Veterans Day (Now with photographs.)

Pop-pop (Bill Goldstein) in uniform, 1942-ish.

So today is veterans day, and I'm sitting here giving a lot of thought to my two favorite WW2 veterans - Bill and Maury Goldstein. I've mentioned my uncle Maury before, in conjunction with a project to record his account of WW2 and my quest for the identity of his kamikaze pilot (no luck there, by the way), but I'm not sure how much I've ever said about my grandfather's service. I still need to sit down and edit the video I took of Maury - I am a horrible niece this way.

Maury, as I've previously mentioned, is the spryest 99-year-old I've ever met. I have a pretty solid account of his travels in WW2, during which he saw more of the world in the course of about five years than most people will see in their entire lives. Maury was born in 1911, so while my grandfather, his younger brother, joined the air force as an enlisted man right out of high school, he'd already finished college and law school. Knowing that he'd wind up serving in the military either way, Maury went to the navy and applied to their legal division. It was full... "But we can give you an armed guard instead," said the recruiter. Maury had no idea what this meant. He went with it.

Armed guard, as it turned out, meant being assigned as the "marine" part of "merchant-marine," manning the large, anti-submarine guns on supply ships crossing the atlantic. He spent one tour on the SS James Turner, during which they lost a coin toss and had to cross the most treacherous part of the Atlantic while their sister ship took the safer southern route. Guess which ship sank in the crossing? I'll give you a hint - my great uncle's still around to tell the story. ;)

Upon returning to the US, they were going to send him to Russia, but at the last second he was called in and offered a post on another ship - they had a new one called the SS Haym Solomon, and they wanted a Jewish captain for a ship named after a Jewish revolutionary. Maury, who wasn't too keen on Russia and had been eying his cold weather gear with quiet disdain, quickly said yes to another two tours of Africa.

What I hadn't known about my great uncle until as recently as this summer, though, was that he'd also served in the Pacific - it was only my grandfather who was discharged once the war ended in Europe. Maury was assigned as an officer on the USS Oconto and he even has a really fantastic "yearbook" with photographs of all the crew, and a map of their ports of call, and pictures from different places they visited. This was very helpful in figuring out some of the islands he was having difficulty remembering when I was interviewing him, but for the most part Uncle Maury was very clear on where they'd been and when.

His Pacific tour is where the story of the Kamikaze comes in. Between ships logs and his own recollection, we've narrowed it down to early April, 1944, off the coast of Biak, and that from there they took their prisoner first to Saipan, and then to Tinian. (The other thing about his story is that it reads like a WW2 version of Forrest Gump - full of lucky breaks, near misses, and unwitting encounters that become important in retrospect. Tinian was the launching point for the atomic bombs.)

Anyway, I'm much sketchier on the details of my grandfather Bill's service in WW2, just that he was extremely proud of it. Next time I see my grandmother I'll have to get her in front of the camera to tell me what she knows about it (my grandfather passed away in 2008). He was the youngest brother, born in 1923 (another brother, Allie, falls somewhere between Maury and Bill, and died in the early 2000s. I'm pretty sure someone told me he was a heavy smoker for most of his life. If not for this and my grandfather's bifurcated heart valve, I'm pretty confident that they'd all three still be around.)

Anyway, my grandfather enlisted into the air force, but he wasn't ever more than ground support. (He was color blind.) I know that he was stationed in North Africa for most of the war, moving around Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, etc, and was later part of the group that moved up through Italy while Eisenhower was taking over northern France. The details are sketchy, and while I know war stories from his time in Africa and Europe, I don't know the chronology and they wouldn't make proper sense out of order. (And besides, I'm saving most of them for a film treatment someday!)

At some point in here, he earned a purple heart for a lung injury. After the war, he had the military wipe the disability from his records because he didn't want to be seen as handicapped. My grandmother tells me that in later years, he regretted this decision.

My mother's father, born in 1910 and as such a year older than Maury at the time, attempted to join the military during world war II and was turned away: he was too tall, had flat feet, and as an engineer, was doing more important things for the war effort outside the military. (Years after the war, in 1956 or so when my mother was a small child, he would move his family from New York City to Orlando to work for a company producing parts for a very different kind of war... the Space Race. However I tend to romanticize this a lot more than Mom says it actually was... Less "Granddad was a rocket scientist!!!" and more "Granddad worked a desk job for a few years and then went and worked somewhere else." I still like to imagine my grandfather diagraming rocket parts in some fabulously 1960s office somewhere in central Florida.)

Earlier today I didn't have pictures, but I have a mother who reads my blog and sends me things. So here we go.

Bill and Maury together, February 2003. (Bill's 80th birthday party.)

Maury's 99th birthday party, August 2010.

(Yes, the fact that these are both at birthday parties speaks volumes about my family.)

Happy Veterans day! Go hug your favorite veteran!