Insurance Agent, WW II Veteran

Malcolm T. Purisch, 88, an Equitable life insurance agent for almost 40 years who died March 30 of complications from congestive heart failure at Holy Cross Hospital, never carried a gun during World War II, but he never doubted his role in the war.

"I wasn't carrying a gun, I didn't shoot anyone, but what I did was important," he told The Washington Post in 1995, during the 50th anniversary of the war's end.

He joined the Army Air Corps in 1938, judging that there wasn't much work for an 18-year-old Brooklyn, N.Y., native during the Depression. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he was sent to Australia and the South Pacific as a supply sergeant and was promoted to headquarters liaison with the 5th Air Force.

"Not all of us were on the front lines. But the man behind the man with the gun" -- by which he meant guys such as himself who loaded the bombs and got the tanks to the front lines -- "was important, too."

He contracted malaria, dysentery and dengue during the hellish fighting in New Guinea, where 1 in 11 Allied servicemen perished. One night, while supervising a convoy of 500 thousand-pound bombs over a narrow mountainous road in a teeming tropical storm, Mr. Purisch climbed onto the hood of a truck that was teetering over the edge, attached a cable and helped pull it back.

He did shoot an enemy soldier, he told his family, when he and his buddies were pinned down by a sniper high in a tree on the Philippine island of Leyte. Mr. Purisch got hold of a Thompson submachine gun, he told his son, stood up and emptied its magazine in the direction of a muzzle flash he had seen. The Japanese sniper fell out of the tree, dead.

During a Japanese strafing of the island, he comforted a wounded comrade whose head was shattered. "He was calling out for his mother, and then he died in my arms," Mr. Purisch said. "I didn't see combat like the infantry, but this sure as hell was combat."

His camera had been lost, so he painted watercolors to remember some of the scenes he had witnessed. Painting remained a hobby for the rest of his life, and he exhibited acrylics works at Strathmore gallery and concert center's Art on the Fence program.

After the war, Mr. Purisch graduated from New York University. He worked briefly in the import-export business before joining the Equitable Life Assurance Society in 1954 in New York. In 1961, he moved to the Washington area, where many of his clients were active-duty and retired military people. He rose to senior master agent and was inducted into the company's hall of fame by the time he retired in 1993.

He was a Mason and taught ceramics at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington in Rockville. He also loved to garden, do woodworking and build toys for his grandchildren.

His wife of 55 years, Lillian Purisch, died in 2006.

Survivors include two children, Mark Purisch and Kathy Cohen, both of North Potomac; and five grandchildren.