Tears for my father

How many times can a daughter cry tears of pride and joy for her father? That’s exactly what I did when my father, Forrest S. Allinder, nearly 90 years old, was honored with a prestigious medal at the University of Utah Veterans Day celebration on Nov. 11.

Forrest, better known as Daddy (I’m the community editor at the Idaho State Journal), and father-in-law of Richard Albright, local photographer and owner of All-Bright Camera in Pocatello, is a veteran of World War II. Daddy shared the honors with 10 other Utahans who had served in either World War II, the Korean War and in the Vietnam War.

I was far from the only one choking up, there were so many family members in the audience who simply couldn’t — and shouldn’t have — contained their emotions. I cried when the bagpiper played “Amazing Grace.” I cried when my father was introduced, as he was escorted by a young ROTC cadet to the stage up front in the student union ballroom. I cried when we stood and placed our hands on our hearts (if you were a civilian) or saluted the veteran honorees (if you were a veteran yourself) because my husband, a veteran of the Vietnam War in the Navy, saluted my father.
I cried once more when the bugler played “Taps,” in remembrance of those who were gone. And when the ceremony was over and I went up to congratulate my father, I cried one more time.

It was just that kind of ceremony, simple yet profound, strong and sentimental and it takes a truly hard-hearted person not to feel a catch in the throat to know what these veterans went through during the wars in which they served.

Daddy was in his freshman year at the California Institute of Technology when he enlisted into the Army. He and his division were assigned to Gen. Patton’s Third Army, 76th Division, 417th Regiment. Feb. 7,1945, he and his battalion had to breach the Siegfried Line at Echternach by crossing the Sauer River. Of course, the division was attacked and the regiment was ordered to cross the river in small boats. The boats were overloaded; the men crowded in, and because the river was in flood stage, most of the men in the boats drowned, including Thomas, my father’s closest friend.

There was, as my father said in later years, a 62 percent casualty rate that day. Even after all these many years, Daddy said of this battle, part of the Battle of the Bulge, was, “… so brutal, so dirty, there is no way to communicate it.”

That’s what struck me, was how incredibly brutal World War II was, and how it was nothing short of miraculous that Daddy survived and thrived so that on the cusp of his 90th birthday he could be honored for his service.

No family can truly grasp the vitality of the nine men and one woman who were honored along with my father, nor can families imagine how any war, every war, carries levels of atrocity, brutality and horror beyond our ability to grasp.

So that’s why I cried. The tears shed amongst all of us this past Veterans Day at the university’s ceremony was the very least we could do to share with them what they went through.

Jodeane Albright is Community editor for the Idaho State Journal.