Papillion veteran Mark Murphy receives Quilt of Valor

Murphy joined the U.S. Navy in July 1975, according to a news release. He attended bootcamp and 16 weeks of “A” school at the Great Lakes Training Center. He was assigned to the USS Caloosahatchee (AO-98), an auxiliary ship that refueled, rearmed and replenished supplies to ships at sea during his enlistment time.

His duties included working in the Combat Information System and working on radar and communications equipment. He helped navigate the ship when entering or departing ports.

Murphy participated in three Mediterranean cruises and two North Atlantic cruises. He visited ports in Cuba; Haiti; St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands; Puerto Rico; Bermuda; Lisbon, Portugal; Weymouth, England; Edinburgh, Scotland; Oslo, Norway; Trondheim, Norway; Kiel, Germany; Rotterdam, Netherlands; Barcelona, Spain; Palma, Spain; Malaga, Spain; Marseille, France; Toulon, France; Naples, Italy; Palermo, Sicily; and Athens, Greece.

He crossed the Arctic Circle and received the Bluenose Certificate. He also spent eight months in the Brooklyn, New York, shipyard. Mark was honorably discharged from military duties in July 1980.

Thanking and honoring U.S. military personnel and veterans with a Quilt of Valor began with Catherine Roberts in 2003 while her son was deployed in Iraq.

Roberts felt “10 seconds from panic” and had a tough time sleeping. In the middle of the night, she had a dream where she saw a young soldier deployed somewhere in the world and sitting on the side of the bed in the middle of the night. He was hunched over with a pervading feeling of gloom and despair. Then as if viewing a movie, the next scene in her dream was transformative. The soldier, still sitting on the bed in the middle of the night, now wrapped in a quilt and the whole atmosphere changed, from one of despair to one of hope and well-being. To Roberts, the quilt represented healing.

Roberts — a military mom, nurse and quilter — thought that making quilts was something she could do. She began making quilts for wounded soldiers returning home from conflict.

Since that first quilt in 2003, the National Quilts of Valor Foundation members and volunteers have awarded 323,574 quilts to U.S. military personnel and veterans to thank them for their service with healing and caring quilts.

Murphy’s Quilt of Valor was made by Kathy Miller of Lincoln, quilted by Sue Streier of Bennington and hand-bound by Ruby Hinrichs of Papillion.