Unremembered Veteran?

They say that war is never over until the last veteran dies. But what if a veteran’s death has no one to remember him?

For the last few weeks Donna and I have been cleaning out Donna’s 96-year-old stepmother’s apartment. She recently fell and is now in a total care facility. We found a Purple Heart Medal that my wife thought was her father’s since he served as a Marine during WWII, but the back of the medal has the name of his brother, Richard S. Greene.

We know nothing about him. There is no one left to ask.

 All of Richard’s brothers and sisters in the Greene family have passed away, and Donna’s stepmother’s memory has tapered to a slender thread. However, through the tenacity of our friends Larry and Maryann Williams and Larry’s sister, Angele, some things came together from documents and articles found by them on Ancestry.com.

Richard died on November 9th, 1944 in Northern France. He graduated from high school in 1943 and one month later joined the US Army. He must have scored well on his army tests because after basic training he was sent to Northeastern University in Boston for 4 months under a program that developed junior officers and soldiers that required special technical skills. But manpower needs must have trumped manpower planning. He was assigned to the 26th Infantry Division, 101st Regiment (The Yankee Division), and shipped out to Europe as a qualified machine gunner in September 1944.

According to records, he died from a fatal shoulder wound caused by artillery fire. From what we can speculate, his unit was working around Dieuze or Moncourt Woods in northern France. His lifespan did not extend to the Battle of The Bulge that started a month later. As part of Patton’s Third Army, his regiment distinguished itself in hard fighting and had a part in helping end the war in Europe. The Division’s last event was liberating a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, an action that presented hard witness for the soldiers’ sacrifice.

Richard was 19 years old and had a fiancé.

The news must have been tragic for his 5 brothers and sisters and in particular for my wife’s father, Donald, who was serving in the Marine Corps at the time. Richard’s obituary’s title in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle states, “Richard S. Greene, Machine Gunner”.

I am sure he was more than that in life. Even a 19-year old’s life creates widening ripples before and after the date of the obituary.

There are voluminous books about WWII and a cursory reading will teach a reader that one person alone did not affect the war’s outcome. But each soldier, taking small steps, taking even an inch of ground, gains progress toward the end of the conflict. Any US combat veteran will tell you that his friends didn’t die with thoughts of the  Constitution, our democracy, or the security of the country… but by their actions, nourished its continued heartbeat.

And even though they didn’t know him, I’ll bet some of those concentration camp inmates appreciate him and his Purple Heart. God Bless Richard, RIP…

Spring Training

                                                        

                                           

 A good thing about being in my 70s is that life slows down. When I was younger, I figuratively had a lot of fastballs throw at me; some belt-high, some at my head. But now I see mostly off-speed stuff which allows me to enjoy the ball’s symmetry and its gravitational arc as it crosses the plate.

Yup, things have definitely slowed down. These days I seem to do more seeing than doing these days, not a bad development when you think about it. It can be difficult to concomitantly do and appreciate, but one can see and appreciate something at the same time. I don’t know why that is, but there is a richness in life now that wasn’t there before.

Tomorrow we enter the season of Lent, and not to overstate the baseball analogy, we can enter our own spring training and place ourselves before God. We don’t have to sequester in the desert and be tempted for 40 days. Christ did that for us. But starting tomorrow, we are called to look within ourselves -not in a forbidding way, getting fitted for that hair shirt and beating ourselves up -but thinking about our shortcomings with an eye toward improvement, gaining more purpose in our lives.

Much earlier in life, for me as a Catholic, I gave up things during Lent. Purportedly to honor God, but many times it became a bargaining tool, to petition for something I wanted. But in Lent, I now realize it’s thinking and talking to God for help. I need more God in my life…and less Jim.

I hope, by turning inward this year, Lent will lead me outward. To bring purchase to the heartbeat of God, and secure in a humble way, God’s love. And give me the ability to realize the good in others and will it for them.

Simple stuff really.

And the good news? No matter what, God will keep throwing those off-speed pitches as we get older. He has an eternal supply.




(hat courtesy of google images)

A Good 16 Minutes

I can’t stand to watch the morning news with my coffee anymore, and there are only 200 or so Law and Order episodes, so I like to sample Youtube and found Anne Lamont’s TED talk on 12 truths she came up with as she approached her 61^st birthday. She can be acerbic at times, but always interesting and humorous. I know your time is valuable, so I’ve listed just a few of her insights, but you owe it to yourself to go on Youtube and listen to her. The talk lasts 16 minutes. Most are direct quotations mingled with some paraphrasing.

Anne Lamont: The 12 Truths I Learned from Writing and Life – TED talk

“I’m not 47, the age I like to feel but I’m not. I’m every age I’ve ever been and so are you.”

1.     “All truth is a paradox. Life is a precious, unfathomable, and a beautiful thing.”

2.     “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes. Including you.”

3.     Almost nothing outside of you will help you in a lasting way unless you’re waiting for an organ. You can’t buy or achieve or date serenity or peace of mind. I so resent that, but improvement is an inside job.

4.      Try not to compare your insides to other people’s outsides. We’re all broken at times. No one could help me get sober except me. I had to reach out to my higher power that I call God. An acronym for God can be “gift of desperation.”  

5.     Chocolate is not actually a food.

6.     “Grace is spiritual WD40. The mystery is that God loves Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin and me exactly as much as he loves my grandchild. Go figure. The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us. Grace finds you exactly where you are but doesn’t leave you where it found you.”

7.     “Laughter is carbonated holiness that lets us breathe.”

8.     “God means goodness. A good name for God is not me.”

9.     “Food. Try to do a little better. I think you know what I mean.”

10.  Death – “We Christians like to think of death as a major change of address, but the person that died will live again fully in your heart if you don’t seal it off.” Leonard Cohen said, “There are cracks in everyone. That’s how the light gets in.”