The tuberculosis was contracted in service, on Leyte, in the conditions that combat in the Pacific produced. The five and a half years of treatment, the loss of a lung and five ribs, the 90% disability that rose to 100% — these were the physical costs of having been in those specific environments, doing that specific work. They were not consequences of his particular faith; they would have applied to any soldier in those conditions. But they applied to him.
The deafness from 1976 to 1988 — twelve and a half years of silence following a medical error at a VA treatment facility — was a postwar cost of a specific and cruel kind. He had survived the Maeda Escarpment. He had survived tuberculosis. He had survived the sniper’s bullet and the grenade and the crawl to the aid station. And then a course of antibiotics from the VA left him unable to hear for more than a decade. The cochlear implant that eventually restored his hearing was not available until 1988; the technology had not existed during the years he spent without sound.
Dorothy’s death in the car accident in 1991 was, as noted earlier in this account, the loss of his wife of forty-nine years in circumstances that left him as the surviving driver. He continued. What it cost him to continue is not something the public record fully captures; it is the kind of private grief that a man either carries or doesn’t, and that does not typically become part of the documented account.