OLEAN -- Six Julys ago while I was relaxing and drinking a Scotch toddy on my boathouse deck overlooking a placid Lake Ontario at my family summer camp, a noisy old Buick roared up and stopped in a cloud of dust in the driveway. It was Ralph Kaufman, our family's favorite war veteran.
Ralph had married my father's attractive first cousin, Gladys Hanchette, in 1940, one year to the day before Pearl Harbor, and had gone on to an impressive military career. Gladys had died with Alzheimer's the year before this particular visit -- and Ralph was clearly upset as he hauled a big cardboard box of papers and pictures over to my chair.
"I want you to write my obituary," he said, blunt as usual. Alarmed by the implication he was depressed, I started persuading him not to do anything rash or harmful to himself.
"Oh, no, it's nothing like that," he said. "It's just that I think I'm losing my memory, too, and I want to tell you all this stuff while I can still remember it."
That showed amazing foresight, and a bit of courage. Ralph always had both.
I inspected everything in his big carton of memories, and interviewed him there on my peaceful boathouse deck, near the sea gulls and a cavorting otter, for six hours over two straight days. It ranks among the most fascinating conversations I've ever had.
When retired Army Capt. Ralph J. Kaufman, 88, died last week in a VA assisted living home in Batavia, it marked the passing of a distinguished combat veteran whose long, varied, remarkable service spanned a military transition from horse-drawn cannon to modern artillery.
He was the only Bronze Star winner I knew, and as a kid, I idolized Ralph Kaufman.
His military career actually began at Fort Niagara just as the Great Depression started. As a teen-ager, he entered what was then called "citizen military training" at Fort Niagara, and in September of 1933 officially joined the real Army. He was immediately posted at the old Madison Barracks in Sackets Harbor, N.Y., a key lake port and shipyard in the War of 1812, and scene of a famous naval battle in that conflict.
At Madison Barracks, they made Ralph a "cannoneer" but his real duties were tending the stock and pieces for the Army's last mounted artillery unit -- the Second Battalion, 7th Field Artillery. Elements of that venerable unit are now attached to the 10th Mountain Infantry Division at Fort Drum. This final horse artillery unit drew French .75s -- once considered a sleek and formidable gun. But the ordnance and its haulers were fading into history by the time Hitler's lightning Panzer divisions invaded Poland in 1939. Soon, Ralph was helping incorporate the Army's new Dodge two-ton trucks into the field artillery.
Born the youngest son of a Rochester harness maker, Ralph had married cousin Gladys after a courtship that featured an unusual vignette involving food. He had met Gladys, he told me on the boathouse deck, at a USO dance, and she took the handsome young soldier home the next Sunday to enjoy a home-cooked meal with her parents in the small mill town of Brownville, N.Y., where I also grew up. Gladys -- knowing husband material when she saw it -- convinced Ralph she was a superior cook. As was common in those days, my grandfather and his brother (Gladys' father) had built their houses next to each other, sharing a common driveway in between.
My grandma was a famous cook in the North Country, working professionally for Adirondack resort hotels and restaurants for a time. She died when I was a sprat, but I can still taste her great dishes and baked goods as I write this.
Ralph arrived for this ritual courtship dinner and sat in the dining room with his prospective in-laws. In the kitchen, out of Ralph's line of sight, Gladys in her embroidered apron rattled the pots and pans, ostensibly whipping up a great feast. Every few minutes or so she would produce with great fanfare another delectable course of food. Beef vegetable soup. Chicken and dumplings. Pot roast. Fluffy mashed potatoes and silken gravy. Slivered green beans and homegrown parsnips. By the time the scrumptious blueberry pie with homemade vanilla ice cream arrived, Ralph could hear the wedding bells.
"I was a goner," he recalled on the boathouse deck. "I had never tasted food so good."
What he didn't know, and didn't find out until a week after the honeymoon, was that my grandma was preparing all this spectacular provender in her big warm kitchen next door -- then quietly tip-toeing it across the driveway and smuggling it into the woodshed behind the kitchen where Gladys was putting on her noisy cooking show.
Ralph never resented the fraud. Gladys never improved her cooking skills.
"I loved her anyway," he told me. "What the hell, food is food."
Ralph was a favorite relative of my father, the late B. Quinn Hanchette of Brownville, who at the kitchen table would quietly prod Ralph into describing wartime experiences for me and my two brothers -- all of us paying rapt attention.
After his 1940 marriage and soon promoted to First Sergeant with war looming, Ralph was transferred to Fort Devens in Massachusetts, where he helped set up the Army's new large-scale reception and processing center. In 1942, he was sent to France for the duration of World War II, and was assigned to the Medical Services Corps.
As the Nazi advance was stemmed, and American soldiers pushed back the Wehrmacht on the western front, Ralph ran hospital trains between Paris and the frontlines -- including dangerous railroad shuttles to and from the Battle of the Bulge.
"The casualties were so heavy, the medical units couldn't handle it up front," Ralph recalled in the lakeside interview. "We put 20 trains in service carrying 120 injured each. We'd go back to Paris, unload, and head right back to the front."
