I had an 83 year old guy in the office today as an emergency. As is often the case, I asked this WWII veteran-aged man if he had been in the military. “Yes.” This was a simple answer to a simple question. No elaboration was given until my next query. What branch of the service? “Army.” Where did you serve? “New Guinea.” I then commented that I presumed it to be “no picnic.” His response, so typical of men who served our country in the military particularly in WWII, was that “the guys before me had it worse.” In fact, about a year ago, I met a WWII vet who had served in the Army and landed on D-Day. As is typical, I had to question him repeatedly and specifically about his role in the landing. As it turns out, this vet was in the second wave on a beach designated “Dog Red,” one of the bloodiest landing sites that morning in 1944. When I commented how hard that must have been for him, he said “the guys in the first wave had it worse.” So here it is that this man comes ashore in France, under heavy German fire, many of his buddies being literally cut in half with machine guns, and his perception is that his situation was that his condition was not as desperate as the guys before him.
Nor do I think that this was false modesty on his part. I’ve heard this kind of response enough, and in the same sincere tone, to know he really did think that the other guys had it a lot harder then him. Unlike the moaning and carrying on of some today about the war on radical Islam, these men accepted their task and performed generally without lamentation about their own situations. They were drafted if they did not enlist but this does not seem to matter in terms of their perceptions. They did what they needed to do and still don’t brag about saving the world from totalitarian rule. They saved the world and you just about have to beat their stories out of them.
