Thursday, September 13, 2007
WWII vet departs on his final mission - Robert Jamieson, Seattle P-I columnist
MOST 18-year-olds will never have to see dead guy after dead guy, day after day.
Most will never know the feeling of refusing friends out of fear a new pal will be slain by a sniper's bullet and the grief will be unbearable.
This is life in war, and while such fears could describe U.S. soldiers now in Iraq, they arise from the war experiences of World War II vets whose bravery and sacrifices too easily slip away in our blinkand-you'll-miss-it modern age.
So, it's a good thing Al was a keeper of such memories.
...
Fresh-faced and 18, he signed up for the Navy for the same reasons many young people today do: money. His father had skipped out. His brother had polio. His mother had five mouths to feed.
Weddle was assigned to the USS Tangier, moored stern to stern with the USS Utah, in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941. He had just put on his dress whites that day when alarms sounded.
"Then I just saw flames. The Utah was getting torpedoed," Weddle told me. "I saw the red meatball" -- the red insignia from the Japanese flag painted on enemy planes. "You could see the Japanese pilots right as they flew over. Face to face."
...
His heart gave out at 84. As medics wheeled him to a waiting ambulance Saturday, he blew his wife a kiss and started to regale them with stories about Pearl Harbor. ...
MOST 18-year-olds will never have to see dead guy after dead guy, day after day.
Most will never know the feeling of refusing friends out of fear a new pal will be slain by a sniper's bullet and the grief will be unbearable.
This is life in war, and while such fears could describe U.S. soldiers now in Iraq, they arise from the war experiences of World War II vets whose bravery and sacrifices too easily slip away in our blinkand-you'll-miss-it modern age.
So, it's a good thing Al was a keeper of such memories.
...
Fresh-faced and 18, he signed up for the Navy for the same reasons many young people today do: money. His father had skipped out. His brother had polio. His mother had five mouths to feed.
Weddle was assigned to the USS Tangier, moored stern to stern with the USS Utah, in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941. He had just put on his dress whites that day when alarms sounded.
"Then I just saw flames. The Utah was getting torpedoed," Weddle told me. "I saw the red meatball" -- the red insignia from the Japanese flag painted on enemy planes. "You could see the Japanese pilots right as they flew over. Face to face."
...
His heart gave out at 84. As medics wheeled him to a waiting ambulance Saturday, he blew his wife a kiss and started to regale them with stories about Pearl Harbor. ...
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