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attempt by Hitler to counterattack against the advancing Allied forces, Ko and his men were deployed in defensive positions, in heavy snow, to keep the enemy from overrunning Allied gains. “It was terrible weather, with snow up to your knees,” he remembers, “. . . we had our olive-drab uniforms, so we stuck out like sore thumbs.”
    During one withdrawal Ko and his sergeant were the last to leave. They looked to their left and saw a company of men in snow-suits. Ko relates: “The Germans! We were startled. There were only two of us, so we had to get out of there. We ran through a creek to keep out of sight. To this day I can’t remember how I ever got dry.”
    Ko went on to more fierce fighting at close range, in the attack on the Siegfried line. “The concrete pillboxes were so thick that not even heavy artillery was effective, so the only option was for the men to get close enough to drop grenades. But in order to get close you had to suffer a lot of casualties. In my regiment alone, which had a couple of thousand men, we had close to two hundred killed, more than seven hundred fifty wounded, and forty-nine missing in action.”
    Ko was promoted to captain and given command of a company as his outfit pushed east, participating in the battle for Cologne, Germany, and assisting in the capture of the 21st German army, which was trying to avoid the Russian troops advancing from the other direction. Ko and his men helped liberate the Wobbelin concentration camp at Ludwigslust. “We dug a mass grave and made every German citizen in the area who was aware of the situation help us and also attend the burial of the hundreds of dead inmates.”
    The war was at an end. Captain Wesley Ko had participated in six campaigns in two and a half years, under fire in some of the most important and ferocious battles of the war. He had accumulated enough points for a swift return home. As he put it, “Not many of us made it all the way.”
    On September 23, 1945, he arrived back in the United States aboard the USS
Constitution.
    When he returned from the war Ko decided to go back to his old printing-plant job, but after a year or so he teamed up with his brother and a friend to open their own business, Komak Printing. They specialized in silk-screening for advertising companies and then began doing custom work for electronics firms. It was hard work but Ko was thriving.
    He married his wife, Ruth, in 1950 and they bought a home in the leafy Philadelphia suburb of Chalfont (“James Michener lived there,” Ko is proud to point out). They raised a son and two daughters. It was anyone’s American dream come true, but especially for the grandson of a Chinese coolie.
    It didn’t last.
    By 1985, when he’d been in business for almost forty years, Ko faced some difficult decisions. The printing business involves a good many chemicals and waste, and the government was cracking down on disposal. His plant was outmoded. Philadelphia was losing business to other metropolitan areas.
    He accepted an offer to relocate to upstate New York, in Glens Falls, near Albany. It would be an expensive move—he’d have to personally guarantee the $1.3 million loan—but the Glens Falls chamber of commerce was offering lots of incentives and his son was interested in continuing the business there.
    It all looked good on paper. The reality was a nightmare. Ko says the Glens Falls incentives took longer to get in place than promised. He was forced to shut down the Philadelphia plant before starting the other, so there was loss of income and, worse, a break in the continuity with his best customers. By the time he did get the new plant open it was too late. He went out of business after only a year.
    â€œIt was a big decision-making time. I couldn’t retire. I hadn’t taken out Social Security. So at the age of seventy I had to go get a job and start paying back that million-dollar