09/17/2026
OPINION: THE GREATEST GENERATION SUFFERED LINGERING WOUNDS
John C. Hughes--The Daily World
DEAR READER: My copy of “The Greatest Generation” is autographed to me by Robert Eugene Bush, who personified the title of Tom Brokaw’s best-seller.
A high school dropout, Bob joined the U.S.
Naval Reserve at 17 in 1944. Sixteen months later, he was a medical corpsman attached to a Marine Corps r***e company during the Battle of Okinawa.
Here’s the official citation for what he did on May 2, 1945: “Fearlessly braving the fury of artillery, mortar, and machinegun fire from strongly entrenched hostile positions, Bush constantly and unhesitatingly moved from one casualty to another to attend the wounded falling under the enemy’s murderous barrages. As the attack passed over a ridge top, Bush was advancing to administer blood plasma to a marine officer lying wounded on the skyline when the Japanese launched a savage counterattack.
“In this perilously exposed position, he resolutely maintained the flow of lifegiving plasma. With the bottle held high in one hand, Bush drew his pistol with the other and fired into the enemy ranks until his am******on was expended. Quickly seizing a discarded carbine, he trained his fire on the Japanese charging point-blank over the hill, accounting for six of the enemy despite his own serious wounds and the loss of one eye suffered during his desperate battle in defense of the helpless man.
“With the hostile force finally routed, he calmly disregarded his own critical condition to complete his mission, valiantly refusing medical treatment for himself until his officer patient had been evacuated, and collapsing only after attempting to walk to the battle aid station. His daring initiative, great personal valor, and heroic spirit of self-sacrifice in service of others reflect great credit upon Bush and enhance the finest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service.”
BOB BUSH returned home to Pacific County that fall and married his dimple-cheeked high school sweetheart, Wanda Spooner. Their honeymoon trip took them to the White House to meet President Truman. At 18, Bush became the youngest member of the United States Navy to receive the Medal of Honor during World War II.
In 1952, at South Bend, Bush and fellow veteran Vic Druzianich founded the Bayview Lumber Company. Over the years, emphasizing customer service, they expanded their business to seven lumber yards in Southwest Washington.
I was a fly on the wall one night at Westport in the 1970s when Bob hosted a fishing-trip gathering of the Medal of Honor Society, including General Jimmy Doolittle. “I hate it when someone says I ‘won’ this medal,” one recipient said. Shaking his head with a sad smile, Bush said, “If war was a TV contest, they’d call it ‘You Bet Your Life.’” Bush told Brokaw the Medal of Honor “wasn’t given to me because I’m the greatest guy who came down the pike.” Acting on instinctive courage and waves of adrenalin, he said he was lucky to become a surviving hero. From Omaha Beach to Okinawa, there were thousands of other selfless soldiers, sailors and airmen who paid the ultimate price to protect democracy, Bush said. “So, I look at it as though I’m a custodian for those who died.”
He honored that obligation for 60 years as a tireless advocate for veterans.
Cancer proved more cunning than enemy fire. It claimed Robert E. Bush at 79 in 2005. I joined the throng of mourners at historic Fern Hill Cemetery on an evergreen hillside near Menlo. I think of him often in these difficult days.
ONE OF OUR obligations to those who died defending democracy is to sort the truth from the shibboleths promoted by those who want us to embrace plastic patriotism while our government shirks its duty to our servicemen and women and military veterans.
David Nasaw, an award-winning historian whose father served in the Army Medical Corps during World War II, has given us a revealing new book: “The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II.”
The book amplifies the stories I heard from my mother-in-law, Irene Lillis Descher, who joined the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in 1942 after receiving her nursing degree from the University of Portland. She was assigned to the hospital at Kingman Army Airfield in Arizona, which was treating air crew members for psychoneurotic symptoms, commonly called “combat fatigue.” In World War I, the catch phrase was “shell shock.” Today, we know it as PTSD.
Irene put it like this: “A lot of the wounds were invisible until they started screaming in the middle of the night.” My uncle, Charles McSpadden, who flew 32 missions over Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II as a waist-gunner on a B-17, kept it all inside. He never talked about planes tumbling out of formation with a missing wing or exploding in fireballs. When I asked, he deflected.
