A Veterans Day Remembrance
Tuesday, November 11, 1968 was cold and stormy in Connecticut and it was barely light when my father drove my husband, Army Captain Dave Crocker, Jr., and me to a tiny airport in Groton where Dave would board a small prop plane for the first leg of his trip to Vietnam. I was probably not thinking about the fact that it was also the fiftieth anniversary of the armistice in 1918 that marked the cessation of hostilities on the Western front of World War I. Fifty years seemed like more than two generations to me at age twenty-one. My grandfather had fought in the British Army in World War I and he died in 1955, another lifetime ago. Three years in the trenches of France took an unspoken toll on him but he survived for enough years to succumb to the sequelae of the wounds, deprivations and mustard gas he suffered between 1915 and 1918.
Today, November 11, 2019, I’m imagining how my grandfather must have received the news of that horrible war’s end. I’m wondering if he heard the news in the hospital in Malta where he eventually recovered enough to come back to the U.S. and marry my grandmother, or if he was still limping through the freezing mud in France when the Armistice was announced. I was only eight when he died so I don’t think he had the opportunity to advise me about the risks of marrying a soldier going off to war. And, as I’ve heard from many family members of veterans, he didn’t reminisce about the war. Even my father […]