BY KAREN SAMPLES
The Cincinnati Enquirer
INDEPENDENCE -- Alan Campbell never saw any heads disintegrate. He never ran through a rain of bullets, never suffered nightmares related to the war. Don't glorify me, he says. All I did was show up.
Well, OK. Lately, though, I've had this urge to look in a veteran's eyes. Mr. Campbell, being a friendly man who happened to send me a letter, will do just fine.
I blame Stephen Spielberg for this.
Before Saving Private Ryan, I thought of World War II veterans as gruff old guys drinking beer in VFW halls.
Now I think of them as men who once were boys. Heroic boys. Boys with shaky hands and fear in their eyes.
Better than any war movie I've seen, this one asks questions both subtle and profound. Where is God during war? Why does one man fight and another freeze with fear, letting comrades perish a few steps away?
And what becomes of a generation like ours? We are without perspective. Whiny, apathetic, we can't conceive of a mission that would truly and fatally bind us.
Mr. Campbell, 73, left the theater in tears.
He asks whether I remember the gold stars.
Well . . . not exactly, I say.
He sighs. Private Ryan brought it all back.
During World War II, every community posted a sign listing its men in service. Gold stars went up next to the names of those who died. Stars were posted in their windows, too.
Mr. Campbell was from Walton, Ky.
"Ah," he says, "there were a lot of houses with gold stars in the window. Some of them had two."
He hasn't thought of this in years. When he returned from the Philippines, there was a family to begin, then four kids to raise and a living to earn. He was never one for looking back.
Now, though, with the movie out and time closing in, Mr. Campbell is seized with nostalgia.
Sitting at his kitchen table this week, he looked out the window and was struck by another memory. On the train to California, first leg of his journey to the Pacific, he contracted scarlet fever. Just now, here in the kitchen, he'd remembered his three-week quarantine. Mr. Campbell was 21 when he entered the Navy. He went to the Philippines as a radar man on a PT boat.
"Remember the Packard automobile?" he asks me.
Well . . . not exactly.
Three Packard engines powered the PT, Mr. Campbell says. The engine took 100 octane fuel, highly flammable stuff. Everyone smoked, of course, so the wooden boats were floating bombs. Thank goodness for youthful ignorance, Mr. Campbell says. Otherwise they'd have been too scared to sail.
He didn't see any action during the war, although others did. PT boats patroled around the islands, looking for signs of the Japanese. John F. Kennedy's boat was cut in half by a Japanese war ship; he saved several of his men and came away with back pain for life.
In a few photographs from that time, Mr. Campbell is a bare-chested young man grinning cheekily at the camera. He served from May through October of 1945. The men wore jeans and sweat-soaked shirts -- if any at all -- and few records were kept of their daily activities. During the war, some 60,000 served on or around the PT boats, and 331 men were killed in action. A veterans' group is now attempting to find about 6,000 sailors whose whereabouts are unknown.
Mr. Campbell started attending PT reunions five years ago. He's moved, now, by all the men he meets once but never sees again. The newsletter arrives with "deceased" typed next to their names. Time is the most persistent enemy of all. He feels it nipping at his heels.
Please, Mr. Campbell says, if you know anyone who knows a PT boat veteran, have them contact the veterans' group.
It wants to hear their stories before it's too late.
The organization can be contacted at PT Boats Inc., P.O. Box 38070, Memphis, Tenn. 38183, or by phone at 901-755-8440.
Karen Samples is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. Her column appears on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. She can be reached at 578-5584 or email
her at ksamples@enquirer.com
SAMPLES ARCHIVE
