George Krikorian has something to say. His expression confirms it before he utters a word.
He leans forward in his black wheelchair. His discolored baseball cap emblazoned with NAVY and two flying pins attached to it — a cap that appears to have endured multiple missions through hell — is mere inches from his visitor.
His thick hands, weathered by time and circumstance, rest on the looped crown of a cocoa-colored walking cane hand carved by a Pacific Islander and gifted to him years ago. He props his chin on top of stacked hands and pitches closer: eyes squinting, jaw set, his face morphing from invitingly friendly to frozen, seriousness centerstage, a revealing preface to the weight of his words to come.
“War,” the World War II Navy Veteran began, “is a terrible thing. I know. Lots of nights, I still think about it. The whole war comes to me. After all these years I ask, 'Why is it plaguing my mind?' It’s because I lost so many good friends.
“When you work with a group of friends, fighting side by side, if something happens to them, you cry over them. They’re your brothers, and you’ll do anything to save your brothers’ lives. But many of them — my brothers, my friends — never came back.”
The proud Veteran turns away. He casts a blank stare at his daughter, Fairless Hills author Julie Eshbaugh, standing beside him in his apartment at Oxford Crossings retirement community in Langhorne. She smiles at him, his face lights up and he returns an incandescent smile. His attention returns to the visitor.
The smile is gone.
“War,” he said, shaking his head. “Not everybody makes it out alive. Lots of my friends, brothers. Horrible.”
On June 25, family and friends will lift a glass to Krikorian, who on that day celebrates his 100th birthday. There is so much to celebrate beyond just that historic number for the native of Bronx, New York. who moved to Morrisville in Bucks County in 1965: Marriage, two daughters, a lifetime career in aviation for some of the most recognizable companies in the business.
“I’ve had a great life,” Krikorian said, tapping that old cane once for emphasis.
He nods to himself.
“Yeah, a great life,” he adds, smiling.
But on this sunny day, and with that milestone birthday just a few sunrises away, it is the war that Krikorian wants to remember. World War II. His war. The war to end all wars. The haunting chapter of a great life he’d sooner like to forget.
Krikorian winds back the clock, to when he was 21 and working in an airplane factory in New York training women how to build planes. The women: The original Rosie the RiVeters. He taught them to drill holes in the planes’ metal skin and place the riVets tight and right.
“Those women did great work,” he recalled. “They did all for the guys at war. They were fabulous. I was very proud of them, and still am.”
In March 1944, Krikorian was drafted and deployed to the Pacific Theater. As a flight engineer on what was commonly called a flying boat — a type of large, fixed-winged seaplane — he and a crew of eight carried out in many missions against the Japanese near the Marshall Islands, about 2,400 miles southwest of Hawaii.
“We were up there bombing ships at sea and submarines that came above water,” Krikorian said. “We’d fly really high, then come down like a dive bomber, drop torpedoes and bombs as we came over them. Then we’d take off and fly away, and do another one and another one. It was dangerous.”
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At nearly 100, Krikorian was in the sky again as his memories transported him to another time and place. In that flying boat: mind on the mission, heart in his throat, prayers on his tongue.
“The Japanese had these very light fighter planes that came at us,” he said. “One time, when we were hit, the hole was so big I could put my head through it. Luckily, the plane didn’t blow up or damage the engines.
“You’re up there flying around, not sure what’s going to happen. You just know you’re trying to kill them and they’re trying to kill you. I remember thinking, 'God, please, just let me live until I’m 30.' You don’t know if that day is your last.”
Unlike his memories, the numbers of men and women from Krikorian’s war are fading. Of the 16 million service members in WWII, less than 175,000 are still alive, according to estimates by the US Department of Veterans Affairs.
As painful as retelling the horrors of war are for Krikorian, he insists the stories must be shared.
“Young people need to hear these stories,” he said. “They need to know what happened, what war is really like, that men die. That war is terrible.”
Krikorian — with a replaced hip, shot knees and a bovine heart valve replacement past its expiration date — wears his patriotism everywhere. On his cap. On a bookcase, where a model of an American fighter jet and a photo of him as a young seaman rest. On his living room sofa, where a large American flag is draped proudly across the back cushions.
He also wears it in his soul.
“My father was talking to me about the war in Ukraine,” said Eshbaugh. “Seeing the images on television reminds him of when he was in the war, seeing what those poor people are going through.
“One day, he turned to me and said, ‘If they institute a draft to help those people, I’ll go. If they send Americans, I’ll go.’ That’s who my father is. That's the kind of man he is. Even at his age, he’s thinking about helping people.”
Willing to fight for brothers and friends he’s never known half a world away. Despite bad knees, bad hearing, a repaired heart, and in a wheelchair. At age 100. He'd go.
The greatest generation indeed.
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