5-28-02, Voice in the Crowd
One of our Veterans
is Missing
By Pete Chaney
IPS Features
Jim Chambers is dead. He died at the age of 74 three days before Memorial Day 2002. Flags weren’t flown at half mast. There was no proclamation declaring it a national day of mourning. He was just one of the 1,000 World War II veterans who are dying daily.
But he was more than a statistic to those who knew him.
His life was more than an inscription on the tombstone at National
Cemetery listing his name, date of birth as July 19, 1927 and date of death as
May 24, 2002 along with his service in the military.
With Jim died all the memories and happiness and sorrow that were only
his to remember within the span of his lifetime.
Everyone else was a witness. Only
he knew his life from the innermost part of his soul.
His family gathered for his funeral with friends from
his VFW Post 4848. A laptop
computer beside the casket intermittently showed pictures of his lifetime from
childhood from probably the last time he was at his veterans post. The coffin was draped with the American Flag and he was given
a military funeral with a 21-gun salute by the Chattanooga Area Veterans
Council’s honor guard commanded by Ralph Wilson. The heart wrenching sound of taps from a recording drifted
over the burial grounds of veterans at National Cemetery.
Jim was no Louis Pasteur whose name will be remembered
forever in science. He was no
William Faulkner whose books will grace library shelves for generations.
He was just a Chattanooga boy who grew up through the Depression years of
America, was there to fight against Japan in the Pacific, worked at a job and
had a family.
But that’s an oversimplification.
The world is different because there was a Jim Chambers who was born and
lived on this earth for 74 years.
When he was a young man, he followed his father to
Oregon to work in the shipbuilding plants where a ship a day was turned out.
He was a talented welder. In 1944, he went into the military and served
with the air force in the Pacific on B-29’s, the work horse plane that bombed
Japan into submission.
A perennial Christmas favorite movie is the James
Stewart classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
The story is of a man who wishes he had never been born. He gets his wish and sees how the world would have been
without him. It was not a pretty
sight, and he realized his having been born meant more than he realized.
What would the world have been like without Jim
Chambers? One less welder would
have been working on turning out ships to fight the Japanese.
Maybe that excellent bead he welded to ensure the stability of the ship
was missing because another welder wasn’t as talented.
One less crewman would have been on a B-29.
Maybe the man there did things differently or had slower reflexes in a
critical time. Who can say exactly
how much Jim contributed to the war effort, as a welder and as a service man? For sure, he did make a difference.
And for sure there are two sons, three daughters, eight
grandchildren and one great grandchild who wouldn’t be on earth if there had
never been a Jim Chambers. These
are lives who would not have been if he had not been born.
Jim was one of the first members of Veterans of Foreign
Wars Post 4848 after it was organized in 1957.
He remembered sitting in the temporary post home next door and watching
the walls go up for the 1491 Riverside Drive structure.
If there had been no Jim Chambers, there would have been an empty place
at the post. The memories he shared
with contemporary members like Bill Henry, Jim Layne, Tom “Peanut”
Stanfield, Ted Bedoit and other World War II veterans would have been missing.
The joking and laughter he shared with all who knew him would have been
silence.
Life is built on each individual’s existence one
lifetime at a time. Like a building
constructed with bricks placed one at a time, the absence of one life or one
brick changes everything.
No one can say exactly how different the world would
have been without Jim Chambers. Those
of us who knew and appreciated him know that he gave us a lot more than either
he or we realized. That’s why
there is an emptiness in our hearts when one of our veterans is missing.
Picture of Jim Chambers at VFW Post 4848
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