-A Very Special Feature From Ron Warren-
The Volunteers - Veteran’s Day
By: Ron Warren November 4, 2016
Her hands hurt from sewing. She was working on a quilt. Quilters do not hesitate to take a needle and thread into their hands and leave the machine sitting away watching, trying to learn. This quilt was special. Almost as special as the quilts she had made for her grandchildren. This quilt made her reflect back to a time when her husband was at war. His fate, every day, was a torture for her. Now she has had him home safely for almost fifty years. The design she was quilting made her look back on those terrible times. Many times she had to stop and walk by her husband, nonchalantly, just to touch him as a celebration of him having survived. The thought of not being able to do that would bring her to tears. They were lucky!
The photographer stands at the dedication ceremony running his hand over the perfectly smooth, finished wood of the new display cases, his thoughts take him back to a dark Oklahoma morning as he was running in formation. He felt like he was about to die. A few years of drinking beer and smoking cigarettes had chased him down from behind. The smells of the early morning had now become familiar to him. The occasional sound of a creek told him he was learning the area in the dark. People were falling out of the formation to try and recover. The young man wanted to take a knee too but something else, beside the Sergeants, held him in formation. He remembered the display cases in his local courthouse.
One display case had the Medal of Honor winners from his home county. One of these men attacked a house held by thirty five German SS Soldaten. This man was shot in the head –presumed dead. Lying in the muddy blown apart cobblestone street he saw light and knew he was alive. Rage flowed through out his very fiber. A couple of grenades through the window seemed to take some of the wind out of their sails. He stood up, blurry eyed –crazy, and stomped open the door and went inside with his Thompson barking. As the Germans ran down the steps to meet his attack he finished the rest of them off. Knowing that, the young man would never fall out of this or any other formation.
The photographer also remembers when he was a younger man sitting at the bar of a pizza place in his neighborhood. The older man next to him, always standing at the bar, had spent time as a Marine in Vietnam. This man talked about a local veterans group he belonged to. They were inducting a new group of valor award recipients to have their names added to the Hall of Heroes. The young man, no longer a soldier, remembered the display cases and asked about their web site. The older man says, "No, we do not have a web site. If you are you volunteering we could sure use one.”
Veterans of the war in Indo-China were in charge of the display case project. The photographer was freshly unemployed and had some time to help. As he sorted through the pile of colorful ribbons and medals, the one thought that kept coming back to him was, “Lord, thank you for never putting me into a place to be eligible to receive one of these.” He also thought back to the first time he attended one of the induction ceremonies at the courthouse. The Marine from the pizza place surprised him and asked him to say a few words. The photographer spoke of military heritage and as a closing thought, said, “I hope we never have to add new names from another, newer war.”
The table had so many colors of cloth and metal that it looked like they were pawing through a huge pile of colored beads, rolling about at will. After a few minutes everything becomes one, yet all different. It doesn’t seem to get better as the weeks pass by. This “color blindness” seems to never dissipate.
The photographer shakes his head and wipes his eyes, pulling his face away from the table. The foot traffic around the hall of the local courthouse host all types of people. He watches the young, pretty women from the lawyer’s offices, the everyday people who are paying taxes, adopting a child or getting a marriage license. Others wore orange suits with chains for jewelry.
The photographer saw the young man pick up a Navy and Marine Corps Medal and look at it a little too long to just have a casual interest. An envelope was on the table with a piece of thick, faded blue ribbon sticking out. The young man picks up the envelope and a tattered Navy Medal of Honor and its ribbon falls into his palm, scattering the dust of the ribbon’s fabric over his fingers. He didn’t gasp where you could hear it but he buckled a bit in the knees, his gut sank in and his eyes betrayed him. The photographer knew for sure he was a Marine. The young Marine, wounded in the sandbox, finished out the day with the old timers and came back the next day ready to help -a volunteer. There was a certain darkness behind this young man's eyes. The photographer says a silent prayer that the young Marines’ head is right. Here he was in front of the photographer's eyes. "A new name from another, newer war.”
While trying to share photos of the progress of the display cases, the photographer had problems with his web hosting service. During the course of 28 hours he spoke to several call center members who did their best to help but nothing was working. Late on a Saturday night he got a determined young man on the phone. He sent the photographer an email so he could load the images temporarily. When the e-mail was received, the photographer broke out laughing into the phone. Nguyen was his last name. Yes, his father took a boat out into the South China Sea to find the US fleet and they had lived here ever since. This young man’s mother carried him, three month pregnant, to America. The young Mr. Nguyen stayed late at work to help out. He expressed his thanks to the people who tried to save his father’s country and gave their family a new life and home. He too was a volunteer for this project. An old sailor from that war weighs the cost. It was worth the cost to this man’s family. The Nguyens are good Americans now. A worthy cause indeed.
When the people working on the displays did such a poor job mounting the fabric to the practice display backdrop panel, they decided to pay a professional to do it for them. The owner of the upholstery shop refused to accept the work. He instead offered to show them how it was done.
He supervised the building of all four panels. His pay was laughing at the two “new guys” glue their fingers together. He didn’t have to help. He could have done the job faster by himself and made money for his efforts. He had been a navigator for the Navy, operating out of the Gulf of Tonkin when he was a young man. He too was a volunteer.
Late at night as the quilter sews the last few stitches into her quilt she reflects on days long passed. She remembered how she worried about her husband when he was flying over Vietnam. Not even the air space over that country was safe. She dreaded answering the phone. She couldn’t stand to look at the news footage of the prisoners of war she saw on television at night, most of them airmen. Now she was putting stitches, a little at a time, into her quilt just as she had prayed for her husband’s safe return, a little at a time -all the time it seemed back then.
If you look close you will see stars and other patterns made out of the thread. It was a design made by the photographer commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Vietnam War. As an artist, one doesn’t often find appreciation for their works. The quilter would never know how deeply touched the photographer was by what her tiny fingers crafted. Over eight hundred pairs of eyes touched the quilt at the Induction ceremony. No one asked her to sew the quilt. She saw a void she could fill and stepped up. She gladly raised her needle in hand and volunteered.
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| Ron Warren With One Of the Best Views Of the Parade |
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Editor: Here are links to many more photos from Ron's essay that tell much more about his narrative.
http://www.ronwarren.com/displ
http://www.ronwarren.com/mcmhc
http://www.ronwarren.com/mcmhc
http://www.ronwarren.com/mcmhc
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