Steve Amaral, the legendary Oak Bluffs angler and outdoorsman, loves to tell stories. One of his most famous is that he has only missed one Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby since the tournament started in the 1940s.
Don’t worry, he has a pretty good excuse.
In 1956, Mr. Amaral was in Korea, serving his country as a specialist fourth class in the Army’s 51st Signal Battalion. Part of Mr. Amaral’s famous story — well, one of Mr. Amaral’s famous stories — is that hanging on the wall of his decorated Oak Bluffs home, he has every derby pin from 1947 onward, most of them with his “875” phone number. Even though Mr. Amaral collected his missing memorabilia a while back, it turns out the 1956 derby pin wasn’t the only thing missing from his lapel that year.
“I never got my service ribbons,” Mr. Amaral said. “When I got back, I had one thing in my brain. It was, get out of here. I just wanted to get back, because if I got back at a certain time, I’d have four days of the deer season. And I got back in time.”
For Mr. Amaral, who was 21 in 1956, hunting a six-point buck on the Ganz property off North Road sure seemed a lot better than hunting down his good conduct medal at the Army discharge station in New Jersey. Sixty-three years, and hundreds of bucks later, hunting deer has proven a lot easier as well.
“I’m still trying to figure out why I didn’t get them when I got discharged in Jersey,” Mr. Amaral said of the medals. “But I just wanted to get out of there. I just wanted to hit the Vineyard.”
Now, with the help of Dukes County veteran’s agent Jo-Ann Murphy, Mr. Amaral has at last received his long-lost service medals. The three pieces of hardware — a National Defense medal, a Korean Defense medal, and a Good Conduct medal — arrived this winter and were presented to Mr. Amaral during a surprise ceremony at the VFW in April.
And even though they were six decades overdue, Mr. Amaral is thrilled to have received them. Not only does it give his story a happy ending; it gives him an opportunity to finally tell it — in full.
Mr. Amaral graduated from the Oak Bluffs high school in June of 1954. With the draft obligation hanging over his head, he decided to enlist in the Army with two of his close pals from the Island, Jimmy Rogers and James Wadsworth. After initially expressing interest in the airborne division, Mr. Amaral decided to pursue the signal corps because the best Island jobs at the time were with the electric company.
“The recruiting sergeant was there with all his badges, looked like a million bucks, and he says, ‘Where you from?’ And I said Martha’s Vineyard. And he said, ‘Where’s that?’”
After learning pole-line construction in Georgia, Mr. Amaral was sent back home. Well, not exactly. He was sent to Fort Devens. For him, that was close enough.
“You know what the best part of it was?” Mr. Amaral said. “I could hitchhike down from Devens and be on the Island in the summer.”
But Mr. Amaral soon started to get restless.
“When I was at Devens, I got on the honor guard,” Mr. Amaral said. “We did funerals and stuff like that, parades, and so forth. And half a dozen of us said, Jesus Christ, we got to do something different. So we went and saw the company commander and said, is there any way that we can get transferred? So he’s laughing, and I think, uh oh, something’s up here. And he says, well, I got news for you boys, and I said, uh oh. He said, I got news for you because this fall, the whole battalion is going to Korea.”
“I then went on the longest boat ride of my life,” Mr. Amaral remembered.
Mr. Amaral sailed on a 17-day journey from Fort Lewis, Wash., to Yokohama, Japan before arriving in Incheon on the Korean peninsula. He spent a year in Korea, stationed at UijeongBu, a small military outpost between Seoul and the DMZ. He remembers riding on dusty dirt roads, replacing permanent tents with Quonset huts and building telephone poles. Hundreds of them.
“We maintained the lines,” Mr. Amaral said. “We put em up, and then we’d have to go out and guard them. And you know, things happened. Because they were sabotaging the pole lines, and cutting the wire and stuff like that.”
The top of a telephone pole was an excellent vantage point for witnessing massive military exercises, giving Mr. Amaral a broad perspective on the destruction of war.
“We’d be putting up poles and they’d be going through maneuvers and stuff, and I could see,” Mr. Amaral said. “They’d have one group on a mountain side, and another company or something coming up, and I’m up there looking and I said, Jesus Christ, can you imagine being up there and shooting down on these guys? Oh my god, glad I didn’t. When I got out, at that age, you’re only 18 to 19 years old, you think nothing’s going to happen to you, you’re superman, you know? But when I saw that . . . When I got back here and started thinking about that, it’s rough. . . war is hell.”
Soon enough, a year passed and Mr. Amaral finally had his chance to come home. Although his commanding officers wanted him to go to NCO school, Mr. Amaral declined. He had bigger fish to fry. Most of them striped bass.
“I said, I want to get back to the Vineyard so I can get out deer hunting and rabbit hunting and pheasant hunting and striped bass fishing. And all those good things,” Mr. Amaral said.
Mr. Amaral hasn’t missed a deer or fishing season since he returned to the Island in 1957. He’s worked for nearly 60 years as a plumber, 38 years in the Oak Bluffs fire department — 23 of them as captain — and has been a life member of the VFW and the American Legion, marching in veteran’s events on the Island. But he still didn’t have his medals.
“I didn’t have nothing,” Mr. Amaral said. “I did all the marches, and funeral services, and those things, and I’m looking at all the other guys, and I didn’t have my ribbons. . . way back I made the inquiries, and nothing happened. I must have gotten put on the back-burner, and I let it slide.”
Two years ago, veterans agent Jo-Ann Murphy reached out to Mr. Amaral and told him to bring her his discharge papers. Mr. Amaral made the delivery to Ms. Murphy making sure to circle “honorable.” Ms. Murphy told him she would work on getting the medals.
“She told me, the Army works real slow, Steve.” They arrived 18 months later. “And they didn’t tell me nothing,” Mr. Amaral said.
Instead, Ms. Murphy, with the help of Mr. Amaral’s hunting friends and fellow veterans, Peter Herrmann and Julie Ben David, decided to tell Mr. Amaral they were holding a special testimonial for Dr. Bob Ganz, the same man whose property Mr. Amaral was so eager to hunt on back in 1957 that he couldn’t wait for his service medals six decades prior. They called up Mr. Amaral’s daughters, who live off-Island, and told all his friends to come to the dinner at the VFW, where they honored Dr. Ganz, and then presented Mr. Amaral with the awards, much to his shock.
“They all kept it a secret, and I was totally blown away,” Mr. Amaral said.
Mr. Amaral is 83 now. Last weekend, he spent five hours bouncing around on a fishing boat, played 18 holes of golf, and plans to open up a home in Chilmark for one of his oldest plumbing clients. Yes, he still has plumbing clients.
“All that stuff I did, I’ve had my ups and downs with all the stuff,” Mr. Amaral said. “The love for my family and the love for the Island and being brought up here and everything is all worth everything. And I still love being alive and being able to do what I do now.”
One thing Mr. Amaral can’t do now is march in Fourth of July Parades. His knees are shot after years of, well, shooting. But, seeing that he has his medals, and thus a full uniform, Mr. Amaral said he’s set his sights on practicing for this year’s procession. And when he sets his sights on something, Mr. Amaral doesn’t tend to miss.
“It means a lot, and it makes my service complete, and makes me feel complete,” Mr. Amaral said.
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