“I cannot speak for the dead,” Lt. Col. (ret), Examiner Flight Nurse Sandra “Sam” Cotton said. “I do speak about them.”
And so she did Monday morning before a crowd gathered in bright sunshine for the post-COVID return of Star City’s Memorial Day ceremony.
Cotton spoke of Margaret Fae Perry, a Morgantown-born graduate of University High School who signed up for the U.S. Nurse Cadet Corps, took flight training and followed her brother Samuel to Korea.
Neither would see home again.
Samuel, a soldier in the United States Army, was killed in action months after Margaret arrived in country.
On Dec. 22, 1952, Margaret was aboard a C-47 Skytrain that was taking off for her final mission when it collided with an F-80C Shooting Star, killing all aboard.
Margaret and Samuel were two of some 112,000 West Virginians who served in Korea. They were two of 1,388 West Virginians and 23 Monongalia County residents who died there.
“It’s been said that statistics are human beings with the tears wiped away,” Cotton said, asking what Margaret and Samuel would have done with the lives they willingly traded for service to country.
“The only thing we have to remember is all her would-haves are our real possibilities,” she said. “All her would-haves are our real opportunities.”
The ceremony, which was followed by a picnic at the St. Mary Church pavilion, also featured remarks from Father John McDonough with the United States Air Force and retired United States Air Force Lt. Michael Brown, who flew a KC-135 air refueling jet during Operation Desert Storm and later flew American dignitaries around the world with the 89th Airlift Wing.
Post 9/11, Brown returned to active duty to help oversee the air defense of Washington, D.C.
He said the men and women who make up America’s armed services are the best of what America has to offer. Honor is owed, he continued, to those who sacrificed everything on our behalf.
“These are people that would lay their life down for you, and I would do the same for them,” he said.
