Press
BURLINGTON COUNTY TIMES
Sunday, January 29, 2006
OUTLOOK
The
Daughters of D-Day
Daughters of D-Day look for children of veterans
By Gretchen Barrett-Hanafy
Burlington County Times staff writergbarrett@phillyBurbs.com
For the sons and daughters of World War II veterans, raised in the idyllic post-war boom years, knowledge of their fathers' military experiences often was limited to silly stories and'the" sight of a dusty uniform in the back of a closet.
Two area women, after sharing their own childhood memories, were inspired to compile the stories of these veterans and their post-war lives, as told by their daughters and sons.
Through "Daughters of D-Day: Finding Our Fathers," and its Web site, www.daughtersofd-day.com, Ilene Baker and Carol Schultz Vento are encouraging men and women to come forward with their reminiscences and learn more about their parents' journey. In the process, they hope to create a community of individuals who share a collective burden.
"I knew my dad had served, but he told me such small amounts of information. It was like pulling it out of him," said Baker of Philadelphia, who along with Riverton resident Schultz Vento, is organizing the project.
"There are a bunch of baby boomers out there who had dads in the service," Baker said. "It's a wound to the collective consciousness of our generation. None of us knew what our dads saw."
Baker's late father Joe, an Army veteran, served in the Quartermaster Corps. At Omaha Beach on June 7, 1944, or D-Day Plus One, his job was to help retrieve body parts. "I asked him what Omaha Beach was like," she said. "He said, `The ocean was red.' "'
Schultz Vento's late father, Arthur "Dutch" Schultz, was a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army. His first combat duty was on D-Day. He parachuted into Normandy from a plane damaged by enemy fire. He also fought in the Allied invasion of the Netherlands, the Battle of the Bulge and in Germany, she said. Schultz was one of the veterans interviewed in the film "Saving Private Ryan" and also was featured in books on the war by Cornelius Ryan and Stephen Ambrose.
"He had a real tough time after the war" Schultz Vento said, "problems with alcoholism - but he beat it and for the rest of his life worked as a director of alcohol and drug rehabilitation programs.
She also is interviewing her stepfather, Lee Bondy of Riverton, who served as a Navy radar specialist aboard the USS Cleveland in the Pacific campaign, for inclusion on the Web site.
"We started to realize that our dads just told funny stories. We didn't know some of the awful things. There is a whole generation of us who were raised as women by World War II vets. There is an underlying story. It was a- struggle," she said. "They had to deal with a lot of things."
They were the `Greatest Generation', but there was something going on within their families."
"It's so different from Vietnam, when we understood that they were somehow traumatized," Baker said. "They didn't even have a name for it in World War II. They came home. It was a `good' war. They fought for home and country. But they had been so injured. That was the common theme."
With the majority of these veterans gone and the rest nearing the end of their lives, both women feel it's time to get the rest of the story.
"My dad, before he died, said 'talk to the children, (the soldiers') story has already been told',” Schultz Vento said.
