Memorial Day
Boston Herald’s Peter Gelzinis on one paratrooper who took the gift of life and lived it:
William H. “Bill” Tucker spent his last 64 years on this earth living each day as if it were Memorial Day. He simply could not forget the true cost of freedom.
On June 6, 1944, when he jumped out of a C-47 to land in the bosom of history, a tiny French town called Sainte-Mere-Eglise, Tucker was a 20-year-old kid from Roslindale. He survived that leap, only to have a change of orders separate him from seven fellow members of the 82nd Airborne’s 505 Parachute Infantry Regiment.
A couple of days after D-Day, those seven soldiers - Tucker’s closest friends - would be massacred by Germans lurking in the hedgerow just outside a bucolic village called Fresville.
One day after the ambush, Tucker’s unit would seize control of the same German machine nest and ultimately discover the bodies of his brother paratroopers.
None of Bill Tucker’s subsequent accomplishments - not raising a family, becoming a lawyer, being named chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission by JFK or serving as vice president of the Penn Central Railroad - ever managed to eclipse what his daughter, Sandy Duggan, called “the profound level of grief he carried for all the friends he lost over there.”
Yet, unlike so many combat veterans who were decimated by their sorrow, Bill Tucker was emboldened by his. It was a sorrow graced with a fierce sense of both accountability and obligation.
“What my dad lived through, being part of the D-Day invasion and his other experiences,” his daughter said, “that really came to form the core of his entire life on a daily basis. It was as if he knew that the responsibility of surviving was to try and live a life worthy of their sacrifice.”
…
Last November, cancer did what a world war could not: It extinguished Bill Tucker’s valiant heart at the age of 85. On June 6 - the 65th anniversary of D-Day - Sandy Tucker Duggan and her sister, Karen, will journey to Sainte-Mere-Eglise on the Normandy coast with their father’s ashes.
During a Mass in the famed church where one member of the 505th Parachute Regiment was caught on the steeple 65 years ago, Sandy will eulogize her dad in the place his heart felt most at home.
“I believe if my father had never had us kids, he would have lived in Normandy,” Sandy said. “That’s how deep his bond was to the people there. And they loved him. Upon his death, they held a memorial service in the center of town.”
From there, Sandy and her sister will travel to Fresville, to the monument their father built on the spot where his buddies died forever young. The French government is allowing Bill Tucker’s ashes to be buried there.
“We’re laying him to rest in the place he needs to be,” Sandy said. “He was at such peace five years ago when this memorial was dedicated. What could be more poignant or fitting?”
I know that unit, the 82nd Airborne’s 505th PIR: It Breaks My Heart Every Time.
Here’s an excerpt from my friend Joe Galloway’s Memorial Day column this year. McClatchy:
For our remaining World War II veterans, the days dwindle down to a precious few. Some of their veterans associations held their last reunion this past year; too few are left to gather again. Fewer than 5 million are left of the 15 million who wore the uniform between 1941 and 1945, and they’re disappearing from among us at the rate of 30,000 each day.
The passing years also take their toll among veterans of the Korean War, the forgotten war, and they’ve begun to thin the ranks of those who served and sacrificed in Vietnam.
Two who died this past year left holes in the ranks of my own small brotherhood, the veterans of the battles of the Ia Drang Valley, fought in Vietnam at the dawn of our war there in November 1965.
Maj. Ed “Too Tall to Fly” Freeman died last August in his hometown of Boise, Idaho. He belatedly earned a Medal of Honor in 2001 for flying his Huey helicopter through a storm of enemy fire 14 times in one hot afternoon, bringing in ammunition and taking out wounded Americans.
His wing man and boss, Lt. Col. Bruce “Old Snake” Crandall, who received the Medal of Honor in 2005, was beside Ed’s hospital bed that last week saying his goodbyes and continuing their half-century argument over which of them was the “second-best pilot in the world.”
