EARN THIS. EARN IT!

 

Captain Miller and Private Ryan

Observations on Veteran’s Day 2021

Veterans Day was established on November 11 to recognize all veterans who honorably served in the U.S. military.  It acknowledges the armistice ending WWI which took effect on 11-11-1918 at 11:00 am.  Ed Rees. a congressman from Emporia, Kansas and a contemporary of my grandfather Ed Davis from Emporia, introduced a bill to make the date a federal holiday.  It was signed into law in 1954 by another Kansas native, President Eisenhower.

My great uncle returned home to Kansas suffering the ill effects of the trench gas of WWI and two uncles never recovered from the horrors of war suffered in the Pacific campaign of WWII, leaving my grandparents with the distinction of being Gold Star parents.

I graduated college and immediately began working as an Industrial Engineer at a Hercules solid rocket propellant plant at the outset of the Vietnam War.  My draft papers arrived as the war was winding down and were subsequently cancelled, so I was never exposed to war combat.  Just returning to the D-Day invasion and the fateful battle of Ramelle at the end of the renowned film, Saving Private Ryan, on the cusp of another Veterans Day remembrance was enough of an emotional roller coaster that I cannot imagine what any veteran experienced in actual combat.

The greatest generation that lived through the Great Depression and won WWII is now all but gone.  I witnessed a deplaning honor flight in Washington DC years ago and it was very emotional.  Many were just then beginning to tell their story.  And it would be a great travesty to forget their immense sacrifice.  Every generation has their own unique challenges and one of ours is to constantly remind ourselves that freedom is but one generation away from being lost.  And freedom is not free.

Captain Miller and his band of brothers we sent on a mission after D-Day to locate and bring back Private James Ryan, whose three brothers had all been killed in action.  He had been ordered to return to his mother’s side on an Iowa farm as her only surviving son.  The film opens with an elderly Private Ryan visiting the Normandy Cemetery at the cross of Captain Miller who saved Ryan’s life but lost his.  Captain Miller’s dying words to Ryan were “James.  Earn this.  Earn it.”  The gut-wrenching response at the grave site as his family stood aside was “I’ve tried to live my life the best that I could.  I hope it was enough.”  The film switches back to this scene at the end when Ryan’s wife approaches and he implores her “Tell me I’m a good man.”  His wife replies, “You are.”

Small acts of decency in the hellish horrors of combat can be the only saving grace of humanity.  On the 11/11/2021 observation of Veteran’s Day, may we all understand the sacrifice that has carried us to this day. 

And vow to “Earn This.  Earn It!” 

OPENING SCENE:

https://youtu.be/0HUf68gFGEE

ENDING SCENE:

https://youtu.be/IZgoufN99n8

WWI AMERICAN DOUGHBOY

 

Walt E. Ulm, Fort Riley, KS

I had a wonderful, innocent childhood growing up in America’s Heartland next door to my grandparents.  Those were carefree and innocent years.  That is, they were for a young child born as the second world war was raging not long after “the war to end all wars” had been fought by young men like my grandmother’s brother Walt.  Of course, I was oblivious to all of this and thankfully my parents shielded me from knowing that many of our family members were directly involved in both wars.

Those early childhood memories are beginning to become a very faint part of my life at this stage.  But as I finished reading about my great uncle’s time spent in Europe during WWI that my nephew Mike had assembled, I did have one primary memory that surfaced.  My grandparents had the traditional detached garage with access to a dirt alley behind their home.  And just about every Saturday morning, it was always a treat to greet Walt and his wife Edna when they would drive into town and deliver live baking chickens and eggs to my grandmother.  I remember Walt was always smiling and happy to see all the family and he must have been the world’s expert on raising chickens on the farm.  In fact, that’s about all I can remember him talking about in an uncharacteristically, melodic fast pace.  He was the only person that I knew that talked that way and when I questioned my mother, she told me that he was in the war.  So, that sufficed at my young age and I only pondered this again today, many years later.

