New Canaan Marks Veterans Day with Solemn Service at God’s Acre

In Flanders fields the poppies grow,
      Between the crosses, row on row,
   That mark our place; and in the sky
   The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
   Loved and were loved, and now we lie
         In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
   The torch; be yours to hold it high.
   If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
         In Flanders fields.

—“In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae

 

New Canaan’s Peter C. Langenus recalls how the 93^rd Evacuation Hospital supported the unit in which he served as a U.S. Army captain in Vietnam.

If a soldier was injured and required an air ambulance evacuation, someone would “grab a radio and yell into it, ‘Dustoff! Dustoff! Dustoff! We need a dustoff!’ ” Langenus recalled Tuesday morning, standing before the Wayside Cross war memorial at God’s Acre.

“And we would sit there, sometimes still in contact, praying for the helicopter to show up,” Langenus told about 200 residents, including veterans, many in uniform, gathered for a solemn Veterans Day ceremony. The crowd included some 20 members of New Canaan’s Hannah Benedict Carter Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, representing female veterans of the Vietnam War, whose presence and wreath dedication prompted Langenus’ memory.

“And most of the time we were in vegetation, where the trees were growing at 60, 120 and 200 feet above you,” recalled Langenus, who also served as a colonel during Operation Desert Storm. “And the air ambulance would come in and they would drop a cable 300 feet below the helicopter and the helicopter would hover until the cable got to the bottom of the ground, and at the end of that cable was a clamshell device and you would take the solider, open the clamshell, tie him around the cable and they would raise it 300 feet up in the air and go up to the 93rd. And we knew that if we could get the soldier back to the 93^rd, to the Angels of Mercy, they would live.”

The ceremony, which started promptly at the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month—marking the Armistice signed by the Allied forces of World War I and Germany—included: the Pledge of Allegiance, led by Langenus, who specifically thanked the New Canaan Police, Parks and Fire Departments, as well as Channel 79, and also recited “In Flanders Field” (printed above, though Langenus clearly knows the poem by heart); chaplain-led prayers; moment of silent prayer for veterans; reading of local veterans who passed away this past year (names printed below); comments from DAR Chapter Regent Diane Wells and First Selectman Rob Mallozzi; “Taps” played by Don Gels on bugle; presentation and retirement of colors by the New Canaan Police Department Color Guard; and an address from 2000 New Canaan High School graduate Forrest Kimes, whom Mallozzi during an introduction said has is a University of Connecticut graduate who joined the Connecticut Air National Guard in May 2001, was commissioned as an officer in 2008 and has made three overseas deployments.

Kimes in his eloquent remarks noted that this Veterans Day is especially important in that it’s been exactly 100 years since World War I concluded “its opening moves.”

“Few in the newly dug foxholes on the western front could foresee that four years of fighting lay ahead, nor did those fortunate enough to see the war’s end think that such a war could come again,” Kimes said. “Many reflected upon World War I as being the ‘war to end all wars.’ But as we know now, this was not the case. World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Panama, the Persian Gulf and many other smaller conflicts in between. From the Arctic Circle to the deepest tropics, the battlefields from the highest skies to the deepest oceans, many millions of Americans have served in every capacity from rear echelon support to the cutting edge of the front lines and beyond. And many more have since returned home to continue normal lives.”

Those called upon to serve were called away from the comforts of home, school and careers, Kimes said, often to boring or dangerous places, often “knowing that the chance always existed that they may not return home, and sometimes knowing that if they did return, they may return to a nation divided.”

“Not every veteran knows the full tragedy of war, the fullest sting of battle or the deepest loss that it can bring. But all those who have served in times of our nation’s need understand the pride to have answered a call, to have served. To have seen their fellow men and women at their best when faced with terrible odds and to have succeeded. Or in their failing, gave every measure of devotion to ensure their brothers and sisters could continue the fight or make it home.”

