Tom Brokaw by The Greatest Generation Page A

weeks.
    Most returning veterans went to work or back to school as swiftly as possible. They were acutely aware of what they had lost in their training years. In fact many of them to this day just subtract three, four, or five years from their chronological age in good humor, laughingly explaining that those were the years they lost during the war.

    Gordon Larsen
    Gordon’s choice of furnace-and-heating work proved to be a good fit. It was a skill in demand, for America was in a building boom and home heating was changing over from coal to oil. After fixing furnaces on Army Corps of Engineers projects, he stepped up to powerhouse operator on the Corps’ big hydroelectric dams in the Midwest and West.
    He met his wife, Emelia, on the job in Omaha and they raised six children, four boys and two girls. Gordon reveres his Marine Corps connection but he’s also grateful his sons never had to serve. As he said of his Marine days, “It was a million-dollar experience, but I wouldn’t give you a plugged nickel to go through it again.”
    Part of that experience was learning the lessons of loyalty and family. As his Marine buddies had been his family in training and in combat, he carried that attitude into his civilian life. He said, “It’s hard to explain, but my friends are like my family. I found out in the Marines what that can mean in life, and I’m still that way today.”
    Life didn’t always work out the way Gordon had hoped. When he already had six children of his own and was working two jobs to make ends meet, he took in a young Sioux Indian as a foster child. He just felt sorry for the tot, whose parents were both in jail. The boy lived with the Larsens for several years but grew increasingly difficult to control, at one point attempting to burn down their house. They were forced to send him back to the reservation and they’ve never heard from him since. This is not an unusual occurrence when white families try to raise young Indians. The cultural differences often become too great to be successfully managed, but Gordon still feels disappointed that it came to a bad end. It was not what he had learned in the Marine Corps, to lose a family member because there was no common ground.
    When I talked to this ordinary man with such extraordinary experiences during his teenage years, I was sorry that he hadn’t shared them with the young people in our community during the fifties. I understood, of course, why he didn’t want to revisit those nightmare years, but I am confident we could have learned something from him.
    World War II left another mark on Gordon Larsen—he’s an unabashed patriot. That’s a part of American life lost on younger generations, he believes. It’s a common refrain among World War II veterans, forged as they were on the anvil of military discipline and the call to duty to defend their country against real peril. “Whenever I hear Taps or see a flag go by, I get tears in my eyes. Even now,” he said, “and I’m seventy-three.”

    John Caulfield (far right) with buddies, Panama, 1945
    The ROMEO Club—
    Retired Old Men Eating Out

JOHN “LEFTY” CAULFIELD
    â€œI have only one regret. My kid never had a Corner.”
    A LTHOUGH THE WINDS OF WAR had been blowing steadily across the Atlantic and Pacific for some time, it wasn’t until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor that everyone in the United States finally realized we could not stand idly by while the Axis rolled across Europe and Asia. That stunning surprise attack galvanized the nation as no speech or distant development could. While Pearl Harbor was the explosion that triggered five long years of death, injury, and separation, it also gave Americans everywhere common cause. They talk longingly now about the loss of that bond, that cohesion of national purpose and the personal ties that went with it.
    It’s a regular topic at the monthly