Combat in the Pacific Theater took a particularly heavy toll.
A Navy psychiatrist treating hollow-eyed young Marines wrote in 1943: “We are not sure whether we are seeing a new disease entity. … We do believe, however, that never before in history has such a group of healthy, toughened, well-trained men been subjected to such conditions as the combat troops of the U.S. Marine Corps faced” on Guadalcanal and the other Solomon Islands in the summer of 1942. “The strain and stress experienced by these men produced a group neurosis that has not been seen before and may never be seen again.”
Sadly, it has been seen, again and again, with incalculable collateral damage, often downplayed by War Department propaganda that enough testosterone salves all wounds.
THE GREATEST GENERATION won the war, but its homecoming was not all hugs, kisses and happily-ever-afters, let alone the ticker-tape parades for the generals and admirals. “There were shortages of every conceivable consumer item,” especially autos, as well as adequate housing, Nasaw writes. And “no magic switch” could turn off the hurt or erase horrific memories. “The lost years were gone forever.”
The divorce rate soared; wives who had joined the labor force during the war (6.7 million of them, a quarter of whom were mothers of children under 10) were displaced by returning male veterans. Many resented it. Their husbands were confused, moody and impatient. “The vast majority who lived with war connected psychological distress did not seek help from VA doctors,” Nasaw writes. “They suffered quietly, learned to tough it out on their own.” Many self-medicated with alcohol. Some became distant, abusive, cynical.
As a child growing up in Aberdeen’s working-class West End, I caught glimpses of all that. My parents’ marriage was a casualty of the war. An unintended outcome of a three-day pass in 1943, I grew up without a father. My resilient mother did her best to make up for that, though she was emotionally scarred.
WHAT I NEVER saw until I was stationed in the South with the U.S. Air Force in the early 1960s was the viciousness of racism. Practically the only Black person I’d ever seen was the road show Aunt Jemima who whipped up pancakes for us in the A.J. West Cafeteria one day.
If Black veterans returning to the South harbored any notion that their bravery would dispel Jim Crow, the awakening was worse than rude. Consider the case of Army Sergeant Isaac Woodard, wounded in action in New Guinea. Discharged in Georgia in 1946, he was wearing his uniform and medals when he boarded a bus for home to South Carolina. Told by the white bus driver to sit down and shut up when he asked about a restroom stop, Woodard was confronted down the road by policemen who battered him savagely, one with a billy club. The decorated veteran spent the night in jail, woke up blind, and was fined $50.
“Southern Whites were committed to … punishing Black veterans who disobeyed Jim Crow restrictions,” Nasaw writes. “But of even greater concern was their fear that the returning Black veterans would attempt to register to vote and pressure others to follow their lead.”
We won World War II, thanks to The Greatest Generation. At a price. The battle for racial justice still rages 250 years after we declared the self-evident yet elusive truth that all men are created equal. Unless they want to vote.
Bob Bush would be appalled.
MEANWHILE, it remains to be seen whether President Trump’s submissive Pentagon will follow through on earlier announced plans to name a new aircraft carrier in honor of Dorie Miller, the first Black recipient of the Navy Cross.
A noncombatant mess attendant on the USS West Virginia, Miller was nominated for the Medal of Honor for his heroism on December 7, 1941. The 22-year-old sailor assisted wounded shipmates, including the battleship’s gravely injured captain, during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Then, “despite no prior training in gunnery,” the Texas sharecropper’s son manned an anti-aircraft gun and shot down at least one enemy plane. Some say several more. Miller was killed in action two years later when his second ship was torpedoed.
Sources told news agencies there have been “internal conversations” among Navy brass about naming the new aircraft carrier to honor Trump instead of Miller, never mind that the president sat out the Vietnam War with heel-bone spurs and college deferments. Another warship might be renamed for Miller, according to Pentagon sources.
Another notion is that the Navy might follow through on awarding the brave sailor the Medal of Honor. Better 85 years late than never.
Bob Bush would be pleased.
The final authorization for our nation’s highest military award is up to Congress - and, of course, approval from the omnipotent Commander in Chief.
John C. Hughes was chief historian for the Office of the Secretary of State for 17 years after retiring as editor and publisher of The Daily World in 2008.--The Daily World, August 29, 2026
