Please take a moment to remember those who served our country.
At work, someone wrote on the back whiteboard to take a moment to salute our veterans and I drew one of my lopsided smiley faces and said, "That's me!" I didn't sign it and we have a lot of people working in our area now, so several were trying to figure out who the veteran was. Even one of my coworkers, who finally said, "Duh, that's Terry!" LOL
Anyway, the discussion had been going on back in the back, and finally a few learned who it was.
I'm a member of women veterans who write romance.
http://www.romvets.com/ Just click on the before and after picture link.
I'm at the very bottom as Terry Wilde, under my maiden name, although I continued to serve as Terry Spear.
So many of us were support, some in the midst of some kind of military engagement, and yet more will be involved in war in the future.
I've been reading a historical romance about a well-decorated officer who came back from the Crimean War a changed man. And yes, you can't helped but be changed by all that happens during battle.
I often talked to my dad about his experiences as an ex-prisoner-of-war and how he managed to survive 16 months on death marches and in camps in Germany.
And he earned two purple hearts--one for a mission where he was the only one shot up--the shrapnel wounding him in the arm and cutting his oxygen and communication lines. He was losing consciousness when the other gunner informed the pilot of his peril. He relayed to my father to crawl up to the cockpit where he could get oxygen.
Now, my dad was only 16, unlawfully having lied about being older, so he really was just a kid. But in any event, the shock to his system made him have to urinate. The navigator asked, "Can't you just hold it? We're headed back in."
But dad couldn't. So the navigator gave him his helmet to use. And then the plane was again fired upon and the navigator jammed the helmet on his head....
And swore up a blue streak. He had told my dad he could use his helmet as a chamber pot, so not his fault!!! But the pilot sure laughed.
Dad was in the field hospital for six weeks and was wounded again on his 13th mission--this time his plane shot down, and where he also earned his caterpillar wings. The gunners didn't wear their parachutes while fighting. They didn't have room to maneuver. So he kept it at his feet.
When the plane was hit and they were going down, he only had a split second to decide--put on the parachute before he left the plane, or put it on first. Before he could decide, he was left free-falling with only his parachute in hand. So he struggled to get it on, then attempted to snap it shut, and pulled the rip chord. Nothing happened. He tried again. Nothing.
He was falling through thinning clouds, getting closer to the earth when he realized he was holding his parachute so tightly to his body, he was keeping the chute from opening. Releasing it, and because of the explosion of the plane that sent him spiraling upward, kept him from hitting the ground too soon. He said he dropped in what he felt was the most perfect landing that he'd ever made, better than any of his practices, despite having been wounded in the leg by shrapnel.
He became a member of the caterpillar club--exclusive membership to those who parachute from a plane to save their lives.
My mother's father had been a doctor during WWII in the Royal Canadian Army and my grandmother had been a secretary for a general in the same unit that my grandfather was assigned and that's how she met him.
My mother was born in Alberta and to obtain her citizenship sooner, she joined the Army and met my dad in San Antonio while he was in the AF on recruiting duty. They had both been from the west coast and that was the start of their romance. :) She was a postal clerk before the military changed the setup to an all civilian job.
I was one of the first women who went through the Army Reserve Officer Training Corp six weeks basic training summer camp for the two-year program. Before this, women had to go through Officer Candidate School or receive direct commissions. But we became the first ROTC graduates--Rot-Cees, as we fondly called ourselves. And I was a Distinguished Military Graduate.
Even my mother's grandfather, my great grandfather from Alsace Lorraine, though the rest of the Roux family was from Selencourt, France, was in Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders. My great grandmother was so impressed when she saw him in uniform at the World's Fair in Chicago, she married him and they returned to Portage-la-Prairie, Manitoba.
My father's uncle, who was only 7 years older than my dad, and my dad was only 16, died as a prisoner of war of the Japanese during WWII. Their grandfather, though not in the military, had broken horses for the cavalry during WWI.
One of our MacNeills was in the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) in Canada, but I couldn't ever track down who he was. Here is a picture showing some in a parade.
Farther back, some of my father's family fought during the Civil War. I'm not saying which side. :)
A Hessian mercenary on my mother's side, was brought over to fight the Patriots during the American Revolution. In fact 1/4 of the forces fighting the Patriots were Hessian mercenaries. But he was so against the war, he went AWOL, ended up in NY, married, and moved to Quebec where he served in the Canadian militia, along with a son, and a grandson. The grandson was named George Washington Cramer in honor of George Washington, who the mercenary much admired.
I wish I could upload pictures of all the family in uniform--or at least some of them, but I don't have a scanner to do so. :( My grandmother had a picture of her father in his Teddy Roosevelt uniform while he posed with his rifle, but it wasn't passed down to us.
My son has followed in my family's footsteps and he is in the AF in navigator training currently.
Unfortunately the pictures I have of him in uniform are on the dead computer. So all I have to share is this one again! :)
So I wanted to thank all the veterans who went before us, those who are in currently, and those who will follow in our footsteps and pray to keep them safe.
Terry
www.terryspear.com
When I hear Terry Spear has a new release coming...I make sure I don't have any books in progress because I will drop it to read her books!Yet again I was not disappointed!
