Lakeville War Heroes

War Heroes: the Summit Test, and an Honest Empty Column

The summit test runs first and prints whole, whatever its result: there is no Medal of Honor recipient of Lakeville or Union Township. The carrier is the Congressional Medal of Honor Society's recipient record, the Society chartered to maintain it, searched whole by state: "Lakeville" occurs zero times. The county's sole accredited recipient stands at pointer, and his record is this build's standing lesson in attribution: Artificer Joseph A. Nolan, Company B, 45th Infantry, U.S. Volunteers, who at Labo, Luzon, on 29 May 1900 "voluntarily left shelter and at great personal risk passed the enemy's lines and brought relief to besieged comrades" — accredited to South Bend, where he entered service; born in Elkhart; died 1921 and buried in Silverbrook Cemetery, Niles, Michigan. Accreditation, birth, and burial are three different places, and none of them is Lakeville; any one-place version of Nolan is incomplete, and none is printed here.

Below the summit, the decoration record is worked war by war, and it is empty at every line — printed as a table of results, not skipped. Civil War: no Union Township man is carried as decorated, brevetted, or commended in any carrier read; the state adjutant general's reports, where brevets would sit, are the named settler, unworked name-by-name. Spanish-American War: none for the township; the era's county decoration is Nolan's, for a 1900 Philippine action, accredited to South Bend — not re-dated into the war proper and not re-placed here. First World War: the township's one man on the county's Gold Star roll, Martin Gunderson, carries no decoration in his entry. The same roll's decorated dead are South Bend men, printed at pointer and never promoted to town: Corporal Howard William Dietrich, cited by his division commander for gallantry in action, died of pneumonia 27 September 1918; Sergeant Sylvester Kopinski, cited for bravery in action, died of wounds 21 July 1918; Private Raymond Peter Holycross, of the Canadian Army, awarded the British Military Medal, died of pneumonia 16 October 1918; and First Lieutenant Arnold Matthew McInery, whose company was decorated with the Croix de Guerre — a unit decoration, printed as one, because any text that promotes him to an individually decorated man misreads the roll. Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, later wars: no decorated Lakeville or Union Township man found in any carrier read, at the searches named's note. The finding, stated as the leg requires it stated: at the strength of every carrier actually read, Lakeville's distinction record is service and death, not decoration — and the settler that could change it is named, the county library's Tribune Service Notes index, which must be queried name by name against a township roster rather than by the word "Lakeville," because this township's men entered service at South Bend and their notices file under the county seat.

The hard cases print with their proof problems. Gunderson is the reverse of Nolan: a genuine township man — resident here from 1916 on the state roll's own statement — whose burial place that roll states as unknown; there is no home-ground grave to test for him, and under the claim rule he is the town's by residence and service, his resting place an open record, not a silent assumption. The decorated-man-buried-here test was run against the township's grounds and returned no candidate at the searches named; its stronger form — a stone-by-stone read of the grounds against the service rosters — is a field pass, named in the note. The women of the record were tested whole: no Union Township woman who served — nurse, Red Cross worker, or in any service organisation — and no township woman who died in service was found in any carrier read. The one woman in the county's Gold Star roll is Gladys Nancy Lyon, Army Nurse, born at Galien, Michigan, trained at Epworth Hospital, South Bend, who volunteered at South Bend, served with the 68th Hospital Unit at Mars-sur-Alliers, and died of meningitis 19 December 1918, buried in the military cemetery at Nevers, France — a South Bend woman by service and training, the county roll's only daughter among its 109, and not this township's. The roll's scope did include nurses — the volume counts Indiana's dead as 3,354 sons and fifteen daughters — so the township negative is a tested negative, not an artifact of who was counted.