Sadly, we too usually grow to be numb to sports activities groups and leagues who honor our troops in a wide range of methods, whether or not it’s discounted admission on Military Appreciation Night or an invite for veterans to face and be acknowledged by the gang or, after all, the standard navy flyover that always comes on the finish of the nationwide anthem.
On this Memorial Day weekend, allow us to all take a second to recollect one other navy flyover in North Vietnam greater than half-a-century in the past; a deadly mission in a failed conflict that left a neighborhood lady with out her husband and two younger youngsters with out their father.
And allow us to additionally bear in mind there are names and faces and women and men behind these navy tributes at sporting occasions. We’re speaking about courageous males like Capt. E.A. Stamm, a Navy pilot who left his Sanford residence in 1967 and by no means returned.
The motive I learn about Capt. Stamm is as a result of his daughter — Katrina Stamm-Shoemaker — contacted me early final 12 months a few lengthy, misplaced card issued by Major League Baseball in 1973 on the finish of the Vietnam War. The card was a lifetime move to MLB video games for Vietnam prisoners of conflict, their spouses and their youngsters. It was baseball’s means of exhibiting gratitude to the a whole bunch who have been captured after which tortured in North Vietnamese POW camps.
When I acquired Katrina’s unique e mail about her misplaced card, I made a perfunctory effort to contact Major League Baseball and by no means heard again. I let the difficulty die, however Katrina by no means did. She stored emailing me and asking me to assist and I used to be all the time too busy. Finally, after her umpteenth e mail, I attempted once more and made contact with MLB Chief Communications Officer Pat Courtney, who got here to the rescue. Courtney and his employees confirmed Katrina’s story and issued a fantastic new “gold” card to Katrina — a grown lady with nothing however little-girl reminiscences of her brave father.
She remembers being within the fifth grade at Sanford’s Southside Elementary School on the day earlier than Thanksgiving break when her instructor, Mrs. Carlton, referred to as her to the entrance of the category an hour earlier than faculty was to set free.
“Your mom wants you home immediately,” the instructor stated. “Get on your bike right now, ride straight home and don’t you stop.”
“As a little kid, I was oblivious, and I just assumed it was something good my mom wanted to tell me,” Katrina says. “To this day, I can zap myself back to that moment as a little girl on my bicycle riding home, the wind is whipping through my hair and I’m thinking something really, really good is about to happen.”
Instead, it was one thing horrifically dangerous. When she reached the home, her mom, Ruth Ann, was crying and being comforted by the household pastor and two Navy officers. That’s how Katrina and her little brother David discovered their daddy’s airplane had been shot down over North Vietnam.
According to Navy and household accounts, Stamm volunteered to interchange one other pilot who had fallen in poor health and couldn’t go on a harmful picture reconnaissance mission alongside the nineteenth parallel in North Vietnam. It was Nov. 25, 1968, when Stamm swooped downward in his supersonic A-5 Vigilante jet so his navigator might take the images. But at 5,500 ft, they have been inside vary of North Vietnamese anti-aircraft artillery and their airplane was hit and broke into 4 items. Stamm’s navigator didn’t make it out of the airplane, however Stamm ejected from the plane, parachuted to the bottom and was taken captive. He died in some unspecified time in the future whereas in captivity, however not earlier than the household went by means of years of hell questioning what had occurred to him.
The household, in line with Katrina, was advised twice by the Navy that he was useless and advised two different occasions that he was nonetheless alive in a POW camp. They lived for years, till the conflict was over in 1973, not likely figuring out whether or not or not he was coming residence.
What they did know was this: If he was certainly nonetheless alive, he was being subjected to excessive torture and mistreatment in North Vietnam’s grotesque POW camps — sarcastically referred to as the “Hanoi Hilton” by captured troops. Surviving American POWs have advised tales of being in solitary confinement for weeks with no loos and having to sit down in their very own excrement whereas rats and roaches crawled on their our bodies. They advised of brutal beatings, waterboarding and being tied up for days and hung from ropes suspended from iron meat hooks.
Many POWs died and a few tried suicide.
“For the family members of those POWs, it was like trying to go on with your life while there is still an ongoing tragedy happening every day in your mind,” Katrina says. “You’re watching yourself try to live a normal life, but in the back of your head, you know your father is in Vietnam being tortured. In many ways, it was like we were imprisoned in that POW camp with my dad.”
Even when the conflict was over, the uncertainty continued. Katrina says when the Navy flew residence the supposed stays of her father, the household was skeptical and paid for a forensics report on the bones. The unique report was carried out by a lab on the Smithsonian Institution, Katrina says, and confirmed that the stays weren’t her father’s. Suspiciously, a subsequent report confirmed they have been right here father’s.
“There’s still this big discrepancy about whether or not that it’s even my dad buried in the grave next to my mom,” Katrina says. “If it’s not my dad, I hope it’s somebody nice who my mom gets along with.”
Katrina laughs at this level, however different occasions she cries throughout our interview. Like when she describes the months earlier than her father was deployed to Vietnam when, in these days earlier than Disney, the younger household spent the whole summer time visiting previous, forgotten Florida sights like Six Gun Territory, Marineland, the mermaid present at Weeki Wachee Springs and the water-ski present at Cypress Gardens.
Or simply earlier than her father left on his closing deployment and she or he sat on his lap and hugged him and he advised her, “You’re a big girl now so you take care of your mother and your little brother David.”
Her mom handed away six years in the past, however not earlier than efficiently elevating Katrina and David, who each graduated from UCF and have gone on to thriving careers and fulfilling lives. But even now, greater than 50 years later, they have fun and commemorate their father.
Just a few weeks in the past, Katrina and her husband Dean used her newly issued lifetime baseball move to attend a recreation in St. Louis, the place each of her dad and mom are buried. She was thrilled that earlier than the Cardinals performed the Diamondbacks that evening at Busch Stadium, the well-known Budweiser Clydesdales — their hair braided with pink, white and blue ribbons — took a lap across the discipline pulling the pink beer wagon.
“It was a blast. We had such an amazing time,” Katrina says. “I think it’s wonderful that sports organizations like Major League Baseball pay tribute to our military. When I was a kid, and somebody would do something nice for the families of those who died in the military, it always made me feel that we weren’t forgotten, after all.”
Her voice cracks.
“It’s no secret that we didn’t treat our Vietnam veterans very well when they came back home,” she provides. “And for the families of those who didn’t come back home, it feels good even today to know that somebody still cares. I appreciate Major League Baseball for continuing to honor my father.”
Next time you’re at a soccer recreation or a baseball recreation or a NASCAR race and people fighter jets streak throughout the sky on the finish of the nationwide anthem, bear in mind one other navy flyover in 1968.
Remember the braveness of Captain Ernest Albert Stamm.
And bear in mind the phrases of Elmer Davis, the good World War II-era information reporter and commentator:
“This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.”
Email me at [email protected]. Hit me up on Twitter @BianchiWrites and take heed to my Open Mike radio present each weekday from 6 to 9:30 a.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and HD 101.1-2
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Source: www.bostonherald.com