At last he is back, that happy-go-lucky kid who left four years ago to help settle things in Europe. He is no longer happy-go-lucky and the sparkle once in his eyes is now hidden by a somber cloud and often he looks afar off as if seeing things he’d rather not remember and can’t share with others.

No one guessed that he would return with two rows of medals pinned on his coat and if someone is careless enough to say “The Bronze Star”, he’ll casually reply, Aw heck that’s nothing.” and to another, “But I didn’t get the Purple Heart, and somehow that’s one I didn’t really want.”

Yes he’s a man now, but unsettled, wondering about the future. The strikes leave him cold. “We didn’t strike or we’d be over there yet, and sometimes I think I’d rather be,” is what he says.

He liked Germany the best of any country he “visited”, and the German people especially the older ones treated the solders fine, but he says “It was the young ones we had to watch.” And then he’ll say as if contradicting something he was taught to believe. “The German people are not all bad, there are many good ones. I’d even hate to think that there isn’t one good Jap.”

In that, it seems, lays all the hope for the future of America and the world for future peace.

Wars are fostered by misunderstanding and hate, and when one has been through hell and can still say of those he fought, “They are not all bad.” One feels that they didn’t fight in vain.

Written by, Mary Tackett Beaver.

After WWII of her younger brother Orville Tackett.

Note from Tom Beaver

After the war Uncle Orville was never the same. I am sure that today he would be said to suffer from PTSD. He drank heavily and I don’t think he had a regular job.

He was a heavy smoker and rolled his own cigarettes. He could even roll a cigarette with one hand. He used Torch Light tobacco and had the nickname Torchy even before the war.

That same tobacco would prove to be the end of him. He developed cancer of the mouth where he held the cigarettes.

He died in southern Ohio in a veteran’s hospital.

Orville Roy “Torchy” Tackett

Find A Grave Memorial# 137051059

Orville R Tackett