Today I wish to honor all Veterans of War, including my father George Dean Ellsworth. Like so many other brave men of the Greatest Generation my father volunteered to serve his country. He had only been home from his mission a short time when he met and married my sweet mother Helen Hamblin. During this time the winds of war were already howling in Europe and Pearl Harbor was attacked in the South Pacific. These men knew if they were to preserve their country and their way of life, their precious freedom, their families, & their homes they had to step up and do what none of them ever thought they would have to. They left their families behind and headed off to strange lands. They were young college boys, athletes, farmers, businessmen, husbands, & fathers. They were All-American boys who found themselves jumping from airplanes, storming beaches, trudging through swamps and jungles, huddling in foxholes, sweltering in summer and freezing in winter. Some, like my Uncle Orland Hamblin were prisoners of war. He endured the Bataan Death March and spent the entire war as a prisoner of the Japanese. His faith got him through. He never held a grudge afterward. Most soldiers saw things they would rather forget. My Uncle Rulon Blunck was among the first liberators at the Nazi death camps. He saw and testified of the truth of the Holocaust's existence. My own father was part of a group of soldiers who, when the war ended was in China. He helped free Americans who had been held in a remote mountain location.
They had been tortured irreparably and kept in the most deplorable of conditions. He tells of his experiences on a dvd we have. He cried as he told the story. It is the first time I had ever heard him speak of many of the things he did and saw. I am grateful he finally told of them for the coming generation needs to know what other brave Americans went through for them.
Ordinary men heard the call and left their comfort to carry the Banner of Freedom.
