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New museum collects stories of Purple Heart recipients - 2 July, 2006
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By MICHAEL RISINIT
mrisinit@lohud.com
THE JOURNAL NEWS
More information
Audio slideshow
Hear about the museum and veterans' war experiences in an audio slideshow:
www.thejournalnews.com/legacy/slideshow/062906
Contact the museum
If you are a Purple Heart recipient or know someone who is, you can make sure the story will be preserved by contacting the New Windsor Cantonment State Historic Site at 845-561-1765. The museum is collecting the name and story of each recipient, proof of a Purple Heart (DD-214 discharge certificate or equivalent) as well as any photographs and personal mementos that will help tell a recipient's story. Don't send any materials before contacting the hall.
More information can be found at: http://nysparks.state.ny.us/heritage/purple_hrt.asp.
Grand opening
Opening ceremonies at the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor on Route 300 in New Windsor in Orange County are scheduled for Nov. 10.
The day before Thanksgiving 1944, Vinny LoGiudice crouched on the dirt floor of a cellar beneath a German barn. He was bleeding from several holes in his left leg, courtesy of shrapnel from an 88 mm shell the Germans had lobbed into the adjoining courtyard.
"They saw us coming and we had ducked into this courtyard," LoGiudice said. "We ducked down into the cellar. They in turn put four tanks around the building with two of their barrels pointing down into the windows."
LoGiudice's unit, a company of the Army's 84th Infantry Division, surrendered about 30 minutes later. With "shirts and other things" wrapped around his leg, the Eastchester High School graduate and his buddies marched all night to the first of several prison camps. He said the Germans treated his wounds.
The following April, his captors fled the advancing Russians and his company made it to the British lines — the first step toward returning to his Locust Avenue boyhood home.
Later in 1945, a package with his Purple Heart landed in the family's black, metal mailbox. Fingering the medal one afternoon in his Greenburgh home, where he has lived for 54 years, his voice trailed off when discussing its significance.
"I can't explain it. We don't talk about it too much," said LoGiudice, 83.
His chin is a little more rounded today than in a photo from around 1943 or '44, in which he is grasping his M-1 Garand rifle. Glasses now bring the world into focus. But the recollections of that German farm, the feel of the burning metal in his leg and the anxiety of staring at the tanks' guns penetrating the sanctuary of the cellar are still crisp.
Those are the memories the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor seeks to capture. Under construction near Newburgh and not far from West Point, the hall will be the nation's only repository for the accounts of the men and women who stepped on mines, tripped booby traps, took bullets or lost limbs to IEDs — the improvised explosive devices now taking such a toll in Iraq.
The undertaking is a monumental one. A reckoning of the dead and wounded — those eligible for the Purple Heart — since World War I is about 1.7 million, and every one has a story.
"We want to be able to get more than the numbers," said Michael Clark, manager of the New Windsor Cantonment State Historic Site in Orange County.
The site is where Gen. George Washington moved his troops for the final winter of the Revolutionary War. It's also where Washington created the Badge of Military Merit — "the figure of a heart in purple cloth." The badge was originally given for exceptional performance, not battle wounds, and was awarded to only a handful of soldiers. The decoration was revived in 1932, when several World War I veterans received the first Purple Hearts during a ceremony at the cantonment.
Clark said the hall gets "thousands and thousands of pieces of mail from across the country each day." Sawhorses, ladders and extension cords will soon be replaced by video screens, sweat-stained letters from soldiers' pockets and period photographs. An on-site studio will allow a Pearl Harbor survivor, a nurse wounded in Korea or a Marine shot in Baghdad to come in and record the experience for posterity.
"It will be an incredible archive of America's memory," Clark said.
The effort isn't just recalling history but also tapping the present day. As Operation Iraqi Freedom goes deeper into its fourth year and Operation Enduring Freedom continues in Afghanistan, the number of military causalities — and therefore the number of Purple Heart recipients — continues to grow.
Some who have already absorbed shot and shell would prefer not to have to welcome new members to their fraternity.
"The gentlemen and women out there now are my heroes," said Franklin Turner Jr. of Putnam Valley. "I really would not want to see anybody receive a Purple Heart ever again. That would be my wish."
In 1968, he was Army Spc. Turner, 21, with the 1st Squadron of the 9th Cavalry in Vietnam. On a June morning, Turner was part of a seven-man patrol in a village in Quang Tri province.
"Apparently, part of the village was missed. They sent us back in in the afternoon and we basically walked into an ambush (with the North Vietnamese army)," he said.
What followed was a blur then and now to Turner, a carpenter and union leader at the FDR Campus of the VA Hudson Valley Healthcare System in Montrose.
"Everything lit up. I don't know what it was," said Turner, 59. "I remember being put on a helicopter. Then I remember somebody ripping my clothes off."
Metal fragments from an enemy booby trap had pierced "his entire body," according to the Army's telegram notifying his parents on Barger Street. Turner spent time in hospitals in Vietnam, Japan and Queens before finishing his tour of duty stateside.
"You don't have to be a hero to get a Purple Heart," said Turner, a father of two and grandfather of five. "You actually have to be in the right place at the right time, or the wrong place at the wrong time. However you want to put it."
Sixteen months after Turner was wounded and about 175 miles south, Sgt. Jerry Donnellan of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division, was on a "search and destroy" mission in the rolling, green hills of Vietnam's central highlands. He recalls an all-too-brief glimmer of an enemy grenade followed by an explosion.
"I landed with a thud on my back. My only thought at that point was, 'Goddamn that was loud," said Donnellan, who was then 22.
His right arm was broken — both forearm bones were sticking through his skin. His left leg, he said, "was all chop meat."
"I picked up my right leg and it was gone," said Donnellan, 59, of Nyack, the head of Rockland County's Veterans Service Agency. "The medic was on me in no time with morphine. I didn't know if that (the calmness that followed) was the drug or the life running out of my body."
A chopper rushed him to an aid station. He then went to a hospital in Da Nang, followed by one in Japan, before ending up at Valley Forge General Hospital in Pennsylvania. Receiving a Purple Heart there just made him one of the crowd.
"Everybody had one. Gunshot, grenade, mine, ah, June bride," Donnellan said.
The decoration, he said, carries a measure of honor but can also be tinted with guilt.
"You lost one leg, he lost two," Donnellan said. "Even the worst guy is looking back at the guy who didn't come back."
A lifetime later, LoGiudice finds his decoration colored with the memories of a man who never made it out of the courtyard.
LoGiudice worked for 33 years in the Scarsdale post office after World War II, first as a carrier, then as a clerk.
He married, had two sons and is now a grandfather of two. He said he thought the Purple Heart Hall of Honor was a "good way to get the stories out."
From his living room, his thoughts go back to when he was 21 and to Germany, Thanksgiving Eve 1944, and to a buddy.
"Bob Rachofsky from Long Island, the radioman," LoGiudice said. "He was killed there."
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