Aging veterans cast light on battles past

Editor’s note: In honor of Veterans Day, Today’s News-Herald takes a look at the men who served in the armed forces, their families and veterans’ services. This is the second in a four-part series.

Hearing his thoughts on the current war in Iraq, some might be tempted to dismiss Everett Reamer, 83, as just another anti-war liberal.

“I tear up when I hear about these guys being lost in Iraq,” he said. “It’s a senseless war that we never should have gotten into.”

He also stands adamantly against torture. “I’m opposed to it in all forms,” he said. “We should abide by the rules of the Geneva Convention.”

Yet these are not the idle musings of any old man. A glass case on the wall of Reamer’s Lake Havasu City home displays the medals he won in World War II, among them a Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts and three Presidential unit citations.

Fact is, Reamer knows a thing or two about war. He is also no stranger to torture.

Sit with him for a while, and he will bend your ear with a tale of unparalleled brutality he endured during 40 horrific months as a Japanese prisoner of war.

“You’ve heard about the water treatment?” he said, referring to the debate over waterboarding, or simulated drowning, of suspected terrorists by the Bush administration and U.S. forces. “They did that to me.”

Reamer belongs to an estimated 2.9 million living World War II veterans, out of the more than 16 million who served. Called the greatest generation, these veterans defeated the Nazis and the Japanese in what some say was the most brutal warfare the world has ever seen.

Many of these veterans still call Lake Havasu City their home.

“We’ve got a tremendous concentration of veterans here because it’s a retirement community,” said Lee Borgan, an officer with the Arizona Department of Veterans Services. Veterans Affairs estimates there are 37,000 veterans in Mohave County and 11,000 in Lake Havasu City.

With most WWII veterans in their 80s, it will not be long before no living memory exists of their battle against almost unimaginable evil. Reamer, for one, plans to spend his remaining years working to educate young people about war. “You don’t go into war unless you’re attacked, unless you have to defend yourself. You don’t provoke war,” he said.

Reamer’s journey began in tiny Cleves, Ohio, where the then 16-year-old forged his father’s signature on a permission form for enlistment. He soon found himself on the Philippine island of Corregidor, near Manila, manning an anti-aircraft gun. Only three miles from the coast of Bataan, where the Japanese had set up an artillery barrage, Reamer’s battalion endured months of near-constant bombardment.

When the Japanese finally overran the island, they took no mercy on the thousands of prisoners they captured. For Reamer, that meant months in the notorious jungle prison camp of Cabanatuan, where an estimated 40 percent of prisoners died of starvation, malnutrition, malaria and jaundice. Beatings and other torture were common.

“They treated us like subhumans,” he said. “They hated the ground we walked on.”

Reamer eventually ended up in another camp far to the north, in Osaka, Japan. There he drew the wrath of guards after an unsuccessful attempt to steal Red Cross packages that were not being distributed.

His first punishment was being forced to stand at attention for 132 hours successively. If he moved at all, he was beaten with canes.

After another 28 days of torture, he was brought before a Japanese military court to be tried for the theft. He feared for his life. “I was in a state of shock,” he said. “There wasn’t any law there.”

His sentence was one year of solitary confinement in a 6-foot-by-4-foot bare concrete cell. When temperatures plunged in winter, he developed frostbite and gangrene on his hands and feet.

When the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war in the Pacific theater to a sudden end, he was brought before two high-ranking Japanese officers. “They said, ‘The war is now over, now we are friends.’”

Reamer, who stood almost 6 feet tall, weighed only 92 pounds at the time of his release.

Like many veterans, Reamer returned home with serious health issues, and as old age takes its toll, he requires care for increasingly severe ailments.

Yet if the day ever comes that he cannot make it to one of the major veterans hospitals in Arizona without assistance, a group of dedicated volunteers is standing by to lend a hand.

The Lake Havasu City branch of Disabled American Veterans runs Vet Vans, providing transportation for about 200 riders each month to Veterans Affairs hospitals in Prescott and Phoenix. The program has been in place since 1994, and about 19 volunteer drivers give their time to make it possible.

Dennis “Mack” McGee, himself a Navy vet, is one of the group’s most indefatigable drivers, racking up almost 30,000 miles in the past year. The pleasure, however, is all his, he said.

“Without these guys, we might not be talking here today,” he said. “It’s a privilege to haul some of these old boys around.”

You may contact the reporter at jrudolf@havasunews.com.

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