NAP- Neighborhood Alliance of Pawtucket

Veterans Day often forgotten and it was nice to see the Soldiers Stories that Home and Hospice had done for sunday as a remembering. Hope to go but let us thank every vet for their efforts now and years ago.

It will be a great event Sunday, but I am biased and Tuesday is a great day to remember the veterans. We often forget.

PS_ It is easier for me to recall the date as my youngest son was born on that date and one always remembers family birthdays...

Dear Mary,

Where and when are the local Veterans Days events in the Blackstone Valley?

Thanks to all veterans who served our nation.

Peace,

Jim

For some R.I. veterans of WWII, hospice offers a last look back

01:00 AM EST on Saturday, November 8, 2008

By Tom Mooney

Journal Staff Writer

Bill Buell, who began as an interviewer at the hospice and later became the interviewee, prepares to fly in an F6F Hellcat fighter at the end of World War II.

One day this summer, hospice volunteer Arthur Plitt arrived at the Narragansett home of Ernest Gavitt with a simple mission: to chat with the former World War II navigator, in his 80s and dying, about his war.

Lying on a couch in his den overlooking Point Judith, Gavitt recalled the day over Holland 64 years ago when Germans shot down his plane, and Christmas Eve that year in Stalag 3 when another prisoner of war crept through the camp delivering presents of cigarettes and candy and other Red Cross items he had saved up for months.

As Gavitt spoke, a video camera rolled. "I remember George Patton came into the camp" to liberate the POWs. "I'll never forget the Jeep. It had a piece of steel that came right up between him and the driver" to protect them from decapitation by wires strung over the roads, "Patton looked around at us and he put his hand up and he said: ‘Hey you guys, you're free, now get the' - I'll change it - ‘get the hell out of here.' "

Ernie Gavitt smiled as he told his story.

"And we walked through these little streets and the ladies, the wives of the guards where we were living, were very nice. They would come out and offer us food and things of that kind, which I thought was just unbelievable."

Last month, Ernest Gavitt died. His war stories, though, live on. You can hear them - along with interviews of nine other World War II veterans - tomorrow at 2 p.m. at the Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway, in Providence, thanks to Home & Hospice Care of Rhode Island. The showing is free.

Hospice workers usually devote themselves to providing compassionate care for people in the last phases of life. But in 2006, members of the local hospice agency attended a regional conference where the focus turned to the thousands of World War II veterans dying each day and the efforts of the Library of Congress and others to capture their oral histories before time runs out.

The local staff liked what they heard. With the help of a $10,000 grant from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, they set off to try to preserve the accounts of some of Rhode Island's war veterans in their care. The project evolved into Soldiers' Stories at Life's End, A Living Legacy, a 45-minute video presentation.

Twelve hospice volunteers trained to participate in the project, learning from historians, chaplains and social workers the war's significance for an entire generation.

"We approached close to 25 patients and we had 10 veterans who were able to complete the interview process," says Bobbi Wexler, volunteer services manager. "One of the most difficult challenges we had was making sure that the patient was in a situation to be able to tell their story. Their care was our top priority.

"We made sure we had social workers and nurses who visited after the interview to make sure the vet was in an OK place and we hadn't opened any wounds. We didn't find that had happened, but we had prepared in advance to make sure we were being respectful if we had made these veterans uncomfortable in any way."

The volunteers discovered "that some of the vets talked about [the war] all the time and we found some who didn't talk at all about it until we started asking questions," Wexler says. One veteran's two sons and a daughter knew nothing of their father's wartime experience until they learned of his involvement in the project.

"It's remarkable the stories that they have to share. We had vets who were at Omaha Beach, Burma and China, and POWs. It was just astonishing the types of stories that they shared that I don't think they had shared with a lot of people before."

Some of the veterans, such as Gavitt, were interviewed at home, others from their nursing home beds. Some were on oxygen, and the viewer can hear the compression of the oxygen tank as they speak. Some of the veterans struggled to remember stories they had told for decades but in the waning months of life needed some coaxing from family members to remember. You hear their whispers in the background, too.

The veterans didn't dwell on the harrowing or gruesome details. Most remembered their wartime in a softer light.

"One of the vets talked about how he went to a USO dance and, at the request of his commanding officer, was supposed to drive home six women," says Wexler. "The last one he dropped off he married." They were married 52 years.

Bill Buell is 83, and trained as a naval aviator at the end of the war. For almost 30 years he has also been a hospice volunteer, helping people whose lives are approaching an end. He trained as one of the project's interviewers until the veteran he was working with died.

"I was going to interview and then I got interviewed," he says. "In a way, I felt sort of an imposter. Although I was a World War II vet, I never saw combat, no one ever shot at me."

But Buell's stories are enlightening, offering a peek into the mind of a young Corsair pilot as he's about to make his first takeoff from a Navy transport ship converted into a small aircraft carrier.

"I was so afraid," he recalled. "My knees were shaking so hard that I couldn't control the brakes properly, so my plane was inching toward the tail of the guy in front of me." He prayed "Oh, God, don't let this happen to me." Finally the plane in front of him took off and Buell followed him into the sky.

The rest is history. And now, history captured on tape.

tmooney@projo.com