Officers group seeks younger vets

This Veterans Day, the Spokane chapter of the Military Officers Association of America is looking for some new blood to reinvigorate its aging membership.

“The majority of our local chapter members are World War II or Korean era veterans,” said Chuck Latimer of Spokane, a retired Air Force officer and member of the MOAA’s national board of directors.

The organization of current and former commissioned officers, which advocates for national security and veterans issues, boasts 362,000 members nationwide. The Spokane chapter is the largest in the state with about 500 members from Eastern Washington and North Idaho.

But the average age of MOAA members at chapters nationwide is 75, according to Jim Pauls, a retired Air Force colonel who is the deputy director of councils and chapters for the national organization.

“It appears the post-Vietnam era veterans just aren’t joiners. It’s just a different mind-set,” Pauls said.

It could be that among younger veterans, social life did not play such a significant role in their military careers. Before Vietnam, military personnel shipped out as a unit. With the exception of National Guard and Reserve units currently being deployed on a scale not seen since Vietnam, active duty soldiers ship out as individuals.

Like other military fraternal organizations, recruiting a new generation of members has become a problem for the military officers group, which has depended on strength in numbers to advocate effectively in Congress for the rights of soldiers and veterans.

Most recently, the MOAA has been fighting for veterans health care and survivor benefits for military widows in the 2006 budget.

According to a 2003 report prepared by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, World War II veterans accounted for 17 percent of the total veteran population of more than 25 million nationally. That year, the median age of WWII vets was 80, and they were dying at an estimated rate of more than 1,000 per day.

“We lose about two or three every month,” Frank Potter, a local MOAA board member, said of the Spokane membership. “We’re trying to get new members and would like younger members, the 40- and 50-year-olds.”

Potter, a former Army Air Corps pilot, flew heavy bombers after finishing flight training late in World War II, and also flew for Far East Airlines and in the Berlin Airlift after the war.

“We need some young blood,” said MOAA member Al Daniels, who also joined the Army Air Corps in 1942 and flew for the 51st Troop Carrier Wing in Italy. “We old-timers are dying off.”

When they are gone, they take with them chapters from the living history of the most significant event of the 20th century, a war that redrew more boundaries and affected more lives than any other. Here are two such chapters from the lives of members of the Spokane chapter of the Military Officers Association of America:

Merrill’s Marauder

The only U.S. combat force on the Asian mainland in World War II kept a Japanese Division tied up for months in the China-Burma-India theater, but the biggest battle faced by the 5307th Composite Unit (provisional) was against hunger and disease.

Of the original 3,000 volunteers who came to be known as Merrill’s Marauders for their commander, Brig. Gen. Frank D. Merrill, only 200 survived. Two-thirds of them were casualties of tropical disease.

Among the unit’s many citations, 14 Silver Star medals were awarded to Merrill’s Marauders. Roy Pearson of Spokane Valley received one of them.

Pearson, now 84, entered the war as part of Spokane’s 1st Battalion of the 161st Infantry Regiment, which was deployed to the Pacific theater in 1941. Just before Christmas, the unit arrived in Hawaii, where it became part of the 25th Division.

Pearson entered Officer Candidate School and after being commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in November 1942, and joined the Filipino Infantry Regiment, where he served for a year and a half. In May 1944, he volunteered for the 5307th, code-named Galahad.

The unit was to be supplied by airdrop, but food and water came only “sporadically,” Pearson said, “and malnutrition was a big problem.”

“We were hungry all the time, feeding the worms in our bellies.”

The 5307th coordinated with the Chinese 22nd and 38th Divisions, which had been badly led against the veteran Japanese 18th Division in Burma and China.

Pearson suffered cutaneous diphtheria from leech bites, dysentery, scrub typhus, hookworms and malaria.

“I didn’t know anybody that didn’t have malaria,” Pearson said. “Dysentery was automatic. You wondered why you weighed only 120 pounds.”

Merrill’s Marauders fought numerous encounters with the Japanese in Burma, including five major battles, but their crowning achievement was the capture of the airfield at Myitkyina (pronounced michenow) on May 17, 1944. It was Japan’s principal Japanese base for the defense of Burma.

