The Lonely Shadow Box

On the wall of Chick’s den hangs a shadow box.  You know the sort; a framed box containing three-dimensional things, real objects as opposed to art.  That someone would go to the trouble of putting a shadow box collection together tells you that its contents had personal meaning.  There is something about displaying such objects, your own things, behind a frame that hints at their importance even if the story behind glass front may be elusive.

Chick’s real name is Charles Keim.  He died in 2016 at the age of 93.

The shadow box in question contained paraphernalia from his years in the Army during the Second World War.   It wouldn’t take an expert in arcane military history to recognize the Screaming Eagle patch of the 101^st Airborne, the Bronze Star medal or the Purple Heart.  Many might even see the badge with a parachute and wings and make the connection, or the marksman award.

That rectangular swatch of blue inside a gold border?  That’s the Presidential Unit Citation for those who parachuted on D-day.   Certainly the campaign ribbons and Oak Leaf clusters would resonate that the owner had been in the middle of it.  There’s a lot of information in that box that only hints ofponge the stories behind it.

It might take a more observant eye to see the single dog tag attached to a ball chain with a part of the chain broken off.  Someone with knowledge of these things might wonder why there was only the one tag when soldiers were always given two.  They were there in case the soldier was killed, or wounded.  One tag would stay with body for identification and the other collected for reporting by the military authorities. 

There was only the one tag in Chick’s shadow box.  That is, until recently.  His family had noticed and over the years would ask him what happened to the other.  He might shrug his shoulders, smile, and say, he didn’t know, “Must have lost it somewhere.”  If speculation went beyond that, it was kept inside.  It was just something misplaced in the course of service, a battle perhaps, a war, a life and maybe just left at the bottom of some laundry bag lost to the ages.

In May of 2018 that second tag was found.  Soon thereafter it was returned to Chick’s family where it was reunited with its twin.

The tag was a few inches under the ground, beneath the remnants of a GI’s foxhole near the town of Foy, in Belgium, just up the road from Bastogne.  Foy was the seen of intense fighting during the Battle of the Bulge and the foxholes near Foy were occupied by the 101^st Airborne.  The forest where the tag was uncovered was held by the 501^st Parachute Regiment, Chick’s unit, in the winter of 1944-45.

The tag was found by an American man, his son and a very close friend of the family who were on what they called a “Back to the Front” trip to visit various battlefields and celebrate, among many things, a college graduation, a pair of 60^th birthdays, and family members who been at the various places the toured.  The goofiest of this goofball crew brought along a metal detector just in case they had the opportunity, and privacy, to use it.  The laws on that are byzantine at best and subject to the whim of any authority should such be encountered.

In the quiet woods near Foy, they found what clearly had been foxholes, now more like shallow depressions that had been filled with leaves and debris over the intervening 74 years since they were dug out to protect soldiers from German fire.  The detector beeped scores of time, meaning there was metal beneath.  99% of the beeps revealed shards of shrapnel from shells that had exploded in the trees and showered down on the soldiers below.  That artillery shrapnel was one of the main sources of wounds, and death, during the battle.

The trio had grown tired at many beeps, recognizing their distinct ping as coming over yet another bit of rusty metal and not worth the effort to dig.  Besides, it was already late, starting to drizzle and they were anxious return to the Belgian beer which they grown quite fond of in the prior few days.

The father swept his detector over one area in a final effort to uncover treasure.  The beep they heard was unique.  Whatever it was under the ground, it wasn’t the ubiquitous shrapnel.

A few inches below the duff that had collected in the foxhole was the dog tag.  It had damp soil in the stamped letters and numbers, but the metal was shiny.  It looked nearly new.  They cleaned it off and wondered what they had found.

The tag read; Charles J. Keim A, 39160672 T-43, Clyde A. Keim, Ontario, Oregon, P.

Had it been left by some group of reenactors playing soldier? That’s not so farfetched an idea; they ran into dozens of paunchy middle-age men, late middle aged mostly, in Normandy dressed in WW2 uniforms.  Was it a joke, a tease, put there to fool fools who might try metal detecting in those woods?  Had they found an unmarked grave?

Thanks to a very decent Wi-Fi system in that area of Belgium, it didn’t take long to find out that there had been a Charles Keim, in the 101^st, and that he’d died just two years earlier.

A bit more research, in the field, revealed that the ‘A’ was his blood type, the numbers were his serial number, the T-43 told when he had his tetanus shot, that Clyde was his next in kin, he was from Ontario Oregon and the ‘P’ stood for Protestant.

How did the tag end up by itself in the ground?

Many soldiers put a tag in their shoes so they wouldn’t be lost.  Did Chick do that and, perhaps when rubbing his frozen feet during the battle or changing socks, it dropped out into the snow and mud?  Had a blast from a shell nearby caused it to snag on a branch and snap off?  Or maybe Chick gave it to a Jewish buddy who didn’t want to be captured with an ‘H’, for Hebrew, on his tag.   Those are all plausible, but we’ll never know.

What we do know, however, is that Chick dropped in on Normandy on D-day, got his Purple Heart from a shrapnel wound in his rear end, was briefly captured in the Arnhem fight, won his Bronze Star for disabling a German Tiger tank and finished up the war with the 101st capturing, Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s Eagles Nest.  He was a few months shy of his 23rd birthday.

All in all, Chick spent three years in the army.  Three years out of 93 isn’t a lot in one sense; it only about 3% of his life.  But a lot was packed into those three years.

After the war, he got married, brought up three kids, ran a Shell Station in Ontario, owned a home insulation business and was the club manager at the local Elks Lodge before running the supper club at a local golf course.  And then retirement.  That’s a pretty prosaic life, which I offer here with respect and the honor it’s due.   I think of one the last lines in “Saving Private Ryan” where Captain Miller, played by Tom Hanks, tells Ryan, “earn it.”  Chick Keim most certainly earned it.