News-Info-Alerts

Re: Remembering Bobby Brandes

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: May 26, 2003

"Remembering Bobby Brandes

By Sylvia Adcock
Staff Writer

His hands are jammed in his pockets, his trousers tucked into his boots, paratrooper-style, wings pinned to his chest. The start of a smile on the young face. "You gotta go airborne," he had told one of his buddies. "It's the greatest thing."

The black and white photograph is undated. But his friends remember: It was the last time Bobby Brandes was home in Blue Point.

As a kid, he'd played soldier in the woods north of the railroad tracks, north of where the summer kids lived in the big houses near the Great South Bay. They had used helmets from World War II. "Here, kid, have a helmet," the returning brothers and fathers would say, and the boys would run off, excited, in awe of those who had just come back from fighting.

Bobby Brandes was too young for that war. But in December 1950, six months after the Korean War began, he signed up for the Army. And in June 1953 -- only weeks before the war ended -- his family on Bell Avenue got the telegram: MIA, missing in action. He was 22 years old.

This summer, 50 years will have passed since the signing of the armistice that effectively ended what has been called "the forgotten war." In three years, 33,000 American lives were lost. Nearly 3,000 prisoners of war froze to death or died of starvation in North Korean prison camps. On Long Island, 21 were listed as missing in action or prisoners of war who never returned, according to the Defense Department. Bobby Brandes was one. His story resonates with those who remember the war that so many forgot: a life full of possibilities never realized, grieving family and friends with no grave to visit.

For the soldiers who did return from Korea, there were no ticker-tape parades. The servicemen were greeted on the street with, "Hey, where ya been?" -- almost as if the war hadn't happened. Officially, it wasn't even called a war. It was a "police action," the government said, or the "Korean conflict." At the time, some Korean War vets were even told they couldn't join the Veterans of Foreign Wars because they didn't fight in a real war.

"It was so far away," said Ruth McGloughlin, a longtime Blue Point resident who grew up with the Brandes kids. "But if there's gunfighting and shooting, that's a war."

The fighting began in June 1950, when U.S. troops were sent to stop Communist-ruled North Korea's invasion of the south. The nation of Korea had been split arbitrarily in two after Japanese domination ended with World War II; north of the 38th parallel was controlled by the Soviet Union; the south was an ally of the United States. The peace was shattered when North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel.

"It could be a dangerous situation, but I hope it isn't," President Harry Truman told the nation. Two days later, Newsday's banner headline read: "U.S. Orders Planes, Navy to Korea."

But early that summer, the attention of Long Islanders was focused elsewhere. The state awarded a contract to build the Sagtikos Parkway. The Long Island Rail Road promised better service, again. Three new cases of polio were reported in Suffolk County.

The GIs who had come back from World War II were eager to get on with their lives -- and they did. "We figured there wouldn't ever be another war," said Bob Parente, who lived behind Bobby Brandes' house. On Long Island, houses went up like beanstalks. The pages of Newsday were crammed with ads for washing machines and wallpaper, everything new homeowners might need. A Castro convertible sofa for $149, a five-piece dinette set for just $49.95.

For a time that summer, the war captured the attention of the nation and Long Island. The Air Force base at Mitchel Field tightened security. Local political leaders worried that aircraft factories could make Long Island a target. A civil defense air raid warning system was discussed.

But it was nothing like World War II. "Shoppers who remember wartime scrambling for consumer goods face no immediate problem," Newsday reported.

And at first, it seemed destined to end quickly. Less than a month after the war began, an Air Force pilot from Garden City shot down two North Korean fighters. "Of course we're proud," his mother said, and then added, "I do hope it won't last much longer. There must be some way to settle these things."

In the hamlet that is Blue Point, a sliver of a community wedged between Bayport and Patchogue, life was simple. There was no traffic to speak of on Montauk Highway. The hotels that once attracted hordes of tourists had burned down, one by one. But the Blue Point Inn on Montauk Highway was still there, and in the winter ice boats skimmed across the bay, and in the summer there was fishing, the beach and shuffleboard.

"We used to know everybody," said John Bonk, 68, who still lives around the corner from where Bobby Brandes grew up. The kids would hang out at the candy store on Blue Point Avenue. They'd sit on the chairs, have an ice cream soda and then try to read magazines without paying for them. Sometimes they'd help bring up cases of soda from the basement or put comics in the stacks of Sunday newspapers.

Bobby Brandes was a good kid, a tough kid. He was good-looking, too, and the girls liked him. "He was rough-and-tumble. He could take care of himself," remembers Parente, who was four years younger and grew up in a converted woodworking shop behind the Brandes house.

