Showing results for "the widow" in Military & War

When Florence Finch died at the age of 101, few of her Ithaca, NY, neighbors knew that this unassuming Filipina native was a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, whose courage and sacrifice were unsurpassed in the Pacific War against Japan. Long accustomed to keeping her secrets close in service of the Allies, she waited 50 years to reveal the story of those dramatic and harrowing days to her own children.

Mortar rounds rained down on us continuously, starting at sunrise. We hadn’t slept the previous night because the business of life and death were upon us. Now those mortar rounds were erupting like little volcanoes. But instead of hot lava rocks, they were hot pieces of shrapnel that whizzed by us in every direction.

The dream of every writer is to have their heart type the words for them; as the voice of so many veterans and their families, my heart would not stop writing until our family's VA story was told. My husband of 16 years, James Anthony Caldon, the father of our three children, served with the Navy Seabees Mobile Construction Battalion in Vietnam in 1968. In January 1987, our lives suddenly changed forever.