Episode 9 in Band of Brothers, “Why We Fight.”

When Winters is standing in front of the gate to Buchenwald there are two Medics standing behind him. My father in law was one of the first medics into that camp. The Army would award him a bronze star for his efforts saving as many as he could.

My father was with the 3rd Marine division and fought on Bougainville and Guam so The Pacific was very real to me.

An Uncle in law was shot down in a B17 in February 1945 and spent the rest of the war in a German prison camp and the “Mighty Eighth” is his story.


Sadly, my family has deeper connections to WWII than the above.

Probably the reason I’m alive today. His unit guarded mobilized hospitals the precursor to the MASH concept. They also had these hospitals on Iwo but most casualties were evacuated to hospital ships.

I don't think he was near Iwo Jima, but I recall him telling me he spent time in the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific theater and the ship he was on evacuated wounded to Australia as well as back to Pearl Harbor and San Francisco. He was in the Atlantic by June of '45 and his ship made several passages from Europe back to Norfolk in the weeks after D-Day, taking the seriously wounded back to stateside hospitals.

The scenes in the series "The Pacific" that show the US Marines taking R&R in Australia was also something my father did. He got to know his host family in Melbourne very well and went back to stay with them for a time after the war.

The men who fought in the Pacific were doing unbelievable things under extreme conditions, but I am sure that can be said about all soldiers in all wars.

My dad passed away in August of 2000. A WWII and Korea Veteran, followed by 25 years in the CIA.

He would have been 100 years old this past December 21st