Veterans Day – Why We Need War Stories
Veterans Day , 1968, was the last time I saw my beloved husband, Captain David R. Crocker, Jr. He left Connecticut for the war in Vietnam from the tiny Groton Municipal Airport in Groton, Connecticut at 7:00am on November 11, 1968.
The first time I met the survivors of Alpha Company of the 2/22 Infantry in 2006, I was scared. It had been almost four decades since my husband died in a booby-trapped bunker on May 17, 1969. I had never heard a first- person account of precisely what happened, and I still wasn’t sure I was ready to hear the stories. But they wanted to meet me and members of Dave’s family. We had learned from their tributes on the Vietnam Virtual Wall that they cherished his memory so I attended a reunion of the regiment in Omaha.
What was I afraid of? Perhaps simply the peeling back of the protective layer of years since I was informed of the tragedy on that warm spring day in 1969. Back then, I had avoided the nightly newscasts by Walter Cronkite. I couldn’t bear to see bloodied young men carried out of battle. Before the worst happened, superstition about what might protect my beloved governed every move I made. At age twenty-two I still believed in childish charms.
“Don’t step on a crack. It will break your mother’s back.”
For many years that followed, war stories repelled me.
Real war stories are hard for both the teller and the listener. Veterans and other survivors of war may hold back their untold stories for decades. Despite their courage on the battlefield, to describe that experience requires a reach back down into gut-wrenching […]
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 […]
Veteran’s Day 2018: Grief and Gratitude
On Veteran’s Day, November 11, 1968, my husband departed for the Vietnam War. I was twenty-two and could not fathom that he might not return. That rainy Tuesday morning, fifty years ago, would be the last time I heard his voice.
September 2018. I’m at an airport hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, where three giant, air conditioned buses are loading veterans and family members for a trip to the Infantry Museum at Fort Benning, Georgia, a US Army post where many trained for the infantry. I have a front seat, right behind the driver. Most people have boarded already but the seat next to me is still empty and it seems I’ll be traveling the one-hour plus journey without a seatmate. I know several veterans of the Vietnam Triple Deuce at this reunion of the 22thInfantry Regiment Society – especially the guys of A Company who served in Vietnam during ‘68 and ‘69.
They knew my husband, Captain David R. Crocker, Jr., as their beloved Company Commander. When he was killed in a booby-trapped Viet Cong bunker on May 17, 1969, the entire unit grieved and had to be taken from the field for several days. I didn’t know any of them until we met, by chance, in 2006 and they opened a window to our shared past.
Since that first reunion in Omaha, I’ve met them at reunions around the country every eighteen months. More and more veterans of the Triple […]
Veteran Voices of Pittsburgh: The Story Whisperers
The Veteran Voices of Pittsburgh started out quietly enough. First, a few vets gathered for breakfast once a month. Eventually, there was a trip planned to visit a monument in Washington, DC.
Stories that had been bottled up for as much as fifty years began to pour out on that bus trip. Stories of what war was really like.
Everyday should be Veteran’s Story Day. I believe in the healing power of telling true-life stories, especially the ones that are hardest to tell. Not only is it good for the teller, but the world needs first person accounts in order to know what actually happened during calamitous events.
One of the great qualities of the recent PBS Vietnam War series, created for television by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, was the relentless telling of stories by people who lived through it on both sides. The stories were often brutal, but we need to hear them. Third person summaries that supposedly supply facts cannot do justice to the horror and terror – or the exhilaration for some – of war.
A group of less well-known documentarians in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Veteran Voices of Pittsburgh, have been collecting and recording the oral histories of veterans and survivors on podcasts for several years. Kevin Farcas, founder, and Todd DePastino, historian, have reached out to find veterans of all wars and produced a unique archive of stories captured in a warm conversational style.
In 2016, in his 90th year, Gene McShane was recorded describing what it was like to land on Omaha beach in Normandy having been […]
Veteran’s Day 1968
Veteran’s Day, 1968. An excerpt from Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion after War.
He spoke of his time in Vietnam as unavoidable, a river to cross, an obstacle to remove. Once the orders are issued, he said he would face court martial if he didn’t go.
“There’s no other choice,” he said. “I have to go even if Dad says the war is a mess right now.” What his father had said was that there was a disconnect between what was happening on the ground, in the jungles, and what politicians and the Pentagon perceived the war to be and expected it to be, a reality which would not be unraveled from the fundamental untruths and hyperbole of the war until years later. But, I understood nothing about what he was about to step into.
“We’ll survive – I’ll be home by Christmas next year,” he said. “Then I have only one year before I can get out of the army completely.”
I promised to write every day and prayed for the rash to go away.
“Letters – that’s all we’ll have over there,” he said. “Where I’ll be, there won’t be any other communication except mail.”
The anticipation of verbal silence, physical distance, had its own power. It began slowly with long silences and idle activities, constant unspoken preparation. We could drive for an hour together without a word between us. We unpacked and repacked, organized cleaned, straightened, made lists. On our last night together on November 10, 1968 we barely spoke. We expressed our love for each other only with our bodies. The poison ivy scourge had […]
A Veteran’s Day Remembrance
My husband, Capt. David R. Crocker, Jr., left for Vietnam on November 11, 1968. Veteran’s Day always brings back the memory of his early morning departure from a small local airport. This year, on the anniversary of his death in Vietnam, May 17, I published a memoir about that time in my life and the aftermath. I’m happy to say that the experience of writing this book and reconnecting with the men who served with him in Vietnam has been transformative. I have reconnected with a neglected past. The following is an excerpt from the first chapter:
Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War
Truly nothing is to be expected but the unexpected!
Alice James (1891)
On May 17, 1969, when I was twenty-three, my husband, Captain David Rockwell Crocker, Jr., was killed in the Vietnam War.
We had married on the day after his graduation from West Point in June 1966. Three years later, after six months in Vietnam, he was mortally wounded while inspecting a deserted Viet Cong bunker. He had entered the small dark enclosure with his first sergeant along with a Vietnamese translator, and another soldier, who was a conscientious objector, carrying a bulky radio.
There are speculations about what happened next in the bunker. Possibly an unseen wire like fishing twine, strung overhead, connected to the trigger on a booby trap; probably the antenna, projecting up from the radio, pressed against the wire. The explosion sent earth, human flesh, glass, bamboo and shrapnel in all directions. Dave survived for a few hours with fatal wounds to his […]
