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loan.” He adds, “I just didn’t feel comfortable with declaring bankruptcy. I just didn’t think it was the honorable thing to do, even though it would have been easier.”
    Lessons learned in training and during the war more than four decades earlier were critical during this trying time.
    â€œIn the war I learned to be self-sufficient. I matured. I learned to be a leader. When my business failed I was able to move on, whereas my wife was devastated by the loss.”
    Ko managed to preserve the plant’s assets for his principal creditors, and his lawyers negotiated the settlement of other debts at reduced levels. Continuing to live in the small-town environment with local suppliers still carrying Komak debts on their books wasn’t easy, but Wesley and Ruth persevered. He managed to get a job as a quality-control manager at a local electronics company and applied the stock options he earned toward the debts he owed. Finally, at the age of seventy-six, Wesley retired, saying, “I have no regrets.”
    He and Ruth now live near their daughters, in Massachusetts. He’s editor of
The Glider Towline,
the newsletter of the surviving members of the 325th Glider Infantry Association. It’s filled with chatty reminders of coming reunions and pictures of grandfatherly men in baseball caps bearing the regiment’s insignia. One caption reads, “The youth of World War II are the senior citizens of today.” A column called “Taps” gets longer with every issue, as it marks the passing of the glider veterans or their wives.
    Ko’s only regret is that the lessons of his generation are lost on his grandchildren. He was disappointed when his grandson quit the private school he was attending. Now, however, the young man seems to have found a calling as a carpenter, and Wesley is feeling better about his direction.
    However, Wesley Ko reflects the common lament of his generation when he says, “Everything comes too easy. Nowadays you just don’t make the effort like you did in our day.”

JAMES AND DOROTHY DOWLING
    â€œI ran that department like a business and in military style.”
    I N A WAY no one could have anticipated at the time, the military training and discipline required to win World War II became an accelerated course in how to prepare a young generation to run a large, modern, and complex industrial society. Nearly every veteran, however painful the military experience may have been, seems to be grateful for the discipline and leadership training they were exposed to at such a formative age.
    James Dowling of Smithtown, New York, is the personification of the difficult times of his generation, the heroics of ordinary men in extraordinary situations in time of war, and the priceless contributions of veterans to the development of postwar America.
    He’s now seventy-five years old, a grandfather, a founder of the Little League in his hometown, a retired highway superintendent, and a vintage car enthusiast. He’s proud of his family, his personal independence, and his contribution to his community. If that sounds like a predictable and bland résumé for a man in his mid-seventies, it is also deceptive, for it masks a life of deprivation, struggle, adventure, heroics, and achievement.
    James Dowling was orphaned soon after he was born. His mother died when he was only six months old and his father was unable to care for this baby and his four brothers and sisters. In those simpler times, when much of social welfare was a matter of good-hearted people, the plight of James and his siblings was made known in church. The minister announced that someone had to take in these children.

    James and Dorothy—home on twenty-four-hour leave
    James and two of his brothers were taken home by the Conklins, Clarence and Anna. It was not a formal adoption but the Conklins raised these Dowling children as their own. Conklin was a prosperous builder in