Tom Brokaw (15 page)

When, by mutual consent with the owners, he left the AFL in 1966, Foss went on to a variety of other jobs, including a starring role in his own television series,
The American Sportsman.
His primary role, however, remained that of being Joe Foss, war hero, or, as he liked to say, “bull in the woods.” He was a restless sort, so he liked to keep moving.

Money wasn't all that important to him. He turned down $750,000 for the screen rights to his story in 1956, a veritable fortune at the time. He remembers the final meeting in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, what Foss called “that little café just off the lobby. I was in a booth with John Wayne on one side of me and the producer Hal Bartlett on the other. Wayne was to get a million dollars to play me. They asked me how I liked the script. I said, ‘Fine—except for that romance baloney. If you're going to do a story on Joe Foss, you gotta take that out.' ” The screenwriter, who had contrived a love story to go with the combat, said, “We need that to make a show for the public.” Foss explains, “I just turned them down flat. It wasn't me at all.”

After all, Foss knew that what he had been through in the skies over the Pacific wasn't a love story. It was kill or be killed, pure and simple. Or, as he once said, “Combat is dangerous. It tends to interrupt your breathing process.”

Foss's breathing process was once almost interrupted in a freak incident, this one connected to his love of the outdoors. In the sixties, he suddenly became very ill, practically paralyzed and steadily losing weight. No one could figure out what was wrong until, finally, his condition was accurately analyzed as arsenic poisoning, probably from chewing on insecticide-soaked weeds while filming his television show.

That experience, and his second wife, DiDi, led him to a life-changing experience. Joe Foss became an enthusiastic born-again Christian. For an old whiskey-drinking, cigar-smoking master of profanity who had been an absentee father and husband for much of his first marriage, it was a complete makeover. As a fundamental Christian who takes the Bible as the literal truth, Joe Foss had found a theology to match his personal philosophy: There is no middle ground in his life.

As president of the National Rifle Association, he was proud to appear on the cover of
Time
magazine with crossed six-guns. He believes fervently in the Second Amendment to the Constitution and thinks “that crew that wants to take the Constitution a section at a time has got it all wrong. The only piece of paper that's outlasted the Constitution is the Bible. They both mean what they say.”

In Gary Smith's riveting 1989 profile of Foss in
Sports Illustrated,
the journalist said that if Foss were “a traveling campfire, men would form a circle around him and warm themselves by the flame that men have always sought—certainty. And nudge each other in the ribs and grin and whisper, ‘Isn't he a pisser.' Because even if they thought he was wrong, he was still that rare thing, an original, himself.”

Foss has the same unapologetic attitude toward his religious beliefs. He told me his embrace of the Lord is “the greatest decision I ever made. I made it for eternity. In every speech I give I mention the Lord. I always end with, ‘In Jesus' name, Amen.' Now there are those who take me aside and say, ‘Joe, maybe you ought to leave Jesus out.' ‘No, sir!' I tell 'em.”

He simply can't understand the shadings of modern life. President Clinton's lawyers arguing about the meaning of his answers under oath triggered strong memories for Foss. “Folks now just don't have an appreciation for what an oath means. When we took the oath when we were sworn into the Marines, it was a contract! That's what we went out there to defend. I can still see my pals sitting around when we weren't flying, guys like Casey Brandon and Danny Doyle, a couple of baseball players from Minnesota, talking about what we were going to do when we got back from the war. Well, they didn't get back. I lost half my squadron. We all knew what an oath was about.”

Foss, for all of his strong feelings, isn't a bitter old man. He still roars to life shortly after dawn on the Arizona desert, ready to fly off to give a speech at a Marine base change-of-command somewhere, or share with others what his embrace of Christianity has meant to him. He was pleased recently when a schoolboy member of his church asked him to come to his school for a day set aside to honor American heroes. Joe chuckles when he says, “Well, I got there and I was the only living hero. All the rest were George Washington and those guys. But at least the school was studying history and thinking about heroes.”

When I asked him if he thought more about those World War II days now than he did a few years ago, Foss said, “Yes, more people seem to be bringing it up. People seem to realize how the world would be different if we hadn't put up that scrap.” When I ask if he missed the old days, he answered quickly, “Oh, no. I'm not a guy who missed anything from anywhere. I've always been a guy who just gets up and goes.”

It's probably that quality that made him such a cool, daring, and effective fighter pilot. It's also what makes him so engaging as a man. His unalloyed views on everything from guns to God to education to right and wrong may not match your own, but you know that he's arrived at them honestly. And if you don't agree with him, Foss, now in his eighties, may think of you as a “bird” or a member of “that crew,” his all-purpose mild epithets, but he won't take time to hate you. He's too busy for hate.

