pPOTSDAM — For village resident George E. Burkum, memories of Japan, and his time there as a soldier in World War II, are bittersweet. And now, at almost 91, he feels lucky to be alive — and in one piece./ppFrom his room on the fourth floor of Midtown Apartments, the 90-year-old veteran, whose birthday is in April, said he volunteered for the Army in 1944 with five friends because it was something he felt he ought to do, and was the only one in that group deemed fit to enter basic training, despite the fact that he was missing the index finger on his left hand from a woodcutting accident. /pp“I was the only one that passed,” he said. “I decided it was time for me to serve my country.”/ppDespite the missing finger, Mr. Burkum set a record for marksmanship during basic training, later receiving a medal for sharp shooting, and earning the rank of technician third grade in the 176th Engineers, 9th Battalion, in the 10th U.S. Army, while stationed in Okinawa./ppMr. Burkum, who made it through the war with all his limbs, counts himself lucky, recalling one incident that ended in tragedy when a buried explosive claimed both legs of one of his comrades. /ppHeaded back from his camp’s shower, he said he did not notice the trigger of an explosive buried nearby, and therefore could not warn three soldiers he knew who were headed the other way./pp“They said, ‘How’s that path? Did you see anything?’ I said, ‘No, I’ve just come through there. Didn’t see nothing.’ I hadn’t walked 200 feet from where I was, and they started down that path, (and) he lost both his legs,” Mr. Burkum said. “I’m lucky to have my legs, I tell you. I’m lucky.”/ppHe said a bunkmate was also lucky, having narrowly missed being impaled by a tent pole when a violent typhoon leveled their camp, tearing tents like paper and tossing their floors like frisbees in winds that gusted at speeds above 120 mph./pp“The ridge pole broke, and went right through his bunk, right through his cot, right into the ground,” he said. “If he hadn’t moved, got up out of there, it would have went right straight through him.”/ppBeyond the camp, Mr. Burkum remembered the costs of the fighting, from civilians who committed mass suicide by throwing themselves off seaside cliffs to avoid capture by American troops, to the deaths of Japanese soldiers at a castle near the city of Naha, who refused to surrender. /pp“They didn’t give up; they wouldn’t come out,” he said. “We asked them to surrender and come out, put their hands up, and they wouldn’t, so we tossed some grenades up there and that was the end of them.”/ppDespite the losses, Mr. Burkum stood tall, even near the war’s end in 1945, when the nation mourned the loss of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt./ppStationed at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, Mr. Burkum said he was one of many soldiers standing at attention on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., that spring, saluting the late president’s hearse as it passed in the funeral procession. While he called it an honor to be there, he mourned just as the nation did that day. /pp“It was a sorrowful thing; you felt sorry,” he said, holding back tears. “You hate things like that.”/ppOne of 10 children, Mr. Burkum was born in Pierrepont and has been a lifelong resident of Potsdam. Having once owned a farm on Benton Road, he raised and raced horses at fairs across New York and Vermont. He is one of 35,716 World War II veterans in New York, and one of 697,806 World War II veterans who are still alive today, according to the National World War II Museum online. /ppThe website reports that according to U.S. Veterans Administration figures, the remaining World War II veterans, most now in their 90s, die at a rate of approximately 430 per day and are estimated to be gone completely by 2036./p
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