After a century of shame and silence, a soldier’s family gets the medals he earned

When Charles Monroe Baucom returned home in 1919 after his third and final tour of duty with the Army, he struggled to cope.

He had apparently been exposed to a mustard gas attack during World War I, and when he began losing his hearing and vision, he worried he'd also lose his job with the railroad.

Baucom died by suicide five years after he returned to his home in downtown Cary, N.C., leaving behind five children and a cloud of silence around his military record.

Nearly a century after his death, Baucom's granddaughter, Joy Williams, has worked to restore his legacy to the place of pride she believes it should have always held.

Williams, who lives in Dunn, contacted the Veterans Legacy Foundation, a North Carolina-based nonprofit that tracks down military histories and awards mislaid medals during ceremonies around the country. Williams, 70, showed the organization letters her grandfather had written and asked what it could find out.

On March 26, Baucom, who served as a lieutenant in the Army, was finally awarded the recognition he had earned. During a ceremony in Raleigh, the Veterans Legacy Foundation gave Williams two medals for her grandfather - one for his service in the Spanish-American War and one for service in World War I.

"Most people get so wrapped up in the day that they don't appreciate the past," Williams said. "I wish he could have received these when he was living, but I'm proud to have them now in his honor."

It was tough in the early 20th century for the military to track down veterans, said John Elskamp, who served in the Air Force for 24 years and founded the Veterans Legacy Foundation in 2010. As a result, many soldiers never received their medals.

For Baucom's family, the foundation bought the Spanish-American War medal from a private collector and received the World War I victory medal directly from the Army.

Thirteen other families were also honored during the event in March. Some received original medals unearthed from a state government building in Raleigh, commissioned in 1919 for North Carolina veterans of World War I.

"People are curious," Elskamp said. "They want to know, and it's their family's legacy. And we think it's important for everyone to remember that legacy, that this country was built, in my opinion, by veterans and their families. They did a lot of the work."

No one in Baucom's family knew if he had ever received medals from his service. He fought in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and then took part in the China Relief Expedition during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. During that effort, the military rescued US citizens and foreign nationals.

He volunteered when he was 38 to serve in World War I.

Williams' mother, who was Baucom's daughter, was 9 when her father died. So Williams, a semi-retired insurance agent who moved to Dunn from Cary 25 years ago, never knew much about her grandfather.

"She never spoke of him," Williams said of her mother.

Her great-aunt told her the pastor at Baucom's funeral said the lieutenant's decision to end his own life would keep him out of heaven. Thinking about that still puts a lump in Williams' throat.

"My mother, that probably affected her greatly," she said. "Instead of being proud, they were kind of quiet about their father. It's really a shame. When you die on the battlefield, that's honorable. But if you die afterwards, it's not as much."

Williams saw a newspaper article about the Veterans Legacy Foundation two years ago and decided to reach out to the group. It appealed to her sense of duty to those forgotten and misremembered by history.

She and her husband, Martin, who are white, are part of a years-long effort in Dunn to preserve and maintain an old cemetery where many of the town's black residents were buried. Until 1958, it was the only cemetery that would accept them.

Her home in Dunn - her husband's childhood residence - is full of photos, artifacts and heirlooms from her family, which she said has "been in North Carolina since before it was North Carolina."

"I don't like home decor," Williams said. "I like to be around things that have some kind of meaning."

Among the items are original letters Baucom wrote while stationed at various military bases and while abroad in Cuba, China, and France. Those, as well as letters he and his wife received, have been painstakingly preserved by Williams.

A letter from Baucom's attorney gives a sense of the former soldier's state of mind in the days before he died. The attorney and longtime friend wrote to Baucom's widow in the days after his death, recounting a meeting less than two weeks earlier.

"He seemed very interested and very much worried over his physical condition," the attorney wrote of Baucom, "realizing that if he did lose his hearing and his eyesight, that the position he now held (with the railroad) he could not hope to keep."

Another, from Baucom to his wife, reveals more of what Williams hopes will be remembered about her grandfather - his love of family and pride in his service.

"Tell the boys we will play catch and I will tell them stories when I get there," Baucom wrote from Camp Merritt, New Jersey, as he awaited a train home to Cary. "Expect to get home in a week or two. Much love from Pop."

After so many years, Williams is happy to feel pride where her mother felt shame, to have something in her house she can point to as proof that her flesh and blood had something to do with securing the life she now enjoys.