- April 18, 2024
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90-year-old World War II Air Force veteran Joseph Flattery is no hero, he says. But the VFW honored him anyway.
At 90 years old, World War II Air Force veteran Joseph Flattery finds it more and more difficult to remember yesterday.
Thinking back seven decades to when he was drafted in 1942, however, is cake. He describes his memories as if narrating home videos only he can see, the pictures grainy but explicit, dulled with time and only a hint of prideful reverence.
He is a military man, after all.
“I live alone,” Flattery said, regarding his Formica countertops and flower-printed wallpaper with a “this is it” flick of his wrist. “My wife passed four years ago,” he said. “ ... Pall Malls ... ”
Flattery was 21 at the time of his enlistment and spent his last night as a citizen with a group of draftee buddies, pub crawling their way to Penn Station, where they’d board World War I train cars with concrete floors and wooden benches, en route to Camp Upton, in Long Island.
The railways were a creaky kind of magic, carrying Flattery out of what he called a life of no guidance and into something else, something high and fast and tearing through the clouds.
“I think it shaped me up,” he said of his four years of service. “ ... It was much better than being on the ground, you know?”
Along with 90 local vets, Flattery was honored March 27, at the VFW’s second-annual WWII and Korea Veterans Recognition Day ceremony.
The ceremony was held prior to April’s National County Government Month, which Flagler approved alongside 3,068 counties nationwide this year, to serve “our veterans, armed forces and their families.” The County Commission also recognized all 49 of its employee veterans, two of which are currently on active duty in Iraq, in a video Monday, April 18.
“I never figured on being a hotshot pilot,” Flattery said, noting that after his mother died when he was 12, he, his father and two sisters always just “got along.” He was working in accounting and a year and half into college at Brooklyn’s St. John’s University when Uncle Sam picked him for duty.
You start out and “you’re a nothing,” he said. But you got used to it.
“Very little bothers me,” he added, adjusting his dark knee-high socks. Not military life. Not looming war. Not even taking his first plane, a Stearman single-engine, open-cockpit flier off the ground for the first time.
Hung in a row on Flattery’s wood-paneled Florida room wall are 8-by-10s of all the planes he’s ever flown: a BT-15, an AT-6, a twin-engine B-17 (“the big workhorse”).
Coming in toward the tail-end of the war, he logged 15 missions without incident. “I wasn’t any hero,” he said.
But he had close calls, instances where a last-minute formation change or his position in a runway queue made him the guy watching a warbird explode in front of him, rather than being the one to explode.
Joe Flattery isn’t a “great religious man,” but he believes God saved him. And that’s that.
Continuing to travel even after his military tenure, Flattery has seen more countries than he can remember. He’s had an audience with the Pope, but can’t recall how many others were with him. And today, most if not all of his Air Force buddies have died.
But there are things he’ll never forget.
Like when his then-girlfriend “decided” they were getting married, just before he was deployed in June 1944. She must have traveled 24 hours to get to him, he said, from New York, down to Panama City. When she arrived, they had a traditional military wedding, “with the swords and all.” They honeymooned in a dorm-like building, with other honeymooning servicemen.
Just like that, off the train she appeared, he remembered.
Peggy.
She was dressed in white.
Flattery is one of 12,000 resident county veterans.
