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Then
House
of Heroes
by Larry Chabot
A former hospital on a Marquette hilltop, now the D.J. Jacobetti
Veterans Home, is a hallowed place. During the day, its halls
are lined with veterans in wheelchairs: visiting, dozing, heading
somewhere. In the day room, they watch television, play cards
or sleep. Some paint or work at crafts, some read, others sit
in the chapel for hours.
More than sixteen million Americans were in World War II, and
I’m looking for one now, a man named Russ (in order to protect
their privacy, no last names are mentioned in this story). I find
Russ curled on a bed, a lean man with sharp features. He fixes
me with a curious eye, then stretches his hand. I shake it lightly.
Might I interview him? He thinks a moment, then nods. Because
he can barely speak, his story is revealed in pantomime, air-writing
with a finger or mouthing words to lip read. He made us laugh
at times—silent laughter, his belly shaking.
He served all over Europe. In the Battle of the Bulge? A nod yes.
Patton’s Army? Yes. Did he like him? Vigorous yes. Ever shot
at? Yes. Ever wounded? No, but I wounded plenty of others. What
did you do? Fired a bazooka, shot at German tanks, rode American
tanks. Holding an imaginary gun with both hands, he went eh-eh-eh.
You made it out alive.
“I made it,” he mouthed, as I watched his lips. “I’m
here. I don’t know what else to say.”
And so it went, and then it was time for treatment. We agreed
to meet again. On my next visits I learned he was failing, and
then that he had died.
He was one of 40,000 living Upper Peninsula war veterans in 1981,
when the state approved this facility for Michigan residents who
served on active duty on or after December 7, 1941. They came
from all over: every county, town, branch of service. This was
a place where I interviewed veterans, almost all of whom were
in wheelchairs or bedridden.
There was George, a tank driver, whose job was waterproofing Jeeps
for the D-Day invasion before entering battle himself on D-Day—June
6, 1944—on bloody Omaha Beach. A good buddy fell next to
him, but George—a seasoned U.P. hunter—survived because
“I always walked in a hunter’s crouch.” He drove
tanks all over Europe, earning five battle stars and an injury
from repairing a tank tread. At Jacobetti, George was known for
passing out candy to all his visitors.
Ed was another tanker who fought in North Africa, Sicily, Italy,
France, Germany and Austria. He was there at the battle of Mount
Cassino monastery in Italy, and one of the first GIs to enter
Rome. His life nearly ended when a road grader blew up over a
land mine, sending a wheel bouncing off his head. At war’s
end, he celebrated at a party in Austria with a cave full of alcohol
the GIs found. The medals Ed earned finally were delivered to
him fifty-seven years later.
Al was a Marine. When we first met, he was on his back, covered
with bandages. He ordered me out until I asked him about John
Dillinger, the FBI’s Public Enemy No. 1. Freshly escaped
from prison, Dillinger and partner John Hamilton were hiding from
the FBI in Sault Ste. Marie until they smelled danger and blew
town. On April 17, 1934, Al met them on a country road near Lake
Superior. Hamilton pulled a knife on little Al, but he darted
through the swamp. Not long after, Dillinger was slain by cops
in Chicago.
Little Al, meanwhile, grew into Big Al. Only nineteen and serving
in the Pacific, he was wounded on two different islands.
“I had shrapnel all over and in my right eye,” Al said.
“I bled all night, under fire all the time. Then I had a
heart attack, but I kept fighting.”
His fists were clenched as he relived it all.
“They pulled me out of my foxhole covered with mud and clay
and blood and shrapnel,” he said. “They cut my fatigues
off with scissors. A doctor took out my eye, but the ether wore
off as he was cutting.”
After the war, he couldn’t work much because of the wounds
and only one eye. He said he never amounted to much, this man
who gave his all for his country.
There was Bill the Army cook, uninjured in service, but seriously
hurt when an overhead door slammed down on his head at a prison
job, leaving a long dent in his skull. There was Arvie, frustrated
by a stroke. A ninth-grade dropout, he defied the odds to became
a bomber pilot. I can’t forget Eddie the frogman, who swam
underwater to four enemy-held islands to remove mines and other
obstacles before American invasions. Only 120 pounds, but all
spunk.
And Marilyn, a photographer for both the Air Force and Marines.
