Where do we get such men and women?  Where do they come from?  Will we always be so blessed?  As a young septuagenarian, I feel a variegation of positive emotions about these heroes we are blessed to have known or read about.  They make me so very proud to be an American citizen in the early 21^st century.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch on 5-7-08 carried the sad news that a black American war hero born in 1913 had died.  During WWII, William J. Hamilton won five (5) Bronze Service Stars in Europe.  In his personal life, he was a community role model and devoted family man of the Catholic Faith.  I never met “Bill” when I was a St. Louis police officer in the 60’s, but I patrolled his streets Page and Whittier.  Like this man, I used the GI Bill to put me through college.

Meanwhile, we just lost our neighbor, one John Wiesniewski, aged 87, who was a carrier pilot in the Pacific during WWII.  His Catholic wife, Lucia, survived a Nazi concentration camp in Poland when she was 10yrs. old (1945).  The so-called “showers” (poison gas) failed to work.

All of these heroes danced between the raindrops and I for one am humbled by their character and faith. 

J. Skip Bennett

Lebanon, Ill.