An Understated Hero: TJ Patton and the Disappearance of the G.I. Generation

Thomas J. Patton, a 91-year-old veteran of the Second World War, placed his left palm on the obituary page of a recent Philadelphia Inquirer. He slid the paper across the table toward me and pointed to a photo of a sailor he knew from the war.
“How many veterans are left?” he asked.
I looked it up when I returned home later that day. Some 16 million Americans served in World War II, according to the US Department of Veterans Affairs. Around 558,000 were alive in 2017. By 2036, nearly all of them will be dead. America’s G.I. Generation is disappearing.
Patton, however, is very much alive. “You wanna see my latest project?” he asked. “We’ll go backwards through life.”
Patton, known as TJ, wore a Navy-blue Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirt and loose jeans rolled up at the cuffs. His eyes were sharp. Only the long creases in his face betrayed his age.
From a closet, he removed two clothes hangers wrapped in yarn. They resembled the ornamental rope work on the railings of historic ships.
“It’s all half-hitches,” he said proudly. “My mother always said, ‘Idle hands are for the devil.’”
Patton joined the Navy in 1943, “the day I was 17 years old.” His older brother, Bill Patton, also served in the Navy during the war.
By March 1944, 18-year-old TJ Patton had learned to coxswain a 36-foot troop carrier, a Higgins Boat. His boat was loaded onto a tank-carrying amphibious ship, the LST-510, for the convoy to England.
“That damned North Atlantic,” Patton exclaimed. “That’s a rough-ass place. We lost a lot going over. U-Boats. The water was ice cold, and there were no survivors.”
Two months later, on June 6, Patton’s boat approached Omaha Beach with 18 to 20 men on board. His brother’s ship, the USS Emmons, was off the coast participating in the heavy bombardment of Nazi defenses prior to the D-Day landings.
The soldiers on LST-510 jumped into the chest-high water, and Patton never saw them again. After that, he and his crew pulled injured men from the beach and shuttled them to the ship, which had converted its tank deck into an operating room.
One night a few days after D-Day, a storm scattered all the small boats. They ran aground, and Patton’s crew was stranded on Omaha Beach for 11 days. They helped carry bodies and serve meals.
Later that year, as LST-510 was heading to Cherbourg Harbor, a troop ship, the SS Leopoldville, was torpedoed nearby. Again, Patton went to work ferrying soldiers to his vessel.
“I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas morning picking out bodies,” he said. “My Christmas dinner was cans of sardines.”
Patton returned to civilian life at the age of 20. He married, had three daughters, and spent 35 years as a pipe fitter at Allied Chemical Corporation.
After retiring in 1989, he and his wife, Helen, moved to Long Beach Island, New Jersey, a barrier island where only one fifth of the population are year-round residents. The off-season can be slow, and Patton needed something to do.
“I like to be moving around an ‘all,” he said.
He mowed lawns, installed screen doors, and eventually became the contracted handyman for several real estate companies. Shortly after my wife’s family bought a home in Long Beach Island in 2000, Patton showed up on their doorstep.
“Hi, I’m TJ,” he said. “I come with the house.”
Three years ago, Helen became sick. She was in the hospital for 43 days. Patton was there all the time. Of all the traumatic stories he told, this seemed to weigh the heaviest on him.
“It was terrible,” he said. “I watched her fade, little by little, every day. One day, I said, ‘Did you hear that?’ And she said, ‘Fuck it,’ and she passed.”
Showing me around his house, Patton gestured into a bedroom with an impeccably-made bed. A decorative hooked rug depicting two oversized hands clasped in prayer hung over it.
“Helen, she liked to make these rugs,” he said and pointed to an urn on a dresser at the foot of the bed. “She’s still here.”
As he spoke, a truck pulled up to his house, and a man, whom Patton referred to as the Irishman, entered. They had a brief discussion about electrical wiring. He asked Patton advice on removing a ceiling fan from a house.
“It’s 12–2,” the Irishman said. “I thought I could hardwire it.”
“I still need to install a new range hood,” Patton said. “But I have to find a 20-inch oven.”
“I’ll keep my eyes open,” the Irishman said.
After some banter over the Philadelphia Eagles’ prospects of winning the upcoming Super Bowl after a spate of injuries, the Irishman left. Patton pointed out a ceramic plate on his mantle. It commemorates an LST-510 reunion. For decades, he met his shipmates every year. The reunions were often held on board the former LST-510, which now serves as a ferry between Connecticut and New York.
Now, there are too few survivors to hold the event. In June, NBC aired a special on the LST-510, now called the MV Cape Henlopen, in which they interviewed the only other surviving member of the original crew, Jim Lijoi.
“There’s three of us left, I think,” said Patton.
Last year, he attended his brother’s reunion for the USS Emmons in Buffalo, New York.
“A guy died,” he recalled. “Right at the reunion. Dropped right dead.”
I felt a bond with Patton from the moment we met. Like Patton, my older brother is also in the Navy. He joined before me and is still serving. I entered the US Naval Academy in June 2001. The 9/11 attacks happened during my first month of class and changed the course of my life as World War II had changed Patton’s. I imagined myself in his place, speaking with a young veteran, in 55 years.
After college, I served as an active-duty Explosive Ordnance Disposal Officer — a bomb disposal technician — until I transitioned to the Navy Reserves in January 2017. During that time, 21 Navy bomb technicians died in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria — nearly one percent of my community.
The frequency of casualties has decreased as the wars wind down. I live in New York City now, where only a handful of friends and coworkers are veterans. The impact of military service in the Global War on Terror is not an everyday topic of conversation. Sometimes, I even forget about it.
But there are reminders. For example, I recently received an e-mail from a member of the Naval Academy’s rugby team, on which I played during college. The midshipman was designing a memorial plaque and compiling names of the team’s former members who had died in the line of duty. I had played with several of the officers who were on the list. But two of them surprised me. I had thought they were still alive, but they had died in separate helicopter crashes in 2012 and 2014.
Speaking with Patton, who has never forgotten his generation’s war, was almost a relief.
Patton stopped me on his front porch as I was leaving. An American flag and a Philadelphia Eagles flag rippled in the strong ocean wind. He grabbed my hand and said, “Thank you for your service. I always thank people for their service.” There was a long silence before I thanked Patton for his.
