A.G. Gancarski
Like any smart governor, Florida Gov. Rick Scott knows the importance of the National Guard and the military — both in Florida and in points far beyond.
In Jacksonville Tuesday to bestow 244 Governor’s Veteran Service Award medals, Gov. Scott noted the contributions of members of the guard, which range from having 200 on active status in the aftermath of Hermine’s landfall, to over 100 deployments since Sept. 11, 2001.
For Scott, service is a personal thing.
He noted that his adopted father was in the 82nd Airborne, and — after hearing his stories — the governor signed up.
To the Navy, that is.
Scott — a veteran himself, having served at the end of the Vietnam War — noted that “thank you’s” were few and far between.
“A lot of wars, people come home from and aren’t thanked,” Scott noted.
Tuesday’s event at the National Guard Armory on Jacksonville’s Westside was a corrective to that.
“Everybody has their story,” Scott said, of “how proud they were to serve their country.”
Though 244 veterans were bestowed medals, five of them got special mention. A couple were from the modern era, and some from bygone times, bearing the scars of conflicts that were once matters of vital national security, and are now represented by a few paragraphs in American history books.
Among them: Army veteran James Bryant, who enlisted in 1943, was trained at Fort Bragg, and found himself shipped off to Italy.
He was hit in the head and the eye and, during his recovery, Bryant met Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan.
And then there was William Tatum. A captain under Gen. George Patton, he was captured in Palermo in 1945.
Capt. Tatum is 100 years old.
“Everybody who’s ever served has a story,” Scott said.
And in many of those stories … the story of America itself.
A country that came to dominate the world for a time, in no small part because of the indomitable spirits of those Scott paid tribute to, and so many others besides.
