Today I think about my Dad's younger brother, Earl, who was shot in a firefight with the Germans in France. 21 years old, he had been stationed in Washington state with an artillery unit. My Dad was in the south Pacific with the Army Air Corp. Earl didn't want to serve stateside and requested a transfer. He was sent to Europe.
He was killed in a foxhole in the spring of 1945 with another soldier. Their remains were left there for weeks. The other two in the hole with them were taken prisoner.
Whatever was left after their remains were retrieved were buried there. In the mid-50's the government offered to have them repatriated, and he was brought home and buried in the family plot in Marathon, NY.
I got the details of this from another uncle, Lloyd, who is 89 or 90 now, a couple of years ago. When he told me of what had happened to Earl, he started crying. He said his mother (my grandmother) never was told how Earl had died and had been left. My Dad never spoke of his younger brother, but from what I've been told, there were very much alike as youths.
As for Lloyd, he was a sergeant in the infantry, in occupied Japan, when the Korean war broke out. He's in a VA hospital now, suffering from the effects of frostbite on his feet. He told me of guys in his unit freezing to death overnight with only a blanket to cover themselves, and how his own feet froze to his boots because he had no dry socks to put on.
Lloyd, and Earl, were only two of the hundreds of thousands from all of our families who stepped up when it mattered. For myself, it puts a human face and a personal story to the sacrifice, but we're obliged to take a moment today to think of those who never came home alive, and many who never came home at all, and thank them for the grace we're blessed to live under by their deed.
