Veterans Day 2020
During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, my moms took me to Nova Scotia. For some reason, they decided that we could go to the tiny little town in northern Nova Scotia, where almost the entirety of my mother’s side of the family comes from. It is a town where restaurants don’t open until 3:00 PM and then close promptly at 7:00 PM. While we were there, I visited the grave of my fourth great grandfather. When I sunk my knees into the dirt in front of his grave marker, I think that’s when I really started to love history. He was right there, six feet below me. Not long after that trip, I discovered that my great uncle on my father’s side had been killed in the Battle of Mont Sorrel in the First World War. My first cousin, four times removed, had died of the Spanish Flu just one month before the First World War would end. So, to honor them, I decided to learn everything I could about World War I. By the time my senior year of high school arrived, I was quite the war buff, so I cleared out my schedule so that I could take a history elective…and I chose World War II, European Theater with Mr. Dent.
It was so fascinating to learn more about the Second World War, but it was kind of difficult for me to connect back to myself because most of my family missed World War II. When summer began, I was offered a job to write for The Reading Post, though, and I was overjoyed. But as I thought more and more about it, I became concerned that I wouldn’t really have anything to write about because COVID-19 was keeping everyone home. So I came up with this idea that I could try to follow the men from Reading that served in World War II through the summer of 1943 or 1944. It was really a pipe dream. When I talked about it, I really didn’t think I would be able to do it. But I told myself I’d take a crack at it and give up when I didn’t find anything, which I knew I wouldn’t. I sat down with Ken Burns’ documentary The War, a box of goldfish, and started going through the World War II draft cards from Reading. And I started finding things…a lot of things. I started finding stories of people whose names I’d never heard of, even though I thought I probably should have. When I asked if anyone had names of relatives for me, people answered. Before I knew it, the pipe dream I’d had was starting to come true.
I told myself that I wouldn’t get attached to the boys I would write about. I hadn’t known them, anyway, so I wouldn’t be able to get attached. But to me, a 19-year-old girl born a bit over a month after 9/11, and a girl whose family was mostly spared from the war, I was…well, I don’t know how to describe it. I obviously knew the Second World War happened, but even now, sometimes it’s hard to believe it did. How could so many people be so selfless? How could an average man or woman become a hero larger than life in anything other than a movie or a book? All of it felt so far away, like something out of a novel. As I wrote about them and started to understand what they had experienced, I could not help but become attached. Each story pulls at me. All the women from Reading, whose stories I cannot track because of the very limited records that the Army kept on their women, I yearn to know someday. From the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the one Reading boy that I know of as of right now that was there, to the deserts of North Africa, and the boats offshore where Edward Palmer and three other Reading boys stood. The hills and rocks of Sicily and Italy where Charles Beighley and James Arsenault trod, to the muggy and gruesome islands in the Pacific where Fred Day, Charles Parry, Henry Brodecki, and many more fought and died. To the shores and grounds of Normandy where Roy Sherrod, of 13 Washington Street, would breathe his last, and Sherwood Collins would witness the worst that humanity had to offer, to Holland and Operation Market Garden where Richard Austin of the 101st Airborne Division would be killed, and Arne Dahlquist, wounded. To the Battle of the Bulge where many a Reading boy showed his strength, and where Donald Davidson of Prospect Street and later Longview Road, would become so cold, that when he returned home, a Christmas would never go by that he wouldn’t mention just how freezing he’d been during that godforsaken winter. From an island called Iwo Jima, where courage never died, with two Reading Seabees, a Reading Corpsman by the name of George Enos, of West Street, and three Marines, to Okinawa where hope went to die, and to Robert Nickerson offshore, whose boat was thrown into the air by a kamikaze that had hit the water and became stuck under the ship. To the Roer and Rhine Rivers with William Curran, whose life was saved by a metal wallet in his front pocket that stopped a bullet from entering his heart outside of Kerternich in early 1945. All the way to the walkways leading into the most horrible places the world had ever seen, with Joseph Doucette and Jacob Goldberg, at Dachau and countless other camps. And into the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. with Barbara Blaikie.
I cannot forget their names. I couldn’t even if I had wanted to. They are written on my heart, I think. Though I have absolutely no right to, I really do think of them as my boys and my girls. We cannot forget their names. Their stories get at the heart of what it means to be a veteran, regardless of if you saw combat, if you left the United States, or if you fought during a war. Inside the heart of John Francis Beaudoin of 32 Park Avenue was the thought that perhaps he might be able to make the world a better and safer place. Inside the mind of Fred Melvin Day of 18 Elm Street was the hope that perhaps the Army would give him a purpose that he hadn’t found in civilian life. For Madeline Beagin of 101 Wakefield Street, she just wanted to do her part. Deep inside the heart of Richard Charles Austin of 180 Prescott Street was a desire to serve a cause that was bigger than himself.
Everywhere we look, we can find veterans. The person who bags your groceries might be a veteran, or the person who checks you out at Home Depot, or the person that teaches your children. When my moms were growing up, it was pretty likely that about half of the men that they met had served in World War II. The family that lived in your house before you, or before the people you bought it from may have had a veteran in their midst. For all you know, your front steps may have been the site of an emotional and long-awaited reunion between a service member and his or her family. The kid that once lived across the street from your house may have been one of the brave boys who landed in Normandy and watched his friends get torn apart. Maybe he, himself, was torn apart. Or maybe that kid that once lived across the street was one of the kids that ended up going to Vietnam, walking through a jungle that came to life with each step he took. Just because the kid who landed in Normandy’s hands may be wrinkled, and they may ache, and he might need a cane to walk now, and his ears don’t work the way they used to, doesn’t mean that we can forget who he is, what he did, and the things he saw. And just because the woman who operated a switchboard somewhere in the United States during World War II is older and greyer now, and her mind might not be as sharp as it once was. It might be harder for her to stand up and move doesn’t mean that we can forget who she is, what she did, and the things she saw.
All I ask of you all this Veteran’s Day is to remember one name that I spoke here today, and hold it close to your heart, and remember that without our veterans, the story of our nation loses quite a bit of its color.
