Allan Appel Photo
Police Detective Caminer Lavache is also First Lt. Lavache with the 192nd Engineer Battalion, Army Reserve. In a moving and candid pre-Veterans’ Day conclave he told 100 third to eighth-graders that the hardest part of his deployment to Afghanistan was “leaving my children.” One of them was in the audience to concur and to applaud.
Lavache (at right in photo with World War Two vet Grant Briggs, chaplain with American Legion Post #83 in Branford) and other vets addressed the students of the St. Aedan-St. Brendan School in Westville Monday in the run-up to the official celebration of Veterans Day on Thursday.
During his deployment to Afghanistan between January 2006 and May 2007, “My kids gave up a lot. They gave me to the U.S. Army,” Lavache said.
After giving him a hug before the assembly began, Kiarra Lavache said she was proud of her dad.
Of his year and a half absence, she said, “It was the saddest time in my life.”
The kids listened to tales of being a saxophone-playing first sergeant in an army band in Germany; told by Grant Briggs; and of jumping out of an airplane on a practice run and landing in one of the few trees in Kansas told by Navy Air Corps vet John Anderson. They seemed particularly curious about the younger vets like Lavache and Specialist Robert Turner.
Once the call of patriotism was acknowledged by the speakers, the heavy toll on families seemed to be front and center in many stories.
One student asked Turner, who served with the 411th Civil Affairs Battalion in Iraq in 2008, if it was hard to leave his family.
“Yes, it was, very. When we had our send-off, I cried. I blubbered. One of the three times [I cried] in my life,” he said.
Principal Mike Votto asked Vietnam vet John Cooke if he still feels hurt by the unappreciative to hostile response many vets from that era received.
Cooke, who did technical radar work on planes flying high over Vietnam, said he didn’t experience that as he left Vietnam in 1961. “I was not spit upon or ostracized,” he said, but he had friends who were.
Another student asked if it was tough to leave his friends for war in Vietnam. Cooke (left, with Turner right) said it was not,because many of his friends, like himself, were enlisting. And not just for patriotism, but the benefits like paying for a college education.
Such admissions were another aspect of the candid exchange at St. Aedan-St. Brennan: personal gain that many of the vets reaped out of their service for the greater good.
Grant Briggs was able to earn two engineering degrees after World War Two thanks to his service. Cooke said he was happy to be “a 22-year-old freshman” in college in the early 1960s courtesy of the G.I. Bill
Likewise Specialist Turner, whose education at Southern Connecticut State was underwritten by the Army.
A reporter wanted to know if Turner was miffed that the two current wars were hardly discussed in the recent elections. Are today’s veterans invisible? If so, does it bother him?
“I feel left out in a way. On the other hand, lack of appreciation doesn’t bother me. There are a lot of things people [that is, the public] don’t know about [and that’s OK]. We do what we have to do there, so there are no more planes flying into buildings here,” he said.
The event was an eye-opener for seventh-graders Matthew Spence (right) and Javoni Ambrose. Spence said he thought soldiers only shot their guns. He didn’t know that a specialist soldier like Turner gave away toys to kids in Iraq.
The experiences with kids in fact made up his very bests memories of war, Turner said.
Monday’s event was organized by first-year social studies teacher Dan Garritta. With many of his own relatives in the service, Garitta said, he wanted the kids to be thankful to the vets “no matter if a war is controversial or not.”
Kiarra Lavache said that when her dad returned home after his Afghan deployment, he arrived earlier than the appointed time, and quietly let himself in the front door of his house.
“He surprised us. We all ran to hug him,” she remembered.