Memorial Day may be canceled, but the cemetery still beckons

By ANDREW MCGINN

a.mcginn@beeherald.com

The last time anyone saw Capt. James L. Flack alive, his crippled B-25C Mitchell was falling into the Strait of Messina, the treacherous waters of antiquity personified in Greek mythology by Scylla and Charybdis, two irresistible female monsters who devoured mariners and wrecked their ships.

Today, it’s known as the channel in the Mediterranean Sea that separates the island of Sicily from mainland Italy.

But for boys from the rural Midwest like Flack, 22, going off to World War II must have seemed like they were suddenly cast in the pages of Homer’s “Odyssey.”

On Aug. 16, 1943, with the assist of German Flak guns, Flack and two of his crew members were devoured by Scylla, never to be seen again. Two others survived, albeit taken prisoner.

More than 75 years later, if you’re looking for a memorial to Flack, you won’t find it in Ames, the town where he grew up and went to high school. You won’t find it anywhere in Story County, for that matter.

Rather, a marker honoring Capt. James L. Flack — “Killed in Action Over Messina Strait,” it reads, once you brush away the grass clippings  — is in the Jefferson Cemetery.

This is no big revelation. But, for me, it’s a reminder as we near Memorial Day that our cemeteries are gifts that keep giving, if you’re willing to visit.

It’s true that public Memorial Day services are canceled this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the cemetery itself isn’t closed — in fact, its rows are probably far safer than any grocery store aisle.

Take a moment this weekend (or next weekend, or the one after that) and make a pass, perusing the etched names. The beauty of living in a small town is that you’ll certainly recognize many of them. But just as many will be new to you. In fact, it’s as if some stones remain hidden for decades, only to reveal themselves on your next visit.

That was my recent experience with Capt. Flack.

My eye one day this spring caught the aviator wings etched onto his stone, piquing my curiosity. Flack is a well-known name around here, but I’d never heard of this Flack who was killed in World War II.

“Killed in Action Over Messina Strait.”

I wasn’t even all that sure where or what Messina Strait was.

It’s simply astonishing how much information is now available at our fingertips. Within moments of Googling “Capt. James L. Flack,” I had his entire service history and even the serial number of his doomed B-25 Mitchell: 53465.

It took me longer to see if his plane had a nickname, and I was ultimately unsuccessful there. But Google is many times like a trip through the cemetery — it’s easy to miss things.

It started to dawn on me, though, that when it comes to our nation’s war dead — whose honor Memorial Day is dedicated — the trail of information starts to go cold once their military record ends. In other words, it’s extra work to find their final resting places, or to find the stones that would have marked their final resting place had there been anything to return.

Mike Bierl, director of Greene County Veterans Affairs, who was to have delivered this year’s Memorial Day address at the Jefferson Cemetery, is in the process of creating a searchable database for his office of veteran grave records. Currently, that information — dating back to the Civil War — is still all on paper in a fireproof safe.

But Bierl has come to suspect his records are spotty, a hunch confirmed when he tried to find a record of Capt. James L. Flack for me. He didn’t have one.

He requested one from Camp Dodge, and promptly got it, but it doesn’t state the location of Flack’s gravestone. That, it would seem, is where the government’s responsibility ends and the family’s obligation begins, particularly if there’s no government-provided grave marker.

Flack’s marker is in the Jefferson Cemetery for the simple reason that he was born in Jefferson.

But Flack — who is memorialized among the missing at the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in Italy — isn’t considered one of Greene County’s 46 Army/Army Air Force casualties in World War II. If not for a site like Find a Grave, a sort of Wikipedia for cemeteries, you’d be left to assume that his mother in Ames perhaps never accepted he wasn’t coming home, because there’s no marker there.

And take Sgt. Dick Allen, for example, the first man listed alphabetically on the Army’s list of casualties in World War II from Greene County.

Allen, who was killed in Italy on July 10, 1944, at the age of 21, was a Grand Junction boy through and through. A 1940 graduate of Grand Junction High School who was the star ace on their 1939 state championship baseball team, he went off to the war with the town’s National Guard unit, Battery D.

But he’s not buried in Grand Junction.

He’s buried in Tama, where his mother lived.

Bierl’s office has no record of Allen, either.

“It makes you wonder if a guy’s got to walk around a cemetery,” Bierl said.

That’s exactly what Dave McQuillen has been doing.

The Jefferson native, a Vietnam veteran, found himself wondering how many veterans are buried in the Jefferson Cemetery after a visit to the final resting place of his daughter, Lisa Ann, who drowned in 1982 at 16 in Panama (where McQuillen, a 23-year veteran of the Army, was stationed at the time). The McQuillens moved back to Jefferson in 2004 for the reason that Lisa is buried here. 

On this visit, he noticed a veteran buried in the plot next to her.

Off he went on what he called a crusade, and he said he’s recorded every veteran buried locally, a process he then expanded to include all Greene County cemeteries. He also has the whereabouts of every Iowan killed in World War II buried overseas, culled from the databases of the American Battle Monuments Commission.

“Maybe I could help people find somebody,” McQuillen offered.

Memorial Day may be muted this year, but the cemetery is always open.