Early this year, medic Randy “Doc” Lose, one of the survivors of the “lost” platoon of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion 7th U.S. Cavalry in the Ia Drang, was buried in the National Cemetery in Biloxi, Miss..
Doc Lose earned a Distinguished Service Cross for his actions in saving the lives of a dozen wounded men who were trapped behind enemy lines for over 24 hours. He was wounded four times as he crawled from man to man, plugging their wounds with C-ration toilet paper after he ran out of bandages.
Doc never got over the experience. The Vietnam War killed him just as certainly as it did the 79 other men of his battalion who died during those three days in the valley of death. May God rest his soul and grant him peace.
Yes, for the 20 million living veterans of America’s wars, old and new, and for the families and friends of the fallen, Memorial Day has a very special meaning, and it is a time for reflection and silent tears.
This Memorial Day, 2009, America is mired in two wars. The one in Iraq is supposed to begin winding down this summer, even as the other, in Afghanistan, is building toward a new crescendo.
We have a new president, Barack Obama, who was elected on a promise of change. For those few who wear the uniform of our country, however, nothing has changed. They continue to serve and sacrifice in wars in distant lands whose purpose and goals and eventual end are as fuzzy now as they were when they began in the dawn of this new century.
Joe and I have different views about the fuzziness of purpose and goals but he’s right about the eventual end. Speaking of the new president, John at Castle Argghhh!!! does the unfortunate duty of noting that our president is also fuzzy about what day it is. Mudville notes that a lot of people share that confusion. Multiple posts at Mudville may help clarify.
NYT Op-Art: The Memorial of the Mind. On a POW’s special task, which continues from freedom at age 91, to memorialize the past and the dead.
Neptunus Lex loses a warrior friend, and his three daughters, in a Memorial Day tragedy.
Van der Leun with a personal story, The Name in The Stone. I saw one of those once, for my own dead uncle, RAAF Flt. Sgt. Philip Crittenden, killed in flying battle like Gerard Van Der Leun was. His namesake, Gerard, notes it’s busy at the little cemetery down the street.
Acute Politics notes former President Clinton’s declaration of 3 p.m. as a National Moment of Remembrance in 2000, ironically enough a little more than a year before the tolling of the moment when our current conflict became unavoidable. Teflon Don counts his own tolling of the bell.
Maggie’s Farm marks Decoration Day with a little Ronald Reagan.
AmericanThinker notes who is, and more entertainingly, who isn’t observing the day.
Malkin with some memorials and some words of remembrance about the fallen.
Surber points to Rick Lee’s photo essay of West Virginia’s little cemeteries.
Tigerhawk with poignant Memorial Day editorial cartoonage.
Protein Wisdom’s got your Gettysburg Address excerpt and links to a very long list of names.
Gateway posts the Lizzie Palmer vid, viewed 27 million times. If you haven’t yet, go make it 27 million and 1.
More vid at Stop the ACLU.
Fausta has your Memorial Day history.
HotAir with a look at MOH history … most of it posthumous.
Pushing a little further down memory lane, my Memorial Day 2006 column in the Boston Herald, about the ceremony in my town, where the reading of the names starts with eight men in King Philip’s War, 1675:
John Borrows, Samuel Bumpus, Joseph Eames, John Gorham, Joseph Phillips, Thomas Little, John Low, Joseph White. Everyone would have known them. Their loss would have devastated the town. There were no more than 400 people living in town then.
Nearly 25,000 people live there now. About 500 to 700 of them will show up at Veterans Park tomorrow. A similar number will line the parade route. It will be the same in most American towns. Small crowds gathering.
It is the unofficial start of summer, and a lot of our neighbors won’t be there. Not everybody has to care, and not everyone has to be there. They are free to play if they want to. It’s a free country.
We are hoping for a sunny day for our gathering, when we listen to George work through the names of the town’s dead from the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the two World Wars, Korea and Vietnam.
