A comment…
I found this very specific information about Lester Charles Jones, the American buried in the Alliance (Nebraska) Cemetery (All text is copied directly from the listing for the sale of this medal…!)
!
An exclamation point!
Good grief!
Was this reader trying to tell me something…?
I guess so because he is the one who shared these.
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He added this heartfelt comment.
It feels that way, Pierre.
When I found the decoration and read his story, I cried. It seemed – and is! – so wrong that anyone can sell medals awarded by governments to individuals for exceptional sacrifice in war. It would be like buying someone’s grave marker for a Halloween event to scare the kiddies, in my mind. A disgrace. The only good that came of it is we now have a very full description of his life and death. I will never walk by that grave again without a moment of silence, a salute from one old soldier to another. It should be against the law to sell such things. This man is more than a $225 (or whatever it was) chunk of cash in someone’s pocket for shameful behavior.
The irony is that there is a place where that medal not only could have been on display with the story of Lester Charles Jones, it and Lester would have been given the full respect he earned through his sacrifice. As I’ve mentioned, I volunteer Thursday afternoons at […] Nebraska.
Most of the displays and resources there are donations from family who found military memorabilia in Dad or Mom’s closet after they died, realized there was no equitable way to share it with survivors or no survivors particularly wanted it because it would end up in their closets for lack of better ideas on what to do with it.
But, the family recognized its importance. The museum gave them a way to honor a loved one by sharing his or her memorabilia, and visitors to the museum gain knowledge of the impact of war on ordinary people in a small, isolated town in Western Nebraska. Heroes walk among us, silent in life many times because of the horrors they experienced in service to their country, but revealed and honored after they are gone because
we all need to recognize the fact John Wayne was just a fiction, but these people lived, fought, and sometimes died to save a world from tyranny. It’s a small museum, but it serves a large purpose.
If we can’t have the medal for the Museum, I can, at least, make sure his story isn’t lost. There is a project in the USA (I think Canada, too) to photograph each grave marker in every cemetery in the country, and to put together as much information as possible for the stories of the individuals buried there. The other history museum in town, is in charge of the local project. My friend, the director of the museum, has a small staff and volunteers who’ve been deeply involved in that project, but there over 8600 graves in the city cemetery, more than live in town! Little by little, though, they are working through the task, and it seems only fitting that I pass on what I found on Lester Charles Jones in case they don’t have some or all of it, other than a photo of the grave marker.
British Commonwealth Air Training Plan 