Tom Brokaw by The Greatest Generation Page B

Van Gorder has been struggling with his own health problems—he suffered a small stroke in 1997—but he’s still cheerful and grateful for a full life.
    His war experiences, however, now more than fifty years in his past, live on in his memory. “I have flashbacks of the war every day. You can’t get it out of your mind. D-Day, all those boys being slaughtered. When I was working in our hospital I thought about it a lot. I thought about how the war taught us to handle things. We learned a lot.
    â€œThe thing I am most proud of is that hospital,” he says. “If I had my life to do all over again, I’d do it the same way—go somewhere small where people have a need, contribute something to people who need it; help people.”

WESLEY KO
    â€œIn the war I learned to be self-sufficient. . . . I learned to be
a leader. When my business failed I was able to move on,
whereas my wife was devastated by the loss.”
    A SENSE OF personal responsibility and a commitment to honesty is characteristic of this generation. Those were values bred into the young men and women coming of age at the time the war broke out. It’s how they were raised. There are always exceptions to the common bonds of any generation, but in talking to the men and women whose stories make up this book I was struck by the connective cords of their lives, wherever they lived or in whatever circumstances.
    One after another they volunteered how in their families and in their communities they were expected to be responsible for their behavior, how honesty was assumed to be the rule, not the exception. They also talked matter-of-factly about a sense of duty to their country, a sentiment not much in fashion anymore.
    Moreover, in their communities there were always monitors outside their own families to remind them of the ethos of their family and community. I’ve often said I was raised by the strict standards of my mother and father, and also of the parents of my friends, my teachers, my coaches, my ministers, and by the local businessmen who didn’t hesitate to remind me “that’s not how you were raised.”
    Those qualities didn’t show up in a statistical survey of America’s strengths as the country steeled itself for what seemed an unavoidable war, but they were critical to the nation’s preparations, for success depended as much on personal resolve as it did on tanks and planes and ships and guns.

    Wesley Ko, June 1944
    The idea of personal responsibility is such a defining characteristic of the World War II generation that when the rules changed later, these men and women were appalled.
    Wesley Ko is one of them. In 1988, at the age of seventy, his printing business failed, in part because of government regulations and in part because a relocation deal was seriously flawed. Ko was left with a debt of $1.3 million, a loan he’d personally guaranteed. It never occurred to him to declare personal bankruptcy. Ko had learned early in life the meaning of responsibility and self-sufficiency.
    Ko grew up in the Philadelphia area, the son of a Chinese man brought to this country by an American missionary. His father was educated at Princeton and at Temple University and became pastor of a Methodist church for Chinese immigrants in Philadelphia. His mother was the daughter of a Chinese coolie brought to America to work on the railroads, one of the laborers who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were subjected to the same vicious racial discrimination that African Americans suffered. They were treated like an alien and subhuman population, restricted to the backbreaking work on the railroad, or to hand laundries in their own well-defined ghettos.
    Ko’s father hoped to escape that with his education, but the Great Depression was especially hard on preachers, who were dependent on their congregations for financial support. Wesley’s father was just able to hold on to