Veterans come in all shapes, sizes and genders. Some spent a career in the service, others did their hitch and got out, some were on the front lines, others were support staff stateside. But they all have one thing in common – they served their country when needed, in wartime and in peace.
Durango will be one of many communities across America honoring its veterans today as that service is acknowledged.
Trip of remembrance
But for Hugh Towsley, an even larger acknowledgement came when he was invited to participate in an Honor Flight in late September.
During a three-day trip to the Washington D.C.-area, he and 22 other veterans of World War II toured a variety of monuments, including the World War II, Korean and Vietnam war memorials and Arlington Cemetery.
The 86-year-old Fruita native is quick to note that his enlistment straight out of high school in May 1945 meant that he never served in combat during the war. He qualified for the free Honor Flight because he had been a member of the military during wartime.
“I was in radar school in Chicago for (Victory in Japan) Day,” he said, “so I went downtown and danced with all the dollies. I never shot at anybody, and nobody ever shot at me.”
But that doesn’t mean his 20-year career in the Navy didn’t include some brushes with history. Towsley began his career in naval aviation, working in ground-control maintenance of radar and other equipment. That took him to Argentia, Newfoundland, which was on the route for planes participating in the Berlin Airlift in the late 1940s.
Other postings included Atsugi Naval Base in Japan to provide ground support to Marines staging for the Korean War, and, after graduating in the first class to study nuclear-propulsion power systems, an assignment to the USS Enterprise, America’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. During his deployment on the Enterprise, it was assigned to be part of the blockade of Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
‘Visit their memorial’
Honor Flights began in May 2005 with a simple philosophy: “Since America felt it was important to build a memorial to the service and sacrifice of her veterans, the Honor Flight Network believes it’s equally important that they actually get to visit and experience their memorial.”
Eight years later, numerous Honor Flights from across the country visit our nation’s capital each year in what has become a whirlwind of formal recognition – the honor guard from Fort Carson saw off Towsley’s flight from Colorado Springs and welcomed it back – and spontaneous appreciation along the way. There were 59 flights in September alone.
“When we walked into the airport, everyone stopped and let us go through with all the wheelchairs and walkers,” Towsley said, clearly moved. “All those people were acknowledging us with salutes or shaking our hands.”
Two stops on the trip will stick with him for different reasons, the Lone Sailor Statue at the Navy Memorial and the Washington D.C. Navy Yard.
“The Navy Memorial is a small area, one sailor standing alongside his seabag,” Towsley said.”I thought, ‘That’s me. I remember carrying that seabag from one post to the next.’ When I was a kid, I looked like that, lost or lonely, there were always new people, and I felt like I never got to know anyone in those early days in the Navy.”
The Navy Yard stop will be remembered as a close call with tragedy.
“The next day was that shooting,” his wife, Mary Ann Towsley, said about the shooting during which 13 people died, including alleged shooter Aaron Alexis. “Some of the people on Hugh’s trip thought they saw someone who looked like the man who did it, wearing a backpack and praying when they were there the day before.”
‘Dedicated to Garth’
Durango Herald columnist Garth Buchanan, a veteran of the famed 10th Mountain Division, will receive a different kind of acknowledgement today.
“All the screenings of “Climb to Glory: Legacy of the 10th Mountain Division Ski Troopers” will be dedicated to Garth,” said organizer Donna Chase. “The Colorado Ski Museum partnered with Warren Miller to bring his flare to the story.”
Many know of the 10th Mountain Division because its alumni founded many of the major ski areas in the West, but most don’t know their mission and training were among the most grueling and demanding of any unit in World War II.
“Everyone had to have mountaineering experience going in,” Buchanan, 89½, said. “Some only had skiing, and there were a lot of climbers who had no skiing experience.”
Buchanan was an anomaly in the division in a number of ways. He joined right out of high school, when most of his colleagues had at least some college under their belts; most were from well-to-do families in the East, and he had grown up in Bellingham, Wash., with a father who worked as a logger; and most had never touched a gun before their training, while he had grown up hunting to put meat on the table.