Because he was traveling almost daily through the chaos of the near and rear echelons, Ralph was also responsible for "locating displaced personnel," as the Army puts it, and for returning them to their units.
After the war, in 1948, he was sent to Korea, then Japan, with the 24th Medical Battalion. When hostilities broke out in Korea two years later, his unit was sent back to that frozen nation -- right into the thick of things.
"We were pretty far north," Ralph recalled. "When the Chinese came across the Yalu River, we could hear them. At first I didn't see them, or didn't think I did. A faraway hillside looked like it was falling in an avalanche or something. Then I realized they were enemy soldiers, so many of them tumbling downhill and running over each other it looked like a landslide."
With his experience, he was assigned to a forward medical unit -- like the one in the popular TV show MASH. He was put in charge of logistics and triage (deciding whom to treat and who was hopeless). Because retreating and advancing with speed was crucial for successful surgery and medication, Ralph kept three trucks running and ready at all times, and devised a new, faster way to pack up the surgical and treatment tents.
"Our fingers bled in the cold, rolling up so many tents so fast," Ralph remembered. "Then we'd move again on down the road like a bunch of medical gypsies. We were dragging people back from the front by the carloads. The dead were stacking up like cordwood."
Because his quicker logistical method of speedily moving field tents and equipment saved so many lives, Ralph -- then still a sergeant -- was given a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant. The promotion was not a fluke. Unlike many, he kept his brass.
After the Korean conflict, he was posted to Bad Kreuznach in Germany, as a sectional commander in the 6th General Army Hospital. He was also assigned to Fort Meade in Maryland, upon return to the states, to train young medics in medical administration.
Ralph retired from active duty as an Army captain in 1957, and returned to the North Country, where he worked for five years at a state game farm, raising pheasants for release, then for 15 years as a frame cutter and welder, making ski lift chairs near Watertown. In retirement, he was one of the prominent but forgotten Korean War veterans who lobbied long and hard for a Washington memorial to that conflict. As a veteran who'd received a battlefield promotion ("Battlefield Mules" they called themselves in their official association) Ralph had special leadership standing in the memorial effort.
The campaign for a memorial was successful, and when the now-famous statuary grouping of rain-slickered patrol soldiers emerging from the Foggybottom mists was dedicated a few years back on the Mall in Washington, my brother Jim accompanied Ralph, still hale at the time, to the ceremony. Instructed to meet Jim at the right big toe of Abraham Lincoln in the mammoth Lincoln Memorial, Ralph was there waiting, one of the first to arrive. He was wearing a baseball cap stitched with "World War II -- Korean War Vet" on the front.
Ralph, in his old age, had taken on the idea that service in the military was looked down upon by most Americans. But during the Washington gathering, younger men who'd spotted his hat -- Vietnam vets -- kept coming up to Ralph and shaking his hand. Jim remembers they would utter the same phrase: "Thanks for protecting us; thanks for serving."
Ralph cried -- in fulfillment and relief, he later said.
Even though much of his military career was spent in the Medical Services Corps, Ralph had an expert gunner badge to go with his Bronze Star, and he kept his ties to the Seventh Field Artillery Regiment. At the age of 82, he was inducted into the exclusive Honorable Order of Saint Barbara, the patron saint of field artillerymen everywhere. This organization has been around for quite awhile. It s charter reads that it's also open to "Stonehurlers, Archers, Catapulters, Rocketeers, and Gunners."
For years, Ralph's modest house on Franklin Street in Brownville -- two doors down from where he ate his sumptuous courtship dinner -- was identifiable by two visual marks: A large black-and-white POW-MIA flag he flew daily, and a lush field of vegetables he was happy to show off out back. Ralph was a master gardener.
His wife Gladys and two older brothers died before him. Ralph's premonition of Alzheimer's was accurate. By the time he entered the VA home in Batavia, he had only a smidgen of usable memory. On visits, he would think my brothers and I were my father, asking why we'd left good jobs at the paper mill to do whatever it was we were doing. World War II was a moment ago. Yesterday was not recalled. When the chow bell would ring, he was up and off to join his comrades at meal -- no matter the juncture of conversation.
At his Brownville funeral, Ralph was buried in uniform, wearing his Bronze Star, clutching his captain's hat -- and carried by honorary pall bearers from the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Two officers from Fort Drum presented his blood niece from Rochester a folded American flag, and delivered a brief speech of apology for not sending down a rifle squad to fire off a salute. Most of the 10th Mountain's riflemen are still in Afghanistan, or on other unnamed deployment, they explained.
Ralph probably wasn't cognizant of our new age of terror, nor of all the hideous medieval ramifications it implies. The fact that he died on the eve of Veterans Day was probably mere coincidence. My father's brave and gentle cousin probably wasn't aware of the startling fact that more than 1,200 of the 16.5 million Americans who served in World War II are dying each day in the United States. Each day.
Ralph Kaufman will quickly fade into history with the rest of his comrades, but my personal gratitude for what he did won't fade. And the way I thought about Ralph Kaufman when I was a kid is the way I think of him now.
He's still a hero to me.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | November 19 2002 |