Guest Column: Memorial Day remembrances

In past years, when I travelled to our nation's capital, I tried to visit the Vietnam Memorial. It was always an emotional experience. The "wall," as the memorial is informally known, is a v-shaped black granite monument that contains the names of Americans who died in the war or remain missing. The polished surface of the granite reflects the surrounding trees and lawns.

The wall has no inscriptions of any sort, no words about the war that left a legacy of bitterness, only engraved names. It is a long stone wall that emerges from the ground and recedes back into the earth.

When I am at the wall, my thoughts go back to my experiences during World War II. I am reminded of the urgent orders I received to fly from the Philippines to the island of Guam to prepare the communications network for the planned invasion of Japan. At the time, I was in Manila, living in barracks that only weeks before had been occupied by Japanese staff officers.

While on Guam, a B-29 Superfortress, the Enola Gay, which lifted off from the nearby island of Tinian, dropped the first atomic bomb, named "Little Boy," on Hiroshima. Three days later a second atomic bomb, called "Fat Man," was carried by another B-29, Bockscar, named for its pilot, Fred Bock. I still recall Colonel Bock's warm greeting when we met several years after the war.

Japan surrendered five days after the dropping of the second atomic bomb, averting an invasion that could have cost a million American lives. Soon after the war ended, I was flying back to the states, returning to the university classrooms I had left three years earlier.

George Rand, a Franklin Square resident, is a retired engineering manager and university instructor. He served with the U.S. Army in the Southwest Pacific operations area during World War II.