By Kelli Baxter
For some people, Veterans Day might mean nothing more than a day when they don’t get their mail, or a day off from school or work.

But those who gathered at Rush City’s senior dining site last Wednesday on Veterans Day will tell you that it should, and does, mean a whole lot more.

Commander Ken Opatz, of American Legion Post No. 93, spoke briefly during a program at the dining site appropriately titled “Honoring Our Heroes.” He came prepared with several reasons why the day should be devoted to veterans.

“By honoring our veterans, we remember their valor and reflect on why they fought ... We remember that freedom did not come easy,” he said to the rapt audience encircling the dining room. “(President) Calvin Coolidge once said, ‘The nation which forgets its veterans or its defenders is itself forgotten.’ ”

At right: John O’Brien of Rush City tells his story about joining the U.S. Navy to a captive audience at the senior dining site in Rush City last Wednesday.  Photo by Kelli Baxter 

Some memories get fuzzy with time, and some disappear altogether, but it was evident to all in attendance Wednesday that the veterans who offered up their war stories clearly had not forgotten the past.

Richard Cooper of Rush City still can feel the bullets whizzing by his skin in an attack that happened after he landed at Normandy during World War II.

“I could have reached out and touched the bullets going by,” he said. “But God can make you invisible.”
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He talked in detail about what it was like to crawl more that 100 yards, through a barrage of ammunition, to get to the rest of his men after their tank was caught in an attack.

He wasn’t wounded then, but he recalls the exact date when he was. It was on his parents’ wedding anniversary in September.

He also remembers when his unit was sent to help platoons, sometimes entire companies, decimated by gunfire. He remembers asking, “Is this all that’s left of your platoon?” They answered, “No, this is all that’s left of the company.

“Companies had 300 people, some only had six left,” Cooper said. 

Betty Stoffel asked the question that seemed already to be affirmed in the faces of the audience.

“Are you getting a sense of what we owe these people?” said the recently retired coordinator of the We “R” Able support group, who organized the Veterans Day program.

Richard Kemen of Williams, Minn., landed on the beach at Normandy, too. He was 18 when he enlisted in the military during WWII “because all my friends were in the service, so I thought I would go,” he said. 

He remembers the French kids, excited to accept a candy bar from the American soldiers. He remembers the French girls who wore silk. And he recalls that a lot of the people there didn’t have shoes.

“There were a lot of dead guys laying around, so we gave them their shoes,” he said bluntly. It was just a fact of the war.

Kemen talked compassionately about his comrades, and the German soldiers on the other side. His unit had captured a company whose men were just thankful to be given food.

“They didn’t want to kill anybody any more than we did,” he said.  

Rush City resident John O’Brien brought some humor to the stories told when talked about enlisting as an 18-year-old.

“I joined the Navy,” he said. “Which was odd because I couldn’t swim.”

After he finally passed his swimming test, he became a radio operator for the military. A hobby he still enjoys today.

These are the stories that Stoffel fears will be lost as a generation that was taught not to talk about their problems, about the war, passes away.  

“Back then, they just didn’t talk about things. Then, it was you got out of the service, went home and went on with life,” she said.

If there’s anything she could say to veterans and to the people who were given freedom because of them it would be this: “It’s OK to talk about it. And we need to honor these things.”

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