WWII veterans find fast friendship in retirement home

Bob Murphy, a Navy pilot during World War II, loves to visit George O’Connell, who was a Navy ship commander, at the retirement community where they both live. “Every time I go to his room, I always salute him and say, ‘Request permission to come aboard, sir,’ and he always says, ‘Permission granted,’ ” Murphy says.

They met when Murphy, 89, moved to the Lenbrook retirement community a few years ago. O’Connell, 96, already lived there. “I heard about ‘the Lenbrook Admiral,’ so I went over and introduced myself and saluted,” Murphy says.

They’ve been friends ever since.

O’Connell, among the oldest Naval Academy graduates and a participant in many of the major naval operations of World War II, is the quiet one. Murphy, praised by Lt. Cdr. R.W. Ramage, a commanding officer, as a “skillful and aggressive” pilot, is gregarious and fancies himself a ladies’ man.

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“I feel very sorry for them,” O’Connell says. “They don’t know who they’re fighting. Identity is a big thing. Who is the enemy? It’s hard to tell whether someone’s friend or foe.”

Murphy says: “I just look at Memorial Day as more than crosses in a field. Not long ago, I saw in the paper that we had lost 13 (servicemembers) but they (the enemy) lost 64. Those are people on both sides. I don’t like it when they make it look like a basketball score.”

Neither calls himself a hero. “No. We did our job,” O’Connell says. “The heroes have crosses on their graves or are sitting at the bottom of the ocean,” Murphy says.

Sharing war stories

Lenbrook is a luxury retirement community in Atlanta’s upscale Buckhead section. Murphy says there are other veterans among its 452 residents, but “I don’t think they’ve got the relationship George and I have.” They visit at least weekly and “shoot the bull,” Murphy says.

They reminisce about men they served with, those who made it back and those who didn’t. They are among 2,272,390 surviving veterans of the 16 million who served in World War II, says the Department of Veterans Affairs, which says about 263,000 of them will die this year.

So they share war stories about battles that are but historical names to generations of Americans — Normandy, Okinawa, the Mariana Islands, the Marshall Islands.

O’Connell was at sea aboard the USS Salt Lake City, a heavy cruiser, steaming toward Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on Dec. 7, 1941. The ship got there the next day. O’Connell was awarded a Silver Star and a Gold Star for his service aboard the Salt Lake City — among 26 awards and decorations he received but isn’t eager to discuss.

“This is a modest man,” says Reggie Vachon, O’Connell’s nephew. O’Connell’s wife, Francys Galvin O’Connell, died in 1991. “He doesn’t even like it when we pull his medals out and show them to people.”

Intersecting lives

A Birmingham native who served 34 years in the Navy and then was a textile company executive, O’Connell isn’t the oldest living Naval Academy graduate. That distinction belongs to retired rear admiral Aubrey J. Bourgeois, 102, says Lawrence Heyworth III of the U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association. O’Connell is 31st-oldest.

O’Connell was captain of the destroyer and minesweeper USS Hambleton, which escorted the battleship USS Missouri into Tokyo Bay, where the Japanese formally surrendered on Sept. 2, 1945. Murphy was also there, flying above Tokyo Bay. “(Gen. Douglas) MacArthur said he wanted so many planes over the signing of the peace terms that he couldn’t see the sky,” Murphy says. By then, he had flown his Grumman TBF torpedo bomber on numerous missions. “If I told you the cities I bombed, I couldn’t pronounce them, and you couldn’t spell them,” he says.

His hardest war duty was visiting the family and fiancée of a buddy who didn’t come home: “I had a roommate, George (Gus) Gustin of St. Louis. We had an agreement that if one of us didn’t make it back, he would go and see the family of the other one. … It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do; stays with you forever.”

Murphy, an Atlanta native, was in the Navy for four years and then a food company executive. His wife, Betsy Osborne Murphy, died in 2002. He has two adult children and is quick with a quip, saying of his wartime duty: “I don’t like to be shot at — except by jealous husbands.”

He’s glad he’s friends with “the Lenbrook Admiral.”

“He had to replace Gus,” he says.