They were young and fit. They had seen war and knew how to handle it.

But they had not yet seen the Kokoda Track, had not faced waves of suicidal Japanese soldiers, had not been lost in the steaming jungles of New Guinea’s Owen Stanley Ranges… which the Commander in Chief of World War II’s Second Australian Imperial Force, General Sir Thomas Blamey, would later assert was a cowardly retreat.

Isolated in the jungle, far from life-saving medical support, mortally wounded soldiers cried out to their mates to put them out of their misery with a bullet, rather than be left suffering, spending their last moments on earth alone, waiting to be run through with a bayonet by an advancing Japanese soldier.

One profoundly courageous man did help end that suffering. It would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Through defeat, desperation, humiliation, heroism, victory and vindication, the esprite de corps of the South Australian 2/27th Battalion endured.

www.thelostbattalion.net is their story.

On my wall
bright children’s drawings
sent in the mail
from children
mine, known only briefly
through short visits
on lasting memories
short-lived

The view from
my window, lacking
from my chair
braced by weights
of lost love
lost waltzes
through meadows
green with my youth

The bed hurt my ribs
painful…so painful
the man in me
stopped the tears
from falling on
the pages they sent
they deserved better
my daughters
holding in the spirit
for their short stays

Watching one of my girls
distant – disillusioned
hearing whispers
Mother’s kitchen
unsure of what it was
my wife
passed in my absence
is it possible the girls
were in need of me?

Fighting my chair
I could not get up
I could not run, to protect mine
the tubes held me down
my fathering absent
and only
the disease
if only my body was present

But those colored drawings
how they
brightened my days
they kept me from suicide
my girls
in innocent smiles
leaving them
it was not
going to happen, not yet 
but Agent Orange
its brutality
of body planned
a battle that broke me down

As the days shortened for me
the faces
of my daughters
held me closer to God
and knowing
death would catch me
alone at night
I clung to their pictures
even tighter

Then the wind came
and down a hallway
she walked
my disillusioned daughter
holding my hand
she told me
all the things I needed
to know and hear
a dying man
needed to know
he’d be remembered

Photo Credits

Photo courtesy of Melinda Cochrane – all rights reserved

Poppy Field

It’s a Friday afternoon at school. Our daycare is filled with children playing. Screams of delight, shouts of joy – their little voices sound so big in the little room. All is right with the world. I get into my car at 5:00pm to go home and hear on the news that while my little charges are busy at play in a safe, beautiful setting, miles away across an ocean tragedy is unfolding. Paris is under siege. I can’t believe what I am hearing: 53 dead, 66 dead and the numbers keep going up.

Arriving home, my husband and I turn on CNN and watch in shock at what is transpiring on the continent. My thoughts go to one of the families whose child attends our daycare. Chloe is her name. She is in grade 1 and is a lively, exuberant, joyful little girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. She looks like her Mom, Natalie. Natalie is much more reserved, however.

Over the past year and four months I have gotten to know them. They are your average young family, living and working and raising their two children in a lovely quiet neighbourhood, a place for their children to grow and feel safe and free. There is one difference: Natalie is in the military. I only heard about this in the past few months when Natalie came to see me one day to ask me about taking Chloe out of daycare because their situation had changed. She was going to be deployed to Kuwait and felt that Chloe would be better off at home rather than in daycare while she was gone.

Her husband’s mother and her mother would take over duties as surrogate Mom while Natalie was in Kuwait. It was interesting and yet somehow somewhat melancholy to realize that Natalie was military and her job was taking her overseas, taking her away from her young children and husband, family and friends. Then it kind of hits you as to what kind of a sacrifice she is making for our country. Leaving her safe environment here in Canada to travel miles across the ocean to work in a place that may be very hostile in not only its logistics but in its environment and its culture.

A few days before Natalie was going to be shipped out she did us the honour at the elementary school of coming in to speak to our juniors – grades 1 and kindergarten -about the poppy. She graciously gave up her precious time to speak to the children about the poppy program and why we wear “flowers,“ as my little kindergarten children called them. We had all the groups in our daycare, and Natalie and her husband Francois, a retired reservist who served in Bosnia, spoke so eloquently to the children about what it meant to be in the military. The children listened intently and asked all kinds of questions and told Natalie stories about their Grandpas and Uncles and family who also served in conflicts around the world. I felt very privileged to have her with us to talk about Remembrance Day. How apropos it was, especially with the horrific details that hit the news circuits just days later on Friday with the Paris attacks. How vulnerable we all are to the threats of our enemies. It is our service men and women like Natalie, past and present, who have given up so much of their lives in order to give us the freedom we are so accustomed to.

