MOORESVILLE — Last November, Richard Warren put up a sign announcing that his North Main Street gourmet coffee shop wouldn’t be observing Veterans Day.
“We’re taking a whole week,” the sign said, “because one day’s not enough.”
Sixty veterans turned out for the weeklong celebration, and this year, the number more than doubled. “And if it doubles in size next year, we’ll keep making accommodations,” he said.
The Veterans Week celebration at Pat’s Gourmet Coffee Shop may be over, but the truth is, Warren, who opened the shop five years ago, honors veterans each and every time one walks in the door. “We celebrate Veterans Day 365 days a year,” he said.
Particularly today, when Americans gather with family and friends for a national holiday of Thanksgiving, Warren said he will be giving thanks for the veterans, “for all those who have gone before me and paid the supreme sacrifice, everybody that stood watch all around the world.”
And others should, too, according to Warren. “We’re losing our World War II vets rapidly,” he said, “I’ve heard a thousand a day.We can’t afford to let these heroes go without saying ‘thank- you.’ ”
Warren, along with offering them free coffee, thanked the veterans who showed up for his coffee shop gathering for all they had done for the United States of America.
“We’re surrounded by heroes in here,” he said in an emotional tribute. “You’re all heroes, different times, different places in the world. Some aren’t here in person, but they’re here in our hearts.”
One of those heroes, Clayton Dyson, was moved to tears by Warren’s gesture of gratitude. “This is something that makes me feel good,” he said.“It makes me feel like we aren’t forgotten.”
Dyson, who lives in Mooresville, served in the 317th Infantry of Gen. George Patton’s Third Army. He led 10 men on the front line and spent seven months in the hospital after his feet froze during the Battle of the Bulge.
“They were going to cut my feet off,” he said. “I said, ‘No, you’re not cutting my feet off, I’d just as soon be dead.’ They were black and blue.”
He survived with his feet and walks now with special shoes the Veterans Affairs has made for him. To this day, Dyson said he has to have his feet checked about every 30 days because of the damage done to them by the hypothermia.
Medals awarded to Dyson were displayed among the tables of memorabilia area veterans brought into the coffee shop. His children had the medals framed for their father, according to John Kirkman, who lives on Country Stroll Lane near the Atwell Volunteer Fire Department.
Kirkman, who served in the Navy from 1968 to 1972, was the one who called to tell the Post about Warren’s celebration. “It just keeps getting bigger and bigger,” he said. “Not too many people do things for the veterans.”
He pointed out the Veterans Honor Roll that veterans signed as they came in. The one from last year hangs across the shop on the wall.
It’s not uncommon for veterans to come in and find out they served at the same place at different times. In fact, Warren said, one man who signed it noticed that the man who had signed right before him had served on the same Navy ship, the Ticonderoga.
“The fact that these two guys showed up in Mooresville, N.C., and signed a Veteran’s Honor Roll and had never laid eyes on each other ...,” he said. “They sat there and talked about 25, 30 minutes.”
When David C. Chuber, a retired Army lieutenant colonel signed the Honor Roll, Warren said, he spotted the signature of his father, William C. Chuber, a former prisoner of war who served in the 34th Infantry Division in World War II. “A father and son signed the Honor Roll,” Warren said, “and neither of them were from here.”
Warren is a veteran, too, Kirkman said, something the coffee shop owner hadn’t mentioned before, “and he always makes veterans feel at home.”
Indeed, Warren greeted the veterans walking in the shop with a heartfelt “Welcome Home.” For the veterans of the Korean and Vietnam wars, it was the welcome they never got upon returning to their homeland.
When John E. Bigliardi, who moved to Mooresville three years ago, returned from active duty to an Air Force base in California, he said it had to be closed down due to protesters marching. “I was broken-hearted,” he said. “We were outcasts.”
Ron Evans, who served in the First Air Calvary Division, said no one wanted to hear about his experiences in Vietnam when he returned home to Kannapolis.
“They said, ‘Go in there and sit down and shut up,’ ” he said, “and, ‘Get back to your normal life.’ People had had enough of the war. They had already seen it on TV.”
