July 22nd

16C part cloudy.
Worked about the house, Tea bowled and the kids + Todds for supper. Doing another one of my older stories today, all based on fact.

A SOLDIER’S 

 STORY

By

JOHN LITTLE

 

Dedicated to

 Master Sergeant Roy Stewart Harvey

(My Uncle Roy)

His Battles Are Over

INTRODUCTION

This is the story of my Uncle Roy, a career soldier who joined the United States army in 1938. The last time I ever saw him was a few months after I became a three year old and it wasn’t until my late ‘teens and into my twenty’s that he and I exchanged letters spasmodically.

When I was young he became a hero figure for me, in part for the heroic deeds that he performed, but also for the appeal of ‘leading a soldier’s life’. As I grew up a change occurred from my boyhood idealism and somehow over time and distance he invoked in me a passion to know him better and eventually to be a friend and confidant.

I don’t, of course, know all of his story but I have taken the liberty of using my imagination and some ‘reading between the lines’ from the letters we exchanged so long ago. It may have been better to have attempted this history when I was much younger and before his death but on reflection perhaps some of my idealism may have skewed the words and it is only in these last few years have I woken to an urgency to write.

Unfortunately dates and the correct order of all events may not always be entirely accurate, but the heart of the story is as good as memory allows.

So, this is his story as he may have related it to me if we had ever had the opportunity to sit down together.

John Little

January 2010

1

N

ot that it’s necessarily important but for the record I was born April 1919 in Sacramento California. Neither Ma or Pa actually ever said, but I think I was born at home on our farm. I don’t think it was the same farm that we lived on when I was seven or eight.  I know that next one was pretty much a stump ranch, but me, my brother and two sisters had a lot of fun there even though we were dirt poor.

  All us kids took after Ma and never got very tall. That was specially tough for me cause I was kinda cute and the girls all liked me so I got teased a lot. I had a bit of a temper back then so had to learn how to use what size I had to ease the teasing. We moved a couple times then finally settled in Eureka. It was a nice little town in those days, still small enough so that most everyone knew each other. Pa started carpentering and money got a bit better.