While Natalie is away Chloe will be here with us at Christmas Park Elementary School and we will all look out for her. We will look out for her the way her Mom is looking out for us, miles from home. As Christmas approaches and as tensions between so many countries around the world seem to give us pause about the direction the world is going in, I find myself thinking of Natalie and her family. I want to thank her for her service, her bravery, and her courage to do something not many of us would find even comfortable thinking about. May all of our troops across all of the war-torn countries and those stationed with our allies around the world find peace and hope and the real meaning of Christmas this year. How fragile and delicate our little world is and how lucky we are to have Natalie and her fellow service men and women there to protect us from that fragility.

Image Credit

“poppy field” by Jon Bunting. Flickr Creative Commons . Some rights reserved.

People have asked what inspired me to write “Still Having Fun,” the story of my parents’ military marriage. The short answer is grief. After both of my parents died in May of 2007, I found solace in re-reading my mother’s 1947-48 letters from post WWII Okinawa.

Before she got Alzheimer’s, Mother had mentioned wanting to publish those 30+ letters. I decided I would take on her project and the little project grew. It expanded back to my parents’ courtship and my father’s Army Air Corps days. It crept forward in time as I delved into documents and records, navigator logs and travelogues, performance evaluations, weight charts, emails, tax returns and household expense ledgers. My parents, it turned out, led well-documented lives.

Much to my surprise, I ended up writing an entire book about their life adventures, “Still Having Fun, a Portrait of the Military Marriage of Rex and Bettie George, 1941-2007.” Since the book was published, I’ve become an evangelist for capturing family stories and documenting family life. What could be a better time to start than Thanksgiving?

In my mind, November is the most family focused month of the year. Starting with Veterans’ Day and the Day of Remembrance, November ends with families gathered around the bountiful board, expressing gratitude and sharing stories. This year is doubly meaningful because Hanukkah and Thanksgiving fall on the same date – a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, I’m told.

Don’t wait; don’t hesitate. Do it now – before it’s too late. Record your uncle’s memories about the Vietnam War. Ask your mother or grandmother to tell you about an early job or the origins of a favorite family recipe. Decide to make saving memories a family tradition.

If I hadn’t asked my father about his most memorable WWII experience as the navigator of a B-24 heavy bomber – the mission that earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross – I wouldn’t know about his crew’s harrowing return to the UK after their plane was disabled over Bremen, Germany: “We lost control of everything. The aileron cable was severed. The plane dropped about 6,000 feet. We couldn’t get air speed to catch up with the formation…”

If my father hadn’t asked his ancient aunts for their stories, scribbling his notes on a stained paper napkin, I wouldn’t know that his great, great grandfather built a school house with the wood and salvaged nails from a dismantled sunken Civil War gun boat, then hired and boarded a school teacher for the children near their Kentucky tobacco farm.

If my mother hadn’t written notes about her mother’s family, I wouldn’t know the significance of a hand-painted, 1790 Pennsylvania Dutch wedding certificate I found when I cleaned out my parents’ house after their deaths. If my mother hadn’t saved her mother’s yellowed newspaper clippings, I wouldn’t know that Grandma was a finalist in the first Pillsbury Bake-Off.

If Grandma hadn’t saved my mother’s letters written from a Quonset hut in war-scarred Okinawa, I would never have written a book about my parents’ marriage.

Everyone has a story to tell. Vow to create a new family ritual of telling and asking about family stories. Encourage your children to document their past year. What were the highlights? What did they learn? What are their hopes and dreams? If they are too young to write, they can dictate their autobiography to you. The very young might draw a picture and tell you about it. Record them doing so. Put everyone’s contribution in a binder.

Add entries at least once a year – or more – perhaps also on birthdays or other holidays. Give your family the gift that lasts. Give them the gift of story.

