They served their nation honorably, but many combat veterans have had, or may still have, difficulty actually talking about their experiences. A special writing project is helping a group of Kalamazoo-area military veterans talk about experiences they may not have thought about in years.
The Combat Veteran's Writing Group resumes Tuesday night at 6:30 p.m. at the Portage Community Library. The meetings are held on the second and fourth Tuesday each month.
“I received a USO Care Package just before I went overseas in 1945. In the package, it was a number of personal items, but one thing was a wool scarf about six feet long and maybe a foot wide and just really nice and warm,” says Dr. Richard Westerman, a veteran of World War Two.
In the writing group, Westerman wrote a story called "My Army Scarf."
“Whenever I wrap it around me each time I immediately recall memories of the war and my adventuresome youth. I’ll probably have it tucked under my head when I go to my final resting place,” he reads.
Westerman was drafted into the Army in 1944 in Detroit. He began thinking about putting his experiences on paper 11 years ago while on vacation with his daughter and grandson.
“So I began talking and we just went from one subject to another and it was about an hour and a half later, and he had not said a word and he was just sitting there totally amazed,” says Westerman.
And that’s when Westerman, who was a surveyor in Europe with the “Ozark Division” decided he’d better get started writing. Then, he discovered the veteran’s writing group based at the Portage Community Library. He joined with a friend of his, Korean War veteran Rudy Hanson, who thought he’d give it a shot too.
“I enjoyed the first visit because it gave me an insight to other veteran’s ideas," says Hanson. "I’m not the type of guy that goes to VFW Posts and drinks and carouses, it’s not my nature, but I do enjoy hearing the stories of other wars, recognizing that wars have changed dramatically in my lifetime as the whole world has.”
Vietnam veteran Bert Murphy, now in his third year with the writers group, also heard about it through word-of-mouth.
“Being in the writers group helps me bring up things that I thought I’d forgotten, or had never talked about,” says Murphy.
Murphy entered the Army in 1967. He was serving with the First Infantry Division at QuanLoi on Christmas Day, his first Christmas away from home. One of his writers’ group stories is called “The Bad Ammo – Sergeant Dukes and the Hot Bomb.”
“I was finishing up with the bomb while Dukes was making the final preparations when suddenly I heard him gasp. I looked up and all the color had drained from his face. He was working at the nose end of the bomb when he told me to get out of the pit…this thing is hot, and the fuse is still in. There are two sealed letters in my locker, if this thing goes off on me, please send them home. I assured I would send them, got out of the pit, and unrolling the detonation wire, I headed to the perimeter sandbag wall. I got behind the wall to watch and wait for Dukes to come, or an explosion. Shortly, Sergeant Dukes came running towards me, yelled at the infantry to get even farther back and joined me at the detonation box. He hooked up the last wire, and yelled ‘Fire in the hole!’ I was happy that Dukes was okay, and that I would not be mailing his letters home for him.”
Margaret Von Steinen of Western Michigan University’s Haenicke Institute for Global Education, started the veterans writing group in the fall of 2009.
“It’s amazing to me the recall they have, especially the World War II vets," says Von Steinen. "They are all 90, or near 90, and I think it amazes them too sometimes the memories that pop back in. The good memories pop back and that’s another thing that I want them to own, is that their service, that even a combat veteran’s service is not all sad and gloomy.”
Although veterans of the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam are well-represented in the writers’ group, Von Steinen says it also welcomes younger members that have served during more recent conflicts in Panama, the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
