The Living Lessons in Sacrifice

He can’t march anymore. Roy Burch doesn’t have any legs.

But nobody was standing taller on Memorial Day than the World War II veteran.

Gov. Gray Davis, a pair of generals and a crowd of 2,000 were nearby at the Los Angeles National Cemetery in Westwood to salute those who have fought for the United States.

Burch, 76, was on a hilltop a quarter-mile away, as close as he could get. He was sitting in a wheelchair outside a Veterans Affairs hospital building where he lives. He strained to hear or see the ceremony that was so close--yet so far away.

Davis was urging that future generations be taught that America’s peace and prosperity is the result of past generations’ sacrifices. As Davis finished, a squadron of WWII fighter bombers roared overhead.

The deep rumble of the propeller-driven Corsairs was a familiar sound to many in the hospital--old soldiers like Burch who wear their battle scars like others wear battle ribbons.

Burch lives among 150 patients who are being cared for in the hospital’s nursing homes north of Wilshire Boulevard. For many, it is the last home they will ever know.

The warriors are mostly from WWII, Korea and Vietnam. One of the spryest is a 106-year-old Army private from World War I.

On a day when many thought more than usual about wartime sacrifices because of the movie “Pearl Harbor,” some in the hospital still felt forgotten. Many have no families and few visitors.

Burch snapped a photograph of the nine aging warplanes flying in close formation in the distance over the ceremony.

“I think I got pretty good pictures,” he declared. “I’ll get them developed as soon as I can and show the guys.”

Many have stories like Burch’s.

An Army sergeant trained in artillery, Burch was assigned to a front-line infantry unit that island-hopped across the Pacific.

He had been a scrawny 18-year-old from Lynwood when he volunteered in 1942. “Everybody wanted to fight in WWII--it was not like Vietnam,” he said.

He received a Purple Heart for the shrapnel wounds he suffered to his hands. He earned a pair of Bronze Stars for heroism in fighting off enemy soldiers rushing the American line.

“I was in a foxhole, and they were as close to me as that wall,” Burch said, pointing 15 feet down the hospital corridor toward a wall decorated with a painted mural of an American eagle.

The room next to the mural was occupied by William Waddell, 54, a Vietnam veteran who is dying of cancer. The former aircraft structural mechanic is from Palmdale.

Waddell had been startled by the window-rattling blast of the 105mm Howitzer cannons that rendered a 21-gun salute to end the cemetery service.

“When I came home from Vietnam, we were met by protesters at the El Paso airport,” Waddell said. “They spit at us and called us ‘child killers.’ They didn’t hit me with the spit, but the words hurt. It was disgusting to be called a baby killer.”

“People should think about veterans,” Waddell said. “This country should celebrate Memorial Day.”

After he got back, Waddell never put on his uniform again. When he applied for his first civilian job, as a warehouse manager for an El Paso air-conditioning company, he simply told his new employer that he was a veteran who had been honorably discharged.

In actuality, Waddell had been a Navy fuel technician on the aircraft carrier Oriskany off Vietnam. He worked in 110-degree heat below the flight deck, showering in seawater because the aging ship’s freshwater supply was used by the flight deck’s catapult.

VA nurse Frank Gillette of Carson, himself a retired Navy medical corpsman, said authorities are investigating whether the asbestos-filled Oriskany might be the cause of Waddell’s fast-spreading cancer.

Gillette, 56, is part father-confessor and part son to 53 patients on the second floor of Building 213, where Waddell and Burch live.

Included in that group is former World War I Army Private Andrew Lee, who lives in the hospital because of his advanced age. Lee hitched a ride to Monday’s cemetery ceremony, at which uniformed members of the military lined up to have their pictures taken with the 106-year-old after the hourlong program ended.

“He’s every nurse’s dream. He works out every day,” Gillette said of Lee, the son of a slave whose WWI job was to tend horses and mules that carried supplies for American soldiers. “It may sound silly, but all I want to do when I see Mr. Lee is walk up and hug him.”

Building 213’s residents include amputees who have lost legs to diabetes. Unlike Lee, many of them are unable to walk.

Gillette made his way through a knot of veterans in wheelchairs watching a baseball game on a lounge-area TV to check in on Uyless Clement, a 70-year-old ex-Marine from South Los Angeles, who drove a 4x4 supply truck and a staff car during the Korean War.

A recent arrival at the hospital, Clement has undergone a skin graft for a diabetic condition. The onetime electrical company worker is uncertain how long he will be hospitalized.

“I’ve got no family, no children. There were no big parades for us after our war. It look like we were forgotten,” he said.

Those attending the cemetery ceremony were reminded that a prolonged period of peace has caused the ranks of veterans to drastically shrink.

For that reason, “there’s the risk we’ll forget all we have paid” in blood for American freedom, warned keynote speaker Brig. Gen. William M. Wilson Jr., vice-commander for the Space and Missile Systems Center at the Los Angeles Air Force Base.

Back at the hospital, VA spokesman Ron Bergan said veterans groups and other organizations work hard at trying to cheer up bedridden veterans. Loneliness and despair can take its toll.

“There are other weekends that aren’t Memorial Day. That’s when having a visitor can be precious,” Bergan said. “Come and play cards, or read a book or a newspaper to them. There’s plenty to do.”

Roy Burch, who has been hospitalized eight months, said he makes the rounds in his wheelchair, doing what he can to cheer up his buddies. He leads regular “smoking classes” where patients assemble outside to light up. “We teach how to inhale cigarettes,” he joked.

Several weeks ago, he talked one of those on Building 213’s second floor out of killing himself.

Burch, a former Salvation Army worker from Los Angeles said he has no living relatives. He is working to keep his own spirits up, he said, even though doctors tell him they may soon have to amputate part of his left arm.

His circulatory system, perhaps influenced by lingering malaria he contracted during WWII, is giving out on him.

“But I’m not going to give up. I’m going to keep fighting until the last moment.”

Like any good soldier.