It is Memorial Day and the first thing I did was put a link on Facebook and Twitter to my pages on
Footnote. They are all about
Buck.
Even though this photo hardly looks like the other pictures we have, it is his “formal” picture. It shows a young man who is eager to serve his country, who is willing to put himself out there in order to protect his loved ones. He gave the ultimate sacrifice, giving his life so that the right to be free people in a free land would be a protected and precious treasure for future generations to come.
He left this world way too early. I never knew him, never saw him…he is only “words on a page” and a few one-dimensional images left on fading photographs. Who knew his favorite color? What did he liked to do on hot summer days when all the work was done? What did he want to do after the war was over? What were his plans for his own future that never came?
He never married, unless you count the Army Air Corp. No wife, no kids, but surely he had plenty of good buddies who grieved when they heard the news that he was gone. Men who, like himself, had watched out for each other, encouraged one another, laughed together, and mourned together.
It took a year before he came back to US soil after his plane collided with another US plane over Germany in June 1944. His family wondered and sorrowed for a whole year before his ‘mass grave’ was found and he was reinterred into another ‘mass grave’ in Arlington.
But knowing he finally came back to his final rest brought peace of mind, even if his tombstone is a shared one with other heroes like himself. I can look into his eyes and know that he wouldn’t mind, but would consider himself in great company.
James Edward Dozier, my Uncle Buck, is our family hero. I honor his service today and preserve his memory. He never died in vain.
