Willard, my third oldest brother was next in line to become a soldier.  He became a proud cavalryman.  The Cavalry’s history of riding off to battle while the regimental band played “Garry Owen” and brave young ladies waved yellow ribbons, gave the Cavalry a glamour second only to the Air Corps and had induced Willard to volunteer to be a Cavalryman.   But Custer’s heirs in the `40’s rode to battle on steel tracked tanks, belching shells, flame, and machine gun fire from their turrets.

One weekend Willard came home from Ft. Riley, Kansas all spit and polish; looking like a recruiting poster.   He had smuggled two smoke grenades home in his duffel bag.  Smoke grenades were designed to cover a large area of a battlefield with smoke so thick you could hardly see two feet in front of you. One windless day he pulled the pin on one and threw it into our backyard.  Thick blue-black smoke hung heavy in our neighborhood for almost half an hour.  It created quite a stir around Taylor and Spring Streets.  But when they found what it was the neighbors just shrugged it off.

Willard sang a song; I don’t know if he sang it often or that I was just an excessively impressionable kid.  The words he sang said a lot about how Americans were thinking and feeling those days.  The words, to the tune of  “Buffalo Gals,” were;

“Nazi tanks wont’cha come out tonight, come out tonight, come out tonight.
Nazi tanks wont’cha come out tonight?  We want to play boom-boom.”

War permeated everything.  It was our way of life.

Homes in those days didn’t hang yellow ribbons.  They hung small red, white, and blue silk banners in their front room windows.  There would be a blue star on the banner for each boy in their family who was “in the service”.   The blue star would be replaced by a gold star when one of their boys was killed in the war.

The banner in our front room window eventually had five blue stars.  My brothers Robert, Rudy, and Willard claimed the first three stars.  The fourth was for my brother Gene, who left high school before graduating to join the Army.  He went into the infantry.  They sent him to California for training, then shipped him shipped to Maryland, then back to California, where he sailed to Hawaii to join the horde of American boys who would have been sacrificed storming the beaches and fighting through the towns of Japan had the A-bomb not ended things.  Needless to say, Harry S. Truman was one of my brother's favorite presidents.

On a pleasant mid-April day in 1944 I was home alone when our telephone rang. It was Western Union.  The stationmaster in the Santa Fe Railroad depot, who doubled as the Western Union telegrapher, refused to read the telegram over the phone.  “Someone needs to come and get it”, he told me.  I could have waited until my parents got home but I didn’t.  By the time I got home from riding my bike all the way across town and back, Dad and Mother were home.  I handed the telegram to Dad, who read it, said nothing, then handed it to Mother.

The words "Missing in Action" began a nightmare that became a reality a few months later, when a second telegram told us our Engineer/Turret Gunner would not be coming home.   The banner in our front room window now had four blue stars and one terribly expensive,desperately unwanted gold star.