Son gets war vet dad's tags found near German border

Its contents had been a mystery to the French farmer who discovered the weathered pouch buried in a field near the German border.

Army dog tags. A silver St. Christopher pendant. A U.S. Army medallion. A ring that would fit a delicate finger.

To Robert Foster, a retired Greenport school janitor who lived his whole life in the tiny North Fork village, they were a final connection to the dad he never knew.

"It's great to have something of my father," said Foster, a graying, bespectacled man, as he cradled the items in his weathered hands. "It brings emotions I have never had before."

The pouch had been secreted in a field in the waning months of World War II by Foster's father, William, who may have thought he was about to be captured by the Nazis, and ditched items that could identify him as an American GI.

William Foster made it home safely but died in 1948, three years after the war's end, while Robert was just 4 years old.

Robert Foster grew up working the bays as a commercial fisherman, then worked 20 years for the Greenport school district.

His mother, Frances, never remarried, and she and Robert spent more than six decades living together with few physical reminders of their soldier loved one.

They had no pictures, no Army citations, no medals to remember him by.

That began to change in early December, when a farmer plowing a field near Metz, France, uncovered the pouch and disgorged its contents.

Sensing their sentimental value, the farmer forwarded them to authorities, who eventually placed them in the hands of the U.S. Embassy in Paris.

U.S. officials were able to establish that William Foster had been a resident of Suffolk County, and contacted the county's Veterans Services Agency, which began trying to reach members of his family.

His widow, Frances Foster, died Dec. 21, 2009, hours before Suffolk officials reached her home with word that her husband's effects had been found.

County Executive Steve Levy presented the long-buried mementos to Robert Foster during a ceremony honoring Long Island's military personnel Thursday evening at the county's headquarters in Hauppauge.

Levy also presented the Suffolk County Medal of Distinguished Military Service to family members of two Suffolk residents who were killed last year.

The medals honored Army Sgt. Jonathan Keller, 29, of Wading River, and Army Staff Sgt. Keith Bishop, of Medford. Keller died at a Fort Bragg, N.C., medical center Jan. 24, 2009, of complications of gunshot wounds suffered the previous April in Afghanistan. Bishop, 28, died in a helicopter crash while on an Oct. 26 mission in Afghanistan.

The ceremony seemed to overwhelm Foster, who family members say is naturally reserved and seldom speaks much in public.

But after the audience drifted away, Foster reflected on the trove, encased in a clasp box lined in blue fabric.

He paused, searching for words.

"I don't have much of my father's, don't know much about my father," he said, his eyes fixed on the contents of the box.

"I'm going to bring them home and have them in a good place," he said. "It's like he's come back to me."