world war two

Do you know any of the men in this photo? Researcher and historian Teunis Schuurman from the Netherlands is trying to identify all the men, who were aboard a plan believed to have crashed in his hometown during World War II. He believes S/Sgt. Joseph Deffner, from Batavia, is in the front row, but isn't entirely sure which man he is. He's hoping for help in identifying him as well as finding out as much information about him as possible. Teunis can be reached at teun.pats@gmail.com.

Today we premiere the first episode in a series that I would hope continues indefinitely. Without much deliberation, we chose Veteran's Corner as the official title — but if anyone thinks this isn't apt or not apt enough or has other ideas, please submit them before we get too far along in the series, and we'll consider renaming.

Every few weeks we hope to sit down with another veteran and just talk. There are no set topics of conversation. I don't have a list of questions. We want only for the veteran to talk about whatever is on his mind. He can talk about his time in the war. She can talk about what life was like when she got back from the war. He can talk about bagging groceries before he ever even got drafted. Whatever.

That's it.

For our first episode, we sat down with Don Nagle, a veteran of the U.S. Navy during World War II. Don told us a little about his time with the American Legion — he's the historian for the Bergen post. He also spoke a little bit about his training as a radioman for a division of the Navy's air crew, about flying over the Bermuda Triangle and about almost getting shipped to Japan for an airstrike in what may have very well been a suicide mission.

Eighty-six-year-old Louis O'Geen tells me that the "guy upstairs" took all of his friends from him, all his hunting and fishing buddies, and he's the only one left. He seems resigned to the fact, though slightly bemused by his own good fortune, if he would ever call it that. Probably not. But he isn't above getting a laugh out of it.

Louis fought in World War II. He saw the gore, the portent, the indecipherable anomaly of war up close, nose to nose with bodies chewed to the marrow and eyes sick with the madness of submerged warfare. Louis was a seaman. He joined with the Navy shortly after Pearl Harbor, left his native LeRoy and was dispatched with little haste to some of the most hairy battle theaters in the Pacific and elsewhere.

When the German U-Boats were wreaking havoc not far from Casablanca, he was there. He saw bulkheads torn to shreds. He saw the deck of his destroyer, its hawsers and rails coated two inches thick with ice. He saw the fizzle and flotsam of ships sunk like tinker toy bath boats poked underwater by the vengeful finger of a child.

"I had many close shaves," he says.

Louis almost joined up as a submariner. Almost. Until he saw the subs come up to dock, beaten and barely afloat, ambulances parked on the shore, waiting for the wounded and cracked as they were taken back from the sea that had swallowed their minds whole, often along with some of their limbs.

Ironically, though, the one episode of the war that nearly knocked out Louis O'Geen for good came after the war was already over, in the waters just off the shore of Okinawa when a typhoon tore through the Pacific in early October, 1945. (I think that typhoon was named Louise, and isn't that apt.)

Louis told me that he thought World War II would be the last war. He couldn't imagine how we could do it all over again. Then came Vietnam. Then came Iraq. He's quite fierce in his opposition to the war in Iraq. When I paid Louis a visit Monday, he showed me a drawing he made not long after he got out of the service. The drawing summed up his then and future feelings about war, feelings one can only understand when listening to Louis tell his stories. So let's do that: