A few weeks ago I had my 67th birthday. If you forgot or were busy it's still not
too late to send gifts. Cash is always
appreciated. Family and friends made the
day special for me but I must be honest, I wasn’t too excited about now being ‘officially in my late 60’s!’ I am at the age where my body and mind are
showing the effects of nearly 7 decades.
However, my appreciation of savoring each moment of the life I have been
given was given a huge shot of adrenaline not long after Walter called asking me
for a favor. He needed to take care of
some business with his bank and wanted me to go to town with him. I thought it would just be another errand to
help a senior citizen. Boy was I
wrong.
I came to know Walter (Not his real name. He would be embarrassed if I used his name to
brag on him.) several years ago as I served as an area minister. I was not his pastor but had spoken in his
church a few times and helped with some ministry needs. He and his wife came to my office one day and asked
me to be the executor of their estate.
They had no children and for some reason saw me as a responsible person
who could be trusted with that task. My
first thought was, “They should have
gotten out more to meet more people”.
But what was I to say? They chose
me so I told them I would do the best I could to help them. Walter has now been a widower for several
years. He is 94 and I don’t mind helping
him. He is a sweetheart of a guy. However I did not know what Paul Harvey would
call “The rest of the story” until
this recent trip to take him to his bank.
He still drives but usually short trips for local errands. As I pulled into his driveway I noticed, for
the first time, the tag on his car was a permanent POW tag. I never knew he was a prisoner of war. He had never spoken about this to me.
As we were on the way I mentioned his POW license plate and
said, “I never knew you were a prisoner
of war.” He shrugged his shoulders as
if it were no big deal and began telling me how he enlisted in the Air Force at
age 18 during World War 2. He was a
turret gunner operating a 50 caliber machine gun on a B-17 bomber when his plane
was hit on a bombing mission over Nazi occupied France. The pilot realized that they would not make
it back to England and rather than ditch in the English Channel risking the
lives of his ten member crew he crash-landed in a field. The crew began scrambling for safety hoping
to encounter members of the French Resistance or French citizens more
sympathetic to assist Americans rather than fearful of the Nazis.
He continued recounting this event in a calm manner that
would be similar to me telling someone about mowing the yard rather than describing something
that sounded, to me, like an exciting plot from a movie. They found a French farm and the farmer spoke
enough English to allow them to ask permission to sleep in his barn. They hoped to hide for the night, get some
rest and seek help to be rescued. However,
they didn’t realize that the farmer’s fear of the Gestapo was greater than his
desire to help the American soldiers. While
they piled up hay to make a bed and drifted off to sleep he was contacting the
Gestapo to turn them in. Walter was
awakened from his exhausted sleep, as he explained it by; “a kick in the ribs by a boot and I woke up looking at the barrel of a
Nazi machine gun.” He and the crew
spent the rest of the war in a German POW camp.
He calmly, without resentment of mistreatment, told me that it was “cold
and difficult but the Russian prisoners were treated worse. They seemed to carry out a dead Russian each
day.”
As I drove listening to this remarkable story of a young kid
just out of his late teenage years who survived being shot down over Nazi
territory, being captured and help prisoner in a Nazi prison camp; I simply
could not believe this quiet senior adult church member who had humbly asked me
to assist him in his old age because he had no living heirs was such a war
hero. Tom Brokaw’s book, The Greatest
Generation, profiles those ‘ordinary men and women’ who came of age during
World War II in the United States. In the book, Brokaw wrote, "it is, I believe, the greatest
generation any society has ever produced". He argued that these men and
women fought not for fame and recognition, but because it was the "right
thing to do". Afterwards they
came home and most lived quiet lives. Walter
was one of this ‘Greatest Generation’. I
had primarily known Walter to be a man of quiet faith. He had his share of difficulties and ailments
that come from living 94 years but I had never known him to complain. I guess when you have survived being shot
down behind enemy lines, awakened by a kick in the ribs by a Nazi holding a
machine gun in your face and then being held prisoner in a German POW camp, the
troubles of today are not so bad. The
complaints we have are trivial in comparison.
The rudest awakening from sleep I have experienced was loud snoring…and
it was me!
