Anyone other DUers watching D-Day ceremonies

[pinboy3niner]

11. There were later landings at places like Anzio

Last edited Fri Jun 6, 2014, 07:34 AM - Edit history (1)

One good friend I lost in Vietnam was Joe Hearne Rufty. It wasn't until 20 years later when I found his family that I learned that Joe was named after his uncle, his father's brother, who died at Anzio in WWII.

Try to wrap your mind around this:

Joe Hearne Rufty, Salisbury, NC
July 21, 1917 - June 2, 1944
KIA Anzio Beach, Italy


Joe Hearne Rufty, Salisbury, NC
February 23, 1945 - January 29, 1970
KIA Thua Thien Province, I Corps, South Vietnam

R.I.P.

I've told my story about Joe here before...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=1911231

Edited to add the post from the link above:

41. Not just songs, of course

(And it's always a pleasure to "bump into" you here. LL. I still remember when we first "met" on that thread... The rest of this post is the kind of stuff that I think you are intimately familiar with. )

All kinds of things can trigger our memories and emotions--even, as the OP notes, things that may have been psychologically suppressed for a long time.

Without being consciously aware of what I was doing, after I lost my Mom I began making peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches again--even cutting them just the way Mom did when I was a little boy and she was making my bag lunches for school. (Subsequently re-creating Mom's recipe for Hamburger Soup was more of a conscious effort, both as a comfort to me and a remembrance of, and tribute to, her.)

I lost my Dad way back in HS, but it was only many years later, when I caught a whiff of some stranger's Old Spice Aftershave, that I suddenly experienced flashbacks of my Dad. He was an Old Spice guy.

But the most profound experience of this kind that I had came some years after Vietnam. (I know you've heard this before, but I'll re-tell it here.)

When my wife was a nurse at UCLA hospital, we went to a Saturday afternoon party for medical staff at somebody's place in Westwood. I was sitting on the couch when suddenly, from behind me, I heard the sound of a Laugh Box. Tears started pouring down my face, which scared the hell out of me because I had no idea why that was happening.

It was only when I slipped into the bathroom to wash my face that it started coming back to me. Joe Rufty and the fucking Laugh Box.

The day Joe Rufty got hit by machine gun fire and was down with a sucking chest wound nearby, and ground fire was too intense for the Medevac chopper to get in.

I had 36 men in my Infantry platoon, and they volunteered--unanimously--to rappel into the firefight in what certainly would have been a suicidal attempt to take the pressure off so Joe could be extracted. HQ turned us down, and we couldn't have saved Joe anyway.

About a month earlier I'd spent Christmas Day, 1969, on a hilltop out in the jungle with Joe and his platoon. When a chopper delivered supplies and mail, Joe got a package from home with a bottle of whiskey, home-made chocolate chip cookies---and a Laugh Box.

Joe shared the cookies, and the whiskey--making sure everybody got a taste, but only a taste--in case we got some action. As we played cards in a poncho hooch out in the jungle on what Joe's men would come to remember as 'Christmas Hill', every so often someone would hit the button on the laugh box, and we'd all crack up.

Christmas was otherwise uneventful, though we had numerous engagements in the following weeks. During that time, Joe and I had to coordinate by radio, and he would often activate the laugh box over the radio, giving all of us a laugh and a brief respite from the war.

The laugh box, the selflessness of those good, good men I was privileged to serve with, and being so close by yet unable to help Joe (when I knew he would have been there for me if I was down), combined to make Joe's loss more impactful for me than the day I was wounded nine days after Joe died.

It only added to that impact when I found Joe's family 20 years later--and learned he'd been named after an uncle who was KIA at Anzio in WWII.

R.I.P. Mom and Dad, and Joe Hearne Rufty, Panel 14W, line 80.