I was privileged to listen to these accounts during clinical rotations at the Nashville VA Hospital, the medical service at Fort Knox, and in my clinical practice in Chattanooga. I honor each narrator.
* After months of Army training, he had been shipped to France for the closing months of World War I. He recalled long marches and ruined villages and farms. The war ended before he saw combat. Severe influenza after the Armistice almost took his life and left him with a chronic cough and an easy susceptibility to subsequent respiratory infections. Dying of lung cancer, he recounted his experiences as a boy from the country who found himself part of a trained, fighting force in a foreign land.
* He had been captured in 1942 as Japanese forces overwhelmed his Army unit in the Philippines. During the next three years in a prison camp, he endured disease, wretched food and deaths of fellow prisoners. Following a lengthy recuperation after the war, he remained in the army. I was privileged to see him several times in the medical clinic at Fort Knox before his retirement.
* She had graduated from nursing school several years before the outbreak of World War II. She felt drawn to the care of wounded soldiers and volunteered to serve as an Army nurse. Her service took her across North Africa as Allied forces pushed the German army out of Egypt. The field hospital in which she served could be quickly set up close to the front line. Her hospital unit next landed with invading forces at Salerno on Italy's western coast. A shift meant working until everyone had received care. Next up for her hospital was assignment to follow Gen. George Patton's force across Northern Europe. In the winter of 1944-45, frostbite intensified the workload. In late April, she was part of a medical detachment sent to Dachau to treat recently freed inmates of the infamous concentration camp. At war's end, she returned to civilian service.
* Within days of landing in the second wave at Normandy, the young infantryman had been gravely wounded by machine gun fire, sustaining injuries to an arm, both legs and his pelvis. Months of hospitalization and multiple surgeries in England preceded his return to the U.S. where lengthy rehabilitation awaited him. Now retired from his civilian work, he devoted his attention to creating and maintaining a beautiful flower garden, which he proudly explained to me on a relaxed walk among the blossoms.
* An early enlistee soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was assigned to the Army Air Force where his short stature led to the eventual assignment as a bombardier on a B-17 Flying Fortress. In multiple bombing raids over Germany, his aircraft sustained only minor damage from flak. While focusing his attention on his bombsight, he was aware of bombers in his squadron exploding or going down in flames. He marveled that he had survived.
* A fighter pilot stationed in England, his job was to provide protection for bombers on long flights. Before each mission, he took a prescribed pill, probably an amphetamine, to maintain mental sharpness. Back in civilian life, he struggled with dependence on stimulants and alcohol. A psychiatrist helped manage his chronic anxiety. He achieved and maintained sobriety. Today, he would likely be diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
* He downplayed his service in Vietnam by stating he was a truck driver. Only later did he describe two deadly ambushes that his convoys had to fight through to safety.
* Two tours as an infantryman in Vietnam took an invisible toll. He slept poorly, had intervals of panic, and often used alcohol or marijuana to calm his anxiety. Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, he received a pension and regular consultation with a psychiatrist. Sometimes, he recalled outrageously humorous events. At other times, he described nighttime fire-fights with an enemy that could melt away into the jungle. He could not understand why his military service was often criticized once he had returned to the states. A visit to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., soon after its dedication brought comfort to him.
Veterans Day celebrates volunteers, draftees and career military personnel who "support and defend the Constitution of the United States, against all enemies, foreign and domestic."
Thank you - each of you - for your service.
Clif CleavelandContact Clif Cleaveland at ccleaveland@timesfreepress.com.