HONORING OUR HEROES - MEMORIAL DAY EDITION
WEDNESDAY, MAY 26, 2021 | 11
A Birth and a Death before, but the medics said, “Just follow us!”, and off we went on a wild chase up the unfamiliar curved mountain road. I desperately tried to keep my litDick Vick grew up on a farm by Lake Lillian, but tle VW close behind the speeding Jeep ambulance, in his teens his family moved to Litchfield. So, Dick praying I wouldn’t get into an accident or get lost. I went to high school in Litchfield, as did I. Dick went could barely do fifty mph up that mountain with the into the Air Force rising to the rank of Master Sgt. gas pedal of my tiny car floored. I had some narrow He was sent to Germany for duty at the Ramstein misses, as I blindly screamed around curves that dark Air Force Base. I got drafted into night, trying to keep up with the ambulance, afraid to the Army in the late sixties lose sight of them. Finally arriving at the hospital, I during the Vietnam War. was separated from my wife, and escorted into a waitMy mother’s prayers were answered, and I was sent to ing room to pace and smoke cigarettes with another GI in the same predicament. an Army base in Pirmasens, A little after two in the morning, a nurse came in Germany instead of Vietnam. and told me that I was a father for the first time. I I was given two weeks leave wasn’t allowed to see Christine, the name we had to go home before shipping picked out if it was a girl, except through a nursery out, so my fiancée, who lived on a farm by Lake Lillian, and I room glass that the nurse had led me to. Officially got married. My new wife came born on April 30, 1969, Christine was tiny at five pounds, fourteen and a half ounces and, we learned over to Pirmasens to be with the next day, she had Down Syndrome. me a few months later after I A strange thing happened that same night at the had found an apartment off the hospital just a few rooms away from my wife’s. Somebase and had saved up enough thing that would’ve made the hair stand up on the money to pay for it, buy an old back of my head, had I known about it at the time. used VW, and send for her. She was pregnant and had never been Thousands of miles from America, in a tiny Army Hospital, on the side of a mountain in Germany, a away from her parents or out of the United States before, so it was woman who grew up on a farm by Lake Lillian, who a scary situation for her. Pirmasens had married a man who went to school in Litchfield, gave birth on April 30th. In another room down the was about a 30-minute drive south of Ramstein AFB and we’d drive up there often to go to their PX, which hall, in the same hospital, an Air Force soldier from Lake Lillian, who went to the same high school I did was bigger and nicer than our Army one. Late one dark and moonless spring night, when the in Litchfield, died…on April 30th. His name was Dick Vick, and he had been in a car accident on a curved time for our first baby had arrived, I loaded my wife mountain road. He left behind his wife, Barbara, into our little beat-up $200 Volkswagen “beetle” and and four children. What are the chances of two Lake rushed her to the local Army clinic, five kilometers Lillian people with Litchfield connections both being away, to confirm what we already knew. The medics in that same hospital, on the same floor, on the same said it was time, put my wife into an ambulance, and night, thousands of miles from home in Germany, told me to follow them to the Army Hospital on the one giving birth, and the other one dying? We call side of a mountain in a town called Landstuhl, near Christine our “little angel”. God took Dick away from to Ramstein. I had never been there to the hospital this earth that night, but He gave us an angel.
BY TERRY SHAW
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God took Dick is away from th ight, n t a h t h t r a e us but He gave an angel.
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