Stone Gardens: From the cornfields of Iowa to WWII action in Europe, a Purple Heart winner is buried in Benton County

On a May morning in 1919, when the Iowa corn was knee-high and the Des Moines River ran slow and brown, Frank Gregoire drew his first breath in a farmhouse outside Eldon.

The world he knew stretched no farther than the county line. He learned to drive on gravel roads that never curved, fished the Raccoon River with a cane pole, and graduated from East Des Moines High in 1938 with grease under his nails and a grin wide enough for the whole senior class.

War came calling in 1941. He kissed Aileen goodbye on a Des Moines sidewalk, boarded a troop train, and vanished into the fog of the Atlantic. He landed with the 34th Infantry Division the Red Bull, the first American division to fight on European soil.

Tunisia, 1943: sandstorms that turned noon into dusk, German 88s that screamed like banshees. Faïd Pass, Kasserine, Fondouk, all names he never spoke aloud again. Then came Hill 609, a jagged knife of rock in northern Tunisia. From April 27 to May 1, the Red Bulls clawed upward through minefields a—nd machine-gun nests.

Frank was hit on the final day by shrapnel or bullet, earning the Purple Heart that would ride in a drawer for sixty-three years. The hill fell. The Axis in Africa collapsed two weeks later

Italy was worse. Salerno, September 1943: the beach a slaughter pen. Three crossings of the Volturno in chest-deep water under tracer fire. Cassino, January 1944: the abbey a fortress, the Rapido a graveyard. Anzio, Livorno, the Gothic Line--517 days in combat, more than any other U.S. division.

Frank marched every mile, the Iowa farm boy now a veteran with eyes older than his years.

On May 3, 1945, the Red Bull accepted the German surrender in Milan. He came home with a duffel of medals and a silence that lasted a lifetime.

Back in Des Moines he built the life war had postponed. Thirty-seven years at Air Reduction, a brick house, three kids. Richard, Thomas, snd Connie, camping trips along the Raccoon, the Oldsmobile gleaming in the driveway.

He joined the Church of Christ in 1952, swapped stories with the “Romeos” over weak coffee, and never missed a VFW meeting.

Iowa held him like family. Then, in 1984, at sixty-five, he did the unthinkable. He and Aileen loaded a U-Haul and drove five hundred miles south, past the Missouri bootheel, across the Arkansas River, into the folding hills of the Ozarks.

Bentonville was booming—Walmart money, new subdivisions, red clay instead of black loam. They bought a house with a wooded lot. Zeppo and Boots chased squirrels. The Cadillac learned Highway 62’s curves. He found a new VFW Post 9063, a new Church of Christ pew, a new set of breakfast companions who had never heard of Hill 609.

Twenty-four Arkansas winters passed. Grandkids flew into XNA instead of DSM. On February 3, 2008, Frank died in a Bentonville nursing home, surrounded by the family that had once waved him off from an Iowa porch.

The honor guard fired their volley under a softer sky. They lowered him into Benton County Memorial Park in Rogers.\, a cemetery that did not exist when he learned to drive, in a county whose name he could not have imsgind as a boy.

The Red Bull who charged from Tunisian deserts to Italian peaks now rests beneath Ozark oaks, five hundred miles from the cornfields that grew him. Iowa gave him roots.

Arkansas gave him rest. And somewhere between the two, a quiet man proved that home is not always where you start--it is where the road finally lets you stop.