Peter Meletis had similar feelings when he returned from the Korean War. He recalled the Sunday morning he got off the bus to walk to the Alexandria, Va., home he had grown up in. He saw people on their way to church, going about their business as usual.
“They didn’t realize that men were dying over there so they could do this,” he said.
He was 22 and had spent the last year and a half in a foreign land, dealing with death and violence on a daily basis. “When we came home,” he said, “Iguess we kind of expected that somebody would say ‘thank-you.’ ”
But they didn’t, and Meletis decided that if the American people didn’t care, he wouldn’t either. “I was really bitter,” he said. “I tried to forget it. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t go to reunions.”
That was the wrong thing to do, according to Meletis, who has lived in Mooresville for 15 years. It took a phone call from a fellow Marine inviting him to attend a convention in New Orleans to get him to face his feelings.
“That’s when I broke down and started crying,” he said. “It all just came flooding back and I realized if I was going to get this out of my system, I had to confront it because I’d carried it all those years bottled up inside me.”
Meletis attended the reunion and reconnected with his past, but it wasn’t until about five years ago, while at the Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C., that some healing began to take place. “I was standing looking at that memorial,” he said, “and I was crying, just bawling, because I said, ‘Nobody cares. This country doesn’t care.’”
About that time, Meletis said he overheard a conversation between a little boy and his father as they walked behind him. “He said, ‘Daddy, what was the Korean War about?’” he said. “He said, ‘Was it bad?’”
Yes, Meletis said his father told him, “The Korean War was a terrible war like World War II, and all the wars. These men sacrificed and fought so we can be free. Freedom isn’t free.”
Meletis’ wife, Vivienne, read a poem she had written for the veterans gathered in the coffee shop. “She feels the pain of every man in this room,” he said. “We’re patriots. I would give my life for America today.”
He might not believe the same way some of the people in this country believe today, Meletis said, “but I would give my life so they can believe. That’s a freedom, and freedom isn’t free. Look at the price we pay for it.”
Those who paid were not forgotten in Pat’s Gourmet Coffee Shop. They came up many times. The Rev. James R. Speece, a former Marine sergeant and pastor of Community Baptist Church in Mount Mourne, mentioned them in his invocation.
“Many did not make it back,” he said. “They gave their all, Father, these men and women who have joined in an effort to preserve our peace and our liberty. They have enabled us to be here today in a free land.”
Though they were from different branches of the Armed Services and served in different parts of the world, Speece said the veterans gathered there were partners, comrades and fellow soldiers. “This makes us brothers in a very special way today,” he said,“brothers and sisters.”
“Coffee’s on the house,” Warren said as the formal part of the observance ended. As veterans talked together afterward, Evans introduced Edd Furr of Concord, a fellow veteran of Vietnam and a career Army man, as his brother.“We may as well be blood brothers,” he said. “He’s one of the best you’ll ever run into, just like Richard.”
Furr picks up Evans, who developed diabetes after three bouts of malaria during the war and rides a battery-operated scooter because of the neuropathy in his legs, whenever his wife can’t take him to his appointments at VA medical centers in Salisbury, Winston-Salem and Durham.
They got lost coming off Interstate 77 one day and were driving through Mooresville, Furr said, when Evans mentioned that a veteran he had met a couple of years earlier through the Internet ran a gourmet coffee shop there.
“I sort of laughed,” Furr recalled, “and said, ‘A gourmet coffee shop in Mooresville?’ ”About that time, they looked over on North Main Street and saw the sign for Pat’s Gourmet Coffee Shop.
“We came in and we’ve been coming back ever since,” he said, “Every Thursday about 11 o’clock, we’re sitting up here. We just enjoy ourselves, have lunch, tell lies.”
For Evans, the weekly lunches are a chance to “sit, spit and tell lies.” Well, they don’t really spit, he said, but they do sit, and they do tell lies. “Our battles get bigger, and we get braver as time goes on,” he said.
After getting to know Warren, Evans said they found out he flew gun cover missions in some of the same areas where they were fighting on the ground. “He’s a super guy,” he said.
It was at Warren’s coffee shop that Evans and Furr met Mike Keller of Statesville. “I’m one of those guys they consider post-traumatic stress disorder,” Keller said.“I go down to the VA weekly, and I sit through their pop-a-pill sessions and learn how to sleep and what not to do and all that.
