Fated to Be Friends

"Does the name Ken Myers mean anything to you?"

It didn't.

"How about the 99th Infantry? Battle of the Bulge?"

Serkedakis stared and said: "Pull over."

They stood on the curb and talked for four hours.

Serkedakis had found the guy to thank. They had been living, all that time, less than five miles apart.

* * *

Ken Myers came home on a hospital ship as well. His war ended when a mortar round blew him off a motorcycle, shattering his right leg. More than 60 years later, he still has pain in his feet. Another piece of shrapnel worked out of his arm three years ago.

Myers returned to Takoma Park, where he was a plumber for the next four decades. He outlived two wives and stays alone in the house he bought in the 1960s. He often sits on the porch, watching over the neighborhood with Gigi, his bichon frise. With the little white dog in his big working-man's hands, he talks about the war in a soft rumble.

"They told us there were two soldiers out there, one dead, one alive," he said of his first morning in that Belgian village, still surrounded by Germans. He was a corpsman in a medical unit. "We found the dead guy. Half of his head had been shot away. We were working on the other one when darned if the dead guy didn't raise his head and look at us."

Myers and the other corpsman carried the living corpse back to an aid station in an abandoned house. There he caught holy hell from a doctor who was a major. The officer took one look at the head, half-caked in ice with a tendril of brain matter hanging from one side, and told him to take the man outside and go back for the living soldier.

"I told him he had moved his head, and I wanted to try to save him," Myers said. "That major was cussing me out so much, I was asking the good Lord for help."