On this Veterans Day 2025, an enduring thank you to our nation’s veterans. In so many tangible and intangible ways, they have made our great nation and indeed the world a better and safer place. But for their service, the rays of hope, security, and liberty would have been extinguished for hundreds of millions of our fellow human beings.
As I think about my dad’s World War II service as a U.S. Army combat infantryman, a group of veterans whom I would like to specifically recognize are the caregivers. Perhaps lesser known their accomplishments were crucial. My dad’s life, and by extension my own, are literally owed to them.
I’ll focus on two whose names unfortunately I will never know. The first was a U.S. Army nurse who in Liege, Belgium, in November 1944 rescued my dad from the aftermath of a shattering blast of approximately 1,800 pounds of explosive from a Nazi V-1 “Buzz Bomb.” The bomb hit the forward hospital where he was being stabilized from wounds suffered in combat days earlier. The blast collapsed the roof and ceiling beams onto my father while catapulting his 19-year-old, legless body into the air. In a terrifying, chaotic scene of gruesome death and destruction, a U.S. Army nurse, shouted to dad that she was going to get him out. Without regard for her own safety, she quickly organized an effort to do so. It was a scene in which the courage meter was pegged at 11. Without this nurse’s speedy efforts to get dad out and connected to blood plasma, he would have been dead.
A year or so later, dad was enduring his two-year odyssey through Army hospitals, learning to walk on prosthetics and dealing with rapidly declining vision in his one remaining eye due to the V-1 blast. Again, it was a nurse who intervened to make a pivotal change in the trajectory of dad’s life.
In this instance, it was a nurse’s intervention at a Utah Army hospital. Dad was coming to grips with the fact that in addition to losing his legs in combat as an infantryman, his vision would soon be irretrievably gone. Sensing that something was off with dad, the nurse got him out of his hospital ward to go to a baseball game. That nurse’s random act of kindness pulled dad back from falling over a precipice into a vortex of debilitating gloom.
The fact that dad remembered these two occurrences so vividly decades later speaks volumes as to their importance to him. My father was always regretful that he never knew the names of those two nurses and was unable to personally express his gratitude to them. So, at least in some small way, and I will try to do so here. Thank you, and thank you to the millions of caregivers to our service members and veterans whose stories replicate those I have summarized here.