Photo Credits

All photos by Candace George Thompson – All Rights Reserved

Guest Author Bio

Candace George Thompson
Candace George Thompson is the author of Gold Medal awarded “Still Having Fun, a Portrait of the Military Marriage of Rex and Bettie George, 1941-2007.” The book is a testament to the character and resilience of American military families, a history lesson and an entertaining romance.

Candace is the daughter of a 30-year career Air Force officer whose first mission as a B-24 navigator was on D-Day. She was born in Kentucky, as were both of her parents. Like most service families, hers moved frequently. By the time she started 10th grade, she had changed schools 13 times.

After college graduation with a BA in Spanish Literature, Candace served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Venezuela. Her rootless way of life continued upon her return – Vermont, San Francisco, Oregon, New Jersey. She and her husband have now lived in Chicago for over 30 years – eight times longer than any place before. She is happy to have finally found a home.

Her interests include reading, writing, sharing a good meal with friends, laughing, early morning walks, rock ‘n roll, feeding squirrels and collecting penguins. She likes all things Mexico and weird tidbits of information.

Candace’s stories have been published in several anthologies including those of the Puerto Vallarta Writers Group, the Off Campus Writers Workshop and the Military Writers Society of America.

Follow Candace: Facebook

The Battle of Vimy Ridge holds a special place in our Canadian psyche as it was the first time that all four Canadian army divisions (15,000 – 25,000 soldiers per division) fought together as a Canadian Corps (60,000 – 100,000 soldiers in a Corps) under a Canadian commander, not a British one as would have been the norm at this point in time. Independent from Britain since 1867 it was Canada’s military success at Vimy Ridge during April 1917 that many argue sparked a growing sense of Canadian identity which ever so slowly began separating us from mother England.

Briefly escaping the grey October showers of Paris we drive north-east of The City of Lights towards the Belgian border to the French town of Arras. With our rented Mercedes, which cost about the same as a mid-size car rental in Canada, we flew along the highway making great time to Arras. An hour out of Paris the grey clouds began to break allowing small streams of sunlight through, with brief glimpses of blue skies lifting our spirits.  Two hours after leaving Paris we arrive in Arras.

Pulling out our road map and reconfirming our route with the car’s GPS we leave the medieval charms of Arras as we drive through a serene countryside on our way to Vimy Ridge to visit the Canadian National Vimy Memorial a 100-hectre (250 acre) historic site that encompasses the trenches of the Canadian Corps and the opposing German trenches.

The Canadian Monument at the Canadian National Vimy Memorial site, Vimy, France.

Driving around the last bend in the road as we head up the ridge the two towering, white columns of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial monument come into sight. Their clean, simple white lines reaching upwards as if to heaven overwhelm the visual senses. After decades of viewing them in paintings and photographs there they are, seeing those majestic columns 400 metres in front of you drives home the sanctity of this place.

Walking up to the memorial the skies suddenly become overcast, the winds intensify and large raindrops come pelting down for several minutes. As quickly as the squall started it abruptly ends and the skies clear when we reach the base of the monument and gaze upon a stone carving of a mother’s mournful face.  The names of thousands upon thousands of Canadians whose last breaths were drawn assaulting this height of land are carved into the walls of the memorial. Many of these men would have been in their late teens or early twenties, dead before their lives had truly begun. As a father this is unsettling.

In German trenches looking at Canadian trenches across a crater field. Those two British school boys are in the Canadian forward observation trench just to the side of steel plates meant to provide some protection to forward observers. Life could be very short in the trenches if you didn’t keep your head down since there wasn’t a shortage of snipers on either side.

As a historian Vimy Ridge enthrals me. From the top of the ridge I stand at a spot where German officers would have had a bird’s eye view of the French, then British and finally Canadian trenches below. The green valley below is vast. It is kilometres and kilometres of wide of open killing fields. Whoever held the ridge had the advantage. What the French and British failed to do the Canadians succeeded in by capturing the ridge from the Bavarian regiments that had held them for years.

From an archaeological perspective what makes the Canadian National Vimy Memorial fascinating is that on its 100 hectares of land are some of the very few trenches left from the First World War. Considering that there would have been several thousand kilometres of trenches this is amazing.

A Canadian command post where orders were issued from inside the tunnel.

