ARLINGTON — Marty Rausch served at Grissom Air Force Base in Indiana from 1958-62, but in spite of his insistence that he was “no hero,” his four years of enlisted duty left him with a lifetime of stories.
“I was a k-9 handler, but he trained me,” Rausch said during the Stillaguamish Valley Pioneer Hall and Museum’s annual Military Day Dec. 7. “He’d been in the Army before I got him. He liked me, and he still put me in the hospital twice.”
Perhaps surprisingly for someone stationed stateside, Rausch got off track twice while on duty, once when he was standing watch with his dog, and another time when his vehicle was supposedly leading the way for a caravan of bombs along the base’s runway.
“I was just following my dog, since he seemed to know where he was going, and before I knew it, I’d wandered off my post,” said Rausch, who’d been surrounded by nearly impenetrable fog at the time. “I got myself back onto the runway, and I started following the mile markers, but the numbers kept getting higher, so I realized I was going the wrong way.”
When his vehicle had been ahead of the bomb caravan, Rausch had been told by his non-commissioned officer to watch out in front of them, but he soon realized that the caravan that had been behind them had opted to take a shortcut to their final destination without telling anyone.
“That was what I did to save the world,” Rausch joked. “When I was checking out, the klaxons on base started to blow, and I was told that I’d been involuntarily extended for another few months. I don’t know if that was related to the Bay of Pigs or what.
“We never knew anything,” he added. “One time, I was told to guard something, and when I asked what it was, they said, ‘We can’t tell you,’ so I asked, ‘How will I know if it’s gone, then?'”
Meanwhile, even before Bob Haverty was deployed to Da Nang in Vietnam as part of the Navy, he had an even more surreal experience on the day of his enlistment; Nov. 22, 1963, the same day JFK was assassinated.
“We were in Hawaii, raising our hands to swear the oath, and it wasn’t until the next day that we even knew who we were working for,” Haverty said.
While the old vets laughed together in the Pioneer Hall, they still took seriously the reason for their gathering, on the 73rd anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Rausch, who serves as caretaker of the Pioneer Museum, explained that the Military Day began in 2000, in response to the desecrations of a number of military memorials in town.
“We thought that it should be on the same day as ‘the day that will live in infamy,’ according to FDR,” Rausch said.
The memorial between the Pioneer Hall and Museum honors men and women in all branches of service, including the Merchant Marines.
Military Day drew not only veterans, but military enthusiasts, including David King of Jim Creek, and Stanwood’s Kelsey and Amanda Palaniuk. While Kelsey served in the Army from 1990-2002, he had the least to say about the day, while his wife Amanda was much more outspoken about his family’s military service, as was King.
“My grandfather survived Pearl Harbor,” Amanda said. “My grandmother was a Navy nurse who was sent down to Hawaii to help out afterward. It was like a love story in a movie. She said there was just something about a man in uniform. We should give thanks to them.”
King added, “My father fought with Patton to liberate Pilsen. They’ve built a whole museum to honor Patton in Europe, and my father’s name is listed there. What we should learn is that this can happen again so easily, because it did.”
