On Veterans Day, SLO County residents remember relatives who served their country
Who are the veterans in your family? Do you know their stories? Do you share them?
Most of the older men in my family served in the military. So did a woman who retired as a lieutenant colonel with the U.S. Marines after serving in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm and in Italy and Germany.
My late husband, my ex-husband, my father, my mother’s father and my grandfather were all veterans all. Sadly, all those men are gone now, taking their military memories with them.
All of them took time out of their vital young lives to serve their country.
I honor them and their fellow military comrades every day, but especially on Veterans Day. We all should.
SLO County residents recall military veterans
Sue Foreman of Cambria’s Once Upon a Tyme certainly does.
Her late husband, master horologist Jay Foreman, was drafted “a couple of months after opening his first watch repair shop … and served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the Korean War,” she said.
“One of his jobs was climbing telephone poles,” which made him a perfect target for North Korean troops, Sue Foreman said.
Jay Foreman’s Army jacket and dog tags still hang on the closet door, and when his widow served as an escort on a recent Honor Flight, she wore his tags.
Sue Foreman wrote that a ceremony at the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., “brought tears to my eyes.”
Oz Barron of Cambria told me via social media that “at 15, my father ran away from home to fight the Nazis” and went on to spend 22 years in the U.S. Navy, serving mostly on destroyers.
“He never regretted it, loved being at sea, seeing the world and finding great jazz in every port,” Barron wrote.
Ron Alsop’s father served one duty period in the U.S. Army, but his uncle, David Alsop, was a career Army man, serving in Korea in 1953, and two tours in Vietnam. He then joined the Central Intelligence Division, and was stationed at Fort Meyer and the Pentagon.
Remembering relatives who served
Among my relatives whose military stories I know, some had terrifying war duties. Some had it easier. Some had great adventures.
Some served out of pure, dogged patriotism. Many had other goals, too, such as job training and veterans’ benefits.
Others had a blend of motives.
My late husband Richard told us many times that he’d been so determined to defend the United States that he tried to enlist in every branch of the service during World War II. They all turned him because of his bad eyesight.
Stubborn to the core, he signed up with the U.S. Merchant Marines, and wound up aboard ship as a radio officer, traveling in convoy.
He probably had the scariest service of any of the military men in my immediate family.
While serving overseas, he saw a torpedo headed for his ship — the missile missed, thank heavens — then watched in horror as another ship in the convoy was bombed and destroyed. He could hear shelling happening all around in port.
But even the most altruistic of patriots can have ulterior motives, and so did Richard.
Richard was initially one of five children in his family. When the sixth one came along, he reminisced frequently, “I was sick of the smell of diapers.”
My father’s service was all stateside. He was on stage in the brass section of the U.S. Army band.
My great-great-great-great grandpa, Richard Sopris, was a carpenter and gold prospector who went on to become a captain in the 1st Regiment of Colorado Volunteers, a volunteer infantry regiment of the U.S. Army. He was also Denver’s mayor and a representative for what is now Colorado in the Kansas Territorial legislature.
I know less about the military assignments of the other servicemen in my family.
The only proof I have that my mother’s father was in the military, for instance, are some photos of him, looking quite dashing in his uniform.
Those few pictures are among the scarce family records that survived a fire that destroyed our Cambria home in 1994.
Gone are a ton of other photos and memorabilia. The memories linger, but fade and blur, and sometimes they’re hard to call up.
Thinking of them, however, I think of people whose homes and lives were destroyed by war.
I think about what they lost in addition to military family members who may have died defending their countries. Surely war survivors are veterans, too.
In war, as in political disputes and plain old arguments, it usually comes down to right and wrong, depending on your point of view.
In politics, it’s usually right or left or somewhere in the middle.
In arguments, all we can hope is that everybody keeps a level head and remembers what’s really important: The relationship behind the debate.
In war, we pray that everybody survives. When they don’t, or are severely injured, we mourn and must honor their service and their loss, no matter how we feel about the war in which they served.
We honor the veterans in our lives once a year on Veterans Day, yes, but every day in our hearts.
This story was originally published November 11, 2021 at 5:05 AM.