Tours of the monument, Canadian tunnels as well as Canadian and German trenches are arranged through the Reception Centre. It is a popular destination for school groups with thousands of British students visiting the Canadian National Vimy Memorial each year.

(click images for larger versions and descriptions)

Vimy Ridge is rural and surrounded by villages. Behind the Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery is a restaurant called l’Estaminet de Lorette which was recommended to me by a Canadian friend who has lived in the area for a few years. They have a €15 lunch menu of normally three main choices which include an entrée, main dish and dessert. This is a good place to eat before heading back to Paris.

Yet gazing upon the vast, green fields as we drive by Vimy Ridge for the last time it is hard to imagine that these fields were soaked with the blood of 3,958 Canadian soldiers who had died on them and by another 7,004 who had fallen wounded and the hundreds of thousands of French, British and German soldiers who met a similar fate. These fields today look serene. Without the monuments and cemeteries it’s impossible to envisage the murderous carnage that took place almost a century ago.

Photo Credits

All photos by Joseph Frey – All Rights Reserved

On that December morning, while Joseph Carlini was asleep in his bunk in Pearl Harbor, Alice May Bunt my mother, and her brother Albert Nelson were attending the funeral of their father, whose coffin was being carried from the parlor of the family home to the cemetery in Richburg, New York. My father Charles van Heck, Jr., his parents, and sisters were gathering around their dining room table in North Bergen, New Jersey. He had spent the night at work in a dairy where he was a pasteurizer. His best friend Cy Sommer was at home reading the Sunday paper with his wife. They had finished lunch. Terri’s Uncle, Philip Tardiff, his parents, and sisters were eating their Sunday dinner in Detroit, Michigan.

The planes came in over Kahuku Point, Oahu’s northern tip. They banked right, and then flew down the island’s west coast. Mitsuo Fuchida looked through his binoculars at the ships in the shallow Hawaiian harbor. Checking his watch, he saw the time was 7:49 A.M. He gave an order. Mitsuo’s radioman signaled, “T0-,to-,to-” the syllabic abbreviation for “Totsugeki,” Japanese for “charge” (WW II: Time-Life Books History of World War II, 162)

August, 1914, when the nations had stumbled into a world war, was a memory—haunting for some, barely remembered, forgotten, or merely the distant past for others—on that December morning of 1941. Between August 22, 1914 and November 11, 1918, nine million military personnel had perished. An additional five million civilians had died from hunger, disease, and bombardment. Of the First World War, Barbara W. Tuchman wrote:

“When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion. ‘All the great words were cancelled out for that generation,’ wrote D.H. Lawrence in a simple summary for his contemporaries. If any of them remembered, with a twinge of pain, like Emile Verhaeren, ‘the man I used to be,’ it was because he knew the great words and beliefs of the time before 1914 could never be restored” (The Guns of August, 440).

My grandfather van Heck had spent World War I in the Dutch army along the Belgium border. Terri’s grandfather Tardiff had been a doughboy; he spent the duration of the war building railroad bridges in Washington State.

During World War II, my father would train the machine gunners for the bombers, then irritate his commanding officer to be transferred to the European theater. Instead, he was sent to the Pacific and a desk job. Again, he would become a nuisance until he was allowed to fly as a machine gunner on missions over Iwo Jima. At the war’s end, after the bombing, he was sent to Hiroshima. He knew the crew of Enola Grey, knew the reports. He wasn’t prepared for what he saw. He wrote on the back of a photo he took, “Never again. Never again.”

My mother enlisted a few days after Pearl Harbor. Following boot camp, she would be sent as a WAC to Texas, where she met and married my father, then to Washington State and Georgia serving in supplies, and eventually was transferred to the University of Kentucky.

My Uncle Albert Nelson Bunt fought in North Africa, was sent to Louisiana for training, then England. He landed in Normandy on D-Day +6, fought through the hedgerow country, the breakout, and at the Battle of the Bulge. For a few years after the war, Uncle Albert was fine. Then the memories and trauma swallowed him. We used to visit him in the V.A. Hospital. His fingers were stained yellow from the cigarettes he held in trembling hands. He would just stare and sometimes speak quietly. During one visit he took my grandmother’s hands. “Mama, I want to come home.” She took him home, caring for him until the day he died. Years after his death, I began to inquire about what happened to his outfit the 801st TD. They had been assigned to the 99th Infantry Division. The responses I received from the men of the 99th told of finding the bodies of the 801st frozen in the positions they had died in the following spring after the battle.

