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 **MY UNCLE SAM |
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* Veterans day marks the day when World War One ended: Nov 11 1918-a war in which 8.6 million soldiers on both sides were killed and 6.5 million civilians died. The politicians called it "The war to end all wars"
I knew Sam had fought in WW I but, as a small child, I missed the details of how he had been terribly wounded by poison gas in 1918 and had spent the last ten years of his life slowly dying in a veterans hospital. World War 1 began in 1914; Sam joined the Army in 1917, the year the USA entered the war. He and thousands more marched off to war to national cheers and the rousing music of Over there, over there, At first small US units sailed to Europe to fight. By 1918 larger and larger forces joined the battle. Newly invented weapons made this war ever more deadly-the
new machine-guns, tanks, Zeppelins that bombed cites, submarines. The French Army was the first to use gas as a weapon, when
in the early weeks of WW1 they fired tear-gas grenades at the
Germans. By mid-1918 huge casualties by canon, machine gun, poison gas and tanks were in the hundred thousands. In the trenches "Spanish Flu" was endemic and tens of thousands more died of disease. Germany requested a cease fire on October 3, 1918. In the trenches there were rumors the war would be over before Christmas. On the first of November, 1918 the U.S. Army attacked the heights near Barricourt. It was the same day my Uncle Sam inhaled poison gas. On Nov 11, in memory my Uncle Sam, I plant a little American flag by an old maple tree in my back yard-but also in memory of the men in Ken's Unit, the 3rd Army, who in 1944 in a blizzard, marched hundreds of mile over snow and ice and then smashed Hitler's last great offensive at the Battle of the Bulge. The little flag is also for the men in my unit in Korea, who were killed by shell fire, while building a bridge south of the Chosin reservoir, so that the Marines could escape entrapment and live to fight another day. The little flag is for my friend's son, who never returned from Vietnam and for the dead of the Gulf War, Afghanistan and Iraq. I like to think the little flag is also a small tribute to those who fought for America in other ways-the women who suffered in jail so my mother could vote., the Freedom Riders who died so other Americans could live as free people. But mostly the flag is for my Uncle Sam, who died Aug 24 1928 at age 30, having spent ten years slowly dying in the Veterans Hospital on Staten Island NY. He was poison-gassed on Nov. 1, 1918, |
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I remember another
November day in 1943, during World War Two, when my mother hung
out a little banner with two blue stars to signify that two members
of our household were in the Armed Forces. One was my older brother
Ken, the other my Uncle Mike. As she walked away I saw she was
crying. I did not remember ever seeing my mother cry before.
My father put his arm around my shoulder and told me Mom feared
what happened to her brother Sam might happen to her son Ken
or brother Mike.