There are no names on his list from Iraq or Afghanistan yet. Thank God. I’d have to fight back tears if there were, because I’ve gotten soft that way. While George is reading, I’ll think about the names on my own list.
This is the day we remember them all. The kids get to wave their flags and watch the parade and scramble for candy. We bring them down because they love parades, and so maybe someday it will mean something more to them, too.
“It isn’t about waving the flag and being patriotic,” said John Eade, 63, who saw a lot of his friends die in Vietnam and knows what he is talking about.
“It’s a look at who we are and how we got here,” John said. He will attend the ceremony in another Massachusetts town. Memorial Day for him is about the history, all the generations who did this. His own list includes a brother who was killed in Korea and a great- uncle who died at Shiloh.
“What they were fighting for, in their hearts, was so that their families and friends could live with the ideals we believe in,” he said.
Now, there are another 48 Bay State families whose sons gave their lives, this time in the war on terror. For them, Memorial Day will never again be just the start of summer. It has become a day on which they share their sacrifice with all of us. Lou Petithory admits he used to be one of those people for whom it was just another holiday.
“Before Danny died, I’d be lying to you if I said it meant a lot to me,” said Mr. Petithory, whose son Dan was killed in Afghanistan in December 2001.
“Almost every single day for me is Memorial Day,” said Dan’s younger sister Nicole. “I’d like to have a day when it’s just a barbecue. I’m sort of envious of people who can say, `Let’s just have some chicken on the grill.’ I guess it’s selfish of me.”
Nicole was a senior at Simmons College when it happened. She loved her older brother and she misses him. She’ll meet her parents tomorrow at Massachusetts Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Winchendon, where they are among the guests at a ceremony to honor soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It can be emotionally exhausting, she said, but she has a duty to her brother’s memory and what he died for, and she will be there.
Which brings us to the pressing question of the day. Where will you be?
I’ll be at work, so I don’t have the chance to do any of the things I’ve done in past years, go to the local parade, or take the kids by the Shaw Memorial at the top of Boston Common, one of the saddest memorials in the world because it shows the 54th Massachusetts marching to their deaths or maybe beyond death into eternity. If I can break away this afternoon, I’ll stroll by there. It isn’t far. Kids like to touch Col. Robert Gould Shaw’s sword, which seems to be missing in this shot from his right hand wear it runs along his boot, because it’s fiberglass now and gets broken. I’ll probably walk by without stopping, because it is an almost unbearable spot and there are too many tourists waiting at the Beacon Hill trolley stop there for what it evokes, so I’ll just run my hand over the plaque again as I pass, as I’ve occasionally noticed older guys than me doing sometimes.
Topics: military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:00 am on Monday, May 25, 2009
6 Responses to “Memorial Day”
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May 25th, 2009 at 9:36 am
[...] Malkin has roundup. TigerHawk links to the best Memorial Day Cartoon. Gateway Pundit and Jules Crittenden link to this [...]
May 25th, 2009 at 10:48 am
In memory of Pvt. Eugene Okeefe, Machine Gunner, Australian Army, WWI. My grandfather, and 2nd hero, after my father. He survived the carnage in France, only to suffer the rest of his life from the lingering effects of poison gas.
To the AW’s lost last week on Indian 617, whose names are added to the growing roll of lost among our very small community. Their brothers and sisters are listed here:
http://www.tourohio.com/fleetaw/memorialintro.html
God bless them all, and all who gave their tomorrow’s for our today’s.
May 25th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
[...] And then, there are those who actually put their lives on the line for you and gave it. Most of these people you haven’t met, but you should. [...]
May 25th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
[...] Via Jules, the Armorer on the crucial distinction betwixt recognition and remembrance. Category: Guardians [...]
May 25th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
[...] Jules Crittenden's post not only excerpts two very good columns, but also aggregates some of the better posts around the blogosphere today. [...]
May 26th, 2009 at 10:22 am
try and live a life worthy of their sacrifice
So may we all. Thank you, gentlemen, from the bottom of my heart.