The battle of Myitkyina was “a knock-down, drag-out deal” lasting three and a half months against an entrenched enemy force, said Pearson, who was a platoon leader and reconnaissance officer.

“We were close enough to talk to them,” Pearson said of the Japanese forces. “We lost lots of good men.”

Pearson earned his Silver Star by taking a Japanese artillery position. The enemy had moved a 75mm gun, which the GIs called a “whiz bang,” into point-blank range of the Marauders, “maybe 100 yards away.”

“That morning the platoon sergeant and I were sitting in the (command post) and the gun opened up on us, blowing our rations all to hell,” Pearson recalled.

Later in the day, Pearson found himself “in a position where I could get to them with grenades and a submachine gun.” He declined to comment on how many enemy soldiers were killed in taking the artillery position, but he noted that his commander chewed him out for risking his life that day. Good platoon leaders were hard to come by in Burma.

“There are times when everyone is thinking, ‘How am I going to cover my ass,’ ” Pearson said. At other times, adrenaline takes over and drives soldiers to act without regard to life and limb. “But as a platoon leader, you have to pull everyone through.”

Pearson was discharged from the Army at Ford Hood, Texas, in 1946. He entered the Reserves and retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1970. For his actions in combat, he also was awarded a Bronze Star. The 5307th was awarded the Distinguished Unit Citation. But like other combat soldiers, it is the Combat Infantry Badge that Pearson points to with the most pride.

Marine survivor

Dean Ladd of Spokane would not have survived the battle of Tarawa were it not for the actions of a Hollywood actor and a Montana doctor who happened to be on a transport ship in the South Pacific that November day in 1943.

Ladd was 18 when he joined the Marine Reserves in 1939 and was called to active duty in November 1940 as part of the 2nd Marine Division. His unit was deployed to the Pacific theater the week after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.

Though he entered the Marines as a private, he received a field commission as 2nd lieutenant while he was stationed in American Samoa in November 1942.

“They chose the ones who had a little more education and who demonstrated leadership ability,” said Ladd, now 85.

Though he fought in some of the toughest engagements in the South Pacific, including Guadalcanal, Saipan and Tinian, it was the 1943 battle for Tarawa, a series of islets 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii, that earned him one of two Purple Hearts.

The task of dislodging 4,700 Japanese troops defending a strategic airfield in the U.S. military’s path to the Philippines fell to the 2nd Marines beginning Nov. 20. The American assault craft, coming in at low tide, had to unload the Marines yards from shore. Many men were cut down by enemy machine-gun fire before ever reaching the beach.

Ladd, leading his platoon on the second day of the invasion, was immediately shot through the abdomen just below his navel.

“The only reason I survived is one of my men grabbed me and got me back to a landing craft,” Ladd said. “He had to wade through waist-deep water.”

The landing craft was ordered back toward shore to pick up wounded Marines by the salvage officer for the transport ship Sheridan. The officer was Eddie Albert. The actor had appeared in several motion pictures before joining the U.S. Navy. He is probably most famous for his role in the television series “Green Acres.”

Once back aboard the Sheridan, Ladd was still not out of danger. But by chance, also aboard the transport ship that day was an abdominal surgeon from Havre, Mont., who had worked at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Dr. Lloyd Sussex removed a section of Ladd’s intestine and patched a hole in his bladder.

“He told me I wouldn’t have made it more than a couple of hours,” Ladd said.

The Marine recovered in time to see more combat, including the battle of Saipan, where he was wounded again by a “tree burst” from an artillery shell that exploded in the jungle canopy, raining shrapnel on the men below. Ladd served five years in active duty and 25 years in the Marine Reserves, retiring in 1969 as a lieutenant colonel.

He is the author of the book “Faithful Warriors,” which retraced the steps of three companies of the 14th Marine Reserve Battalion that left Spokane in 1940, and the poem, “Curtains of Fire,” an account of the horror of landing at Tarawa.

Of the current struggle in Iraq, he said, “It’s too bad we are in it, but there’s not much we can do about it now. The whole thing has become political.

“Any casualties are bad,” he said, “but at Tarawa we lost 1,110 men in our division alone in three days.”

In fact, 3,000 U.S. Marines and all but 17 of the 4,700 Japanese defenders were lost in the battle, according to various accounts.