I talked to Phil Roettinger every chance I got, and since he came into the store for an Ice Cream almost every morning and then took his traditional seat in the corner, we talked pretty much every morning. No matter what was falling apart in my world on any given day I always tried to make sure that I put those pressures aside to sit and talk to him for at least a few minutes. I esteemed him (as I did Phil Maher) and tried to dedicate the time to be with them when the chance was there to do it.

Unfortunately, there is a "knowledge barrier" that comes into any conversation between two people of greatly differing ages and experiences. As with my own father, my early questions graduated from "did you ever see a Tiger tank?" to the much more refined "did you ever see a Panther tank?" without ever really being able to ask him about some of the real terrors of the Battle for Normandy that I found out later -- after he had passed -- by really reading up and researching the topic. Some of the best books about the Second World War have come out in the last 20 years but yet Dad died in 1994. Phil Roettinger died in 2001 or early 2002 and Phil Maher died in 2006. So much I would have liked to ask them about was knowledge I had yet to learn and since the books that taught me had not yet been written it is difficult to beat myself up about not knowing what to ask at the time. As my friend Allen Williams in San Miguel always says: "You don't know what you don't know."

Former Marine Stan Levine, whom I met in San Miguel and sat with often, many times along with Phil Maher and Phil Roettinger, had been on Tarawa, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. I knew at the time that those were big, fierce battles. Now that I know a lot more about them than I did at the time I often think that opportunities were lost because of my lack of knowledge about what to ask. Then -- in the same instant -- comes the realization that the same lack of knowledge about what to ask also prevented me asking anything that would perhaps disturb memories best left covered in dust and often forgotten except on odd nights when sleep seems something too distant to reach.

But I'm certainly glad that I talked to each of them as much as I did, and that they gave me the chance to do it. I am happy I do not feel I ever pried too deeply into something they did not want to talk about or remember, and I never made the conversation uncomfortable. Perhaps not "knowing enough" at the time was a hidden blessing.

And I was keeping a lot of balls in the air at the time, trying to run a Mexican small business with no visible means of support, although that actually turned out all right in the end too.

Four of the little photos on the 78th Fighter Squadron website note that the pilots of those planes were KIA. Phil Maher once told me about circling around as a friend of his ditched his P-51 into the ocean between Japan and Iwo Jima. He watched his friend get out and into his little yellow raft, noted the position and then flew on to Iwo where he reported the entire incident. But his friend was never found. "I stopped carrying my 1911 with me after that and carried a spare canteen instead." He told me. "The thought of sitting in a little yellow raft and staring at the 1911 as the thirst set in..." . It was one of those statements that end with a silent "Well, you know." One wonders if one of those 4 KIA pilots was the one Phil watched ditching into the ocean. One wonders.

Running this photo again: Phil Maher on Iwo Jima doing the "after action" report of his flight. Perhaps reporting where his friend went down? I guess we will never know, now.