Both of my parents are buried at Arlington cemetery on a hill that overlooks the Pentagon. My Dad served in the 82nd Airborne, 325th glider infantry. If you saw Saving Private Ryan that scene with all the men who had been injured in the glider crash - that glider infantry.
He was born in 1922 in Hoboken to Irish immigrant parents. They were very poor in the depression. He went to Catholic schools and worked on the dock as a longshoreman and tug boat hand as a young man.
He joined the Army probably when he was 20. The 82nd fired their weapons more than any other division in Europe, or so I'm told. He was at that terrible battle in the movie A Bridge Too Far. I remember going home for a visit not long after that movie came out and asking him if he was there. When he told me he was all I could say was, "Oh my god".
The gliders landed behind enemy lines the day before DDay. Only two people in his glider survived the landing. He was wounded a couple of weeks later for the first time. I remember him telling us he was wounded and sleeping in a foxhole in Belgium when he was woken up by something tugging on his foot. It was a gigantic pig. Those were the kind of stories he talked about,not the bad stuff, not to his daughters.
He was wounded the second time at the Battle of the Bulge. We always had to have the heat low in the winter in our house because he said he had never gotten acclimated after spending that winter in Belgium. We just rolled our eyes and put on sweaters. I didn't know how many men froze to death there.
He took 4 machine gun bullets to his leg. He had a scar that went from his hip to his ankle. One bullet had hit the bone and traveled down his leg. He was in a foxhole by himself when it happened and he was bleeding to death. A teenage boy, maybe 15, with a German uniform and a medic insignia came into the foxhole, took my father's belt off of him and put it around his leg as a tourniquet. He spoke no English, but my father said they spoke a few words of Yiddish that my Dad had picked up in melting pot of a neighborhood he grew up in.
They flew my Dad to an army hospital in West Virginia. He said he was so disappointed that he never got to parade through Paris when it was liberated.
My mother joined the WACs in her 20's. She was a phlebotomist and nurse. She had grown up in Salt Lake City. Her grandmother walked across the country with Brigham Young's party when she was a baby. My Mom wanted to be a doctor, but the money wasn't there and how many women doctors were there in Utah in the 1930's?
She went to work at a veteran's hospital. She told us that one day they carried in a very good looking young man and she took his blood and prepped him for surgery. She told us he told the doctor to "tell that nurse with the gray eyes that I'm going to marry her".
Then she would always say, "My eyes are blue. Just like him to mess that up."
He stayed at that hospital for a year. He was supposed to never walk again without a brace on his leg, but he fell flat on his face crossing the street in Times Square, took the brace off and never put it on again. He had the only slightest limp. It was a limp you could hear when he walked down the hall, but not see.
When we were kids and played soldiers and called the Germans all the derogatory names they used in the movies that the German people were not bad people. They just had bad leaders who led them to do some bad things. He didn't like us watching Hogan's Heroes because he said the Germans were not stupid.
He had been very badly wounded emotionally by the war. It was something he never got over. My brother told me his first memories are waking up in the middle of the night because my father was screaming in his sleep.
He died in 1981. There was no discussion as to where he would be buried. He was so honored to be able to buried in that cemetery with all those soldiers and with the Kennedys.
Mom died 3 months later. We went back to the cemetery and buried her with Dad.
They were both Democrats. I think they would have liked this young president we have now. I hope some day I'm able to be at Arlington on Veteran's Day when he lays a wreath on the tomb of the unknowns. It makes me so proud when I see pictures of those graves that my parents are there, too.