Marine Basic School classmate John Wegl (B Company [TBS 1-67]  July–November 1966) wrote me to comment on my last post about the climate in the United States surrounding emigration of refugees from Europe after WW II.  After this introductory note, I will reproduce his comment/actually a brief summary of his story. It is a story that begs for a memoir—in many ways much more than mine might qualify—because it speaks poignantly not only to the experience of families displaced by World War II, which it most certainly does, but also to the strains on families caused by the Cold War, which extended John’s separation from his parents for more than a decade!

Intro: By my reckoning, our Basic School class had four members who were born outside of the United States, all in Europe. In addition to me, there was John (born in Romania in an ethnic German family), John O. (born in the Netherlands–and only first name given because I don’t have his permission to use it), and Matthew McKnight (born in Wales, of a US soldier and English nurse, and killed in Vietnam in October 1967 [and discussed in https://www.fanande.netwp-admin/?=571 — “And One Thing Leads to Another, and Another“).

John’s abbreviated story, offered with his permission, follows below.

Thanks for sharing [Andy].  It was a different time and a different national mindset.  My parents came over in May 1950 along with my six-month old sister—flying in through New York and then straight to St. Louis.  They were sponsored by a family relative who had been in St. Louis for quite some time and arranged for their flight, housing, and a job for my father, and that is another story onto itself.

My parents had been reunited in Germany after the war—my dad coming from a POW camp in England to Germany and my mother from a slave labor camp in the Ukraine (then part of the  Soviet Union), where she and about 70,000 other ethnic Germans from Romania were deported in January 1945.  Quite a few books/articles have been written about that tragedy.

My mother had gotten sick, and instead of being sent home, she was shipped to East Germany in 1947.  She eventually worked her way into West Germany to join my dad in ’48.  I was with my grandparents in Romania and finally got permission to join my parents in the states in 1958.  Ten years to the date I landed in New York, I landed in Da Nang.

While in college and in the Marine Corps, I wrote letters to my grandparents–mailed them to my parents, and they sent them on.  My maternal grandfather died while I was in college.  My paternal grandfather was killed by Tito’s partisans while trying to escape the Russian advance, and my grandmother and my father’s sister and her family were ordered to go back home.  That grandmother died in the early 1970s.  My maternal grandmother, who essentially raised me, got to Germany in the early 1980s as part of Germany’s “freedom purchase” of Germans in Romania.  I got to visit with her twice while I was still on active duty and then saw her one more time after I retired before she passed away.  I did get to her funeral—she outlived both my parents.

I have not written a memoir—started a few years ago but got overwhelmed with other commitments and have not picked up on it.  Maybe after my tenure on the local board ends in December I will start up again.  — John Wegl

John would go on to serve a career in the Marine Corps. Among his duties was working in USMC Recruiting Advertising Branch (1969–1972), as the Marine Corps ramped up its “We Need a Few Good Men” recruiting campaign. Featured were these two posters—which I suspect could be could part of his memoir’s title.