Cy Sommer, Uncle Cy as I called him, fought in North Africa, Sicily, then Italy. He was at Casino, the Purple Heart Valley, then landed at Anzio, a fifteen-mile stretch of beach that became hell for those who landed there and pushed into the rocky terrain.

Philip Tardiff died in the crash of his B-17 bomber flying a classified training mission in Georgia.

Joseph Carlini’s war began on the morning of December 7th. He never said much about that morning to my wife. What he said was enough to understand the death and destruction he had witnessed. He would continue to see combat for the remainder of the war; then he was stationed in Japan during the occupation. Six years after Pearl Harbor he married Virginia Batalucco. Like many others of his generation, he went on to obtain a college degree. Joseph then coached and taught high school physical education. He was active in his church. Terri told me he liked to tease and joke. He always made her smile.

The argument can be made that the Second World War actually began at 7:00 A.M. on November 8, 1918 when German and French officers faced one another in a railroad car in the mist shrouded forest of Compigène to negotiate an armistice. Others mark the date as September 1, 1939, at 10:00 A.M. the day Poland was invaded and France declared war on Germany. By the end of the World War II, 8:55 A.M. September 2, 1945, 55 million military and civilian lives had been lost.

I remember as a schoolboy watching them. They were the veterans of the Spanish-American War riding in Cadillac convertibles; shrunken men waving from the backseat. Then came the World War I Vets, a handful marching with stooped shoulders, their hair-white, their shortened strides, their eyes taking in the cheering crowd lining the sidewalk. They were followed by the Veterans of World War II, shoulders backs, eyes straight, some wore VFW hats, and others were bareheaded in the warm sunlit mornings. And others, like my father stood in the crowd. My father never gave a reason for not marching.

There were the Korean Vets, proud, quiet about their service, comrades of the harsh winters and sweltering heat of summers. They seemed to think of themselves as lessened by the stalemate of their war, yet proud and cynical of war, slipping quietly back into the society the war had taken them from.

And I recall the night of my high school graduation. As we walked off the field after the ceremony, someone began to sing a slightly modified version of a song by Country Joe and the Fish. “One, Two, Three, Four what are we graduatin’ for? / Don’t ask me why I don’t give a damn / Next stop is Vietnam.” For some of us, Vietnam was the next stop. For most of my friends, it was the last stop.

There have been too many wars since the last chopper lifted off the U.S. Embassy in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City). Now as I watch the Vets of Iraq and Afghanistan passing through airports, train stations, bus terminals, see them in the hospital, or observe their funerals at Arlington and in their hometowns, I am reminded of Leslie Coulson’s poem “From Somme” written during World War I.

I played with all the toys the god’s provided,
I sang my songs and made glad holiday.
Now I have cast all my broken toys aside
And flung my lute away.

A singer once, I am fain to weep.
Within my soul I feel strange music swell,
Vast chants of tragedy too deep—too deep
For my lips to tell.

Photo Credits

Photos are by Charles van Heck – All Rights Reserved

When we are too fast, we are barely looking forward and hardly looking back. And that means not enough remembering.

On a day where we are to celebrate those who have fought for our freedom, will you take that moment of silence at 11 a.m.? Will you go slow – or to be precise, stop – for just sixty seconds? Will you let your mind slow down even while you are quiet for that moment? Will you remember to remember?

We have plenty of tools to remind us of things, yet it’s not often we use them to remind us of the things that are “big picture important” – like showing gratitude, disconnecting so that we can better connect with our fellow man, and living our lives instead of chronicling them on every social network we can find. In order to really reflect and remember, we need to slow down. Only we can control that – and it won’t come easy.

Right now there is not enough remembering because we have somehow sped up time. Today is a great opportunity to start slowing down and really examine life. Why not start that habit off right by doing it in honor of those who have helped defend our freedom? It’s the very freedom that gives us that ability to speed up or slow down as we see fit.

Take the time to make the time. Life is so much better when you do. And that’s what those we honor today were fighting for: a better life for all.

