No wars on this Veterans Day

In the winter of 1954, Bob Costigan, who had enlisted in the Army, found himself in the remote city of Daegu, in the North Gyeongsang Province, in South Korea.  He was 19 years old.

The Korean War ended in 1953, but Costigan’s Army aviation unit remained active while the county rebuilt after the brutal war. He was crew chief of a team of soldiers who serviced a twin-engine Beachcraft Bonanza, used by top-level Army officers. He never saw the brass; he just made sure the aircraft was ready for them on their trips around Korea.

“It seemed like a good idea,” Costigan, now 86, of Long Beach, said earlier this week, when asked why he enlisted. He had just graduated from Aviation High School in Manhattan. He spent 16 months in Korea before returning home.

On Thursday, Costigan plans to be at his usual spot: He is the bugler on Veterans Day for the Long Beach Veterans of Foreign Wars post. Veterans Day was to be observed at 10:30 a.m. Nov. 11, after press time, outside City Hall. Dan McPhee, commander of VFW Post 1384 in Long Beach, said he expects both VFW and American Legion members to participate, along with Long Beach city officials.

City Council President John Bendo, a Navy veteran, was to speak at Thursday’s observance ceremony. He said earlier this week that research showed 70 percent of men 75 and over are veterans, compared with only 3 percent of those 18 to 34. Older people, of course, faced the draft, which no longer exists. Still, he said, the numbers are telling.

“There doesn’t seem to be the same sense of self-sacrifice anymore,” Bendo said. “We seem to be becoming a more isolationist country, the way we were before” World War I and II.

Jonathan Zimmerman, now 78, of Long Beach, will say a prayer Thursday for prisoners of war and those missing in action. From 1966 to ’67, he was part of a K-9 unit, working a German shepherd, in Long Bình, Vietnam, about 25 miles north of Saigon. His unit was protecting an ammunition dump. The North Vietnamese blew it up twice.

“It was a little hairy,” said Zimmerman, who was 22 years old at the time. He managed to escape uninjured.

“It seems now Vietnam wasn’t worth it,” he said. “But at the time, it seemed it was. I just want the sacrifice that people made to be remembered.”

It is always a melancholy day, said McPhee, commander of VFW Post 1384 in Long Beach, who as a 21-year-old U.S. Marine was wounded in Vietnam.

This year, McPhee said, Veterans Day will be marked by the absence of American combat in any foreign war.

“It’s the end of American combat in Afghanistan and Iraq,” McPhee said. And it’s a good thing, he said, that the U.S. is not involved in any overseas wars.

Fewer World War II veterans have turned out for ceremonies in recent years. Most are now in their 90s. Peter Kerrigan was one of Long Beach’s oldest veterans. He died at 95 a few years ago, his widow said earlier this week. He had served in the Army overseas.

Costigan, who after Korea service worked as a plumber and air-conditioning repairman, had his own thoughts about war.

“We have to remember the veterans who served,” he said. “But I think we wasted our time in Afghanistan. Why did all those men and women have to die? In World War II, we accomplished something, and even in the Korean war, but the others, including Vietnam, it’s beyond my scope.”