Following John Ficarra’s Nov. 11 op-ed, “My colleague at Mad magazine was a war hero. Who knew?” — Post Opinions asked readers: “Did any friends, family members or colleagues turn out to be secret war heroes? How did you find out they were downplaying their personal history?” Here are some of the responses.
During World War II, my dad, L.R. Baird Jr., was sent with his regiment from Macon, Georgia, to Italy to work on the railroads that delivered supplies to troops on the front lines. One day, one of the train cars carrying ammunition caught fire in the station where he was on duty. He, along with his platoon mates, uncoupled the cars to prevent the train from blowing up and killing people in and around the station. As a result, he, along with his fellow soldiers, was awarded a Soldier’s Medal. I never saw the medal or heard him talk about this incident, but I learned about it — and saw newspaper articles describing it — at his funeral in 2016. He was 97. He was just an ordinary man who achieved extraordinary things in the face of extreme danger.
Joyce Baird, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Most of what I learned of my dad’s time in the Pacific was during his time in hospice. Dad was a medic and thus not allowed to carry a gun. He said it always astonished him that either in the landing boat or the minute someone went down, another would stop defending himself to bring a rifle to him. When I asked why, he said, “The red cross on my arm meant aim here first.” He spoke of having to dig a trench and standing in it with cold water up to his chin, of foot fungus and lice, of bodies bloated on the beach from the previous day, of men running on top of the bodies trying to get to cover. When I asked him how he survived, he was confused by the question. So I asked again, how could you not lose your mind? He said, “We were all in it together. There were people from everywhere, and we were stacked like cordwood on the ship and didn’t get on top much, but I only saw one fight. It only lasted a minute, and it was fast forgotten. They became friends.” He spoke with a smile of the island girls who were thrilled to see them and relieved that the Japanese were gone.
In his 60s, he went to the Pearl Harbor Memorial and a Japanese man about his age walked over and held out his hand and they shook. He said, “That man had a lot of guts to do that.” Dad, who could have taken a medical dispensation on day one and who came home so shellshocked that he ate in the dark, was the same man who was elated to shake that gentleman’s hand. I can just see Dad smiling and laughing. “Me a war hero? Nope, we G.I.s were all in it together!”
Lora Frostman, Eustis, Florida
Gene Snediker and his family became backyard neighbors to us in the early 1960s. Gene was affable, caring and generous. I recently came across his remembrances of Dec. 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor. It turns out Gene was a radio man aboard the USS Breese, a destroyer stationed at Pearl. As the bombing unfolded, the Breese was able to escape the harbor and begin patrolling around the island. The Breese was credited with downing one Japanese airplane and one two-man sub. Gene was in the radio shack for 24 hours, then four hours on, four hours off for the next day, ferrying radio messages and orders to the ship’s captain.
Andrew Sirkus, Sterling
It wasn’t until my parents had long passed that I learned that my mother, Denise, was a sergeant in the Women’s Army Corps. My mother had sent a postcard and photo with her platoon from her WAC post at Fort Lawton to her parents in Wisconsin. My cousin sent me these two items after finding them in a shoebox of old photos. My father, an officer who served in the Pacific, and my mother never made a big deal about their service. They were from a generation that believed it was their duty to serve.
Bryan W. Simon, Waukegan, Illinois
My father left Texas A&M in 1941 to become a fighter-bomber pilot in Europe, based in England. He was shot down over France, made it to Sweden and went back to England in a prisoner exchange. I don’t know how he made it to Sweden. I remember a small yellowed newspaper clipping titled “Lt. Vivian MIA.” His many medals include the Distinguished Flying Cross. He mentioned his service only once: “When you went up in formation, there were three of you. One of you wasn’t coming back.” I later realized that his silence showed a second heroism.
Tim Vivian, Bakersfield, California
My father, Charles Avery Fee, passed away in 2015 at the age of 92. It was only after his death that our family learned he had been awarded the Bronze Star. As far as we know, he was never notified and never received the actual medal. He served during World War II in the 96th Infantry Division, the “Deadeyes.” He fought in the Pacific campaign, most notably in the Philippines. He would rarely talk about the war, even though he had two Purple Hearts (and the accompanying gunshot scars). There were little things; he didn’t eat coconuts, because he had been stranded on an island with only those to eat and never wanted to taste them again.
He slowly opened up during his last two years. My older daughter, his oldest grandchild, started the ball rolling one afternoon during a family gathering. She was adept at drawing out Papa! We learned that so many of the replacements in his platoon were killed within the first few days of their arrival that it was considered best practice to avoid them. “We would tell them to keep their heads down, but most of them didn’t, and it was too much to bear to really get to know them too soon.”
We learned that he enlisted with his cousin and best friend, John, leaving Texas A&M to join up after Pearl Harbor. We learned that at one point he was on leave and able to visit John, who had been injured as a pilot. This was the last time he saw John, who was shot down after recovering.
My father never wanted me, or my two younger brothers, to fight in Vietnam or join the military.
Cary Fee, Orland, California
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