The long road home.
Bob left college at the end of the spring semester in 1941 and enlisted in the Air Force.
It seemed like all young men were enlisting then, and it made Bob’s dad, a former Army engineer, proud.
No more talk of going to Hollywood to become a movie star.
Bob was sent to the Philippines to help push the Japanese out of Southeast Asia.
To outsiders, his job as an inventory clerk may not have seemed important.
But Bob was a cog in a giant wheel which kept food, fuel, the right kind of ammunition and everything else needed to win the war on hand when Air Force planes took off the ground.
But 1942 was a hard year.
In the Pacific, Japan had the upper hand.
The Japanese army overran the Philippines, forcing Air Force personnel to retreat to a stronghold on the Bataan Peninsula.
There, they fought as infantrymen in a vain effort to hold out against the advancing Japanese.
But it was not to be.
Suffering from malnutrition and disease, with little defensive capability left, the men were ordered to surrender to the Japanese.
So, on April 9, 1942, Bob became one of twelve thousand Americans who became Japan’s prisoner of war.
The Japanese began marching the captured Americans, along with more than sixty thousand captured Philippine troops, up the Bataan Peninsula to camps the next day.
This is the infamous Bataan Death March.
These men were already weak from hunger and disease, and their Japanese captors were cruel.
They denied the prisoners water and killed those who couldn’t keep up.
From Capt. William Dyess, a survivor:
"Their ferocity grew as we marched.
“They were no longer content with mauling stragglers or pricking them with bayonet points.
“The thrusts were intended to kill."
Bob and the others who survived the march were dispersed among various POW camps.
He was sent to the Cabanatuan prison camp in Nueva Ecija Province along with eight thousand others.
There was little food and water there.
Death stalked the place.
Bob died in the camp from malaria and dysentery in July 1942.
He was twenty years old.
When US Army Rangers liberated the camp two-and-one-half years later, 2,656 Americans imprisoned there had died.
Only 516 Americans remained.
Bob was buried in a common grave at the camp with many others.
After the war, the remains from this common grave were moved to a US military mausoleum near Manila.
At the time, an attempt was made to identify the remains.
And while these efforts succeeded for some, Bob was not among them.
But a new identification effort launched in 2019 using modern DNA analysis was able to identify Bob’s remains.
His people were notified.
And Bob was brought home.
The Defense Department goes to great lengths to find service people missing in action.
When they are found and brought home, their resting place is considered hallowed ground.
Respect for lost warriors is a tradition that’s ingrained deep in the American psyche.
Honoring their sacrifice is not done just for them.
The reverence accorded the lost warrior tells those who currently serve that what they do is more than a job.
They work a cause greater than self.
If you can’t imagine a cause greater than yourself, you’ll never understand this.
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I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
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