Not too long after John F. Kennedy became the 35th President of the United States, my family was sitting around the dinner table one night in Sioux City, Iowa, where I was born and raised. Before dinner, we’d all seen a story on the local evening news about a soldier who had been awarded a medal for bravery. I was thirteen at the time; but my younger sister, Sue, was only ten and piped up, “Hey, dad. How come you don’t have any medals?” My father, a World War II veteran, saw more action than most during his five-year stint as an Army engineer – North Africa, Sicily, Utah Beach, the Battle of the Bulge.
Dad, who never spoke of the war, sighed and told my sister that he was, in fact, owed some medals, but he hadn’t bothered to pick them up at the time. That would have been the end of the story except that my sister sat down the next day and ripped off a letter to the new President telling him, “My father won all these medals in World War II, and he never got any of them. Could you find them and send them to him?”
My brother and I thought this was pretty funny, but she got the last laugh. About six weeks later, a small cardboard box arrived in the mail addressed to my sister with a very official looking label – United States Department of Defense. When she opened it, she found a letter from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and a raft of medals including a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Of course, we bombarded Dad with questions about how he won the Bronze Star, but characteristically, he refused to talk about it saying only, “It wasn’t anything. I was just doing what I was supposed to do.”
Thirty-five years later, in August of 1997, my husband and I took my Dad's first grandson, then just eleven, to Normandy. There, we rented a car and followed exactly the path my father’s platoon had taken, fighting all the way, from Utah Beach to Cherbourg in the D-Day invasion. We did it because we wanted Ian to understand the great sacrifice his grandfather and so many others had made for him. We brought back pictures and mementos for Dad and planned on sharing them at Christmas. My father died unexpectedly a month after we returned.
The local American Legion provided a three-gun salute for Dad’s funeral; and as his casket was lowered, Ian took the sand from Utah Beach he’d carefully saved in a small plastic bag for his grandfather and sprinkled it into the black Iowa earth.
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