LADY IN WAITING
DONNA, 1943. THIS PHOTO IS THE ONLY ITEM THAT WASN’T DESTROYED WHEN AN ARTILLERY BLAST HIT THE TENT THAT MILT WAS STANDING IN.
You’re No Angel — FRANCIS E. TUCHET, 1942
Donna Stafford first saw her future husband, Milt, in the summer of 1942. As she and her two aunts walked down the sidewalk, they saw a tall, skinny young man walking toward them. “I should have known what I was getting into because he was walking with a .22 slung over his shoulders,” she recalled. Shaking her head, she sighed. “I used to hate the months of October and November because he was always gone hunting.”
But hunting was the last thing on her mind that sunny afternoon. And once Milt spotted her, hunting was the last thing on his mind, too. “I told my friend, ‘I just got to find out who she is—she’s a nice looking chick,’” he said, with a chuckle.
Soon after that fateful sidewalk sighting, family members formally introduced Milt and Donna. It didn’t take long until the two were spending most of their free time together—seeing movies or hiking through the nearby woods around beautiful Lake Coeur d’Alene.
Milt had dropped out of school to work at the Atlas Mill and as World War II heated up, his boss asked for a 30-day deferment for the hard working young man. When that one expired, he asked for another deferment. But in January 1943, Milt told his boss, “I gotta go sooner or later, so I might as well go, now.” He then found himself and 90 other young men from the area boarding a train, intent on letting the Army make soldiers out of loggers, miners and farm kids. After basic training in Utah, Milt discovered to his dismay that he was the only fellow from that group to be sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
On July 4, the kid who’d never set foot outside of Idaho landed in Africa. He missed Donna. He missed his Mom and he missed the pine-shrouded lakes of home. Tucked inside his barracks bag was a picture of the girl he’d left behind. Milt said, “My buddy, Willard, asked, ‘Who’s that?’ I told him, ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry.’”
Willard shook his head. “She’s too good looking for you. She’ll never wait for you!”
He didn’t have much time to worry about whether or not Donna would wait for him. Milt and his unit were on the move, traveling to Tunisia with the Third Army, Third Division, under the leadership of General George S. Patton. There, they prepared for the invasion of Sicily. “It was my first round of combat,” he said. “The first time I saw dead soldiers.” He paused, swallowed hard and looked out the window. “I saw a lot of stuff I didn’t want to see.”
He described that initial foray into combat as “hell on wheels.” The confusion of the nighttime invasion, the shrieking of the shells and the cries of the wounded made a lasting impression. “It scared the hell out of us,” he said. “I knew I was in trouble.” The problem was that the Germans had taken the high ground and could see the soldiers advancing. “They were always shooting down on us!”
MILT STAFFORD (LEFT), AND BUDDY GETTING READY TO MAKE COFFEE, ITALY, 1944.
MILT AND BUDDIES WITH LITTLE ITALIAN GIRL, 1944.
From Sicily they battled through Italy. And Milt made a new friend along the way, a dog they named Pinochle. “That dog could tell when the Germans were going to fire an artillery shell,” Milt recalled. “She’d run into a foxhole and sure enough, shells would land near us or explode over us.” The men quickly learned to follow Pinochle’s lead.
But Pinochle wasn’t around one afternoon in 1944. Milt had ended up on cooking duty when their cook went AWOL. “He stole an officer’s jeep,” Milt recalled. “We never did find him. For all I know he’s still driving around Italy. I told them I’d taken home ec in high school and that was my downfall. I ended up cooking all the way through Italy.”
While he was talking to the first sergeant in the cook tent, the Germans fired a smoke shell over them. Milt told the sergeant they were about to be under artillery fire. There was no time to take cover, and minutes later the sergeant was dead. The blast picked Milt up and tossed him through the air. A friend ran over, grabbed him and pulled him into a foxhole.
He spent two days in the field hospital recovering from wounds to his back, which had been torn up by shrapnel. “Some colonel came in and said, ‘Can you move your toes?’ And like a fool I said, yeah. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘you can go back to the front.’” And back to the front he went. His duffle bag and its contents had been torn to pieces, but one thing remained undamaged: his picture of Donna.
Pinochle wasn’t the only Italian friend Milt made. One afternoon a little girl, probably three or four, wandered into their camp. “Her parents had been killed by the Germans and she came to the camp begging for food,” Milt said. The locals said she had no family, so Milt and his buddy Willard “adopted” her. They fed her, clothed her and when the shelling started (which it did most every day) they made sure she was in the foxhole with them. They never knew her name.
