TheBanyanTree: Happy Veterans Day

[Theta Brentnall]

I have to say that as a Viet Nam era veteran, I certainly appreciate the 
love.  Our church does a montage of photos of all our veterans, starting 
with pictures of the all-American heroes who just happened to have 
parents or grandparents who immigrated from Japan before the second 
World War and going through the years and the wars to the young men and 
women in uniform today who we all remember from funny episodes during 
Children's Moment or the Christmas pageants, surely just a year or two 
ago.  Frank Kageta, a sweet little guy who calls me to remind me to 
spray the apple trees or comes over to see if I need help pruning them, 
just received the Bronze Star and Congressional Gold Medal for his 
actions as a warrior of the 442nd Combat Battalion 70 years ago.  A 
little late, but well deserved although he tells me that all the fuss is 
really embarrassing.  That seems to be the way with heroes.  They find 
the fuss embarrassing.

When Gerry was a brand new 2Lt he got the dubious duty of serving on the 
Officer's Club advisory board when he was assigned to Hanscom AFB just 
outside of Boston (like they would have taken any advice from a 
butter-bar!) One of his tasks was to figure out who all the people were 
who had honorary memberships in the club.  Most of them were Selectmen 
or city officials of the surrounding towns of Concord, Bedford, and 
Lexington, but there was one engineer who worked for a company down the 
road from the base, a guy named Jay Zeamer.  So Gerry, being a brash 
young thing, called him, told him what he was doing and asked why he was 
an honorary member.  They guy laughed and said he could be dropped from 
the roster - no big deal - but Gerry kept asking and he finally said 
with a depreciating laugh, that he'd "somehow" ended up with the Medal 
of Honor.  You can check out his story at:         
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGt8gQulPcM

I'd agree with what Jay Zeamer says at the end of his interview:  there 
are lots of people who do heroic things that never get recognized.  Like 
Monique, I was never in the line of fire, and I'm certainly no hero, but 
I know that I served in the company of heroes, even if that just meant 
doing the job under miserable conditions and making sure everything was 
done right.  So thank you, too, my sister in blue, for doing a job that 
was important, and thank you for putting $10 in the hand of someone who 
needed it more than you did.

Theta

On 11/11/2011 10:18 AM, Monique Colver wrote:
> We love us our veterans, don’t we? As a peacetime veteran, I’m all about
> Veterans Day. I didn’t spend several years of my life hanging out in a
> uniform so I could get a day off once a year, which was just as well since
> it was many years before I had Veterans Day off. And I wasn’t in when there
> were conflicts and wars, only pretend let’s-get-ready-just-in-case
> practices. It was no big deal for me, because I am lucky.
>
>
> But here it is Veterans Day again, as it rolls around each year, and I want
> to thank everyone who served. So there you go.
>