Posted on 07/02/2003 9:18:38 AM PDT by GreyWolf
The spirit of freedom felt on Independence Day is well known to people like Delbert Reffitt, who will help the city celebrate it.
Reffitt is the grand marshal for this year’s Fourth of July parade and the most decorated living veteran at the VFW Post 3809. He has five bronze stars and a bronze arrowhead to his credit for his Army service in the D-Day invasion of Normandy, France, and subsequent service across Europe and northern Africa.
He has not been back to Europe since.
“I got terrible seasick,” Reffitt, now 82, said of the days waiting aboard a U.S. ammunition ship for the green light to be given for the attack. “Them Navy boys was used to it. ... I got awfully sick. I never went back.”
Quiet and frail, Reffitt bears the look of an aged sharecropper. His leathery skin, cloud white hair and knowing eyes make it nearly impossible to imagine him as a young soldier on a ship in the English Channel, counting down the seconds to an uncertain and possibly very short future.
Of all the five bronze stars — an award given for individual acts of bravery by soldiers in war time — he speaks the most about the fifth.
“They let me out early,” Reffitt said.
He volunteered to drive fuel to the front line after others in his unit refused. The Army gave him his fifth bronze star and, as such, his early discharge.
But that was not the end of Reffitt’s bravery. In 1997, he saved two people from a burning building, an act he said he didn’t really have to think about.
Reffitt said he’s unsure why he was chosen to be the grand marshal for this year’s parade. He was approached by parade chairman Ken Wills and asked if he would be willing to do the job.
“I told them I couldn’t walk,” Reffitt said. But that matters little, because he will be riding in the back of a car.
Published 06.30.03
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