Eden Prairie resident honors ‘Remains of Company D’

By Karla Wennerstrom

After James Carl Nelson’s grandfather died in 1993 at age 101, he began to pursue his story.

He inherited his dog tags. He found some photos. “He had this full, wide grin,” Nelson said. It was the man he had always remembered as an old-school tough Swede. He had his memory of the story of his grandfather being wounded in battle. Then he got a muster roll of names in his grandfather’s regiment in WWI.

By the time the Eden Prairie resident had tracked down stories, papers, letters and relatives of two other members of his grandfather’s Company D, 28th Infantry Regiment, U.S. 1st Division, he knew he had the material for a book.

In finding the “The Remains of Company D,” Nelson aimed to pay tribute to an ancestor and to the unsung heroes of “an almost-forgotten war,” he said. He wanted to tell the story from the point of view of ordinary guys.

He uncovered the stories behind that muster roll, starting with Rollin Livick, from nearby Wisconsin, who was wounded at the Battle of Soissons in July, 1918, and never found. He found Livick’s surviving family members and saw Livick’s mother’s
letters, “basically asking, ‘Where’s my son?’” Nelson said.

Lt. Marvin Stainton, killed in action on Oct. 9, 1918, had wanted to go to war. “I am not willing to stay behind while the others do their bit, the hardest and most dangerous part,” he wrote to his mother.

Nelson has breathed life into their stories, walking the battlefields where they walked and weaving those insights into his story.

“Leigh Ellsworth Wilson was one of them that day, now racing through the battered and bombed village of Cantigny, through and over the German trench in the middle of town, past the bodies of the dead Boche that lay here and there in their last positions of agony, eyes wide and lifeless and through the acrid smell of burning Hun flesh, some of them on fire and running from the cellars, reminding one young lieutenant of the time he’d seen rabbits back in Kansas run out of burning haystacks like that, only to keel over, and lie smoking and charred, writhing and doomed,” he writes.

An eternal story

Nelson’s grandfather honored the anniversary of the day he was shot by spending a quiet day in the country.

“And thinking now of that small anniversary he kept, that second birthday, I like to think he kept it as well for the others, that maybe he said a few words to himself those July nineteenths when he rose and thought of a face or half a name, and of what had happened as they crossed the Paris-Soissons Road,” writes James Nelson. “I like to think that keeping July 19th sacred was as much for them as it was for himself, but of course I’ll never know.”

Does Nelson wish he had interviewed his grandfather?

“I don’t think I’d have as good a book if I’d had more,” Nelson said. “It’s been an interesting process from muster roll to full-fledged book.

“I just really had to know who these guys were,” he said. “I just got a better picture of their amazing sacrifice for a war that is not much appreciated.

Their point of view was, “There’s something wrong and we want to right it,” he said.

“It’s an eternal story,” Nelson said.

‘The Remains of Company D’

“The Remains of Company D: A Story of the Great War” was released on Oct. 13. It “follows the members of Company D, 28th Infantry Regiment, U.S. Army First Division from enlistment to combat and focuses on the three major battles at Cantigny, Soissons and in the Meuse-Argonne and the effect these horrific battles had on the men,” according to a news release.

Ron Powers, author of “Flags of Our Fathers,” wrote of the book, “I wish I’d had the honor of working on this book with him. But then, he didn’t need me.”

Nelson is a longtime journalist, a 1983 graduate of the U of M School of Journalism and Mass Communication. An Eden Prairie resident since 1995, he is married to Janet Goodrich and has twin 14-year-old boys.

Nelson’s book is available at book stores. For more information, visit www.theremainsofcompanyd.com. Here's a link to more on Company D: http://www.theremainsofcompanyd.com/companyd.html

From the book
“And on what shelf do we put their war, his war, their suffering and sacrifice and their cause, their lingo, these doughboys who ate ‘monkey meat’ and corn willie, who called their enemy the Hun and Fritz and Jerry and Heinie and Boche, who walked on duckboards in the trenches and dodged ‘G.I. Cans’ and who ‘went west,’ many of them, more than 100,000 of them in combat and from disease, all in the name of ‘making the world safe for democracy?’”

Here's a link to the book at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Remains-Company-D-Story-Great/dp/0312551002/ref=sr...