This weekend I want to honor the sacrifices veterans like my father (on left) and his older brother Isaac (on right) gave. My mother often told me how much my teenage father worried about Isaac when he left home to fight the Japanese over a year earlier than my father did. In one letter to her, dated December 11, 1944, he wrote of his older brother: “He wasn’t like me he was a good boy never hurt a soul in his life and he has really been through the worst of it … I wish I could take his place so he could come home.” Isaac was in the 6th Infantry Division, which holds the record for the most consecutive days of continuous combat in the Pacific Theater. The division fought 219 days of constant combat on the Philippine Island of Luzon. Leah, Isaac’s youngest daughter, told me her father once described being pinned down by enemy gunfire for days on end and fighting to survive next to decomposing fallen brethren. Every time we had an occasion to see Uncle Isaac after my father’s death, my mother always made it a point to remind me how tough he had it fighting the Japanese. In addition to the stress of constant combat, he contracted multiple jungle diseases and suffered from recurring bouts of drug-resistant malaria. Isaac was in such bad shape by the end of the war he had to spend an unimaginable two years in a U.S. Army hospital before he could go home. The doctors said he developed a weak heart due to everything he went through in the Pacific. Uncle Isaac’s granddaughter, Tara, told me that as Isaac drifted in and out of consciousness while he lay dying from heart failure in 1999, his very last words were about his brother (my father) who gave the ultimate sacrifice in Vietnam 34 years earlier. “I heard him say your dad’s name, like he was calling out to him – like he was seeing him again. He died within a minute of clearly saying, ‘Jack, Jack’ several times.”
James B. Wells 