She laughed about the uproar in her little hometown when the FBI
researched her security clearance.
“People wondered what I’d done!” She got married
in the Marines, but was let go when she got pregnant.
“Pregnant women weren’t allowed in the Marines,”
she said.
At Jacobetti, she was on kidney dialysis, and after several visits,
I attended her funeral there.
Jacobetti and a similar facility in Grand Rapids (opened in 1885
for Civil War veterans) house vets and eligible dependents. Jacobetti
is home; staff and volunteers are “family.” Individuals
and groups donate money, clothes, books and magazines, personal
items and their time.
Many veterans have no visitors or possessions of their own. When
my brother died after thirteen years at Jacobetti, all of his
belongings went to those who had nothing.
There’s sadness when a member dies. The obituary is posted,
a memorial service or funeral held in the chapel, followed by
singing.
Reverend Ardy Johnson, the piano-playing chaplain, describes a
typical songfest scene: “Wally raised his hand so I know
he wants song No. 13.” After Taps, wheelchairs roll out to
face the day. A vet I knew attended a memorial one week, but the
next week the service was for him.
Outside Jacobetti, I found subjects everywhere: in offices, malls,
churches, through friends and neighbors and happenstance.
Among Pearl Harbor veterans was Wally, who left his hangar at
Hickam Field, just south of Pearl, to see the action. When a plane
dove at him, he ducked inside, only to be hit by shrapnel in the
back, legs, arms and face. His parents, told he died, grieved
at his funeral Mass. When Wally visited Hickam years later; the
bullet holes were still there.
Gay, also at Pearl Harbor, fired his ship’s gun at attacking
planes. His ship later sailed into some of the Pacific’s
fiercest battles. Frank was a tank driver captured by the Germans
in the Battle of the Bulge.
Despite a leg wound, he limped for miles as the Germans moved
prisoners away from the battlefront. He found a G.I. from his
hometown at one POW stop. After liberation, Frank flew out on
his one-and-only plane ride. When I interviewed him fifty years
later, his leg still hurt.
Another George was a signal installer in North Africa and Europe,
where he dodged bombs, visited his wife’s Italian relatives,
met a Michigan neighbor in Germany, and was carried aboard his
homebound ship on a stretcher, suffering from malaria.
Sailor Wes was on a troop and cargo ship in the Pacific 9,000
miles from home the day his high school class graduated. When
the war ended, he celebrated with islanders on New Caledonia.
As a state trooper after the war, Wes was first officer on the
scene at the Anatomy of a Murder murder in Big Bay.
Another Pacific “veteran” was three-year-old Fran, whose
Filipino family hid in the mountains for more than three years
during the Japanese occupation of Mindanao. Although the enemy
searched for them continually, they always eluded their pursuers.
“The adults started a school for us,” she said. “With
no paper, we wrote with sticks on banana leaves.”
When they looked for their home after the war, they found it in
ruins.
Two more: Gerry was an Air Force weather forecaster in India,
the jumping-off point for planes carrying supplies over the big
mountains into China. The weather was so bad—winds reached
248 miles per hour—that planes could flip completely over.
More than 1,500 airmen lost their lives on this route.
And there was another Wally, who squeezed to the front of thousands
of sailors lined up to salute General Douglas MacArthur’s
motorcade as it rolled through Great Lakes Naval Training Center
in Illinois. He ended up on the cover of LIFE Magazine.
“I was a celebrity for a whole day,” he told me.
These good people are a cross-section of the millions who laid
down their tools and went to war. We remember them as they once
were: sprinting across a beach, outracing Dillinger, swimming
to an enemy island, piloting a bomber over Manila, steering a
tank under fire, standing guard in an outpost.
Whether they fought in wars or kept the peace, we are grateful
to them for our freedom, as nearly 200 World War II veterans found
out when they rode down Washington Street in Marquette’s
2008 Fourth of July parade to a continuous roar of approval.
Actor Ben Stein, whose relatives helped liberate Europe, said
of the sacrifices made by our veterans: “Nothing can ever
repay them. Glory, glory, endless glory to them.”
—Larry Chabot
Editor’s Note: Larry Chabot is the author of The U.P. Goes
To War: Upper Michigan And Its Heroes In World War II.
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