As he says of his World War II experience and what it should mean to others, “Those of us who live have to represent those who didn't make it.”

LEONARD “BUD” LOMELL

“We were trained so well I didn't believe anything could
kill us.”

L
EONARD
“
BUD
”
LOMELL
hasn't been an active-duty U.S. Army Ranger in more than a half a century, but in his heart and in his mind he still wears the distinctive patch of the elite military unit that had the most dangerous assignment on D-Day. He led his men up the sheer cliffs at Pointe-du-Hoc while German forces dropped grenades on them, kept up a steady stream of fire, and even cut the ropes the Rangers were using to scale the precipice. We met when Lomell was one of the veterans featured in NBC News's documentary on the fortieth anniversary of the invasion.

By then he was a sixty-four-year-old lawyer from Toms River, New Jersey, but as we rode together in a small motorized rubber raft just offshore from Pointe-du-Hoc, talking about that day decades earlier, I could almost see the tough, young First Sergeant Lomell directing his men as they landed under the withering fire of the German forces.

They had been getting ready for this mission for more than a year, undergoing training that was so grueling that many of the Rangers said they were looking forward to combat to escape the rigors of preparing for it. They had endured long speed marches with full packs, nighttime landing exercises in the cold waters of the Atlantic, hand-to-hand combat training, climbing slippery rock cliffs and rappelling down again. They were young men, between eighteen and twenty-four, and superb athletes, their bodies sinewy with muscle after months of the most demanding forms of physical exercise.

Leonard Lomell,
wartime portrait

Charlotte Lomell

Bud Lomell had volunteered for the elite Ranger Corps after enlisting in the Army following college. He was the adopted son of Scandinavian immigrant parents who took him into their family when he was just an infant in Brooklyn. Later they moved to the Jersey shore, where Bud grew up, pampered by two older sisters and a big brother in the poor and hardworking family.

He remembers that the night he graduated from high school his father bought him some ice cream. As they sat at the family's kitchen table, Bud was stunned when his dad burst into tears and said, “I am broke. I don't have any money. I can't help you go to college. I wish I could, but I can't.” Bud had never seen his father cry. He recalls, “I went over to him, put my arms around him, and told him not to worry. I could make it on my own.”

Bud knew the family was poor. His dad was a housepainter, and at the height of the Depression no one in their working-class community was spending money to paint their home. Bud always had after-school and summer jobs to help pay the way, and he figured his athletic prowess would help him get a college education.

It did. He enrolled at Tennessee Wesleyan College on a combination athletic scholarship and work program, earning letters in football and participating in Golden Gloves boxing. He was also editor of the school newspaper and president of his fraternity before he graduated in 1941.

He returned to New Jersey, where he was able to get a job as a brakeman on a freight train, often working sixteen-hour shifts on the runs up and down the Atlantic seaboard. He knew, however, that before long he'd be in uniform, so he enlisted in the Army.

Three years later he was a first sergeant in charge of a platoon of Rangers as they ran their LCA ashore at the base of Pointe-du-Hoc. Lomell was commanding the platoon because his lieutenant had been reassigned just a few days before.

As they were landing, Lomell felt a sharp pain in his lower back. He was sure another Ranger with whom he had been arguing the day before had hit him. He turned and gave the guy a whack. Lomell still laughs when he recalls how the other Ranger was stunned, saying, “What's that's all about? I did nothing to you!” Lomell didn't realize until later that, in fact, he'd been shot through the right side. He kept going despite the wound.

The 2nd Rangers had a specific mission on Pointe-du-Hoc. They were to knock out five 155mm German coastal guns Allied intelligence figured to be just atop the cliffs. When Lomell and his men got to the top, however, there were no major German guns on the emplacements. Lomell and another sergeant, Jack E. Kuhn, found a dirt road leading inland and they began to follow it.

By now their daring mission is well known to students of that chaotic and vitally important day. Stephen Ambrose and many others have recounted what the two sergeants accomplished. They found the five 155mm guns heavily camouflaged, well back from Pointe-du-Hoc and aimed at Utah Beach, another landing spot for the Allies on D-Day. The guns were not manned, but Lomell and Kuhn could see German troops about a hundred meters away, apparently forming up to get the guns operational.