Brandes was a hard worker, too. Neighbors hired him to pick up their paper and Life magazine at the grocery store across from the firehouse. He made the deliveries for a quarter a week. He spent so much time at Jim Brown's grocery store that the owner hired him to empty the garbage, sweep the floors and put out new ice cream tubs when one was nearly empty. He'd take a spoon and an almost-empty container of ice cream behind the store for some free licks. He joined the Blue Point Fire Department and helped his dad with his plumbing work around town, getting jobs at some of the new houses going up.

When he left Blue Point in 1950, he passed on the job at Jim Brown's store to Parente. He made sure to tell him about the ice cream.

Bobby Brandes went airborne, just like he wanted, and learned to parachute out of planes. After basic airborne training, he finished "jump school" at Fort Campbell, Ky., with the 187th Regimental Combat Team. He got his paratrooper's wings in April 1952 and sent his kid sister, Carol, an ID bracelet with wings on it. "In some ways, we became closer when he went away," said Carol Brandes, who now lives in Seattle. "I didn't expect him to write me letters. But he did." In them, she said, Bobby talked about his experiences in the Army and the buddies he met there.

Late in 1952, Cpl. Bobby Brandes shipped out to Asia. For a time he was stationed near his older brother Harry, a career Army man, in Japan. The details of what happened next are sketchy, but this much is known: On June 4, 1953, Brandes and other soldiers were on routine patrol near Sokkogae, North Korea, when they were ambushed. The soldiers fell back; when they regrouped, they realized Bobby wasn't with them. His buddies went back and searched the area. They never found him.

Across the ocean, a small town on the South Shore was shaken. "When Bobby went missing it went through Blue Point like smallpox," said Parente. On July 2, the Patchogue Advance's front-page column, "With the Armed Forces," reported that the Brandes family was hoping to get information from his older brother stationed in Japan.

The family tried to hold out hope. After he was reported missing, a Father's Day card from Bobby arrived in the mail. He had sent it before the ambush. Carol was 12 at the time. Later she had nightmares about her brother being captured and tortured. Her parents didn't speak much about the loss of their son but were clearly devastated. "He was, in a way, my mother's golden boy," said Carol Brandes.

For Parente, it was a tough blow. Parente was only 17, too young to sign up for military service without his parents' permission, but he decided he had to go. "I gotta get in," Parente remembers saying to himself. "He went. Why can't I? Bobby was my friend. I lost my friend."

He found someone to sign his parents' names on the consent form and went to the recruiting office in downtown Patchogue. "The officer gave me a test. It was, 'Can you read? Can you write? Do you have your consent?' He typed up the orders." Parente was to report to Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan for a physical.

The next morning there was a knock at the door. The recruiters had forgotten to give Parente his train ticket to Manhattan. "I heard yelling. 'Bobby, get out here!' These two big sergeants at the door." His mom was furious. The recruiters yelled, too. They didn't want to see Parente again until he was 18.

Life went on in Blue Point. The headlines focused elsewhere. "No Cure Yet for No. 1 Destroyer of Area Ducks," read one headline in the Patchogue Advance. And one that would be repeated many times: "LILCO seeks approval of new power rates." A five-room house on Namkee Road in Blue Point was selling for $10,500. The drive-in movie theater in Shirley had its grand opening.

After two years of truce talks while fighting continued, peace overseas finally came on July 27, seven weeks after Bobby Brandes went missing. "Shaky Truce Halts War" was the headline in Newsday. There was no celebration. "Noticeably absent was the air of wild jubilation that followed V-E and V-J days at the climactic moments of World War II," a Newsday reporter wrote. "So what," said a man in a Hempstead tavern as a television announcer read the truce bulletin. "It doesn't really change anything. They'll probably shift their forces to Indochina." And a Garden City woman said, "They've been slogging around in the mud over there for a long time over nothing."

Parente and his dad would stay up late watching their 6-month-old television set, waiting for the names of POWs to scroll across the screen, hoping for news that maybe, just maybe, Bobby Brandes was still alive. There was no news. A year and a day after Brandes was ambushed, the Army officially declared him dead to make it easier for the family to collect insurance. He was awarded the Purple Heart, which Carol Brandes keeps in a box along with Bobby's fireman's shield.

Years passed. Parente stayed in school. When he was 19, he went back to the Patchogue recruiting office and joined the Marines. He was sent to Germany with a military police unit, came home, worked at the post office until 1995. Today he is a grandfather, active in local veterans' groups, ensuring that vets like Bobby Brandes, who were lost in the forgotten war, are not forgotten.

The house on Bell Avenue where Brandes grew up still stands; the giant linden trees in front leafing out as they do every year. His father died in 1958, and his mother in 1982. Older brother Harry has passed away -- his six kids live in Indiana and Oregon. But the name of Robert D. Brandes is inscribed in a brick in front of the Blue Point Library, placed there by local historian Gene Horton, and on a plaque in the Blue Point firehouse.

When he was 18 or 19, Parente used to see Brandes' dad at the local watering hole. He would say two words: "Heard anything?" The answer was always the same.

© 2003, Newsday, Inc. "