, or if it was actually compassion in a conventional sense. It might simply have been a need to help those with whom he felt comradeship. That coupled with good mechanical skills, a very necessary thing in the treatment of great trauma, he might just simply have wanted to "fix" people who had been horribly wounded. It's difficult to explain. I myself have been there, searching for the words to describe what I felt and why I was doing what I was doing, and failed. And of course I cannot speak for George.

At any rate, after returning from Viet Nam, George suffered greatly. Although never wounded in combat he suffered the physically debilitating experiences of being soaked in Agent Orange. He also lived with the tremendous stress caused by all that he had seen and done. All the lives lost. All the bodies torn apart, never to be close to fully functional again. And all the lives of all the young men, slowly going down the drain in that hell hole.

I last spoke with George at the end of 2010. We discussed Christmas and I told him I had a painting of a famous WWII bomber that I was going to send to him for his Christmas present. Until the end, he was true to himself and his country, which was solely responsible for his radically shortened life.

You see, George had a long list of maladies. He was overweight. His heart had weakened. He had lung problems. He drank to much and refused to give up a cigar now and then. And these were just the start. He also suffered from depression, which he carefully hid, by his own account.

In the last good days that George had, we talked several times. We spoke of Viet Nam and laughed, as we had before, when we were young men, and invincible. We spoke of the courtesy and admiration we received from the Marines we served with. We laughed at the uselessness of the whole war and all of the heartbreak and loss of humanity. We swore at the politicians who had feasted on our corpses and those of our enemies. And then we were quiet again.

So the smart, handsome kid from California had decades less of life than his long and dangerously serving father, because he lived in a different world, and fought a much different kind of war. A war where your country's leaders are more deadly to you than the enemy you face in the bush. They poison you with chemicals. They vaccinate you with compounds so dangerous that they are banned in some more civilized parts of the world. They destroy you with your own weapons. They rain terror down on you with "friendly fire". And why? Because they just can't get it right. Because they are not right. And because America is no longer right. They are not now, nor will they ever be, a fraction of the American, George Andres Swars was.

Rest in peace HM2 Swars.