Photo Credit

Photo by Elliott Brown on flickr.com – Some Rights Reserve

I am writing this letter as a Remembrance Day tribute to you and all the others that served our country so unselfishly.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to talk to you about your experiences in the Great War of 1914-1918. I was too young and not very knowledgeable about such things at the time. I certainly did not appreciate your sacrifice, nor did I have any concept of the conditions in France where you served.

I am now in my early sixties with children and grandchildren of my own. I have researched my family roots including the military side of it. Through my research and readings on your military experience I have come to have a deep connection with your experiences. My only regret is that I can’t speak with you directly about this period of your life. This letter is my attempt to do that in a public way.

I discovered you enlisted in the 3rd Division of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) in 1915 to go overseas. You were assigned to the Canadian Army Service Corps within this division. There you drove munitions trucks from the rear areas to the front lines under heavy enemy fire. Now I realize why you were such an excellent driver.

Even though these trips were made under cover of darkness, the enemy could hear the sounds of the truck engines and rained heavy artillery fire down on the roads approaching the frontline trenches. Many of your fellow drivers were killed instantly when shells ignited the explosives in the trucks. The stress of driving under these conditions must have been unbearable.

When I compare your military record with the timeline of battles fought in the Flanders area of France during the time you were serving, it is obvious you experienced most of the brutal encounters of that time. It is fortunate you survived and returned to us here in Canada, so many of your friends and fellow soldiers did not.

Grandpa I value greatly this historical connection you gave our family. We treasure it with tremendous pride. Frankly I and others of my generation wonder how you did it. Your country and King called and you gladly gave up years of your life to serve under dangerous and dreadful conditions.

It’s shocking and sad to realize how young the soldiers were that went to war. I can only imagine what it was really like, but at least now I have a true appreciation for your experience. Bless you and all the others for your service to our country. We will never forget.

Your loving grandson,

Steve B. Davis

Photo Credit

Photo Courtesy of Steve B. Davis – All Rights Reserved

First published at Stamperdad

Guest Author Bio

Steve B. Davis
Steve Davis is a freelance writer and researcher. He calls Calgary, Alberta home. Davis writes nonfiction and fiction. He is working on a nonfiction book related to the 1920’s. His work has been published in mainstream and philatelic magazines.

He is employed full-time in the energy industry at the present time, but retirement is looming. He then plans to pursue his writing full-time. His other interests include postal history and genealogy. Steve is a do-it-again dad with five children, four daughters and a son.

Blog / Website: http://stamperdad.wordpress.com

build, convince, fight,

spray gas, spray orange
on greens,

and they build, convince, fight,

when the winds shift for change
in the name of those who think they have a god given right,

little fists salute in desert sands, salute and shoot,

tanned faces in red and yellow shawls returned to their life of veiled head-dresses,
as men and women in uniforms,

build, convince, fight

while watering a society of its
traditional fires,

but, today above the whitened sky
we witness wrinkled flags in winds as
buildings torn and scattered are redeemed with
bagpipes and bugle notes,

and still we build, convince and fight.

Keith Cochrane (passed away at 36)

Photo Credit

Keith Cochrane – courtesy Melinda Cochrane – All Rights Reserved

Come now boy, don’t be afraid
There’s no need to worry, it’s just routine air raid
Don’t worry boy, we’ll pay for your time
The job should be done by quarter to nine
You’ll get overtime

A letter back home, guess that I’m OK
Had to kill a man, did it yesterday
Looked right in his eyes and as he fell,
Tears were on his face
I just had to cry, seemed like such a waste

Come now boy, no need to sob
You knew it would happen, it’s just part of the job
Don’t worry boy, he paid for his crime
It’s a point for our team and besides
He got overtime

He was just a boy, all of twenty-one
Then the morning came, his number turned,
He knew his time had come
Put his name in stars, send the body home
Find another man, hurry back,
I think that I should phone

Oh you devils, our boy died in vain
Come now ma’am, surely I’m not to blame
You ought to be proud, your boy served us fine
He died for his country, by the way,
Here’s his overtime

Photo Credit

Microsoft Office Clip Art Collection

Overtime Lyrics © 1980, Gil Namur

First Published at gilnamur.com