May 22, 2013 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • Page 21 old Volksturm guys who kept trying to give up and every time one of them would put his hands up, one of their own officers would shoot him. I think if we had to fight the younger guys who got killed in Russia, we might not have made it.” Then there was Bob. He was a soft-shell human tank, a much-decorated U.S. Marine who fought as a teenager in the Pacific, as a gunnery sergeant in Korea, and as an armed combat correspondent in Vietnam. He hated John Wayne for trying to impersonate him. He always said the world’s perfect army would be Japanese privates, German sergeants, British junior officers, and American generals. I suspect that none of the Pearl Harbor survivors I interviewed in Mahwah when I was in my early twenties is still around, but every last one of them told me they felt they had been used as bait. “We had to get an officer with a .45 so we could shoot the locks off the ammo boxes to load the anti-aircraft guns,” one former soldier from Pearl Harbor told me. “They knew it was going to happen. They set us up to get us into the war.” My best friend at work was the son of a man who landed on Omaha Beach, won the Silver Star and Purple Heart, and knocked out a machine gun with a hand grenade. This veteran told me, with some embarrassment, that some of the guys in his outfit shot German prisoners after the Germans had given up. He found this disgraceful and sinful. None of the shooters made it through the war without being killed or disabled, he said, while most of the guys who abstained from the massacre came out alive. Spielberg had the courage to show this in “Saving Private Ryan.” Eric Sevareid wrote about it in “From Anzio to Rome.” Talking to these guys ruined the typical Memorial Day and Veterans Day speeches for me. All who served deserve respect, but not everyone who serves is a hero. One of the great ironies of our era is that it took a 1993 Congressional review to determine that the Medal of Honor had been denied to American heroes based on the racial or religious prejudices of their officers. Near the end of the 20th century, Medals of Honor that were earned during World War II but never bestowed, were given to men who were African-American, Hispanic, Hawaiian, Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese-American. One medal went to a Holocaust survivor who joined the U.S. Army and risked his life to save his buddies in a POW camp during the Korean War. Nobody who got the Medal of Honor was undeserving, and the same holds true for the recipients of the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the Combat Infantry Badge, and Pilot’s Wings or Airborne wings. To call everybody who served in wartime a “hero” is a demotion to those who actually were heroes with lives at risk beyond routine accidents. I volunteered for Airborne, was injured in training, and got medical discharge. I was never in combat and I disparage the notion that I am a hero. I did what I felt every healthy American should. Some of us did and some did not, and those who wave the flag hardest and inflate foreign atrocities, which were harrowing, while they ignore our own atrocities, which were not inconsequential, do no service to those who served. Neither Eisenhower nor MacArthur agreed with Hiroshima. The non-service flag-wavers covered their own tracks predicting a million casualties if we invaded Japan. Why invade? They were starving anyway and had started the war under grotesque provocation by Soviet agents in the U.S. government with the idea of giving up as soon as they could get terms. While 54 Americans soldiers were hanged for murder or rape in England or France -- and one harmless ex-delinquent was shot for cowardice in the face of the enemy -- I know of no case where an American was hanged for a war crime, either in Europe or in the Pacific. We hanged a lot of guys on the other side who claimed they were “only following orders” or simply went nuts but betrayed their status as human beings by obeying those orders. You do not shoot civilians. You do not shoot men with their hands up. When some Americans did these things, nobody said anything. When I heard that 78 percent of Americans supported clemency for William Calley, I was just as glad I never got to Vietnam. The heroes in the My Lai massacre were the helicopter pilot and crew who protected terrified Vietnamese civilians from Calley’s murder squad with their own door guns, not Calley and the guys who pulled the triggers on kids. If we are so blinded by flag-waving that we cannot triage genuine heroism, honorable service, and indictable war crime into three distinct categories, we should never send another army overseas. We have enough enemies as it is. The three honorable U.S. combat veterans I worked with when I was young met their fate not from the Axis but from the axe of interior decorating. The outside phony who took over as managing editor decided he wanted to decorate the