I felt oddly serene while speaking on the phone with Bruce Muench of Roscoe, Illinois. His deep, steady voice. His humility. His obvious intelligence. And something else, which I will get to later.
I also felt reverence, since Muench is that rare and precious American: a World War II Navy veteran and member of the dwindling group known as the Greatest Generation. Only about 2% of the 16 million who served are still alive.
Muench wrote to me following my Tribune op-ed about Arlington International Racecourse’s closing, since he was once a “bottle boy” at the track in the summer of 1941 when his family lived in Des Plaines and he was 15. It was a time when nearly all beverages came in bottles, which he was tasked with collecting and sorting. Muench said he got an early education about adult society from the colorful characters who frequented the racetrack.
Three years later, Muench joined the war effort by enlisting in the Navy, following in the footsteps of his father who was a sailor in World War I.
Duane Collinge, who lived across street from Muench when both were boys, had tragically perished in battle. And Muench’s close friend Harry Miller, a Marine, had been severely wounded.
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Muench felt a responsibility to do his part, and he trained as an aviation radioman-gunner. He flew multiple missions up and down Florida’s east coast patrolling for enemy ships, submarines and aircraft, while practicing his gunnery skills. But he never received orders for active combat.
Near the war’s end, he was transferred to the USS Shipley Bay to assist in the huge operation to withdraw troops from the Pacific and get them safely home.
In 1946, Muench headed home aboard the USS President Jackson. He had joined the Navy as a teenager and returned as a man whom, he said, his father barely recognized.
Over the next few months, Muench fraternized with other sailors and soldiers at nightly card games, or in the neighborhood taverns, in a way similar to how life imitates art in Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Soldier’s Home,” in which the protagonist feels oddly out of place in his childhood home after the war, preferring the company of other servicemen, who understand the feeling of being alive.
Muench eventually acclimated and took advantage of the GI Bill, earning a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s in zoology, which prepared him for a lifelong career as an aquatic biologist for Illinois’ Department of Conservation, as it was known then.
But the camaraderie of WWII survivors has been important to Muench all his life. He attended monthly meetings of the WWII Combat Flyers in a Rockford restaurant into his 80s and did not stop going until 2016, when there were only three of them left.
Today, Muench is 94. He and his wife, Dorothy, who died 12 years ago, raised four children: Kevin, Nancy, Peter and Heidi. Kevin is the lone surviving child, and he is also a veteran. Six years ago, Muench remarried, to Mary Louise Shakespeare.
Muench remains active, dispensing wisdom in stories, essays and his book “Spam Cans, Rice Balls and Pearls: Snippets of Memory from World War II,” which is available on Amazon. Among its themes are the differences and similarities between American and Japanese culture, the unintended consequences of war and the lessons we can learn.
“Both philosophically and as a Christian, I am opposed to war unless it becomes a matter of our survival,” Muench wrote.
I confess to a personal bias in writing about Muench, since he evokes memories of my late father, Charles McGrath, a WWII anti-aircraft officer and a member of Muench’s brotherhood in the era of big bands, Route 66, Audie Murphy and Frank Sinatra.
It was the generation that waged a long and costly campaign against the tyranny of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Emperor Hirohito, when war protests by Americans were unheard of and no one burned their draft cards.
Asked about his role in WWII, Muench answers without hesitation: “I really didn’t do anything.”
But he did, in fact, dedicate two years of his life to train and to wait for the call to battle, along with tens of thousands of other military members staging on the sidelines, without whom the commanders could not plot a course to the victory that would save humanity.
Readers with parents or relatives from that war who are no longer with us will understand the emotions I felt when I was able to offer my gratitude to Seaman 1st Class Muench, a comrade of my father, for his service and sacrifice.
For the other remaining survivors of WWII, this Veterans Day may be one of our last chances to say thanks to these treasured American heroes.
David McGrath is an emeritus English professor at the College of DuPage and the author of “South Siders.” He can be reached at [email protected].
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