Arlington Heights honors its soldiers
Arlington Heights residents poured into Memorial Park Monday to honor all the village’s veterans, but three categories of soldiers received special attention.
The first was “Arlington’s Fallen Heroes” — all 58 men from the village who were killed in action in military conflicts from the Civil War to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The ongoing improvements to Memorial Park are taking place largely in their honor.
The second, longer list included all area veterans who’ve died in the last year. Church bells tolled as their names were read.
Only Marine Lance Cpl. James Bray Stack — killed in Afghanistan last Nov. 10 — was on both lists.
Finally, U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk was on hand to award long overdue medals to two World War II soldiers — one posthumously and the other to a surviving 89-year-old who never thought he’d see the day.
U.S. Army Sgt. Aristo Nicholson said he’d long given up on his service being recognized until the efforts of family members helped overcome the loss of records in a fire.
Nicholson received the Bronze Star for valor in combat and the Purple Heart for receiving five gunshot wounds in the line of duty.
The medals honor his actions in France in 1944.
Nicholson took over a diversionary mission — an attack on a German pillbox — after his platoon leader was killed. Not only did the diversion work, but the pillbox was successfully captured.
A short time later, Nicholson was wounded by a German sniper near the town of Thionville. But he stayed with his unit and received four more gunshot wounds in an ambush by heavily armed German troops disguised as prisoners of war.
Eighty of the 90 soldiers in his company were killed or wounded, and Nicholson lay partially submerged in a drainage ditch for three days before being rescued by medics.
Even during those dark days, Nicholson never believed he was going to die.
“All I could think of was my mother,” he said Monday. “She could not take it.”
After more than six decades of telling himself he didn’t need to be recognized for his deeds, he was gratified a year and a half ago to learn the day would finally come.
He said the honor is truly bestowed on his brothers in arms who didn’t survive.
Receiving the Purple Heart posthumously was Private Nick J. Marchese of the Illinois National Guard, who died of dysentery and gangrene in the Cabanatuan POW camp in the Philippines in 1942 after surviving the 65-mile Bataan Death March.
Kirk presented the medal to Marchese’s niece, Kathleen Marchese of Buffalo Grove, who long lobbied for it.
Kirk said the reason it was denied until now was that the Department of Defense only recently changed its criteria for the Purple Heart to include all who died as prisoners of war, not only as a direct result of combat.
Kathleen Marchese said Kirk himself also was deserving of credit in working toward changing those criteria.