Veterans Day, 2025
On this year's Veterans Day, here's a piece I wrote for The Boston Globe. It references a book of mine from many years ago, Journey Out of Darkness, which included beautiful photography by Jorg Meyer. That book is available here on the Bloomsbury Publishing site; use the discount code GLR AT8 (space between R and A) at checkout for a 35% discount on the hardback or the e-book.
OPINION -- What we can learn from the WWII POWs buried in Bourne
To remember their sacrifices and suffering, to glean the meaning of their lives, we will need to find them where they rest in fields of grass.
By Hal LaCroix
Updated November 11, 2025, 3:00 a.m.
Hal LaCroix is the author of the history book “Journey Out of Darkness” and the science fiction novel “Here and Beyond.”
Vitold Krushas’s plaque at the Massachusetts National Cemetery in Bourne tells the visitor to this Veterans Administration site that he served as a technical sergeant in the US Army Air Forces during World War II, endured captivity as a prisoner of war, and died in 2006, at the age of 84. The plaque concludes with these words: “All Is Well.”
It’s the former POW’s bittersweet epitaph, an invocation pushing back against the traumas of wartime experiences and their lasting effects. One hears, too, a prayer: May the peace which eluded Krushas in life be found, finally, in death.
Eighteen years ago, I published “Journey out of Darkness,” a book, with photographs by Jorg Meyer, about 19 former POWs from World War II who lived in Eastern Massachusetts. Since then, every one of those men has passed away. Altogether, perhaps only a couple hundred former POWs remain alive nationwide, among the 20,000 or so surviving American veterans of the “Good War.”
And so, as we commemorate the 80th anniversary of WWII’s ending, it seemed time to reconvene with some of my old friends. On a cloudy morning this fall, I drove to Bourne.
Besides Krushas, seven other men from my book are buried in the cemetery’s rolling fields. Each lies beneath a small, rectangular stone set flat into the earth. This is an egalitarian resting place, a world apart from private cemeteries, where stature is often indicated by the grandeur and condition of gravestones.
In the National Cemetery, the colonel who fought in both Korea and Vietnam resides in the same row with the private who survived the Battle of the Bulge and the Air Force captain who flew jets in the Persian Gulf War. There are no distinctions of class, wealth, or valor, and no signs of neglect. Every gravestone is kept clean, its sides carefully edged to protect it from encroachment. At the same time, if you climb a hillside and survey the landscape, every grave seems swallowed up by the grass. Everyone here sleeps the same sleep.
With the help of maps provided at the visitor center, I found all the old guys. Chesley Russell, who endured a harrowing forced march during the winter of 1945. Roger Hughes, who let fellow POWs without mail in Stalag 17 read 50 or so letters from his wife. Anthony Dears, a lifelong Brockton resident, who told me that it might take a “vaccination against greed” to end humanity’s preference for killing over helping one another. Emanuel Rempelakis, who parachuted from a burning B-17 bomber only to be beaten senseless by a gang of Hitler Youth chanting “Jude, Jude.”
I kept walking and found Bernard Travers, who lost 50 pounds in captivity at Stalag XIB on a diet of cabbage broth and sawdust bread. And Joe Canavan, a combat engineer from South Boston. When Canavan returned from grueling captivity, Army officials told him not to talk about his POW experiences. Keep it wrapped up, they said; people won’t understand.
Finally, on the far edge of the cemetery, I located the only POW from the group who was held in Japan. Gabriel Paiva, a soft-spoken man, survived three years of inconceivable physical suffering and humiliation at POW camps in Osaka and as a slave laborer for the Nippon company. At war’s end, he returned home to Watertown and worked as a security guard and fireman at the Arsenal. Every day, Paiva struggled to banish negative feelings and to forgive his captors, and every night he grappled with guilt, shame, and recurrent nightmares. His body remained tapped out and dead tired until he passed in 2008.
Then I said goodbye to the men and returned to my car and my life, with its petty concerns.
At Veterans Day parades this year, few, if any, former POWs from WWII will be in attendance. Within several years, the last of the war’s veterans will be gone and buried. No longer will they come to us on commemorative days. To remember their sacrifices and suffering, to glean the meaning of their lives, we will need to find them where they rest in fields of grass.