Gratitude for a POW

Recently Shirley Rutan of Erie, Pennsylvania, went into a store to shop, and when she returned to the parking lot she saw a note poking beneath her door handle. "Oh no," she thought. "What have I done wrong?" Then she read the note and started to cry.

It said, "I couldn't help noticing the POW on your license plate. If you did indeed serve our country, thank you. If you were indeed a POW, again thank you and God bless you. I hope you have been able to gather your life back together again without too much trouble. Please accept my sincere gratitude to you for my freedom." The note was signed, "A Grateful American."

Shirley's husband, Bill, had served in World War II as a bomber on a B-17 airplane. He was on his forty-ninth mission when he shot down over the Alps. He hid for three days before being captured by Austrian ski troops. He spent a year in a Polish POW Camp. After the war, Bill and Shirley married and lived together for a blissful fifty years before Bill's death in 1996. Shirley kept the POW tag in Bill's memory, but she never received such a note before. Now it's among her treasured papers and has been the subject of newspaper articles commending the anonymous writer who took just a moment to say thank you.

Tammy Griffin, "Woman Receives a Special Note from a Grateful American," Independent Tribune of Concord and Kannopolis (NC), July 10, 2005, http://www.independenttribune.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=CIT%2

Turning Points

November 2005

Page 17, 18, & 19

Gratitude; Patriotism; America; Soldiers; War