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***image1***Some things are larger than life. Such is the case with the quilt currently displayed at the chapel room of the 21st Theater Support Command’s Mortuary Affairs building near the military hospital complex in Landstuhl.
Independent of its actual 4-by-5 foot size, it seems to bridge oceans and continents.
Emilienne Wardius, the quilt’s creator who lives in Spotsylvania County, Va., spent five months stitching and embroidering its minute details after researching and laying out its design. That’s after sifting through piles of fabric in search of material just right to create the eight scenes from the far-away Iraqi desert depicted on the quilt; scenes like the ones Ms. Wardius had watched on television newscasts and seen photographed in magazines; scenes that illustrate what Soldiers fighting the War on Terrorism face regularly.
“This is what they are going through every day,” Ms. Wardius said in a recent stateside newspaper interview.
For Ms. Wardius, the quilt was a labor of love and respect – her way of showing support for the U.S. troops in Iraq in a more tangible way than by writing an e-mail or a letter, she said.
Col. Kendall Linson, a family friend, was TDY stateside when he came across Ms. Wardius and learned about the quilt. Colonel Linson, the 21st TSC’s Deputy for Support Operations, oversees Mortuary Affairs and thought of the chapel room as a fitting home.
“It’s a place of solitude and great warmth; one of those places that embrace you,” Colonel Linson said. He felt that since the quilt “captured the heart and soul of what many of the Soldiers are enduring in the War against Terrorism, it hanging in the chapel would be a subtle illustration of what our Soldiers experienced before they paid the ultimate price.”
Sgt. Maj. Jackie Brown, the NCOIC of Mortuary Affairs, said “dignity, reverence and respect is what Mortuary Affairs is all about.”
Indeed, personal memories of the French-born Ms. Wardius are also stitched into the quilt. She, too, has experienced another war in another place. Now 70 years old, Ms. Wardius not only remembers D-Day, but also the devastation inherent to war. Her father was killed during World War II, leaving her mother to look after four children. They fled their home to find what they thought was safe shelter in a place not far from Omaha Beach, Normandy.
“The Germans eventually found it,” Ms. Wardius remembered. Her mother washed clothes for the Nazi troops in exchange for food, she said.
This is where Ms. Wardius learned to sew – a skill which was to become her trade for 30 years after she married an American serviceman and moved to the U.S. Yet it was only after she retired, that Ms. Wardius taught herself to quilt, she recounted.
The quilt’s images and the memories were not easy for her. In the newspaper interview, Ms. Wardius recalled that she cried while stitching the scene of the sailor saluting flag-draped coffins.
“I think about how young they are. I see their faces. Can you imagine how brave they are; how young and brave? I wish I could meet some of them. Just to say thank you,” she said.
An ocean apart, her quilt elicits very similar emotions.
“Ms. Wardius seems to be a very interesting person, and we all would love to meet and thank her in person,” Sgt. Maj. Brown said. “You have no choice but appreciate the dedication, effort and work that went into the research and the making of this quilt.”
He said, “Thank you, Emilienne Wardius.”
