a few months ago, bush attended a reunion of the medal of honor society in saratoga springs, new york. it is really lifting to get together with fellow veterans and enjoy each other. we re just like brothers. bob, if you could change anything right now, based on all that you ve seen and all that you ve been through. what would you change? i think the discipline amongst the young people, even within my home, i can see this lack of ability to interim rhett and understand hard times. in our house, they didn t have any. i really overprovided. so i didn t teach them properly. i missed the boat there. when you look at how successful your children have been, how well they live now, do you look at each other sometimes and say i hope they can afford all this? right. robert says that occasionally. especially with me.
in the midst of a ferocious japanese attack, he crawled on to a battlefield, treated and revived a wounded lieutenant. then japanese threw hand grenades down. i threw my arm up like this. i had a 45 in the shoulder holster so that saved me but it took out this eye. it hit me really hard. bush picked up the wounded lieutenant s rifle, killing a number of japanese soldiers. it didn t mean anything to shoot them. it didn t. i never laid awake at night. they were the enemy. they were after me. and boy, that preservation of life is a big deterrent to how you feel about shooting somebody. it didn t bother me one bit. when i left there, there was more of them on the ground than there was me. that seems to be the way you grade that particular game, if you must call it a game. it is like basketball.
bravery and combat, the congressional medal of honor. when they were kids, they saw the medal in a box in his den. but like a few million other children of gis, susan, rick and mick bush are only now learning to appreciate how many of their father s behavior toward them was formed by the war experiences he kept to himself. probably don t remember anything relating to the war until i was 12 or 13 years old. i don t remember my first recollection of realizing he had a glass eye. it certainly wasn t until i was probably in my early teens. when bob bush was a teenager, he was receiving his medal of honor from president harry truman in ceremonies on the white house lawn. bush was 18. the age that most kids are graduating from high school. only a few months earlier, he had wayne marine medic on the island of okinawa.
i tell you, i m scared to see rick go to the store and so is mary. when it comes to his attitude about money and work, bob bush is no different from millions of other gis. they grew up during great depression. a decade of deep economic despair on the land like a plague. members of bush s generation watched their parents struggle for the barest of necessities. that affected them as much as the war that followed. it is understandable that bob bush and other gis vowed a better life for their own children. but it is difficult now for the children who are living those better lives to understand why their parents still act as if it
they were the winners and the celebrations could have gone on for months, but they didn t. most gis were not looking to be called heroes. they were wanting to apply what they learned in battle to the new task of building their lives. bob bush for one was in a hurr tow make up for lost time. he married his sweetheart wanda spooner and went to work in their hometown in washington. he started at a lumber yard and within years owned the business. over two decades, he and his family developed bayview lumber based in olympia, washington. returning gis like bob bush laid the foundation for what would be called the american dream. a wife, kids, the latest appliances, a home of your. the gi bill of generous government benefits helped them buy the homes they were building. it paid for college educations