I thought about this all day, and didn’t decide until now to act on it. I don’t normally write about family members in much detail, in consideration of their privacy. But I think my dad won’t mind my sharing a bit about him and his wartime experiences on this Veteran’s Day 2003.
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He was in the army during WWII. He interrupted his college education to enlist, and after being stationed in various spots around the US, was shipped to the European theater. He was there only a few months, but managed to get wounded twice. He was hit in the foot by a piece of shrapnel, patched up and sent back into service. His outfit landed at Omaha Beach…not during the historic D-Day landing, but shortly thereafter.
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The account gets a little fuzzy here, but he somehow ended up in Belgium, where a Nazi sniper shattered his arm, ending his military career. He still carries fragments of that bullet in his arm.
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An interesting twist to the story is that he was rushed to the field hospital, where surgery was immediately performed to save his arm. He later learned that the surgeon who did such a great job was, in fact, a German doctor, a POW.
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Incidentally, the sniper that nailed him was himself put out of commission — permanently — by one of my dad’s platoon buddies.
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I was probably forty years old before I heard this complete account from my dad. He just didn’t talk about it; not many of his peers did. I’m not sure what changed… I suspect the interest level of the audience had something to do with it, as those of us who had never experienced war firsthand began to realize the enormous debt we owe these men and women.
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There’s no way I can ever repay that debt, but there’s one thing I can do: listen. And then say an inadequate but nonetheless heartfelt “thanks.”
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P.S. I failed to mention something, something that many of us in these Boomer-and-later generations gloss over or never consider. My dad was the first in his family to be born in America. My grandfather’s native tongue was…German.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I thought about this all day, and didn’t decide until now to act on it. I don’t normally write about family members in much detail, in consideration of their privacy. But I think my dad won’t mind my sharing a bit about him and his wartime experiences on this Veteran’s Day 2003. He was in… Continue reading Veteran’s Day Thanks<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kitchen-sink","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1810"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7368,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1810\/revisions\/7368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}