Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
It’s hard to believe there are only six left. Can that really be true? Is the Greatest Generation slipping away?
When I read the information about this year’s American Legion Post 31’s Veterans Day service it seemed all wrong. Portales has to be home to more than six World War II veterans.
That is apparently all that are left now. When you do the math though, you realize the very youngest WWII vet now is 91 it has to be true.
The thought of just six left clanged around in my brain and this past week I picked up a notebook and found a copy of a 1968 story in the Portales News-Tribune by my good friend and mentor, the late J. Fred Thompson. The story was detailing the stories of Roosevelt County World War I veterans 50 years after the war.
It’s strange that the story would literally fall out of that notebook this particular week. It’s 101 years now since that war ended and 74 years since the end of WWII.
I’ve known WWII veterans all my life, J. Fred was one of them, I’ve interviewed plenty of them over the years and have always been in awe of what they accomplished and what they survived. More impressive was how many of them became great men in their communities.
WWI veterans are a different story. I do remember knowing a few of them but very few and most of them I was around when I was really young. As a kid, I’ve got to say that some of those guys scared me. The more I learned about WWI the easier it is to understand why. They existed in wet cold trenches and didn’t know when the next shell would explode over their head and whether it would rain down mustard or nerve gas or just deadly shrapnel. Those things would drive even the best a little crazy.
As my friend Randy Dunson of the American Legion Post 31 noted last week, there are fewer and fewer veterans these days. That is a good thing in some ways. Fewer having to serve and fewer dying or being wounded is a good thing. But at the same time fewer veterans coming home leaves the average American much more distant from the real cost of freedom.
Freedom still costs blood, leaves personal lives and marriages in shambles and it is still just as important now as it was in 1919 when Armistice Day, the forerunner of Veterans Day was first declared.
There are Veterans Day activities going on in various communities across the area on Monday. Some of you have a day off. Don’t you owe it to a veteran somewhere to show up at one of those ceremonies?
Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:
