War re-enactment draws vets

By Mark Fischenich
Free Press Staff Writer

LE CENTER June 07, 2009 12:11 am

— The wind-driven rain and low ceiling appeared to be good news Saturday for the men of the Panzer division facing an advance by the soldiers of the U.S. Army 101st Airborne Division. There would be no allied air support for this battle.
But the large explosive charges were already in place on the grassy field at Traxler’s Hunting Preserve, originally planned to be detonated as the “bombs” dropped by an Air Corps plane that was grounded by the miserable weather. So instead of letting the charges go to waste, the explosions represented rounds falling from unseen “heavy artillery”, and the Germans ended up being routed anyway.
The raw rainy weather drove away the air support and kept most spectators at home as well, but scores of people were still on hand for Traxler’s Military History Day Saturday — an event that fell on the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy in France.
“Reminiscing,” Jim Boemer said when quizzed about what prompted an 81-year-old Maple Grove man to be standing, drenched, in a cold southern Minnesota field.
Boemer served in the very final days of World War II, not in Europe where the battle reenactment was set, but in the South Pacific.
“Army?” Boemer was asked.
“Marine Corps,” he answered, a bit gruffly.
“Don’t say ‘Army’ to either one of them,” Craig Boemer advised, referring to his uncle Jim and his father, Dick.
“That’s a dirty word,” explained Dick Boemer of Edina, who served with the Corps during the Korean War.
Craig Boemer had been to Traxler’s a year ago and was impressed enough to bring the elderly veterans down for this year’s military history extravaganza. Even with weather that was about as bad as June can produce, they were excited to be there.
The only disappointment for Dick Boemer was that the event — which also included re-enactors from the Civil War, World War I and the Vietnam War — didn’t have a Korean component.
“He’s only mentioned that about 20 times,” his son said.
“Of course, everybody knows it was the forgotten war,” Dick Boemer said. “We never get a clean shake.”
Gabe Rios of Coon Rapids, three young children in tow, came because he doesn’t want any of America’s wars forgotten by the next generation.
“We’re home-schoolers and we kind of like to show them history,” Rios said, huddling against his shivering youngest child and trying to position a pair of umbrellas to provide protection against the horizontal rainfall. “And we want to honor our soldiers on this day.”
With the explosions, machine-gun fire, German half-tracks and Sherman tank, soggy infantry men firing rifles and mortars, the WW II battle was the most dramatic of the day’s demonstrations.
Just before the battle began, Rios talked about the two-fold lesson he wants his kids to learn.
The first: “That we should never enter into war lightly, and we need to remember that war is usually the last option.”
And the second: “To thank our troops — current and former — that have served in our armed forces.”
Jim Boemer, who served on Guam, thought Saturday’s weather provided a small lesson about the more mundane misery that soldiers faced during World War II. Americans fought in the scorching desert of North Africa, the bitter cold of Germany and the rain-soaked mud and volcanic ash of Pacific islands.
“Unbelievable,” he said. “The conditions of war in some of these zones were beyond belief.”
He wanted to venerate, with his attendance on a damp and chilly day, all of the soldiers who served in wars from the country’s founding to the present. And he wanted to honor the service of all of the troops — even the Army guys.
“Our very existence depends on what happened,” he said. “It’s why we are what we are today. We’re still the free nation that we are today because of the sacrifices that were made in the past.”

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