The ordinary veteran gets his medal 98 years later
Veterans Day has a special tug on the heart this year for Hank Druckerman of Sun City Hilton Head.
For the first time, his family has in hand the Purple Heart medal his father earned 98 years ago in World War I.
Hank and his brother, Martin, pursued the medal with help from a member of Congress. Harry never talked about the war and the leg injury he suffered in France. He could have asked for the Purple Heart, but didn’t.
Hank said the brothers wanted it for their children and grandchildren.
“You could say it’s ‘just because,’” Hank said.
You could say it’s just because civilization is built on the backs and wounds of the uncelebrated veterans who simply do their duty, like Harry Druckerman did.
He was the oldest of nine children of Jewish parents who left Russia and its czar for the open arms of Ellis Island.
He was 8 or 9, nobody really knew, when the family settled on the Lower East Side of New York City and then Brooklyn in the late 19th century.
Harry had a few years of grade school but dropped out to help support siblings who would grow up to become a dentist, a school principal and such.
“My father was a very simple man,” Hank said this week.
He delivered newspapers, first in a carriage pulled by a horse named Tony, and later in a truck.
He was 26 when he was drafted like so many other immigrants. After a few weeks of training in Upstate South Carolina, he found himself a rifleman in trench warfare.
A century after the war to end all wars started, Harry’s granddaughter wrote beautifully about the experiences over there of a grandfather she never knew. Pamela Druckerman is a best-selling author and op-ed columnist for The New York Times. She lives in Paris and made the two-hour trip to see where Harry got what her father called “a million dollar wound,” bad enough to get him out of action but not life-threatening.
“At 5:30 a.m., the 106th began walking slowly across a field, behind a rolling barrage of American machine-gun and artillery fire. They were supposed to arrive at the German side at 6:06 a.m., and then seize about 1,000 yards of territory, including two farms and a knoll,” Pamela wrote.
She reports that Harry later walked in a homecoming parade along Fifth Avenue.
He later married and they had two boys. Hank was only 17 on the day he found his father slumped over his truck steering wheel, dead at age 60. Soldiers had been given cigarettes to settle their nerves in the trenches. Harry got hooked, smoking two packs of Camels a day.
But first Harry served quietly in the legion or “ordinary” veterans who set up the world for his family and the rest of us.
And on this Veterans Day, we can salute his Purple Heart.
David Lauderdale: 843-706-8115, @ThatsLauderdale
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This story was originally published November 10, 2016 at 12:19 PM with the headline "The ordinary veteran gets his medal 98 years later."