Published Thursday, Nov. 11, 1999 "I remember my first night in Lae, New Guinea, and we were warned about the Japanese wandering around," said Monsignor Raymond Meier, 88, who served as an Army chaplain.
"I kept hearing these heavy footsteps coming towards my tent late at night, and I would grab my machete, then it would pass by," he said. "Finally the noise stopped outside my tent, and when I looked I saw a huge rat. They lived in the rice fields," he concluded with a laugh.
Rats seemed to be the rodent of choice in many of the veterans' funnier stories.
According to John "Jack" Heintz, 85, then an Army captain, he and four officers shared a tent and had a problem with a rat eating their food at night.
"We would tie (the food) up and hang it from the ceiling, but it (the rat) would always get to it. So one night, one of my buddies heard it, and grabbed his .45-caliber revolver and shot it. We all woke up grabbing our guns and our pants, and had bits of rat everywhere," Heintz said. "My friend just laughed his head off at us."
Monsignor Meier, who was ranked a captain, remembered another sort of creature that bothered him.
"I would always hang up my trousers at night, and one morning I grabbed for them and felt something move," he said. "A red snake with black dots came out of them. It went into eternity," he added.
Other memories weren't so funny.
Army nurse Mollie Stefanak, 82, remembered being stationed in Italy when Mount Vesuvius erupted: "It was nothing but fire."
But her saddest memory was "wrapping the boys in the black bags to get them to the U.S." When asked how she and the other nurses coped with that, she replied, "We shed a lot of tears."
John Malarchick, 86, an Army corporal stationed in Okinawa, Japan, remembered "a huge typhoon that swept everything away; flagpoles were bent in half, tents and supplies just gone."
"I had some buddies in the veterans hospital," said William Rossell, 83, who was a second lieutenant in the Air Force. "They got well physically, but mentally they were never the same," he added sadly.
Domenic Wolf, 87, had a different take on the war: "I worked for Pan Am out of Miami and was in charge of 18 DC4 planes which transported the wounded from Casablanca back here. The men were then divided up and sent out to different hospitals across the U.S., depending on where they were from."
Because the planes were all camouflaged, they had to be sure to stay away from the war zones.
"Once the European theater ended, we were transporting the men from Beijing to Miami," Wolf added.
At the war's end, Rossell remembered that "within two weeks every bottle of beer was gone in Okinawa. We didn't like the saki (a fermented rice drink)."
Several of the men laughed about that, and agreed with him.
Sam Rivetti, 75, then a corporal in the Air Force, remembered being stationed in Japan during the worst of the fighting.
"They fought the war with such a fierceness," he said. "I guess they wanted to get the war over with."
They all agreed with Rossell who said, "A lot of young kids don't know anything about the war. They know more about the Civil War than World War II. I guess they don't teach much about it anymore."
