Back to today's Webcurrents ... Archive IndexWebcurrents Archive - April 1998"In war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, goodwill." - Winston Churchill Tuesday, April 14, 1998 (revised 9-9-99) A Random Act of Kindness c. 1945A young soldier was walking alone one night on the streets of New Orleans, one of several stops he would make following his tour of duty in Italy. He was wearing his Army uniform, regulation except for the short Eisenhower jacket. A tailor in Naples had fashioned it for him from a standard issue wool blouse in exchange for a pack of cigarettes. Many of his buddies wore similar jackets, although the general didn't exactly approve. The soldier was waiting out a layover. A morning train would take him on to Texas and other duties. Tonight he was just out looking around, biding his time, when a dark car pulled up slowly alongside him. Its driver asked the soldier if his employer might have a word with him. The back window rolled down. Inside, an older gentleman reached out his hand to give the soldier a card. "Take this to the manager at the Roosevelt Hotel" was all the man said. "Sure," said the soldier. Might as well, he thought. Got nothing better to do. He barely even looked at the card. The window went up, the car rolled away, and the soldier quickened his pace toward a new destination. Arriving at the hotel, the soldier presented his card to the manager on duty, who at once summoned bellhops with the snap of his fingers. The man in the car apparently had lost his son in the war. Every week he traveled the streets to find three servicemen in uniform and offer them the card with which the manager was now so familiar. "You are one lucky guy," the hotel manager told him. "Everything's on the house for you tonight -- our best room and anything you want to eat." That night, the soldier dined in the Blue Room, the hotel's elegant night club, joined by a Marine, a Coast Guard sailor and three hostesses. The menu offered roast rack of lamb with mint jelly for $2.70 and a Roosevelt Cocktail for 58 cents. Skinny Innes and his band played "Chattanooga ChooChoo" and '40s swing tunes while the group danced ... More than 50 years pass. The soldier has lived through many more battles but none of them his country's. His family is somehow still intact though distant in spirit. They are going through the motions of a holiday family gathering. It is Easter, and his daughter, the youngest of his two grown girls, asks about a pin on his lapel. She thinks it might be related to a pin he wore a few holidays back signifying 24 months of sobriety, but it is not. This pin represents his Air Medal; he remembers it as his "ruptured duck," a bird that no longer flies. "I figured if Bob Dole could wear his, I could wear mine," he tells her, chuckling. The soldier seldom speaks of those days but now and then a few stories emerge. They help to reveal the man he is, someone she loves who exists beneath layers of heartache and a past she can never share. More than once fate had stepped in to spare him. He had missed being shipped out with his crew when he came down with strep throat. He was deployed two weeks later, worried about going to war with men he barely knew, missing the men with whom he had trained for more than a year. His original crew perished in the English Channel. The second crew survived 53 missions together. Their B-24 was shot down once, but all 10 crewmen safely parachuted into a British mission on the Adriatic island of Vis. During the Battle of the Bulge, they arose each day at 4:30 to fly over the Alps toward their targets. On return the weather required them to fly dangerously low through canyons and mountain passes. Their plane, the Lady Patricia, named after the pilot's baby daughter, eventually crashed and was lost, but they were not aboard. A visiting crew had taken it. Other stories emerge in bits and pieces as hazy vignettes -- a stray dog they befriended, an Italian boy with whom they shared rations, a chance meeting with a friend half a world away. This story, triggered by a question about the pin, is easy for him to recall. More follow. The soldier's daughter is grateful for these glimpses of her father rising to meet the demands he faced. She wants him to recall that person, to become him again. Later, the daughter is at his home, asking to see that jacket once again. Together they pull it out of the coat closet. There's a moth hole on the front pocket. The wool is stiff with age. The sleeve bears his patch from the 15th Air Force. The daughter asks to see more. The soldier goes back into his bedroom and emerges a while later with a certificate in a black frame, a box and a leather writing diary. The glass in the frame is dusty and cracked, but the certificate inside denotes it was awarded for distinguished service and bravery in combat as a member of the 456th Bombardment Group, 745th Squardon. The recipient flew 35 missions as radio operator and 18 more as turret gunner. In the box are his beribboned Air Medal with three oak clusters and several other honors that make up what the soldiers called their "fruit salad." The leather diary is missing the strap that once kept it locked, but inside are some mementos of the soldier's participation in history: letters, photographs, official documents, a detailed inventory of what the soldier took with him when he was discharged: two coats, two wool blankets, a canteen, four shirts ... a pageful of items. The soldier's wife had given him the diary before he shipped out. She is in the room now, too, expressing surprise about the three hostesses who had joined the men for dinner. Folded in a pocket of the diary is the menu from the Blue Room, dated Sunday, May 13, 1945. On the back of the menu are the signatures of his dining companions. The soldier can't remember what he had to eat that night, and he remembers little about the others who joined him. But he will never forget the stranger's act of kindness, which gave some World War II servicemen a warm welcome home and endured to help a veteran stand tall in his daughter's eyes. -------- Acts of kindness such as the one in this story were commonplace at the end of World War II. Americans held those who fought the war in high esteem, and often expressed their gratitude to them in many ways. The solider and his wife, for instance, were moved to the top of a waiting list for the first Chevrolet and first Frigidaire to arrive in their town after the war. "There were probably a thousand stories like that one," the soldier now recalls of his dinner in New Orleans. "It was everybody's story. Someone always came along and picked up the check." It was so unlike the way we treated our Vietnam veterans, he says. "It was a whole different country then." -------- This story, originally published in April 1998 in "Webcurrents," an Internet column at www.webcurrent.com, is dedicated to the author's parents, Richard and Helen Wiens, and her sister, Barbara. She also wishes to acknowledge here the members of Col. Thomas Steed's Flying Colts of the 456th Bombardment Group and the flight crew of the Lady Patricia: the late Capt. Daryl Mason of Omaha, Co-Pilot Stanley Burda who played the accordian, Radio Operators Richard Wiens and Fred Schellenberg (the only crewman injured, he was cut on the face by flak and received the Purple Heart; Schellenberg also hosted a crew reunion in Montana in 1988), Engineers Walter Kraczyk from Massachusetts, and Charles Meade, who once shouted from the front turret -- "trees at 12 o'clock!", Armorers "Mac" McLaughlin and "Jeff" Jefferson, who at 28 was the oldest of the crew, Navigator Hank Aarnwyne and Bombardier William Germer; and members of the lost crew including Major Shafer, "Little Ike" Eisenhower and David Casey. The author's mother still has a porcelain lamb that Little Ike bought for her before he left for war, never to return. (For related columns, please see The Crew of the Lady Patricia and the Sept. 15, 1997, edition of Webcurrents.) Related Links:
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