Dear Readers,
Hooray! Summer is finally here! How do I know summer is finally here? Simple; I know because I looked at my calendar and saw that May 27 was Memorial Day, the official beginning of summer!
That’s why Memorial Day was created in the first place, as a reminder to plant your garden and to get your boat out of storage.
The Fourth of July serves as a calendar reminder that the 100 days of summer are nearly half over; you need to schedule those picnics, camping trips, and family reunions ASAP.
I’m guilty of not always honoring the original meaning of holidays; our increasingly secularized and politically correct culture has “hijacked” many holidays. Maybe, dear Readers, this might be a good time to take a moment to remember?
Honoring those who serve
First, if you have ever been in or are still in the military, thank you for your service! We all have stories of family members or friends who gave their lives in the service of their country; let’s tell those stories this summer.
Bernie Kelly grew up in the small town of Auburn, Ind. He was a freshman at Indiana University when on December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor was attacked.
Like so many other young men his age, Bernie enlisted.
Twenty-five was the maximum number of missions the B-17 crews flew during the war, but at the time Bernie was a gunner and a bombardier, the Army Air Corps had a shortage of men and planes so he was required to fly thirty-eight missions.
Before each of those 38 flights, Bernie wrote letters home to his mom and to his high school sweetheart, Bev, my future mother-in-law, to say goodbye, convinced that that mission would be his last.
On one of those missions over Germany, his B-17 was severely damaged by flak and forced to make an emergency crash landing.
All seven men on board sat “nested” in a straight line on the floor facing the bulkhead. Because Bernie was one of the biggest guys on the crew, he was in the very front. Once the plane finally came to a stop, the crew quickly scrambled to exit the aircraft as it was sure to explode.
All the men made it off except Bernie who had been temporarily paralyzed after absorbing the bulk of the impact; he couldn’t move his legs.
Luckily, two of the crew realized what had happened and returned to pull him off the plane just in time.
Sacrifices made
A few years later, my own dad, David Erwin Jr., having grown up about forty miles south of Auburn in the city of Fort Wayne, out of a sense of duty and a desire to serve, enlisted in the army only one month after graduating from high school.
As a military policeman in Korea, Dad had the difficult duty of dealing with fellow soldiers who, because of what they were going through in the conflict, often got into a great deal of trouble.
Even more difficult for him, however, was when he faced a tremendous moral conflict during night duty as guard of the supply bunkers.
If he discovered any non-military person attempting to break into the bunkers, his orders were to shoot to kill. To disobey that order was to risk a court martial, or worse.
Late one cold night, Dad observed a man trying to get into one of the bunkers.
Dad sensed this was just a local peasant desperate to find food for his family, so, disobeying orders, Dad took careful aim and fired over the man’s head, scaring him away.
Although neither Bernie nor Dave died during their years of service, their lives — the lives they lived before the wars — were taken from them nevertheless.
What these teenage boys had to face overseas completely changed who they were and shaped the men they were to become.
And so, dear Readers, when Labor Day has come and gone, when the season has changed from summer to fall, let’s not forget what we remembered this summer so as to take notice when the calendar calls us to celebrate Veterans’ Day.
Linda E. Kelly is a member of Blessed Sacrament Parish in Madison.