A nation at war
A man with a mission
Published, The Secaucus Reporter,
2000
Jim
Cava puts on a one-man USO show.
He
is not a movie star or a professional singer, the kind that usually travel to
distant war zones to keep up the moral of the troops.
He
isn't entertaining the troops at all, but classrooms full of kids throughout
Northern New Jersey. His routine, complete with slides, songs and patriotic
slogans, beats the drum of American pride in his single-handed determination to
bolster a new generation of American patriotism and inject good character into the
American way of life.
"My
goal is to educate and re-educate, to enlighten the hearts and minds of all
Americans, especially elementary school, middle school high school and college
students,” he said, his gaze cast towards some vision of his own.
Dressed
in his Marine Class A uniform -- a pale, nearly mustard green with thick red
stripes -- Cava looks as if he just stepped out of a military parade. Except
for one empty sleeve and a slightly graying crew cut, he looks as much in shape at age fifty as he must have
been at eighteen.
He
carried himself with the same rigid posture drill sergeants did, leaving a
strong impression upon the students he encountered, even before terrorists
attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
Cava,
his stern face and steady eye, recounted tales he'd heard or things he'd seen,
his rhetoric often falling into song or poems.
"I
try to teach the kids the correlation between American principals and
patriotism, values and good character," he said.
Cava toured Vietnam as a United State
Navy corpsman assigned to the U.S. Marines, and generally wore his Marines
uniform when he came to schools to each. The Marines do not have medical
corpsman of their own, and generally have Navy corpsmen like Cava assigned to
each unit
"I'm entitled to wear
both," he said. "I choose to wear this one."
Not
shy about branishing his honors -- which includes Purple Heart, a Combat Action
Ribbon, and a National Defense Service Metal, Cava sells his program to
teachers and politicians as well as to the kids. The New Jersey State Assembly
even honored him for his dedication to promoting patriotism. His resume boasted
of his tour of duty at a variety of patriotic ceremonies taking him from war
memorial to war memorial, from Veteran's Day to Memorial Day, and back. He
seems most proud of his repeated appearances at the Vietnam War Memorial in
Washington and similar appearances at New Jersey's version in Homdel.
With
his performances often full of shouting out slogans and foot stomping songs,
Cava has become something of a legend, even among veteran's groups. He might
have easily become an old fashioned, Bible-totting preacher of the
fundamentalist circuit had he adopted that faith first, his tone and manner
thick with the spirit typical of fire and brimstone speeches. He chants, sings,
pleads, even sheds a tear, hoping to convince people to return to the right
road to salvation: love of their country."
"Good
people died to assure American freedoms," he says, even preaching during
his interview, an interview in which he made no secret about his disappointment
over the public's previous lack of patriotism -- a matter that changed so
drastically after 9/11 his marginal opinion rocketed into the mainstream market
with many ordinary people echoing his terminology. He frequently blamed the
loss in Vietnam to "a weak-willed government."
Cava
grew up in Carlstadt, a small industrial town, along the western shore of the
Hackensack River, where he lived a very typical American life, playing baseball
in the Little League, and running track in his church parish's track meets. He
said was always a devout Christian, attending Catholic schools all the way
through high school.
Long
before he enlisted at seventeen years old, Cava said Vietnam consumed him. He
recalled how “concerned and saddened” he felt when the news reported the first
American soldier's death in Vietnam.
Cava
took his intial training at the U.S. Naval Training Center in Illinois, then
moved onto San Diego for advanced military training at Basic Hospital Corps
School where he became a corpsman. Later, he prepared for jungle warfare with
Marines at their base in California, before being assigned to Vietnam.
"My
base camp was a village called An Hoa, approximately seventeen kilometers south
of Da Nang," Cava says.
His
unit spent most of its time out in the field searching for enemies, and thus
encountered numerous hazards from land mines, snipers and other hidden traps to
poisonous snakes, malaria and leeches.
On
November 20, 1968, two months after his arrival in Vietnam, the helicopter
transporting Cava and other members of his unit got hit by enemy fire as it
tried to land in a battle zone.
"My
chopper was the first to be hit," Cava recalls. "The pilot and
co-pilot were killed instant and the huge CH-46 (transport helicopter) went
down, tumbled three times and exploded into a ball of flame."
Days
later – unconscious through the rescue in which fellow Marines saved his life –
Cava opened his eyes in a hospital in Guam.
"My
left arm was gone, and my legs were encased in hard plaster," he says.
Cava had also sustained injuries to
his legs and back, injuries serious enough to send him back to the United
States and eventually discharged him.
More
than thirty years after his discharge, Cava can't always relate the depth of
disappointment he felt back then, how depressed he was, not just about his
misfortune, but about how little support he felt by the public, blaming the
government and lack of patriotism for a good part of his depression.
"For
many hours and for many days and weeks, I would sit in church unfeeling yet
searching," he says. "I tried to find myself."
Cava
says he prayed for answers, even as he wandered through a variety of careers,
volunteering to serve at veteran's hospitals, mental facilities and hospices.
"I
studied voice with four vocal teachers in New York City and New Jersey in
pursuit of a singing career," he says. Then he studied acting, psychology,
even hotel restaurant management.
"Like
a pendulum, I went back and forth from singing and acting career to college and
a degree," he says.
Years
went by, and he continued to pray. Then in the early 1990s – as if an answer to
his prayers – he decided to establish a program he called "Operation Red,
White and Blue," a tour of public spaces from schools to official
veterans' ceremonies that would re-educate Americans to values he still
considered scared.
Cava
developed a series of five programs, each addressing a different level of
student from kindergarten children to adults, each more sophisticated than the
previous lecture, but all emphasizing themes he said he felt strongly enough
about to sing over and shout out.
"I
want to help these kids develop good character, and that means caring about
themselves, their neighbors and their country," Cava says.