WKBT La Crosse, WI-NewsChannel 8-A Message 65 Years in the Making

Reported by Lara Reed

A Message 65 Years in the Making

Sixty-five years ago, Walter Turk was a 20-year-old soldier in the 101st Airborne.  He parachuted to the beaches at Normandy and fought in the Battle of the Bulge.  But it was during a mission in Holland that Walter left a piece of himself behind.

He says, "I was just sitting in bed one night and the phone rang and the guy says, is this Walter Turk? I said yes. He says did you serve in the Army in Holland? I said yes, and he said we got a bunch of letters from over there."

One of the letters reads, "Dear brother, what have you been doing. I haven't been doing much of anything."

Those letters were all written in 1944 by Walter's mother, sisters, and even a girlfriend.  But instead of being given to Walter, they were stuck in the rafters of an old schoolhouse in Holland and that's where they stayed until six years ago.  The building was being remodeled and someone found the letters.  They were given to a local historian, who then set out to find Walter Turk.  And with one phone call the letters found their owner.

Walter's son, Paul, says, "He wasn't sure he had the right man, so he started rattling off the serial number and dad finished it for him, so he knew he had the right man."

Walter says the letters aren't full of much because the Army had rules about what you could write about, but it was getting the letters that meant so much to him.

"It was very important to get a letter from home because it brings your morale up.  You wanna know what's going on at home," he says.

And now, Walter's family can get to know a piece of him they hadn't known before.

Paul says, "It's awesome.  It's hard to imagine my aunts and uncles in high school and they were writing these letters at the time."

A time that needs to be remembered, so future generations understand the sacrifices made by these brave men.

"It's a history we're going to lose before long.  This generation is dying at a rapid rate. I have a picture of boot camp and there were hundreds of guys there, but he's one of the last living, so it's a history we're going to lose if we don't record it somehow," adds Paul.