War stories by land, sea and air

This was a switch.

Generally, when I contact someone about an upcoming event, they want the article done in advance. The more people that publicity can lure, the better.

Not Ralph Miller.

“I’d appreciate it if you could wait until after the fact to write this,” he said last week. “We’re afraid that too many people will show up.”

As it turned out, his fears were somewhat justified. A special Memorial Day service held at Stonegate Villas attracted more than 80 people, 24 of them veterans, to the complex’s clubhouse off Old Graves Mill Road. The place was packed on Monday, even without our help.

So why did Miller contact me if he didn’t want the world (or at least Lynchburg) to know about his commemoration?

“A couple of the guys have some really interesting stories,” he said, “and I thought you might want to hear them.”

Miller, a World War II veteran, brushed aside his own story, saying only: “I was in transportation.

“When we came home,” he continued, “there was no big celebration or anything. We just went back to doing what we were doing before the war, and a lot of us never really talked about it much.”

Andy Topa, a Vietnam vet, arched his eyebrows.

“It was worse with us,” he said. “They hated us when we came back.”

An ex-infantryman who had to be lifted out of a rice paddy by helicopter after suffering multiple shrapnel wounds, Topa was sharing the clubhouse sitting area with Navy veteran Charles Loving and former bombardier John Lucian. Between them, they had land, sea and air covered.

“My plane was shot down on my fourth mission,” said Lucian, “and we all had to bail out.”

Of course, the crew had been trained in the use of parachutes. Hadn’t they?

“Nope,” Lucian said. “We weren’t paratroopers, and we had no idea what we were doing. I was scared to death.”

The pilot, who had managed to nurse his wounded plane — damaged over Germany — to the friendly soil of England, failed to eject and died in the crash. All of the crew survived.

“I came down in a plowed field,” Lucian said. “Nice and soft.”

And then he flew 31 more missions, crouched down in the belly of a Flying Fortress as puffs of anti-aircraft flak blossomed in the sky around him.

Loving, meanwhile, served much of his World War II time in the belly of a battleship, the West Virginia.

“It was sunk at Pearl Harbor,” said Loving, later a Lynchburg police officer, “and they brought in 200 electrical engineers, pulled it up and got it working again. I was a machinist’s mate down in the engine room. It was usually around 120 degrees there, so we never wore shirts.”

On the day the Japanese finally surrendered, Loving recalled, the West Virginia was the first ship into Tokyo Bay. Loving knew why.

“Because ours was an old ship,” he said, “they wanted it to go in first in case the whole thing was a trick.”

Topa also knew about going in first, having served on occasion as the point man for his infantry column.

“I was drafted,” said the Philadelphia native, “and I went to Vietnam the day Martin Luther King was shot. The worst part about getting wounded was that I was only one week from my R&R. I’d waited for that a long time.”