Merrick World War II hero turning 100

In the trying days after American Army and Marine forces stormed Okinawa Island on April 1, 1945, food was scarce. Merokean Meyer Rothstein, who fought with the Army at Okinawa and who turns 100 this month, foraged for wild garlic, whose shoots form tiny purple flowers that resemble sunbursts.

An Army buddy, whom Rothstein remembers as Ferguson, a farmer, put him on to garlic. The two of them mashed it up and spread it on their bread, giving zest (and a few extra calories) to an otherwise lifeless food ration.

Rothstein, a private first class, mostly ate bread in the field. Occasionally he had meat, which he described as a grade below Spam, but not often.

With such a diet, Rothstein fast fell in love with wild garlic. He never lost the taste.

“He still loves garlic,” said his wife of seven decades, Dorothy.

Dr. Craig Wilcox, a professor at Okinawa International University and co-principal investigator of the Okinawa Centenarian Study, has co-authored two best-selling books, “The Okinawa Program” and “The Okinawa Diet Plan,” in which he outlined a diet rich in tofu, fresh vegetables and … wild garlic. Okinawans, Wilcox noted, are uniquely long-lived, with one of the highest percentages of centenarians in the world.

Whether garlic is Rothstein’s secret to longevity, no one can say. Good fortune and genes also play their roles in long life, of course.

Whatever the case, Rothstein has reached an improbable age for anyone, let alone a man who endured one of the Pacific Theater’s bloodiest conflicts, the 82-day fight for Okinawa, in the 620-mile-long Ryukyu Islands chain, in the East China Sea, southwest of mainland Japan. Okinawa was to become the Allies’ final staging area for an invasion of Japan, which was no longer necessary after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945.

Rothstein’s birthday, it so happens, is Aug. 9.

A ‘dear price’ is paid
All these years later, Okinawa remains ingrained in Rothstein’s mind as a pivotal moment in his life. The images come in flashes.

He remembers clambering down a cargo net to a small boat that ferried him from a ship in the churning sea to a battle-scarred landscape.