Lost Relatives Personals

Family to receive soldier's lost Purple Heart - Brattleboro Reformer

Saturday August 6, 2011

ALBANY, N.Y. -- Corrado Piccoli’s sisters believed one of their other siblings had his Purple Heart. So it was a shock when a Vermont Army National Guard officer showed up at Mary Piccoli’s door one day, telling her he had the medal, awarded posthumously after her brother was killed in action during World War II.

"You better sit down. I have a story to tell you," Adeline Rockko was told when her sister called earlier this year with word of Capt. Zachariah Fike’s discovery. "We had no idea it was even missing."

On Sunday, Fike will give the Piccoli family Corrado’s Purple Heart and other medals he earned while fighting with the Army’s 45th Infantry Division in Italy and France, where the 20-year-old private was killed in October 1944. The gathering in Watertown will cap Fike’s yearlong mission to find the family, an effort interrupted by his deployment to Afghanistan, where he was wounded in a rocket attack.

Fike’s mother, knowing her son liked to collect World War II memorabilia, bought the Purple Heart at an antique store in Watertown, 140 miles northwest of Albany. She gave it to him as a Christmas gift in 2009, when he was on leave waiting to go to Afghanistan.

Fike said when he saw a name engraved on the back -- Corrado A.G. Piccoli -- he had a hunch the soldier likely died in battle. The military doesn’t engrave the recipient’s name on every medal it issues, but someone, possibly in Piccoli’s family, made sure the soldier’s Purple Heart bore his name.

As the son of two Army soldiers -- his mother served four years, his father retired after 31 years and was awarded a Purple Heart in Vietnam -- Fike felt he had to return the medal to Piccoli’s family.

Over four days after that Christmas, Fike scoured local records for any mention of Corrado Piccoli. A janitor at Watertown High School let him in on a Saturday, and Fike found the yearbook from Piccoli’s senior year, 1942. He checked military and ancestry websites and the local library, where the most recent war records from the 1940s said Piccoli had been buried in France.

His search was going so smoothly, it seemed like Piccoli was guiding the way, Fike said.

"I really felt like he was talking to me throughout the process," Fike told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Then Fike, who went to high school near Watertown and lives in Burlington, Vt.

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