My Grandfather’s Flag (and the Navy Cook Who Earned His Own Ship)

In my family, we have exactly one priceless heirloom, and it is not jewelry. It’s a flag, and it isn’t even ours. It’s an enemy flag my grandfather’s unit captured in World War II, and every man in his company signed it, turning the very symbol of what they were fighting into a roster of the men who beat it. My grandfather, Matthew Lupo, was a first-generation Sicilian kid from Bay City, Michigan, who went off to war, and his unit liberated a concentration camp. He didn’t exactly come home and give presentations about it (no slideshow, no keynote, not even a long version at Thanksgiving), because that generation treated their own heroism like a utility bill, something you handle and never mention again. So what we have is that captured flag, covered in the handwriting of men who walked into one of the darkest places on this earth and opened the gates. It is the biggest honor our family holds, and we didn’t do anything to earn it except love the man who did.

So every Veterans Day I think about that flag. This year, my friend Ron Ploof got me thinking about everyone else. Ron hosts a podcast called Griddlecakes Radio, and his newest episode, “That’s Not a Dog, That’s a Sailor,” tells the true story of Vicky, the official mascot of Battleship Iowa, a little dog who slept at the foot of President Roosevelt’s bed during a top-secret Atlantic crossing, logged over 205,000 miles at sea, and met five of the nine five-star officers in American history, which is more networking than I pulled off in ten years of running conferences. The Navy kept official paperwork on this dog’s 50-yard swim test, and when they offered him a life insurance policy, he declined. In 1949 he walked off the ship with his own seabag and a full military sendoff. Go listen to it, it’s a complete delight, and I’ll wait: griddlecakes.com

Notice Vickey's birthday is 11/11. Today! Image thanks to Battleship Iowa on Facebook's post.

Twenty years in kitchens with home cooks has done something permanent to my brain: I cannot hear any story without immediately wondering what everyone ate. Ron is telling me about a dog meeting five-star admirals, and my brain is going, okay, but that’s a floating city of 2,700 sailors, plus the President of the United States, plus the Joint Chiefs, so somebody belowdecks is pulling off the most important dinner party in American history and we don’t even know his name. The dog got a swim test on file. The cooks got nothing. So I went looking for them.

What I found was Dorie Miller.

Photo By Adam Cuerden - Naval History and Heritage Command, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116394647

Dorie Miller learned to cook from his mother in Waco, Texas, and joined the Navy, where he became a cook aboard the battleship USS West Virginia. His world was belowdecks: the galley, the mess, three meals a day for a crew of over a thousand.

Then came the morning of December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor. Miller reported to his battle station and found a torpedo had already destroyed it. So the ship’s cook went up top, into the attack, and started carrying wounded sailors to safety, including the ship’s dying captain. Then he climbed onto an anti-aircraft machine gun he had never once been trained to fire and shot back at Japanese planes until the ammunition ran out and he was ordered to abandon ship.

For his heroism that morning, Admiral Chester Nimitz himself pinned the Navy Cross on Dorie Miller in May of 1942, making him one of the very first Americans decorated for valor in World War II. Miller was killed in action two years later when his ship was sunk in the Pacific. He was twenty-four. In 2020, the Navy announced it was naming an aircraft carrier after him. Sit with that for a second. The ship’s cook is getting his own warship.

Once you start looking, veterans are baked into American food everywhere, and I mean that literally. The Culinary Institute of America, the school that trained half the chefs whose cookbooks are on your shelf right now, was founded in 1946 to teach returning World War II soldiers a trade, which means your favorite chef’s lineage traces back to the GI Bill, not some farmhouse in Tuscany. Jacques Pépin, the most beloved cooking teacher this country has ever had, served in the French Navy, where he cooked for three French heads of state, including Charles de Gaulle (so when Jacques gently suggests you’re holding your knife wrong, remember that man fed generals and presidents in uniform, and put the knife down properly). Go back further and you find Escoffier, drafted into the French Army in 1865, who took what he learned and organized the professional kitchen into the brigade system restaurants still run on today. Every time a line cook yells “Yes, chef,” that’s military DNA talking.

And they’re still with us. Sunny Anderson served in the Air Force before the Food Network. John Besh was a Marine before he was a James Beard winner, and now he funds culinary scholarships and veterans’ foundations. Andre Rush, a retired Army Master Sergeant, cooked at the White House and does 2,222 pushups a day to raise awareness for veteran suicide, which is 2,221 more pushups than I have ever done in my life. Even Alex Haley enlisted in the Coast Guard as a cook and started writing at sea, decades before Roots.

I should mention the veteran coverage in my own house is a little thinner. This morning my husband looked me dead in the eye, with the gravity of a man about to show me a Purple Heart, and said, “I served... in the Cub Scouts.” I died laughing, and then I thanked him for his service, because somebody had to sell that popcorn. To all the Cub Scouts of America, we salute you too.

Here is what gets me about all of it. Cooking and serving your country are the same instinct wearing different uniforms. Both of them are standing in the heat, taking care of people who may never know your name. Dorie Miller fed his crew every single day before the one day history asked him for more, and when it asked, the cook said yes.

So today, if there’s a veteran in your life, feed them. Make the good thing, the one that takes all afternoon. And if they ever want to tell you a story, put down the spoon and listen, because some of them never will, and all you’ll have left is a captured flag full of signatures and a lifetime of wishing you’d asked.

This one’s for my grandfather, Matthew Lupo, and for every man and woman who served. The table is set because of you.