Remembering Dad - on Memorial Day

It was raining Memorial Day and I needed a cap to keep the rain off my head. I knew I was going to be out in the wet, watching the parade downtown.

I've got a few caps in the closet and started rummaging though them. At the bottom of the stack I found an old red cap Dad gave me. It has Company "E", 106th Engineers in insignia yellow lettering, printed around the castle emblem of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

"Well, it is Memorial Day," I thought. "Why not wear it for Dad, why not wear it for all of them?"

When I was growing up, Dad told me stories about Company "E" - how a bunch of Appalachicola boys, members of the "Franklin Guards" of the Florida National Guard, went off to World War II leaving the old Ft. Coombs Armory, where summers were hot and sultry, for the Alaskan wilderness where winters were cold and snowy.

The Army sends you where they need you. That's the only reason Dad could figure why he and his buddies wound up in Alaska in 1942.

They needed an Engineer outfit to carve out airstrips for the 11th Air Army Air Force so it could be within striking distance of the invading Japanese on the Aleutian Islands of Attu and Kiska.

The men of Company "E" thought they were shipping out to Europe, but found themselves on a troop train to Montana and from there, to Seattle, Washington, and then by ship to Alaska.

The end of the line was a snow-covered woodland in the middle of the night about 35 miles inland from Anchorage.

The Floridians grew up hunting and fishing and living off the land, and Dad recalled that they fared a lot better that first cold night than a group of Northern boys.

The "Yankees" kept teasing them, he remembered, about not holding up in the bitter cold, but the Floridians built a fire, captured some snow shoe rabbits, roasted them and did just fine.

Dad and the rest of Company "E" spent 21 months in the Alaskan Territory and he often said he wanted to go back. He filled my head with tales of tall firs, big brown bears and the monstrous salmon and steelhead trout he caught.

I would pour over Dad's picture album with its black and white Kodak scenes of mountains and deep valleys and glaciers.

When they left home for active duty, officers and men, they were 87 strong.

At their 1995 reunion, when Dad gave me the cap, there were around 20 present or accounted for.

Company "E" now musters nine men, including Motor Sgt. Gunn.

Somewhere in a safe and secret place in Appalachicola there is an unopened bottle of rum. According to the plan, the last three members of 1940's "Franklin Guards" will share a toast to those long ago boys from the Florida Panhandle coast, who fought their war more against the elements than the Japanese.

I hope Dad gets to share that toast. He might want to wear the red cap that day.

Father's Day is coming up. I think I will give it back to him.