Published: July 23, 2009 09:02 pm      

We should have had a parade, but didn’t

Several folks have forwarded me an e-mail that calls for a memorial service for Shifty Powers, and it’s worth reading. You can do the search-engine thing for Shifty Powers and find it with no trouble.

Darrell “Shifty” Powers was one of the “Band of Brothers” in Stephen Ambrose’s book and an HBO miniseries that a friend of mine who helped to liberate France said came as close as you can get to portraying the reality.

Powers was a member of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Regiment, 101st Airborne Infantry — one of the “Battered Bastards of Bastogne.”

The e-mail contains an account by Mark Pfeiffer, who met him on an airline flight returning to the United States from France. Powers was there for ceremonies marking the anniversary of the D-Day Invasion and died June 17 of cancer.

Pfeiffer wrote of Shifty’s passing: “There was no parade. No big event in Staples Center. No wall to wall back to back 24X7 news coverage. No weeping fans on television. And that’s not right. Let’s give Shifty his own memorial service online, in our own private way ... . Rest in peace, Shifty.”

My friend Harlan Smith was in France at the same time Shifty was, for the same reasons, on a pilgrimage with 29th Division D-Day veterans and their families.

Her late father, Maj. Howard Harlan Dickey, was a member of Company G in the 115th Division of the Army National Guard that landed at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, and he was severely wounded a month later at St. Lo.

After he died, Harlan’s mother married the late Col. Randolph Millholland, who became the unit’s commanding officer after rising through the ranks from private.

I started to write a story about Harlan after she retired from the Veterans Administration Clinic in Cumberland, but gathered so much material that I couldn’t figure out where to start, let alone where to go with it. (I was, however, wise enough to save my notes.)

Harlan became a debutante at age 17 in Baltimore. Her friends went to Radcliffe or Vassar, but she joined the Marine Corps because many of her high school classmates were going to Vietnam.

“I’d have been glad to go to ‘Nam,” she said, “but at that time they were only taking nurses. I wanted to do something to be supportive of the men over there.” She and her husband, retired Army 1st Sgt. Jim Smith, were married after he returned from his second tour in Vietnam.

Harlan’s job at the VA clinic called for her to work at the front desk, “but really, I did a little bit of everything.

“I gave the veterans my heart and soul, especially those who needed extra help. There’s a lot of them who just needed someone to go that extra mile. Some of them were there to see the doctor and got nervous, and others needed help to put in claims or get some loose ends tied up.

“I just loved all of them. They’re wonderful,” she said.

She said she sometimes became so involved with one or another of them that she had to remind herself that she had close to 3,000 other veterans to take care of.

“There’s probably not a veteran around here who Harlan Smith hasn’t helped,” said one veteran. “Harlan loves her veterans, and we love her.” I can understand why, because she’s also one of my favorite people.

Another told me Harlan changed his life with two words. An unpopular soldier in an unpopular war, he had been back from Vietnam for close to 20 years and life wasn’t going well.

He was standing outside a bar in the rain, looking forlorn, when Harlan came up to him and asked him what was wrong.

“I had been called every foul thing you can think of when I came back,” he said. “Harlan hugged me and said, ‘Welcome home,’ and I just lost it. She was the first person ever to tell me that.”

Harlan said one Marine veteran who had been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) usually was one of the first to show up each morning.

“He would sleep in a car in the parking lot next to our old clinic on Memorial Avenue,” she said.

The man knew Harlan was a Marine veteran, and one day when she came to work he was waiting for her on the steps.

“It was the Marine Corps’ birthday (Nov. 10),” she said, “and he had a birthday cake with candles on it. It was 7 o’clock in the morning, and he sang the Marine Corps hymn for me. It was a very special day.”

Harlan sent me notes and several photos from the two albums she filled with pictures taken in France, including what was on the plates at a banquet she and the others attended at a 16th-century French castle.

She said the French people they met could not have treated them any better.

“The group was honored with ceremonies and lunches and dinners at many towns and cities in Normandy that were liberated by the 29th Division,” she said.

“The mayors and the people said many times ‘Merci, merci (Thanks, thanks), our city was destroyed, but you Americans gave us our freedom and we rebuilt our city again.’ ”

My friend Paul Crawford of Centerville, Pa., was a member of the 7th Armored Division that helped free the French towns of Rambouillet and Gazeran.

He’s told me that every Aug. 19 on the anniversary of their liberation, the townspeople hold a memorial service for the nine American soldiers and airmen who died to help liberate them from the Germans.

Regardless of what we’re told, some folks never forget.

Rest in peace, Shifty. Welcome Home.