Local family concerned -- but proud of -- Marine's service

SIKESTON, Mo. — Her family may have been “up in arms” to see U.S. Marine Corps 1st Lt. Lydia J. Fakes deployed to Kabul, Afghanistan, but they couldn’t be prouder.

Her parents, Gary and Pat Fakes, moved to the St. Louis area before she was born, but “we spent a lot of time during the summer and holidays with my grandparents and aunts and uncles in Sikeston,” Lydia Fakes, 29, said in an email interview.

“My roots are in Sikeston — I have my Fakes side and my Fitzgerald side,” she said. “I love coming to visit, and I have to thank them for their support during my deployment. I wish I could make it home in time for the rodeo! I would love the chance to say hello to my family — Terry and Sherry Fitzgerald, Grandma Maxine, Aunt Marcia and Witt cousins and, of course, Grandpa Jim and Cathy Fakes. I know my Grandma ‘Nanaw’ Cat Fitzgerald and the Mitchells will be reading this story, and I hope it puts a smile on everyone’s faces.”

Her military interest has its roots in her admiration of her grandfather’s service during World War II.

“My Grandpa Fakes doesn’t speak very often about his time in service, but it took a type of bravery that not many people have these days for him to do what he did,” she said. “I only hope I carry some of that with me now.”

Jim Fakes, 90, of Sikeston had just graduated from high school in Bragg City, Missouri, a small town east of Kennett where he grew up, when he enlisted in 1943.

“I went in just a hair early — maybe six months. I got overanxious; I wanted to go in,” he said.

Jim Fakes went on to serve in the European Theater in nearly all of the major conflicts there.

Military personnel go where they are sent, “but I did want a chance to serve in the operation here,” Lydia Fakes said of her deployment in Kabul.

Her decision came much later in life than her grandfather’s decision to enlist, which was almost right after high school.

Lydia Fakes first graduated from St. Joseph’s Academy, an all-girls Catholic school in St. Louis, in 2005. She then got her bachelor’s degree in 2009 from Guilford College, a small liberal-arts college in Greensboro, North Carolina.

“My Grandpa Fakes was there at my graduation,”

she said.

She went to law school in New Orleans and became a member of the Missouri Bar in 2012. But not long after beginning to practice law, she went to Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia, for 10 weeks.

“Officers do not enlist; you are selected from a group of officer candidates,” she said. “I truly believe in civil service and civic duty. I absolutely felt called to serve our country, and the Marine Corps was the right fit for me. Marines always do the right thing, even when it’s more difficult, just out of principle. It’s not in our nature to not do something to the best of our ability, and it translates into everything we do.

“I knew the second I walked through the door that I had made the right decision. The Marine Corps is a family. I consider the Marines I serve with my brothers and sisters and would do anything for them. It’s a bond unlike any other. I wanted to be challenged; I wanted a chance to lead Marines and serve in different environments.”

Military service has changed a lot in the 70 years since her grandfather fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

“Of course, we didn’t take women at all,” he said.

Infantry at that time didn’t wear theater-specific camouflage, just “light-green fatigues,” he said.

“And I think the training is completely different. Every day, it’s getting more high-tech, really high-tech — the drones. It’s completely changed,” he added.

He recalled sitting on a hill in France during World War II, watching U.S. Army Air Forces bombers “filling the sky to bomb a town smaller than Bertrand.”

He also recalled when they got to that town, he was amazed to find a church that had been leveled except for a narrow section of wall, no wider than a window, with a painting of Christ on it.

After the victory in Europe, “I was home on furlough — it was August, I believe, of ’45,” Fakes said. His unit was slated to leave for the Pacific Theater to take part in the final push against the main home island of Imperial Japan.

“We already had our orders,” he said.

Fakes was relieved when the news came the atomic bomb had been dropped, and Japan had surrendered.

“I was not wanting to get in on the invasion of Japan — I’d had enough,” he said.

Before his tour ended and he went to work for the Frisco Railroad for 30 years, Fakes finished his time in the Army doing guard duty at a prisoner-of-war camp in Arkansas near the Japanese-American internment camps. The most memorable prisoner at his POW camp, however, was a high-ranking German general.

“Every morning, he would get up and get fully dressed, boots and all, and walk around the stockade and read while he was walking,” Fakes said.

Lydia Fakes’ military job — ground combat logistics — is “a very competitive specialty to get selected for,” she said, but it was one of her top choices.

“We are a ‘jack-of-all-trades,’ but we mostly deal with motor transport and tactical convoys. Whatever the infantry needs, we figure out a way to get the ammo, gear, equipment to them via air, ground or sea,” she said. “It also has some limited engineering capabilities.”

And while “there are cultural differences you have to get used to here,” she said, “the Afghans have worked with a lot of female U.S. military members now, so it’s not very unusual for them.”

Cathy Fakes, who has watched Fakes grow up from a girl of 8 or 9 years old, said her husband’s granddaughter always has had an admirable determination and drive.

“Lydia has always wanted to make her grandpa proud,” she said. “He is definitely proud of her — she has accomplished that!”