WAR STORIES RECALLED AND FORGOTTEN

Some veterans like to tell war stories; some don't.

Harold W. Henderson, a resident of the Missouri Veterans Home for the past eight years, belongs to the latter group.

"I think we want to forget it," he said Monday afternoon at the home's well-attended ice cream social in honor of Memorial Day. "They are memories we don't care to keep."

Henderson was a 30-year-old salesman with a wife, a child and another on the way when he entered the U.S. Army during WWII. He was shipped to Europe in the armored infantry.

"We hit battle too soon," he said, skipping the details. "The day I got out I forgot the Army."

Veterans Home resident Noel C. Orr seems not to have forgotten much about his days in the Army. He was a member of a mobile anti-aircraft unit that landed in Normandy on D-Day three days after his 25th birthday.

The night they landed in an LST watching searchlights crisscross the sky was scary, but in general, he says of his war experiences: "I didn't have the brains to be frightened."

The 80-year-old recalls the heat and dust of Sicily and the hedgerows of Germany, and the deathly silence that fell on the French village of Maubeuge when a German soldier running across a field mistakenly discharged his weapon, revealing his unit's location.

"We opened up on them," Orr said.

His closest call was feeling something hot beneath the sole of his boot in Sicily and reaching down to find a piece of shrapnel.

That is one reason he doesn't mind telling stories.

"I came through it pretty well," he said.

While stationed in England, Orr did the bookwork for the Army.

"I was the Radar O'Reilly of my outfit," he said.

After getting out of the Army, he got a degree from St. Louis University and spent much of his professional career in St. Louis as the group accountant for the Flaming Pit restaurant chain.

Orr has eight sons, the nearest and youngest lives in Kirkwood. He has eight grandchildren and two on the way. He is the only one of his three brothers and two sisters still alive. He left his home in Oran to move into the Veterans Home three months ago.

"I don't want to glorify war," he said. "I always wanted it to end, but I said, 'This is the way it is.'"

Bill Walker, who was seated next to Henderson Monday, served in the Army in Korea in 1953-54 and didn't want to tell any war stories either. Both men are from Cape Girardeau but didn't know each other before entering the Missouri Veterans Home. Henderson has four children spread across the country from New Hampshire to Nevada. His wife lives at the Lutheran Home. Walker has no children.

The bond the two men have is not war but that "we like to go to church," Henderson said. He is the coordinator of the Wednesday morning services at the Veterans Home.

In the end, the 81-year-old Henderson relented and told one war story.

One day in Belgium, he was manning a machine gun that froze up as enemy tanks were approaching.

"I told the Lord I'd do something for Him," Henderson recalled. His machine guns didn't begin working but "those tanks turned and went the other way. I think the Lord brought me back for a reason."

At age 44, Henderson entered a seminary to become a minister, and in 1965 in Bowling Green, he became the first white minister of a black church in Missouri. Later, he became the minister of a church in Moberly in an experiment that combined black and white congregations.

His sermon Wednesday at the Veterans Home, "Buried Treasure," is based on Matthew 22:44: "The Lord said to my Lord: 'Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.'"