I learned that Walt was a member of General “Black Jack” Pershing’s American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), 353rd Regiment, 89th Division, Company F.  He entered service at Fort Riley, Kansas on April 27,1918, just one month after the first report of the Spanish influenza was detected there on March 8.  The WWI museum in Kansas City, Missouri reports that the Spanish flu spread overseas to the Western front and 20 million people worldwide would perish in the next year.  Walt escaped that pandemic of 1918, but not the “hell on earth” in the trenches of WWI which contained cold rain, mud, lice, rats, maggots, hunger and fear.  And the enemy by that time was also using vaporous mustard gas to seep into the trenches.  Gas masks were standard issue and the cry of “GAS” instilled traumatic, psychological fear in the trenches.  Exposure to chemical weapons resulted in a higher prevalence of depression and anxiety disorders for the survivors compared to war related violence alone.

 Walt also wrote home about the prevalent machine gun nests and sniper fire that were a constant threat.  The story might have been humorous if it wasn’t so dead serious.  “I must tell you about picking plums.  I was in a tree and Bert Coffey was on the ground.  The first thing I knew someone was shooting at me and I dropped quickly to the ground.  We lay flat on the ground for a while but the sniper must have thought he got me.  My helmet was up in the tree full of plums.  We poked it down with a stick and gathered up the plums from the ground, but no more tree for me.”

Company F was involved in two major operations in France against the Germans—St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne.  A record of the division includes over 1,000 killed and 6,000 wounded and gassed.  They captured over 5,000 prisoners.  In one of his last letters home from the war, Walt wrote “We sure had some march all over Germany and carried heavy packs all the time.  It was about 195 miles so you see it was not any easy task.  I was all in when night came.”  His company was present in Stenay, France for the armistice signing on the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month of 1918 (Hence, Veterans Day).

Walt spent eight months in a Tennessee VA hospital when he returned to America and then finally made his way back to a Kansas farm where the odyssey began.

P.S.

The irony has not been lost on me as I realized that my American grandmother Ida Ulm-Davis, who has a German ancestry, had a brother in a world war with Germany and sons in the next world war with Germany.

FLOWER OF REMEMBRANCE

Red Remembrance Poppy, Jamestown, NC

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow,
between the crosses, row on row,
that mark our place; and in the sky,
the larks, still bravely singing, fly,
scarce heard amid the guns below.
-- In Flander’s Fields by John McCrae

“Honor the Dead by Helping the Living”

Memorial weekend is a great beginning to the summer beach days in the sun with outdoor grilling and good times culminating with Labor Day to bookend the season. But the blooming poppy in my backyard garden on this overcast day with a tropical storm on the doorstep gives us all pause to remember the reason for the holiday. Memorial Day was created to remember the men and women who died while serving this great country while Veterans Day celebrates the service of all military veterans. It also gives us all pause to remember those loved souls who have gone before us.

Whenever I see a poppy flower I’m always reminded of my grandmother who all of us grandkids called Mom. She proudly displayed a gold star in her front picture window like many others in our central Kansas town. The practice was started in World War I when families hung Service Flags in their windows. A blue star on the flag represented any family member serving in the military during a conflict and it was replaced by a gold star if that loved one died. My grandmother and our family tragically knew that grief along with Grace Seibold of Washington, D.C. who lost her son in WWI. Grace realized that self-contained grief is self-destructive, so she organized a group consisting solely of those special mothers whose sons had lost their lives in military service and named that group the Gold Star Mothers.

The Gold Star Mothers held regular meetings which we would call support groups today. I distinctly remember my grandmother dressing up and never missing her Gold Star meetings. I didn’t understand the full meaning of those gatherings, and her profound grief, until much later in life. And I remember my sister and me standing on a Main Street corner with Mom passing out VFW Buddy Poppies to shoppers. These small artificial flowers are made by disabled and needy veterans in VA hospitals and other locations. You do not sell them, but the donations from those that accept the poppies are returned to these veterans along with widows and orphans of veterans. I do believe that Mom suggested a five cent donation when we were asked, however. These red poppies were inspired by the WWI poem In Flanders Fields. We always looked forward to accompanying Mom on those ventures, never suspecting that she was modeling a lifetime of partnering with others to help heal the world and us too.

And she was also modeling a behavior of partnering with our Creator to always try to bring something good out of a tragic situation when a loved one does not emerge from one of the devastating storms of life.