Veterans knew fear, stress

BY TONY BARTELME

With the stock market tanking and the presidential campaign turning ugly, it's helpful to get a little perspective about stress, fear and what's really important.

A good place to find this perspective Saturday was on the aircraft carrier Yorktown, where people like Harold Syfrett, Art Leach, Jesse Rodriguez and Ben Couillard gathered for the 60th reunion of the USS Yorktown Association.

Stress?

"Perhaps the most interesting experience was the time we got hit with the bomb," Syfrett said in a matter-of-fact tone.

Syfrett was a telephone electrician on the Yorktown during World War II. He said the Japanese dropped a bomb, "outside the hull, just over by that area here, by the elevator," pointing toward what is now the museum's entrance. The bomb killed five men and wounded another 26. "It sounded like terror."

Fear?

Couillard was a firefighter on the flight deck during World War II. "The bomb hit just below us and picked me up and threw me three or four feet and into a water main. I actually broke the water main and got banged up, and they told me to go to sick bay."

Couillard refused; others were hurt, and he had a job to do too.

Then there was the night the Japanese damaged another American carrier, leaving its planes stranded in the air, he said.

The Yorktown's crew scrambled to make the ship ready for emergency landings.

"We landed three of them," but the fourth crashed, catching fire, he said. "Then the auxiliary tanks started exploding, and the .50-caliber guns started going. The wind was blowing terrible."

He remembered the captain yelling into his bullhorn, "'Get that damn fire out! I lost one ship, and we're not going to lose another!' I was more scared of him than the fire."

Art Leach was a fighter pilot during the war, flying his Hellcat over Tokyo, Okinawa and China.

He remembered how on one mission another pilot managed to fly back to the carrier after a piece of shrapnel flew into the cockpit and lodged in the pilot's skull, blinding him.

The pilot's wingman talked him back the whole way on the radio, telling him to keep his wings up or down.

"That pilot went on to become a school superintendent," Leach said.

Leach remembers another mission over Canton, China, when the pilot next to him suddenly veered toward his plane. Then he saw the tracers from a Japanese plane flying on his tail; the other pilot's quick maneuver had drawn the fire away from him, saving his life.

Leach's eyes moisten as he talks about these times.

Same with Jesse Rodriguez, a parachute rigger, as he remembers a signal officer bringing in planes after battle.

Same with Couillard, who said he doesn't worry too much about the country's economic travails; we've seen worse. "There's too much focus on material things," he said.Not enough on more important things.

Like what?

"Our freedom," Couillard said. And the shipmates he sees during events, like Saturday's reunion.

"The Navy was the best thing that happened to me," he said. "I made friendships that I would die for and will have until I'm out of breath. I loved them back then, and I love what few are left."

Reach Tony Bartelme at 937-5554 or tbartelme@postandcourier.com.