Another Great Story

Thank you to all who have written with stories and sentiments about our veterans. I have permission to share one more with you and I believe you'll find it enjoyable. It's great to see wonderful things like this:

"My dad had a quite unusual experience in WWII. He grew up in the hills of Okanogan, then moved to Longview in 1929 when he was a teenager. The army first tried to draft him in early 1942, but he was underweight. Then he decided he needed to do something for the country, plus one of his older brothers had just been drafted into the infantry, so he put on some weight and then on the second try to draft him he weighed enough. The army gave him some aptitude tests, and then told him, “You WILL be a radio operator.” He was sent to the Signal Corps radio/telegraph school in Georgia, and decided he would give it everything he had. Out of a group of 85 guys, he was at the top of the class with Morse Code, and was the only one from that outfit selected for a very special assignment: being part of a crack team of radio operators in England whose job was to intercept German communications. These were those Enigma Code transmissions you may have heard about.

Just before going overseas, he was sent to the Pentagon for a week. He was thinking, “Here I am, a guy from the sticks who only went through the 8th grade, standing in the Pentagon. How did I get this far so fast?” When he got to England, he became seriously ill and could not eat, and ended up in hospital, as they say. If he had been there for 30 days they would have sent him home, but on the 29th day he recuperated, and went to his assignment in a castle outside of London.

The codes had to be copied perfectly, so the army needed these guys to be well rested and taken care of. The codes were in five letter groups, random characters, and they had to be handwritten, then these were given to the commanding officer who sent them to a then-unknown location to be translated. He slept on a cot in the castle, had to be at his station for 8 hours a day with no breaks whatsoever, and had weekends off. As the war wound down in 1945, and they were waiting to go back home, he was put up in a nearby hotel, and got room service, 3 big meals a day including steak, and slept on a feather bed. As he used to say, “It was some army life!!”

Meanwhile, his older brother Buster came in on Utah Beach the second day of the invasion. He was living in foxholes. There were many instances of God’s miraculous protection over him. Shortly after arriving at Normandy, he got a mail package from his mother: it was a pocket size Bible, Old and New Testaments, very small print. (Today I carry that little book at my work on the mail route. It is getting hard to read now except in sunlight.) In 1945, he and my dad were out touring the country on bicycles while waiting to go home, and they met. They had a big laugh about the extreme contrast between their lifestyles."