THE BELL CURVE:

When I was growing up in Indiana, I liked to spend Memorial Day — we called it Decoration Day then — at my uncle’s house in Decatur because the parade was better there.

I was especially taken by the lone Civil War survivor — I was told he had joined the Union Army very young as a drummer boy — who always walked at the front of the parade. He was grizzled and lame and spoke mostly in monosyllables, but I liked to imagine him on a battlefield and wondered what he could tell me if he would. But a few shy efforts were turned away, and the first year he was no longer in the parade, I stopped going.

Every once in a while when that picture comes back to me — as it will today — I imagine myself leading such a parade, somehow symbolic of the 10 million men and women who fought for our side in my war. And, although my contribution, even spiffed up, might be disappointing, I would respond if anyone asked.

There really isn’t all that much time. We are disappearing fast, and all our World War II stories with us. I embossed those stories and met for lunches with four other Navy pilots with whom I served 65 years ago. In the beginning there were five of us. Now we are two, reduced to Christmas cards and sporadic efforts to crank up the lunches again.

For most of the past 10 years, I’ve spent my birthday on July 4 in North Carolina with a close friend, once my editor, who was a Marine infantry captain, leading troops ashore in the invasions of Bougainville and Guam. His best friend was killed at his side in a Japanese counter-attack on Guam, along with much of his company, and over many intervening years he refused to talk about it, electing to stay with the Marines vs. Navy baloney that takes place whenever we meet. Then one night, a few years ago, on his darkened porch, over a third martini, he allowed it all out in a burst of pain and remembering. I think of that, too.

Another close friend was drafted when he turned 18 during the waning months of the war. He was trained for five months, then sent to France in the reserve unit for the American troops holding the Ardennes Forest in Belgium. My friend had been in France only a few days when a huge German counter-attack, later called the Battle of the Bulge, broke through the American lines, and the reserves were hurried to the front. Within a few days, my friend went from New York to Paris to a frozen fox hole in Belgium where he was wounded, captured and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp.

I have often wondered how I would have performed under the duress my friends survived. When I got my wings in Corpus Christi, Texas, the Navy was losing pilots at an alarming rate and so needed to train and get new ones out quickly.

That required more flight instructors, and my entire graduating class was trained to meet this need. So while 19-year-old George Bush, who graduated two weeks behind me, was sent to a squadron that was decimated almost to the man, I was teaching replacements for his losses.

And a year later, when my editor friend was wading ashore at Guam, I was overhead flying wounded back from his battlefield. Everything that happens once the uniform is put on depends on luck and timing.

But in my war, we at least knew why we were there and had the good fortune — if it could be seen that way — to have the total support of our government and the folks back home. That hasn’t happened since, which means we owe the men and women putting their lives on the line now a special measure of support until we can get them out of harm’s way.

Meanwhile, you might want to listen to a WWII story — even if you’ve heard it before.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His regular column runs Thursdays.