city room with trim, all-white Ivy League graduates. He gave the chop to the veterans. I attempted to go over the managing editor’s head and argue with the guy who owned the newspaper and I got one of them a sixmonth reprieve so he could sell his house. The other two guys got about a month to clean out their desks. The last two vets died premature deaths. The guy who fought Hitler’s henchmen made it to 61, and the guy who fought Hirohito’s henchmen made it to 54. A guy who served in combat support in Vietnam was also phased out, but landed on his feet. We hear it said that in speeches to veterans that “If it hadn’t been for you guys, we wouldn’t be speaking English.” I spoke to all these guys before they left. Their comments on the system they saved with their valor or service were not eulogistic. They were not printable either. Killing a man with a bullet or a bayonet can put your own life at risk. Killing him with a pink slip requires no such courage. Let “Fire the Vet” be your motto and you, too, may rise to corporate glory. On the other hand, you may fall on your face if enough people catch on to you. The building where all this took place is now as vacant as the ruins of the Fuhrerbunker or the Lenin-Stalin room in the Kremlin. Americans need the veterans, and their honest memories, to save us from those Americans who have forgotten whose country this is. This Memorial Day, everyone who loves American should turn out to honor those who served while we think about those now serving. The World War II veterans, in particular, are living treasures. Given some of the nonsense churned out by the mass media then and afterward, they could be a younger generation’s last contact with historical reality. Many of the best historical references are not books, but people. You can often trust the people more than the books, because books cater to a certain audience and the people who live next door usually tell the truth because they have to live with their neighbors. Bill Moxley, a longterm resident of Glen Rock, is one of the last survivors of Merrill’s Marauders, the U.S. Army unit that battled the Japanese in an attempt to recapture Burma. Moxley shook hands with General Joseph Stilwell, who stood at the side of the path with one foot on a box. “He said something personal to each of us when we had to be taken out of the line,” Moxley remembered. “He was a real soldier, a soldier’s soldier, and everybody hated him, but I respected his honesty.” Neil Finn, former police chief of Glen Rock, was a 17year-old Navy combat medical corpsman with the U.S. Marines at the battle of Shuri Castle on Okinawa. Finn was in the line of fire -- an enemy sharpshooter once knocked his helmet off a stone wall -- and his best friend was one of the guys he could not save from a stomach wound, though he saved many others. “I’m glad I did it once, but I would never want to do it again,” Finn told me. I remember a couple of the veterans who worked at my first reporting job. I also remember what happened to them after they stuck their necks out to save the American way of life. John, a calm, dignified man then in his early fifties, worked in the same cluster as four wild guys in their twenties who never expected to get that old. We must have been a chore for him, but we all liked him, and I think that with some reservations he liked us. John had been a rear turret gunner in a B-24 in the Pacific. He once took a shot at a Japanese fighter passing the other way, and missed. The demise of his B-24 was self-inflicted. They were carpetbombing a stretch of New Guinea with fragmentation bombs whose fall was slowed by parachute so the flying fragments did not hit their own plane. Some of the parachutes crumpled, the bombs fell too fast, and in effect they shot down their own plane. The crew jumped out of the burning bomber. When they hit the water and swam for the life rafts, the sharks closed in. John was the last man to make it to a raft. Tony fought in Europe. He also read up on it afterwards. He was not a great writer, but he was an honest reporter who viewed facts with objectivity. “Say what you like about the Russian Army. I owe them big time, because they killed off most of the younger Germans before I landed right after D-Day. The ones they left for us were plenty bad enough. I remember one bunch of Don’t blame the veterans for whatever went wrong Business Locally owned Ridgewood Moving Services recently became an interstate agent for Bekins Van Line. Ridgewood Moving Services owner Cindy Myer said this agreement will allow the company to offer more services to clients and position the company for continued growth. Ridgewood Moving is the only Bekins agent in the Ridgewood and Mahwah communities. Myer took over the family-owned moving company in 2005, after her husband’s unexpected and sudden death. A stay-at-home mom with a degree in fashion, Myer’s only business involvement had been ordering uniforms. 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