I've been kicking around this story in my head and today, being Veteran's Day, is as appropriate a day as any.

 In the small Utah town of Stockton, close to where I live now and where I did live for 5 years lives a man who fought on the front lines of World War II.  Nelson Rolph.  Rolph was sent to Southern France when he was 18 after being drafted in October of 1943 and the terrible thing that is war is remembered by him still these sixty-four years later. 

His story was brought to life for me in our local paper a couple of months ago.  Say Rolph: “I had never been away from home all my life, the farthest I had been was a couple hundred miles into Indiana. I had no idea what was going to happen. They just draft you. They don’t tell you where you are going until you are practically there.”

When he and his fellow soldiers disembarked in Naples, Italy they were sent to France with orders to liberate France from the Germans.  “Basically we were to put constant pressure on the enemy so they would have one of three things to do: retreat, stay and fight or surrender,” Rolph said. “Each soldier has the responsibility to do what he’s been ordered to do the best he can.”

Rolph fought in many battles, big and small, during his time there and saw his comrads be killed around him.  He recalls one battle where the Germans were attacking his platoon “As a platoon sergeant I checked to see if all my men were accounted for,” Rolph said. “They were, except for a soldier by the name of Carpenter. During the shelling we started pushing them back, but then they zeroed all of their artillery in on us and really poured it on. A shell hit Carpenter directly and blew his body up into a tree. Things like this happened all the time. It’s hard but you can’t let the emotion get to you because you’ve got to continue on.”

He recounts another battle where he should have lost his own life:  “I remember we were in the Vogue Mountains and a soldier and I were trying to locate the Germans shooting at us from somewhere up a trail,” Rolph said. “You don’t walk on the trail, you walk on the side of it because they’ve got guns, but that doesn’t mean you’re not going to get hit anyway. We were trying to locate the shooter. I was on one side of the trail and [my friend] was on the other. A shot rang out. I looked at my friend as he was falling. He didn’t need a medic. He was killed right there. The Germans had their sight set on him and not me. I was lucky. I felt good that it wasn’t me, but felt bad that he got shot.”

After two years of cold and rain, death and carnage all around him he returned home having played his part in helping to free France.  Now, 64 years later, he turned his attention to renewing contacts with the people he helped in France and with the help of his son, Dan, he has done just that.  Says Rolph: “My son Dan is a historian with the Pennsylvania Historical Society and one day I said to him, ‘Why don’t you see what you can find out about the areas I served in in Southern France. During his research he met a Frenchman by the name of Gerome Villain, who was also looking for information about the men who had liberated his hometown.”

Gerome Villain and Nelson Rolph exchanged letters, photos, and historical information, then this past July, Rolph was honored to received a diploma from the French government thanking him for his services six decades ago.  The diploma reads:

“Dear Sir, it is my pleasure and my honor to bestow upon you the official diploma of France. France has decided to honor veterans worldwide who fought for the liberty of our souls between 1944 and 1945. This diploma acknowledges how deeply the people of France feel with gratitude and generosity for all allied soldiers whose sacrifice brought victory and freedom to Europe and ultimately the glorious ending of WW II. Please be assured that France, through this token of memory and recognition hold profoundly to heart the unfailing friendship between her people and the people of the United States.”

Says Rolph: “When I was there I wasn’t concerned about receiving medals or honors, I was just trying to do my job and save as many lives as I could. A lot of people don’t want to talk about the war. It doesn’t bother me to talk about the war even though I saw a lot of close friends lose their lives. That’s war. It happened and I think it’s important to talk about it.”