Monday, May 29, 2017

Pro Patria

Memorial Day, here in the U.S. (and among expats just about everywhere else), is a day set aside to honor fellow Americans who have fought and died in defense of this country. Any family that's been here for as little as a single generation may well have someone who's worn a military uniform, and been buried in one.
My father was born in Germany on the eve of the "thirteen years of madness", as he called it, of World War II; his oldest son – my brother – retired from the USMC, having joined in 1986, seen action in Desert Storm and, twenty-some years later, served as well in Iraq.
He's still living (and regularly twisting my arm for the next 5K- and 10-K run), so we'll set him and his service aside to honor on Veterans' Day – his, and many, many other members of this family who live, have lived, in the United States.
On my mother's side of the family, her great-grandparents – her father's grandparents – came stateside from Ireland directly, and via Nova Scotia. This was the 1840s; they weren't fleeing the potato famine (County Leitrim didn't raise that crop… I think), but rather as Catholics rejecting the requirement they pay taxes to support the (Anglican) Church of Ireland.
They settled in quickly, joining with some French immigrants, sinking deep roots in the greater-Boston area of Massachusetts, and finding work in factories, stores, the clergy… and in military service. And some of these never came back home to Massachusetts, New Jersey, and further domestic homes-sweet-homes.
Today – long overdue – I salute them, family all, whose American blood, poured out around the world, has served this country. They gave up their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor – most especially their lives – in so doing, with eyes open: stepping up in the full spirit of that last sentence of the American Declaration of Independence.
  • Emile Joseph Drach, 1844-1862: (His oldest sister was my grandfather's grandmother.) Right around his eighteenth birthday, Emile Drach enlisted in the Thirty-First Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, K Company, to serve and preserve the Union. By December he was on the front lines in Louisiana, where he was killed; as related at a blog put up to honor the regiment:
On December 10, a detachment led by 1st Lt. Nelson F. Bond of Ware was ordered to relieve part of a Maine company at Desert (pron. Des Sair) Station on the Jackson railroad. […] [A] much larger Confederate force appeared before the cooking fires were even blazing. Part of the unit took cover and fired at the rebels, but only half had serviceable guns, as the others had been soaked when a canoe overturned on the outward journey. After some of Bond’s men were wounded, it became apparent that the situation was hopeless, and he ordered the rest to scatter and try to make their way back to safety. […] Emil Drach (pron. Drake) was instantly killed, the first member of the 31st to die in combat. Three quite detailed narratives of this action survive, and each gives a noticeably different account of how Drach died.
In the hundred-fifty-five years since Emile's untimely death, at least a dozen members of the greater family have been named "Emile Joseph" in his honor, including my grandfather, his oldest son, and his oldest son in turn.
  • Michael Leonard, ~1871-1898: (A daughter of one of his paternal aunts married my grandmother's youngest brother.) He was killed in the Spanish-American War; he was the son of Irish immigrants, and just seventeen years old.
  • Joseph Simpson, 1884-1918~: (He was my grandmother's oldest brother.) He died in (or about) 1918 from the effects of poisonous gas in World War I… a notorious theater for chemical weaponry.
  • Donald Vautrinot, 1919-1942: (His grandmother was Emile's oldest sister.) He joined the Army Air Corps in 1940, and was captured by the Japanese at Bataan in the Philippines. As a prisoner of war, he was one of sixty to eighty thousand captives forced to march/walk over sixty tortuous miles to a prison camp. Unlike over five hundred fellow Americans, he survived the march; he died in the prison camp. The forced march has been ruled a war crime.
  • George F. Brandt, Jr., 1923-1944: (I'm still drawing out his line; he's a cousin in turn of one of my genealogist cousins – her great-grandmother and mine were sisters, and were nieces of Emile Joseph Drach.) He was a USAAF staff sergeant stationed in the Mediterranean; in a book on her/our extended family, my cousin records that he was "[l]ost when his plane (a B-25) went down in a lake in Italy". An Italian website adds that the plane "exploded in flight, and crashed into Lake Lesina, north of Foggia. None of the occupants survived." (esplose in volo e precipitò nel lago di Lesina a nord di Foggia. Nessuno degli occupanti sopravvisse)
  • John August Breder, Jr., ~1924-1944: (His great-grandfather's brother married Emile's oldest sister.) He died  in the Philippines from wounds received at the Battle of Leyte; he was about age twenty – barely two years older than Emile.
My title here comes from one of the verses in Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology… in counterpoint.
I was the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge.
When I felt the bullet enter my heart
I wished I had staid at home and gone to jail
For stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary,
Instead of running away and joining the army.
Rather a thousand times the county jail
Than to lie under this marble figure with wings,
And this granite pedestal Bearing the words, "Pro Patria".
What do they mean, anyway?
I don't have the least suspicion that any of the half-dozen courageous men listed above (and there are plenty more) would rather have sat in the county jail than given their all for their home and families.