For months, 10-year-old Jeffrey Szulc of Agawam would see military veterans with their ball caps wearing their military pride at his local Stop & Shop. He would see the veterans and think about his own grandfather, who had passed away and who had served in the Navy.
Jeffrey’s grandfather taught his children and grandchildren that you should always thank a veteran. But, when you’re 10, it’s a little intimidating to walk up to a complete stranger, and an adult at that, and strike up a conversation. But one day this past summer, he saw an older man with one of the caps and, he thought, now is the time.
He walked up and simply said, “Sir, thank you for your service.” Well, says Jeffrey’s mom, Genevieve Szulc, recalling the moment, “That gentleman just leaned over and looked Jeff in the eyes and you could tell the veteran was so touched by that just simple act of kindness.”
And Jeffrey was personally affected by the moment, too, says Genevieve. “On the way home from the store, he said, ‘Mom, thanking that veteran made me feel so good; it just felt so good to do that.’”
And so it began. Jeffrey made it a point from that day forward that he would thank as many veterans as he could before Veterans Day.
A few weeks after that moment, Jeffrey heard that The Wall That Heals, the replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., was arriving at the Eastern States Exposition in West Springfield. That’s where I met him.
On a sultry August day in a crowd of about 20 or so Vietnam veterans and volunteers at a makeshift base camp that we as organizers developed to bring a touch of the Vietnam experience to the public, I looked out and saw a group congregating around a young towheaded boy.
“You got to see this,” said Richard Connor, a service officer with the Disabled American Veterans of America and a Vietnam veteran himself.
There was Jeffrey, not more than about 4 feet 8 inches tall, wearing a bright red New England Patriots retro jersey with No. 87 on the back and the letters Gronkowski.
He was extending his hand to each veteran, thanking them for their service and then asking each one to sign a little black book and to mark down their branch of service and when they served. His book was filling up pretty quickly.
Well, that struck a nerve with the Vietnam veterans, many of whom said it was the thank you they never received when they returned home. In many cases, it was years before anyone, child or adult, thanked them for their service, which over time built plenty of resentment. To the point, where recently if a person walked up to them and thanked them for their service, they took it with a heavy dose of cynicism.
For many Vietnam veterans, a thank you brings them back to the 1960s and 1970s when they returned. They were not greeted by welcome-home parades. The soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors came home to disillusionment. The worst part was some people did not care. The veterans should have been honored. But we all know that was not the case.
But Jeffrey’s youthful act of kindness? That was different. It was genuine, from the heart and didn’t come with any preconceived notion of what Vietnam represented. Several told me that they had never received a thank you from a child before.
“I got to tell you that little guy Jeffrey made everyone’s day,” said Connor. After Jeffrey’s day at The Wall That Heals, the veterans included him in their circle and he’s been on a whirlwind tour ever since.
Jeffrey has been out to Westover Air Reserve Base in Chicopee to shake hands of Air Force airmen, up to the Three County Fair in Northampton for its first veterans appreciation day, and over to Barnes Air National Guard Base in Westfield where he was invited to learn about the Air Guard’s F-15 and talk with pilots and crew chiefs.
He’s thanked veterans on the street, at sporting events and at senior centers. In September, he thanked at least 100 or more veterans alone at Military Appreciation Day at The Big E.
By Saturday, Jeffrey expects to thank more than 1,000 veterans.
Today is Veterans Day and I expect a lot of you will be thanking a veteran when you see one. But, for you parents out there, why not tell them about Jeffrey? Let’s see if we can expand Jeffrey’s mission by multiplying it by the hundreds, if not thousands.
Our nation has asked a lot of our veterans and a thank you to them is the least any citizen can do. For our Vietnam veterans, in particular, it goes a long way to repay what our nation failed to do when they returned home.
“The best thing about it is that he’s put a smile on a whole lot of veterans’ faces,” says Genevieve. “And that’s pretty priceless.”
John Paradis, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, lives in Florence and writes a column that appears on the second Friday of the month. He is a veterans’ outreach coordinator for the VA New England Healthcare System.