WWII vet still doing her part to help the troops
By Arline A. Fleming/Special to the Independent
NARRAGANSETT — Doris Blaney might be 90 years old, but she is hardly an idle nonagenarian.
In addition to knitting items to sell at the South Kingstown Farmers Market and being an active member of the Washington County VFW Post 916, she decided that when it came time to donate to the state-wide project for the Ladies Auxiliary of the VFW, offering an average donation wouldn’t be enough.
This year’s cause, Suicide Prevention in the Military, just felt more important to her than that.
“I was a Marine during World War II and it just hit home, so I decided we should do something as big as we can possible do.”
Blaney decided to organize a fund-raiser to make a significant donation and raise some awareness in the process, and when she announced her intention to her five grown children, her 12 grandchildren, her great-grandchildren and other relatives and friends, “they all jumped in with both feet,” she said.
With her grandson, Christian, by her side handling some computer work – though she is very capable of using her home computer herself – she began to plan the benefit, to be held at the donated Elks Club, 60 Belmont Ave., Wakefield, on Saturday, Jan. 28, from 4 to 6 p.m.
“The incidence of suicide in the military is absolutely astounding. If you talk to people who have friends or relatives in the military, they all know somebody who committed suicide,” she said, telling of the challenges of serving overseas and then returning home to an absence of jobs.
“It just gets overwhelming and they can’t handle it.”
So Blaney, who during World War II felt she wasn’t contributing enough to the cause and so enlisted, could recall the fragile conditions of returning soldiers, including her own husband, Russell, and the memory has never left her.
“We didn’t do much about trauma then,” she said, and though Russell didn’t talk often about his war experiences in the Army, he had many sleepless nights, she said.
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