[In honor of
Veteran’s Day, this week’s series has focused on cultural and historical
moments and issues related to that sizeable and growing American community. As
always, this crowd-sourced post is drawn from the responses and perspectives of
fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours in comments, please!]
First, I’ll
highlight three additional Veterans Day posts of mine that were published this
week on the great new We’re History
site: on Chinese
Americans in the Civil War; African American Civil War veteran Parker David Robbins;
and the post-World War I Bonus Army.
My We’re History colleague Heather Cox Richardson
also published a Veterans Day post, on the recent posthumous Medal of Honor
awarded to Alonzo Cushing.
On Facebook, Paige Swarbrick
shares that her grandmother, Mary E. Dess, “wrote a story about her husband [Paige's grandfather], and the time when they were stationed in Korea and she helped open a school. It
was featured in Chicken
Soup for the Military Wife’s Soul.”
AnneMarie
Donahue writes, “My father and his father both enlisted in the United States military
forces. My grandfather served in the theater of Pacific and never saw a day of
action. My father signed up to serve in Vietnam and was deployed to Germany for
three years, finishing his tour in Kansas. But the veteran I want to write of
is my maternal grandmother, Imelda Fitzgerald (Smith after marriage). She and
her community of only 400 families had been moved from their homes in Placentia
Bay to an area closer to St. John's Bay to make room for the American Naval
Base. My grandmother then went and enlisted as one of the ladies of the call
center. She was not an American, and she wasn't even a Canadian at the time (it
was technically the Dominion of Newfoundland... no seriously that was the name
of it, look it up!). She, and the other young women, learned code, technical
mechanics of the phone system, assisted in landings as needed, and watched as
some of the finest pilots America would see ‘puddle hopped’ to Europe. What
makes her extraordinary is that this woman lost her home, farm, livestock,
fishing business and way of life to the lend-lease program, a program that she
did not benefit from, nor even understand. But she signed up to work for ‘the
states,’ these loud, pushy people who ate and spoke at the same time, yelled
everything they said, and had no idea what ‘thank you’ meant. She loved them.
She would then move (uhm... illegally) to this land and make a home for
herself, her husband and her 16 (anchor) babies. We owe a great deal to the
people who stand on lines, and face an enemy, but we owe a debt to the people
who stand behind them and fight in their own way.”
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. Any other
veterans texts, moments, or issues you’d share?
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