Kenneth Lindl

from Milwaukee, WI

from this article: https://www.milwaukeemag.com/profiles-in-courage-wisconsin-world-war-ii-veterans/ It is the most memorable pinochle game of Ken Lindl’s life. He was in the galley of his Martin PBM Mariner, a Pacific patrol airplane designed to double as a bomber and a small boat, complete with living quarters. They were based just north of Manila in the Philippines and patrolled the South China Sea. The summer of 1945 was relatively quiet for them. So quiet, in fact, that Lindl doesn’t recall ever seeing an enemy fighter nor facing fire from enemy troops or ships. He’d joined the Navy in 1944, before he’d graduated high school, intent on going to submarine school. They made him an aviation ordnanceman, and he manned his Mariner’s bow gun, positioned just ahead of and below the pilots, giving him sweeping views of every stretch of island and ocean they crossed. Two crews were assigned to each plane, and both crews were on this June 30 flight, putting more than 20 men on board. So during takeoff, Lindl was free for a four-man pinochle game. As the plane gained altitude, he noticed that the engine’s pitch didn’t sound normal. They didn’t know it at the time, but seawater was in their fuel tanks. “I looked out the porthole and could see the prop was feathering,” he says. He yelled for everyone to hit the deck, and they did, right before the plane crashed in a rice paddy. “We just saw a ball of flame come at us, and we exploded.” He was near an exit hatch and the first one out, moments before the co-pilot tumbled out on top of him. They scrambled away from the burning wreckage as ammunition from the Mariner’s five sets of .50-caliber guns cooked off. Other men scattered from the wreck. Four crew members never got out. Those who survived were too far from their seaplane tender, the USS Currituck, for immediate assistance, and they’d crashed a few miles from shore. Lindl, with but a small cut on his head, watched as medical supplies dropped from the sky, some from another Mariner in his squadron, some from a passing P-51 pilot, who’d attached it to a scarf. They gave what care they could to the injured, but one man was so badly burned and bloated that the only place Lindl could stick a morphine shot was his foot. Local natives trickled toward the crash. Lindl traded them his .38 revolver for some coconut oil, which they rubbed over the man’s charred flesh, and a wire bedspring to carry him. The natives led them on a 45-minute trek to a coastal village, through rice paddies and across a river so deep that water reached their armpits, forcing them to carry their comrade high over their heads. But even with more medical help at the village, the severely burned man would not survive, one of seven lives the crash claimed. Back on the Currituck, flown there by a Mariner that met them at the village, the survivors recuperated. Lindl’s head cut needed only four stitches, but he spent lots of time in sick bay, often playing cards with his wounded crewmates. Among them was his pilot, whose hands were badly burned. Rather than play his own hand, “I’d deal and play his cards for him,” Lindl says, and he’d wonder at being spared a worse fate.

Joseph F. LoCascio

My grandfather, Joseph F. LoCascio served in Incheon, South Korea and is a Korean War Veteran of the U.S. Army. My grandfather worked hard his entire life and believed a hard work ethic was the foundation for success. He was a wonderful man and our family is proud to call him a veteran.

Tom Hull

from Milwaukee, WI

Tom was a hardworking and very family-oriented man who was also extremely proud of his Native American heritage and proud of his time as a paratrooper in Vietnam.