Honor comes late for POW
When Wayne Crawford saw his Catholic kin sitting in Baptist pews, he knew something was up.
He just didn't know what, until the youth minister at his Mt. Juliet church called him in front of the congregation.
There, the Air Force veteran received formal military recognition for his service in a prisoner of war camp Ñ 60 years ago.
It was a surprise to the 86-year-old Crawford, who had been a captive of the Germans during World War II. He had long since dismissed thoughts of any military recognition for his time as a POW, but his family had spent years weaving through government channels to get it for him.
A few Sundays ago, the small, bronze POW medal was pinned on his chest 60 years after the fact, and the hundreds who worship with him applauded him as a hero.
"I still have goose bumps when I think about it," Crawford said.
Bomber shot down
Crawford was a 20-year-old assistant radio operator on an American bomber in 1943. His crew was in a bombing raid on an Axis airstrip in Greece when enemy fire tore his plane in half.
He scrambled to get his parachute on and made it to the earth in one piece, one of only two survivors in the bomber's 10-man crew.
Crawford said he hit the ground so hard it knocked him out. When he came to, he was surrounded by the razor-sharp bayonets of German soldiers.
"I tried to raise my hands, and they started hollering at me," Crawford recalled. "I didn't know a word of German, but I knew they didn't want me moving my hands."
Crawford spent the next 16 months in a German POW camp. As far as his family back home knew, Crawford's life was over. The military told his parents he'd been killed, and the government issued his death certificate. Crawford still has it.
Allied troops eventually liberated Crawford and his fellow prisoners. After the war Crawford settled in Mt. Juliet, helping set up the town's public water system and later becoming mayor.
His family was given his medals, back when he presumed dead, and Crawford retrieved them Ñ all except the Prisoner of War Medal he'd never received.
Family pursues medal
The medal was created in 1985. Crawford chalked it up to bureaucratic inefficiency and went on with his life.
Years later, his family would decide that the missing medal was Crawford's right.
It's the kind of honor he never would have pursued himself, said Crawford's daughter, Sharron Reed.
"He served, but (his attitude) wasn't, 'I deserve this because I served,' " she said.
Crawford said he was honored by the gesture, but his true pride, he said, is in his service to country.
"If I was asked to go back (to war) and do it all over again, I'd do it," Crawford said. "I'd do it because I love this country."