Buchanan was also a bit of an anomaly because he had gained skiing and climbing expertise growing up near the Cascade Mountains.
The 10th Mountain Division is a quick reaction unit trained to respond in rugged conditions. Buchanan remembers one 20- to 25-mile training hike from the base at Camp Hale in Leadville to Vail Pass, a hike that rose from 9,000 feet in elevation to 12,000 feet and then back down to 11,000 feet. He was carrying full gear, 114 pounds, including a .30-caliber machine gun.
It was good training for what was to become the 10th Mountain Division’s seminal moment, the taking of Riva Ridge in Italy. Buchanan was one of about 830 men assigned to take on a fortified German unit on Mount Belvedere overlooking the main road through the mountains.
“The 5th Army was bogged down for months at the Apennines, and they needed to go through to the Po Valley,” Buchanan said. “They had tried about four times to take it, but they got plastered from above. The Germans’ elite mountaineering troops were convinced that no one could climb that cliff with enough firepower to knock them off.”
Buchanan’s F Company of the 10th’s 2nd Battalion joined three other companies in climbing the ridge, a 2,000-foot cliff that rose above the Germans’ position. At night. In full gear. Including machine guns.
“Features of the cliff included some sections of the rock faces that required technical climbing and fixed ropes,” he said in his memoir, War Memoirs of a Soldier in the 10th Mountain Division. “In between were steep, slippery mud and ice stretches with a small bush here and there that provided tenuous handholds.”
The Germans were wrong, and the successful assault led the way to the Allies taking Italy on September 8, 1943.
The Office of Veterans Affairs estimates that World War II veterans are dying at the rate of 640 a day. Dennis Hagen, the archivist for the 10th Mountain Division Resource Center at Denver Public Library, said he thinks only about 60 men are still living who made that famous 2,000-foot climb.
Buchanan went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in math and physics from Western Washington University and a doctorate in behavioral sciences and statistics from the University of Colorado. During much of his career, he conducted research for the military.
He met his wife of 64 years, Sue, indirectly through the 10th Mountain Division. An avid skier, she used to hang out with some of his former comrades-in-arms at the University of Washington.
While he was awarded a Bronze Star for his actions as a gunner in another action, Buchanan, like many veterans, said it wasn’t that big a deal.
“We were only doing something that we did all the time,” he said. “Suddenly, someone from higher up the command was there to see it, and you get a medal. I did find out there were points attached to getting medals, so I got out a month or two early.”
abutler@durangoherald.com
On the Net
To learn more and to donate to support Honor Flight of Southern Colorado, visit www.honorflightsoco.org.
The Denver Public Library’s archives on the 10th Mountain Division include more than 800 photos and numerous documents, Many of which have been digitzed. They are available at http://digital.denverlibrary.org/cdm/tmd.
If you go
Durango will be honoring its veterans today in several ways:
The annual Veterans Day Parade will begin at 11 a.m. at Main Avenue and College Drive and travel north on Main to 12th Street.
The Veterans of Foreign Wars Post No. 4031, 1550 Main Ave., will host a reception after the parade.
The Benevolent & Protective Order of Elks Lodge No. 507, 901 East Second Ave., is inviting veterans to a free lunch immediately after the parade.
“Climb to Glory: Legacy of the 10th Mountain Division Ski Troopers” will be screened at 9:30 a.m., 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. at the Community Concert Hall at Fort Lewis College. Tickets are $5 for students and veterans and $8 for the general public at the two matinees, and $12 for the VIP screening at 6 p.m., which will include a question-and-answer session afterward with producer Chris Anthony. Tickets are available at www.durangoconcert.com.
Proceeds from the ticket sales will be split between the Adaptive Sports Association’s Veterans Scholarship Fund and the Durango Winter Sports Foundation.
