The Ukrainian Museum-Archives (UMA) has a three foot-wide “banquet-sized” photograph depicting 96 members of the League of American Citizens of Ukrainian Descent at the White House on June 7, 1922: a dozen priests, only seven women and seven men in U.S. military uniform. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes (later Supreme Court Chief Justice) stands in the middle. The group came to lobby for Ukraine’s independence, meeting with President Harding and testifying at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing; among them Ukrainian-born Father Filomen Tarnawsky, pastor at Ss. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Cleveland. No one questioned his loyalty, nor that of veterans who had been on the Western front just four years prior.
Fast forward to another document: this one from the same Cleveland church from May 28, 1944. “Souvenir Booklet Dedicated to Servicemen” lists 495 parishioners in the military, one of them Andrew Boyko. I wrote about him after his passing in 2005 (“Oh, Andy Was Well-Liked.”) He was in the Navy in the Pacific and then went on to a distinguished public career in Parma, Ohio, with his wife, Eva, raising four civic-minded sons, one of them a federal judge. Joseph, Michael and John Jacubic are also listed. Joseph was killed in action in August 1944. He was 27. The Parma VFW Hall is named after him. No one questioned his loyalty, nor that of the other Jacubics or the four Boykos and others, including several women, who answered their country’s call.
Multiply their contribution by hundreds of other Ukrainian churches and we’re into tens of thousands – among them, Sgt. Michael Strank, frozen in bronze at the Marine Corps monument in Virginia. One of six soldiers who raised the flag at Iwo Jima in February 1945, Sgt. Strank, a Ukrainian-Lemko immigrant from central Pennsylvania, was killed in action a week later. He was 25. His loyalty was never doubted.
A few years ago, Ukrainian American Veterans began compiling a database of Ukrainian Americans who served in the U.S. military. I don’t know the status of that list, but the Ukrainian National Museum has a permanent exhibit of Chicago community members who served. The UMA had a temporary exhibit honoring area veterans, including my brother George (“Yurko”) who did two tours in Korea, the first on the frontline at the DMZ confronting the North in the early 1960s. There he met Lubomyr Zobniw – another soldier age 20-something and later a leader in the Ukrainian community in Binghamton, N.Y. That they were Ukrainian immigrants was irrelevant. Indeed just a decade earlier, many young Ukrainian DPs, fresh from World War II battlefields in Europe, were deployed to a hot war in Korea, their loyalty never doubted.
In the 1970s Yurko was assigned to Germany. There he became friends with Col. Nicholas “Hoko” Krawciw: a member of Plast, West Point graduate, decorated officer in Vietnam and division commander facing Warsaw Pact troops at the Czechoslovak border during the Cold War. Yurko retired as a lieutenant colonel. After stints with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and NATO Policy Director at the Pentagon, Hoko retired as a major general. Uniquely qualified, he became a hands-on consultant to newly independent Ukraine, helping to convert Soviet army units into Ukrainian. Neither Yurko nor Hoko – both immigrants and fluent in Ukrainian – has ever had their loyalty questioned.
I’m a Baby Boomer, coming of age during the Vietnam War. I was not in the military, but many from Cleveland’s Ukrainian diaspora were, born in post-World War II DP camps or to immigrant parents here. My lifelong friend Adam Misztal served at a forward artillery base in Vietnam. (He was awarded a Bronze Star.) Another Cleveland friend, Jon Nych, was in combat there as a Marine. Roman Rakowsky was a combat artist. Communities throughout America include rosters of Ukrainian American military. Those reading this column can surely add names (perhaps your own) of those who patriotically served our country’s armed forces with devotion, courage, distinction and loyalty, going back a century or as recently as last week. Add Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman to that list.
Born in Soviet Ukraine, Col. Vindman came to America as a 3-year old, his family like mine and others seeking freedom. Col. Vindman pursued a military career. Serving in Iraq, he was wounded by a roadside bomb, receiving the Combat Infantry Badge and Purple Heart. Fluent in Ukrainian and Russian, and eminently knowledgeable (Harvard M.A.) and still on active duty, he was assigned to the White House as the Ukraine expert. Shocked that President Donald Trump was secretly blocking $400 million in military aid to Ukraine apparently in an effort to coerce Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to help with his 2020 presidential campaign, Col. Vindman, following protocol, reported it to the ethics lawyer. Issued a subpoena to the House impeachment inquiry, he complied as did others engaged in U.S.-Ukraine policy. The upshot? Because he was born in Ukraine, right-wing media and more than a few GOP elected officials vilified Col. Vindman as a possible “traitor,” perhaps a spy. One Republican congressman rebuked him for presuming to wear his country’s uniform to the hearing.
And it didn’t stop there. Weeks later, during the Senate impeachment trial, Sen. Marsha Blackburn publicly questioned Col. Vindman’s patriotism. Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, who’s openly announced he’s rooting for Russia in its war against Ukraine, said Col. Vindman should leave America and work for Ukraine. This is contemptable and, yes, un-American.
The Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, the Ukrainian American Bar Association as well as others writing on the pages of The Ukrainian Weekly and in widespread discourse online, condemned attacks against Col. Vindman. And yet there were other organizations, I was told, who declined, dismissing the attack against Col. Vindman as a “political controversy” and not a national scandal.
How has it come to this? When disrespect for America’s uniform is accepted by many as normal political discourse and the patriotism of a soldier who shed blood for his country is impugned because he’s an immigrant? Say a prayer that America gets back on course, choosing Ukraine over Russia, truth over falsehood, patriotism over partisanship.
Sgt. Strank’s grave, by the way, is in Arlington National Cemetery, Section 12, 7179. 1st Lt. Joseph Jakubic’s is in St. Andrew’s Cemetery in Parma. Let’s not forget them.
Andrew Fedynsky’s e-mail address is [email protected].