Thank You

On November 2, 2011 we were driving home from Minnesota when a message came over the radio asking drivers along the route from Mabel, Minnesota to Calmar, Iowa to pull over, grab a flag and help bring a soldier home. Every school kid from kindergarten to high school lined the road. Veteran's group handed out flags, shop keepers and citizens lined the route, flags in hand as 20-year-old Army Private First Class Christopher Horns and his Gold Star Family drove to his final resting place in Calmar, Iowa.

Our friend Hal Koltz was eighteen years old, the ink barely dry on his high school diploma when he left for the Navy. Hal boarded the Fletcher Class Destroyer USS Cord where he served in the Pacific until August 1946. For the remainder of his life he struggled to forgive the Japanese for the atrocities he'd witnessed at Saipan.

Alphonse “Cookie” Koch hung up his glove and put away his triple 'A' uniform and shipped off to France when was eighteen years old. He came home in 1945 with a permanent limp, a Purple Heart, and Nazi campaign banner that he'd taken when his unit liberated a prison camp in Germany. He never talked about the war with anyone until his nephew, Jim returned from Vietnam. They would sit in the yard together and have a beer, talking for hours, just the two of them. He never talked about it with anyone else.

To all the veteran's, all who serve in the military, and especially the Gold Star Families, thank you!