New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Events intended to help vets
BRANFORD — Down by a patch of beach overlooking the water on a recent Saturday, Ken Hardy was leaning back in a chair with a quiet smile on his face.
Hardy, who served in the Army from 1969 to 1972, was among the 35 veterans enjoying a day at Killam’s Point in Branford at an event sponsored by Take A Vet Fishing, the nonprofit founded in 2007 “as a way to engage and provide fellowship to disabled and recovering veterans,” as its website reads.
The once-a-month event will take place on Saturday, Sept. 4, at Killam’s Point. On Sept. 25, the Branford Yacht Club will host its annual Take A Vet Fishing celebration, with veterans arriving before dawn, heading out fishing, and returning for a cook-out and awards.
It’s possible Hardy will be at both events. If so, you might see his hand gently resting on a walking stick. Other than that, you’d never know that he’s had both of his hips replaced, as well as left knee. He’s had his back fused; there are two screws in his ankle.
“I don’t feel a day over 30,” he quipped, as a gull swooped overhead.
Hardy said the joint replacements likely resulted from his years as an electrical lineman in the service.
“I used to climb the telephone poles and that did a lot of damage to my hips and knees,” Hardy said. “Climbing those poles with the spikes on your feet, you’re climbing them like a monkey, 40 feet in the air.
“We had to install poles in Germany, and also in some parts of Korea, we had to run lines, miles and miles of lines, and that wears out your hips, wears out your knees,” he said.
Hardy, a Greenville, North Carolina native, enlisted in the Army out of Richard C. Lee High School in New Haven.
“I wanted to try and help my mother financially,” he said, amid the aroma of hot dogs roasting in the sea salt air. “We lost my older brother in Vietnam and she had his three kids, and then her own four children, so she had her hands full.”
Following nine months in Germany, he served in the Korean DMZ, working guard duty and running lines.
“There was no ammo so when you got shot at, you just ran,” he recalled. (The Korean Armistice Agreement limited defenses to patrols and observation posts without heavy weapons.) He finished out his term at the Army base at Fort Hood in Texas, where he worked on his GED.
All the while, he was wiring money home to his mother.
Upon discharge, he worked for several years as a machinist for Pratt & Whitney. After a stint with his brother-in-law detailing cars, he got a job installing telephone poles, running wires, and hooking up lights for the Interstate Traffic Equipment Company. “It was bone on bone,” he said, referring to his hips and knees, “but I had to support my family.”
At some point, alcoholism took hold. “Both of my parents were alcoholics,” he said. “I come from a long line of alcoholics, my grandfather too.”
Hardy said he checked himself into the treatment program at the Veterans Recovery Center at the Veterans Home in Rocky Hill in 1998. After a few “slips,” as he called them, he dug in, attending AA meetings several times a day and “finding strength in myself,” he said. Since 2001, he’s been living in the domicile at the Veterans Home and Hospital in Rocky Hill.
For the last three years, he’s been participating in the TAVF outings.
“What don’t I like about it?” he said. “They come and pick you up in a van, and you get away, and meet other veterans. You sit and talk and fish and laugh and the guys that sponsor it for us, we get to know those guys, they’re very helpful and understanding, and they give us a helluva cookout.”
That’s exactly the point, according to Enfield’s Mike Grip, an Air Force veteran who served stateside during Vietnam and transports veterans from every corner of the state to the fishing sites in a Disabled Americans Veterans van.
“A lot of these veterans don’t have a car to go anywhere,” he said. “Just getting them out of a room in a facility where they’re staring at four walls, getting them into the great outdoors, it frees them up.”
For Hardy, “I feel like I get a load off my chest, just being out there with the other guys that you can talk to, and just to get away from where you’ve been, it helps everything,” he said.
As for how his current physical condition doesn’t get him down or bitter, he had one answer: prayer.
“You live your life and you pray for everyone, even the ones that don’t give a damn about you,” he said. “That’s what keeps me feeling fine.
“And this helps too,” he said, making a sweeping gesture at the beach, the sky, and the water.