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Those who pass the veteran’s memorial on the grounds of the Pike County courthouse, probably give little thought to those who are so honored.

Most passers-by don’t know that Rogers Powell, an American veteran, believed that all those who fought, and continue to fight, should not be forgotten.

Through fundraising efforts and the love and appreciation of the many who remember, the monument became a reality, as well as a tabletop scale model of the monument for each municipality in Pike County.

[Editor’s Note: The following article was reprinted from The Messenger archives.]

Rogers Powell has seen what 99 percent of other Americans have never seen and it “bears down” on him.

Powell was a PFC in World War II. He was in the “tail end” of the Battle of the Bulge and was among the first to cross the Rhine River. That crossing was the beginning of the end of World War II but not the end of the war for Powell. It haunts him still.

“You can’t forget the horrors of war,” Powell said. “There are just some things you can’t push out of your mind.”

Powell was drafted into service but he was ready and willing to go.

“But I didn’t know what was ahead,” he said. “I was only in the tail end of the Battle of the Bulge but I didn’t think I’d make it home. The temperature was about 30 or 40 degrees below zero and the wind was blowing 40 to 50 miles per hour and we were on these half-tracks with half-inch steel.

“It was so cold the sergeant stopped us and said we couldn’t survive like that. We dismounted and started walking down what was supposed to be a road. But we couldn’t tell where the road went because it was covered in 12 inches of snow. We were freezing to death.”

Seemingly out of nowhere, the American soldiers heard a someone yelling, “Comrade! Comrade!”

“He identified himself as a dairy man,” Powell said. “He said he had a barn close by that was large enough to hold150 cows. He took us there and gave us bales of hay to sleep on. He told us the troughs for the animals were made from the blueprints of the trough where Christ was born. He was a Christian man. All of us would probably have frozen to death if it had not been for him.”

The battle was just beginning for young Rogers Powell. He had a river to cross.

“Crossing the Rhine River was a real battle, a horrible battle. Men were dying everywhere and I thought for sure I would die, too,” he said.

Powell said the fighting was fierce and the Germans were backed into a tunnel on the other side of the bridge.

“We took some of them out and some of them were taken prisoners,” he said. “The river was washed down and there were these tributaries that were paved on the side. I looked up and a German tank was coming right down on me and striking rocks all around me. I made it up the mountain or I wouldn’t have made it at all.”

Of the 256 men in Powell’s unit, only 76 walked out.