Langenus read the following names of New Canaan veterans who died in the past year:

• John Brennan
• Willard Seymour
• Ralph Scott
• Robert Rockafellow
• Peter Kisken
• Walter Jaykus
• Edward Weed
• John Jex
• Joseph DiBlasi
• John Newman
• Kennan Jayne
• Neil O’Brien
• John Bermingham
• Roger Fulton
• Amerigo Prosio
• Stephen Wise
• Mary Stuart Milhaupt
• Frederick Gricius
• Stanley Mrus
• Edward Winpenny
• Clayton Frye
• Stuart Upson

In his closing remarks, Langenus also said that on Saturday, Nov. 29 (Thanksgiving weekend) at 8 a.m. at Lakeview Cemetery, the process will start of putting a wreath on every veteran buried in New Canaan—938 in all. The project will encompass the 13 private cemeteries in New Canaan, as well.

Here is the full text of Wells’ very touching story about the profound connection between battlefield soldiers and the nurses who helped save their lives and restore them. Due to a problem with the PA system at God’s Acre, not everyone present was able to hear it:

Good morning. You will remember that last year we honored the men who fought in the Vietnam War, so this year we would like to honor the women who served and remember their sacrifice and courage as they gave so much for the nation.

I was touched by a story I read in the past year. The setting was the 20^th anniversary of the dedication of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington D.C. And it goes like this.

For more than two decades, America didn’t want to hear the stories of nurses and other women who served in Vietnam. They were scorned and disrespected. The Vietnam Women’s Memorial served as a place of peace and healing but there was still a void.

Larry Sudweeks knows about that.

“Larry had this hole. Like a big old void,” said Larry’s wife, Loretta Sudweeks, as she pointed to Larry’s chest.

The void in Sudweek’s life goes back to his time in Vietnam, where he spent 45 days in the 93^rd Evacuation Hospital in Long Binh.

He knew it was the nurses who kept him alive. Once they made him strong enough, he was flown home, back to family and away from that place of blood and gauze and death. Another broken, dying solider took his bed before Sudweeks got a chance to thank them or even get their names.

His was a common experience.

“I can’t remember your name, but I just wanted to say ‘thanks’ for saving my life,” read one of the notes left on the Mall on Monday. It was signed ‘One of Many.’

The rest of America had the same problem: never getting the women’s names, never having the time to thank them.

It wasn’t until 1993 that the Vietnam Women’s Memorial was dedicated to honor the ones who volunteered to serve, who stayed while others were flown out, who did the confronting but were never comforted.

There was no draft for women. About 11,000—most of them nurses—raised their hands and went over on their own.

A few hundred of them came to the women’s memorial in the District to remember, talk, embrace, share and celebrate the 20^th anniversary of their memorial—and two decades of America finally acknowledging their service.

Sudweeks, 66, finally got to say thanks, too.

He lives in California. And he came to the Wall a couple of years ago to see the names of his buddies who died, to get closure.

“But he kept circling that women’s memorial—he was drawn to it,” Loretta said.

He still didn’t know who the women were who saved him.

Meanwhile, Annie Koch Voigt, 68, one of the women who kept him alive, wondered about him, too. This was many, many years after those dark days of war. After children and grandchildren and other wars.

Voigt had this one picture she took of a wounded solider on Easter Sunday, when they all wore nurse whites rather than fatigues. And it haunted her.

She remembered his unusual name. She remembered that he was nice and courteous. Most men spent a couple of days at her evacuation hospital, then were flown away. But Sudweeks was there for weeks and in bad condition.

Part of her didn’t want to learn his fate. You never knew who made it and who didn’t. And sometimes, it was best not to know.

And part of her didn’t want to revisit that time in her life.

It was Gen. Colin Powell who first publicly thanked the nurses who saved him.

“General Powell said words we’d never heard before,” said Diane Carlson Evans, president and founder of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation.

Powell dedicated that memorial 20 years ago and returned to the Mall on Monday to remind America what women had done in that war.

“The nurses were the ones who never got respite,” he said, and he asked everyone, on this Veterans Day, to give thanks “especially to the women who served silently.”

Voigt decided to end her silence. She looked up Sudweeks’ unusual name and found his address in California. She mailed him the picture, the details of his wounds and her memories.

“It took me three or four tries to finish reading that card,” Sudweeks said. “It was her.”

At the memorial, Loretta and Larry Sudweeks and Voigt hugged.

And Larry Sudweeks finally said, “Thank you.”