The Third Division was headed to the Italian Alps when the war ended, and while Milt would have liked to see Switzerland, he said, “I’d seen all of Italy I wanted.” When they reached Milan, Milt took the little girl to the US Embassy, having heard that she might have family in the area. Parting with her proved wrenching. Seventy years later, while looking at pictures of the girl, he covered his face with his hands and tears rolled down his cheeks.
“I never saw her again,” he said. “But I think about her every day. I wonder did she find a family? Is she alive?”
Though he worried about the girl, he also couldn’t wait to get home. “I had enough points to get out, but my name didn’t come up for some reason,” he said with a shrug. “I wasn’t happy, but the Army doesn’t care if you’re happy.”
Letters from Donna kept his spirits up until finally, in November 1945, Milt made it home—but not before he said another sad goodbye. He’d hoped to take Pinochle with him, but the dog wasn’t allowed to board the ship. A little girl had been playing with Pinochle while Milt tried to get the dog on board. When he realized his quest was in vain, he gave the little girl Pinochle’s lead. She beamed and hugged both Milt and the dog, and he felt confident that his furry friend had found a good home.
After surviving a horrific storm in the Atlantic and a snowstorm in Montana, a bus finally dropped the exhausted soldier off in his hometown. At 3 am, he walked to his mother’s house and let himself in through the unlocked door. Hungry like always, he had made his way to the kitchen when he heard his mother yell, “Who is that?”
Milt hollered back, “It’s me, Ma. I finally got home!”
While under fire and frightened for his life, Milt said he prayed to God to live, and prayed to see his Mama again. He said, “I must have prayed to see my mom at least 15 times, but she never showed up!” That middle-of-the-night kitchen reunion was a celebration for both of them.
You would think that after arriving home at last, the young soldier would have had his sweetheart on his mind, but all Milt could think about was hunting. “My uncle promised me if I got back before hunting season was over, he’d take me to Priest Lake,” Milt said. Then he shrugged. “I made it back two days before the season closed.”
MILT AND PINOCHLE, THE DOG HE HAD TO LEAVE BEHIND. ITALY, 1944.
After his hunting excursion, he and Donna were reunited, but their courtship was tumultuous. They got engaged, but soon broke up. “It was my fault,” Milt admits. Donna said he was possessive and resented her independence. When he constantly questioned her comings and goings, she said, “I told him to forget it and broke up with him.”
The break up didn’t last long. They worked out their differences and on March 10, 1948 they were married at the Hitching Post, a local wedding chapel. Not long after, Willard came to visit them. Milt introduced him to Donna and exulted, “Well, here she is, you old SOB!” Willard laughed and congratulated him.
Milt returned to his job at the Atlas Mill, earning 32 cents an hour. He worked there for 43 years before retiring. On his meager income, they bought a car, rented an apartment and settled into married life. Or tried to. “I was still hunting and fishing every weekend,” said Milt.
“It took a long time to cure him,” Donna said.
Soon, their first daughter was born, followed seven years later by another. Having his own daughters soothed some of the sadness Milt felt about the little girl he’d left in Italy.
In addition to outdoor activities, Milt was an avid baseball player and for many years played catcher and first base for the Coeur d’Alene Lake-siders club. “We had a hell of a team,” he said. His wife grew to love the game, too. After they retired they traveled to the Baseball Hall of Fame. “I was more excited than he was,” Donna said, smiling.
Donna worked at City Hall for a time and eventually became a member of the “if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em” club. “I finally learned to like fishing,” she said. “In fact, I loved it.” For many years the couple had a lakefront cabin. “He’d get in the boat and be gone for hours,” Donna recalled. “I thought if I ever want to see him, I’d better find out what this fishing stuff is all about. Then I was the one who didn’t want to quit. And sometimes I out-fished him!”
“She didn’t out-fish me too many times, I’ll tell you that!” Milt interrupted.
For 66 years the Staffords have worked out their differences with grit and a healthy dose of humor. “I wanted to buy her a rifle,” Milt said. “She told me, ‘You’d be the first thing I shot with it!’” He paused and grinned. “So I didn’t buy it.”
His wife smiled, too. “I guess I could be ornery, every once in a while.”
Milt freely admits his husbandly skills were lacking at times. “I had some stupid ways about me. She had a lot of opportunity to tell me to hit the road, but thank God, she didn’t.”
LOVE LESSON
“Pay attention! Marriage is a two-way street. It isn’t all about your way and it isn’t all about her way. It’s the together that counts.”—Milt Stafford
MILT AND DONNA STAFFORD, 2010.