“This session here, we come in and talk among people that we know were there doing the same thing in the same place. It’s good treatment, good therapy.”
And Warren doesn’t even give them pills, he joked. “He just gives us coffee.”
Keller brought in a wood carving of a POW, a picture of a combat team he did with wood-burning tools and oil pencils and a drawing of a Vietnamese woman.
“I had seen a snapshot of her and her face showed so much sorrow,” he said. “I took a couple of nerve pills and sat down and drew that one night, and I got up the next morning and cried whenI looked at it.”
It was from Evans and Furr that John Luckey found out about Warren’s coffee shop. They’re all three members of the Metrolina Vietnam Veterans Association, and Luckey said they had been bragging about Pat’s Gourmet Coffee Shop for a couple of months.
“This is my first time here,” he said. “I love it. I love it. We need more places like this.”
Luckey, who lives in Gastonia, was a combat motion picture photographer during the war. “I had a little handheld 16-mm windup camera going out in the field and filming combat operations,” he said.
During combat, he said he held the camera on top of his head, with the wide angle lens taking it all in. The film was sent to Washington, where it was critiqued and a copy sent back for the photo teams to review. Luckey said one sergeant in Washington complained that the combat footage was too shaky.
“Yeah, it’s shaky all right,” he said. “You betcha.”
Once, Luckey stood on the skids of a helicopter wearing a harness fastened to a hook and filmed aerial footage of a convoy. He flew in all kinds of military aircraft, filming over the pilots’ shoulders.
He also filmed for several projects including the work being done to help Vietnamese villagers. His team shot 400,000 feet of film on medevac helicopters, which was edited down to a 20-minute presentation that the commanding general of the medical command showed when he later toured major metropolitan areas encouraging them to start the air ambulance services that are here today.
The images that affected him the most, Luckey said, were on the footage of medics working on wounded soldiers. “Some of those guys didn’t make it and I didn’t know their names,” he said. “I didn’t know who they were. When Igo to the wall, I think, ‘Any one of those names could be one of those guys.’ ”
Four photographers that he went through school with in New Jersey died in a helicopter crash on the way back from Cambodia, and another photographer died when his helicopter crashed right in front of Luckey. “All Icould do was film his helicopter going down,” he said. “I escorted him back and gave the flag to his mama.”
Recently, a friend from the war sent Luckey a photograph of their photo team, including the one who had died. “So now Ihave a good picture to remember him by,” he said, “instead of that last vision of pulling him out from that helicopter.”
The horrors of war don’t bother Luckey as much as they used to. “It’s sort of mellowed out over the years,” he said. “But hearing ‘Taps’ now, it brings me to tears. I can’t help it. I just can’t help it.”
Luckey and Furr were headed to a reunion in Washington over the weekend to see the Vietnam War Memorial. Both of them had seen traveling versions of the wall, but neither had seen the real thing.
It was when the traveling wall was set up in Statesville in 1998 that Warren met many of the veterans that now patronize his shop. Some of them were volunteering at the exhibit 24 hours a day.
“It was in November right during the Thanksgiving holiday,” he said. “I thought, ‘Here I am sitting up here in the coffee shop. Ishould be able to do something for the volunteers.’ So I brewed coffee every night and went up there with a big container of coffee.”
It was then that Warren said he realized that regardless of what the public thought of the Vietnam War, the survivors needed to find each other and celebrate the fact that they made it home. “It’s something that we didn’t do for so many years,” he said.
And when Furr and Evans and others come by weekly, Warren said it’s a way of staying in touch. “I guess you could say we’re kind of making up for lost time,” he said, “and realizing not all of us are going to live forever.”
When other customers walk in and see the war memorabilia that stays up year-round, Warren said they ask questions about what happened. The children are especially curious.
“They look and they ask and there’s always a veteran available somewhere that will explain things to them,” he said. “So we have the added benefit of not only thanking veterans but also passing information on to future leaders and the next generation of what it was like directly from a veteran.”
It’s so very important that children understand the wars, according to Evans. “They’re going to be the leaders coming up,” he said. “If we don’t want things like this to happen again, they’ve got to be educated on it, not just two or three pages in a history book.”
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