81 Years Later, He Finally Got His Purple Heart
At 99 years old, World War II veteran Glenn Fisher finally received the Purple Heart his country had owed him since 1945 — 81 years after German shrapnel wounded him at the Rhine River. A decades-old reporting error had kept it from him, until people who cared set the record right, just mo
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Eighty-one years. That's how long a small piece of shrapnel sat inside Glenn Fisher's body before his country finally handed him the medal it had owed him since the spring of 1945. This summer, at ninety-nine years old, Glenn stood in a museum in Louisville, Kentucky, and received the Purple Heart he had waited most of a lifetime to hold.
And here is the part that stays with you. Glenn turns one hundred in October, and he had said, quietly, that he only hoped the medal would come before his birthday.
To understand this moment, you have to go back to a boy who grew up wanting nothing more than to serve. Glenn came from a military family. His father fought in World War One and brought pieces of that service home, and young Glenn would play with them. As he put it, "I just kept thinking all the time, I really want to be in the Army." So in 1943, at just sixteen years old, with his parents' approval, he enlisted in the United States Army.
By 1944 he had shipped to Europe with the 556th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Weapons Battalion. He landed on Utah Beach in France, then pushed to the front lines in the Netherlands. And by the early months of 1945, his unit was helping the Allies drive into Germany itself.
Then came March twenty-fifth, 1945. Glenn's unit was preparing to cross the Rhine River, one of the last great barriers before the war in Europe ended. German artillery opened up, and shrapnel tore into Glenn's face and leg. He was evacuated and treated, and then, because that is the kind of man he is, he rejoined his unit and finished the fight before Germany surrendered. Some of that shrapnel is still inside him today.
He came home in January of 1946 and was honorably discharged days later. But he was not done serving. Seven years in the regular Army. Thirty more in the Kentucky Army National Guard. A lifetime in uniform.
So why did the Purple Heart take eighty-one years? A simple reporting error. A piece of paperwork that never caught up with the wound. For decades the record did not reflect what Glenn's own body would never let him forget. It took years of patient work, and the help of Honor Flight Bluegrass digging through the history, to finally set it right.
And so this summer, members of the Army's Awards and Decorations Branch out of Fort Knox pinned it on him at last. Glenn, ever humble, summed up a century of life in a single sentence: "I just got to serve my country, in which I feel like I've served it well."
You did, Glenn. You served it well.
It makes you wonder how many other quiet heroes are still waiting for a thank-you the rest of us assumed had already been said. Who in your life earned a thank-you that never quite came? Tell me in the comments.
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Sources: spectrumnews1.com · foxnews.com
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