Lomell instructed Kuhn to cover him, saying, “Give me your grenades. . . . I'm gonna fix 'em.” He ran to the guns and attached thermite grenades to critical parts and smashed the sights of all five guns with his rifle butt. The two sergeants withdrew to get more grenades and finished off the gun emplacement by disabling the remaining weapons. Mission accomplished.

It was just nine
A
.
M
. D-Day morning and Sergeants Lomell and Kuhn had already performed so heroically they would later be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and Silver Star, respectively. It was also the beginning of a long war for both men, as they fought their way across Europe in all of the major campaigns, including the Battle of the Bulge.

That morning and in the days following the heavy fighting on and around Omaha Beach, First Sergeant Lomell came face-to-face with the worst of war. “When I saw my dead Ranger buddies laid out in rows,” he told me later, “their faces and uniforms caked with dirt and blood, I couldn't believe it. I wanted to yell at them, ‘C'mon, get up!' We were trained so well I didn't believe anything could kill us.”

Before the war was over Lomell would be wounded twice more and would receive a battlefield promotion to second lieutenant. In 1945 he was ready to come home, and when he did, he led other uniformed veterans from his hometown in a victory parade down the main street of Point Pleasant, New Jersey.

Charlotte and Leonard Lomell

Lomell family portrait,
taken at the Lomells' fiftieth wedding anniversary, June 6, 1996

He had not been home long when his mother began to talk to him about that nice girl he had been seeing before he enlisted, Charlotte Ewart. She had been training to be a nurse at a hospital in Long Branch, New Jersey, in the summer of 1941, right after Lomell's college graduation. He was already working seven days and nights a week so there wasn't much time for courting. When they were together, however, the mutual attraction was strong. Charlotte remembers, “I thought he was very handsome and very self-confident. That was important to me. He knew what he wanted.”

Before long, however, Lomell had enlisted in the Army and, typically for him, he then turned all his attention to his military training. He called Charlotte occasionally when he was home on leave but he didn't write, and soon they drifted apart.

After the war, when he took his mother's advice and called, Charlotte was enrolled in a public health nursing program at the College of Seton Hall. They arranged to have dinner and as Lomell says, “She was just the most impressive girl I had ever known. The rest didn't have a chance. We just picked up where we left off.”

A year and a half later they were married, on June 6, 1946, two years to the day after Sergeant Lomell was fighting his way up the cliffs at Pointe-du-Hoc, a bullet wound in his side, determined to find and knock out a battery of German guns. As Charlotte says now, laughing, “Every wedding anniversary we share with the surviving Rangers, because it is also the anniversary of D-Day.”

The GI Bill was Lomell's ticket to a career he could not have expected to have before the war. It allowed him to enroll in law school, at LaSalle University and Rutgers University. By 1951 he had passed the state bar exam and been admitted to the New Jersey bar.

The Lomells continued to make their home in southern New Jersey, and by 1957 Bud had founded his own law firm in the growing community of Toms River, about halfway between Philadelphia and New York. It quickly became one of the largest in Ocean County. As Bud likes to say, “I ran it with Ranger discipline.” As the father of three daughters he was especially sensitive to the idea of sexual harassment before it became a popular workplace issue. Over the years, “I had to fire a couple of young lawyers for violating the rules in that area,” he says. “Paid 'em off and got them out of there. I'm proud that my firm is known as the ‘league of nations.' We've had several women and men of different ethnic backgrounds, sixteen lawyers in all and about thirty other employees.”

Charlotte and Bud were a team at home and in the law firm. She kept the books and looked after the maintenance in the law offices, and together they made family decisions. They were raising three daughters of their own when Charlotte's sister died, leaving a teenage son and daughter. The Lomells simply brought them into their family as their own and sent all five children to college.

Through it all, Bud kept a close association with his Ranger buddies from the war. When they were younger, the Lomell daughters—Georgine, Pauline, and Renee—were so accustomed to Ranger veterans from Bud's old outfit dropping by, they just considered them “uncles.” Renee—Bud and Charlotte's youngest daughter—a schoolteacher, considers those visits to be an important part of her education. “You really didn't see the military side,” she says. “It was just a bunch of good men from a variety of backgrounds who cared about each other a lot.”

They rarely talked about the worst of the war, she says. “They talked about the fun times during training or whatever, never about the fighting.”

Renee also remembers as a teenager in the sixties how her father adapted to the idea of young men with long hair and unusual wardrobes. “He worried a lot more about our safety than he did about the length of hair,” she says. He had essentially the same attitude toward the war in Vietnam. He supported it at the beginning, but when he saw it was poorly planned and executed, a terrible waste of young American lives, he turned against it.