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Slinging a Smooth Stone My cousin Arthur of whom I wrote on the front page has been to me for
the past 50 years, a humble, quiet, unassuming man. A farmer, father,
husband and store owner. It was Arthur who first taught me how to find
the Big Dipper and North Star. In all those years I never saw a warrior.
I knew he had served but I never knew what he’d done. I never pondered
what it must have been like to learn his sister died and not to have
had the time to grieve. Those veterans who have survived both WWII and the ordinary perils
of life have gone gray. The youngest among them are in their late 70s.
They were ordinary men and women, citizen soldiers. They were farmers
and ranchers from America’s Heartland and scalawags from the mean
streets of New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago. They were soda jerks who became fighter and bomber pilots. Or, preacher’s
sons reared on the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule who became efficient
killers on European beachheads and sandy beaches on odd named islands
and Archipelagos such as Tarawa, Okinawa and Iwo Jima. When I was a young boy we still honored veterans each November. We
bought poppies on Memorial Day. Walter Williams, the last confederate died in 1959 at 117. He had been
a Forage Master for a Confederate Cavalry company. During the Civil
War as always, an army traveled on its stomach, it was the job of men
like Williams to make sure they had food to eat, shoes to wear, by raids
on the countryside surrounding a battle site. As I grew up in Keyes
there were numerous WWII vets. They were young men in their twenties
and thirties in 1957. The older vets were those in their sixties, veterans
of WWI; and John Chilcutt a veteran from the Spanish-American War. Korea
had just ended four years earlier, those veterans were in their early
twenties. The Keyes American Legion Post was active. There was a Legion Hall;
the only one in the county. Teen dances and church functions flourished
there. Fifty years later, the Legion Hall has been leveled. In this century it takes a terrorist act for us to give our veterans
a passing thought. Veterans, especially those of the WWII era, paid
a price that we will never know. When the war began Arthur was a farmer;
the life to which he returned. When I asked how he did it; how he remained
a farmer after the horror of combat; he replied, “You just forget
it.” How can they forget? How did we? The word for the week is venerate. Boise City News |