Jesse Willingham holds his Purple Heart and Silver Star from Korea. (Ernest Coleman photo) | ZOOM |

        Frank Bates and Jesse Willingham are brothers by blood. Not by the blood that flows through their veins, but by the blood they spilled on battlefields, at different times and half a world apart.

        One was a 19-year-old infantryman who found himself in December 1944 in the Battle of the Bulge and spent the waning months of World War II as a prisoner of the Nazis in a forced labor camp.

        The other was a 20-year-old Army machine gunner from Cincinnati, a member of the last all-black regiment in the U.S. Army, battling the North Koreans and Chinese in the frozen back-country of Korea 51 years ago.

        What they have in common is a short strip of metal, formed in the shape of a deep purple heart, bordered in gold.

        It is the Order of the Purple Heart.

        The medal makes Mr. Bates, 76 and living in Fairfield Township in Butler County, and Mr. Willingham, now 71 and living in Deer Park, members of a club with a high admission price: a wound suffered in combat.

Bringing vets together

Frank Bates was a POW in WWII. (Michael Snyder photo) | ZOOM |

        The two men would likely have never met had it not been for a club of about 50 members that meets once a month at the AmVets Hall in Cheviot, the Cheviot-Western Hills Chapter of the Military Order of the Purple Heart. It's a place where they and other veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam can go for the camaraderie they left when they took off their uniforms decades ago.

        And it is where veterans of wars past can talk about the war on terrorism they see being played out on the nightly news, and hope it does not end up swelling their ranks — the ranks of the battle-wounded.

        There they talk freely and intimately of places whose names sound strange to the ears of young Americans — places like Khe Sanh, Ardennes, Tarawa, Panmunjon.

        “Everybody here gets along with everybody else, no matter what branch they served in or how old they are,” said Tim Culbertson, the 51-year-old Vietnam combat veteran who founded the chapter early last year.

        “We all have one thing in common: We've all been shot, all been wounded in battle. You don't get in this group because you were run over by a Jeep.”

        The chapter was recently given an Americanism award by the national Purple Heart organization, and has within its ranks veterans of nearly every major engagement of three wars and who did every job in combat from bomber pilot to dog-face infantryman.

        Their stories run the gamut: Dick Kist, the young man in the Fourth Marine Division, looking up from a foxhole to see the flag raised over Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima in February 1945. Bill Ahrens, the helicopter pilot hauling airborne troops in and out of jungles in Vietnam. The prisoner-of-war memories of Mr. Bates and the heroism of Mr. Willingham under fire at Chongjin Reservoir.

Harrowing tales of courage

        The Purple Heart is only one of a raft of medals and service ribbons Mr. Willingham earned after joining the Army as a young Cincinnatian in 1948, two years before Korea.

        He has the Silver Star and Bronze Star as well, and he keeps his medals in a frame under glass at his Deer Park home.

        By the time the Korean War broke out in 1950, Mr. Willingham was stationed in Japan as part of the post-war occupying force.

        Soon he found himself in Korea, in the thick of the fighting.

        In late November, his 25th Infantry Division was stationed eight miles south of the Chongjin Reservoir, part of a 20,000-man American force that was quickly being surrounded by Chinese soldiers who had stormed down from North Korea.

        It was there Mr. Willingham took a machine gun bullet in his right leg and won his Purple Heart.

        But the leg wound was not the only reminder Mr. Willingham has carried with him. The weather in Korea that November was brutal; men fought in temperatures of 40 degrees below zero.

        “Men froze to death,” Mr. Willingham recalled. “We didn't have the necessary equipment for winter fighting.”

        The cane and walker that Mr. Willingham often has to use today to get around are the byproduct of the frostbite he suffered, which caused irreparable nerve damage in his legs.

        “We could whup the Chinese,” Mr. Willingham said, “but we couldn't whup the weather.”

        By the time Mr. Willingham took a bullet, Mr. Bates was back in the States, working for the Kroger Co. in Cincinnati.

        But on Dec. 18, 1944, he had been in a tight spot, as a soldier in the 106th Infantry Division at the Ardennes Forest in France.

        What became known as the Battle of the Bulge was in its third day when the 106th was surrounded by two Panzer divisions.

        There was no alternative but surrender. Nearly 7,000 men were taken prisoner.

Living to tell

        Pvt. Bates, the 19-year-old from Madison, Ind., was set off on a forced march to railroad cars that would take the American infantrymen to Nazi labor camps.

        “All they gave us to eat was some rye bread that tasted like it was made out of sawdust,” Mr. Bates said. “When we got to to the camp, all we got was what they called "turnip soup,' but it was mostly water.”

        And it was the dead of winter in central Europe. Nearly as many men died from the cold as from bullets.

        “They'd taken my overcoat, my gloves, and my shoes when we were captured,” Mr. Bates said. “It was unbearably cold on that march.”

        But Mr. Willingham and Mr. Bates know, as do their fellow Purple Heart recipients, they were among the lucky ones.

        They lived to tell about their ordeals decades later in a tiny AmVets hall on Harrison Avenue to others who understand the horrors of war.

        “I'm proud of all the people in this group,” Mr. Bates said, looking around the AmVets Hall at his fellow Purple Heart winners. “We share one thing. And it's a pretty big thing.”

How Purple Heart originated

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