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Historian Stephen Ambrose appropriately described World War II as “history’s greatest catastrophe”. But from the smoldering rubble of that war there emerged amazing stories of ordinary men and women doing extraordinary deeds of valor, sacrifice, and heroism in the midst of extraordinary times.
Today, over 80 years later, there are still such stories being unearthed, stories that need to be told. Such is the purpose of Ron Eckberg’s Ordinary Heroes Project podcast. You will hear stories that you will most likely not have heard before, stories that will inspire, educate, and hopefully challenge you to help in this effort to keep alive the memory of what the Greatest Generation did to keep the world from succumbing to the madness of those who would seek to rule it.
Ron Eckberg is the “proud son of a World War II combat veteran”. Join him as he brings new stories of man’s greatest conflict in the Ordinary Heroes Project Podcast.
Ordinary Heroes Project Podcast
Episode 3: The Last Soldier
Open:
“No war is really over until the last veteran has died”, one soldier declared, and that is true on several levels. I’ll explain in Episode 3 of the Ordinary Heroes Project Podcast, titled “The Last One”.
Body:
Myron Roker died October 25th, 2024, in a nursing home outside Omaha, Nebraska. He was 101 years old.
Now, I don’t expect that name to ring a bell with you. There is no reason it should. Myron lived most of his days in Eastern Nebraska and Southwestern Iowa, Glenwood, Iowa to be precise. He was a man of faith who simply went about doing his job, loving his wife, and raising his family.
But for one short season of those 101 years Myron Roker, like many young men of his generation, trudged across the battlefields of Europe in the quest to stop Hitler’s effort at world domination.
I met Myron sometime around 1980 when I visited Glenwood. I was in town to provide music for an Evangelistic Crusade being held in the town’s National Guard Armory, a massive Quonset type building with a metal roof and cement floor. An echo chamber, to be sure.
The first night of the event I was introduced as Ron Eckberg from Princeton, Illinois.
At the end of the evening a gentlemen came up the front aisle toward me and struck up a conversation that went something like this;
“So your name is Eckberg and you’re from Princeton, Illinois?”
“Well, actually I’m not”, I told him, “I’m from Walnut, Illinois.”
Then the conversation really turned.
Myron ask me, “Do you know a Harold Eckberg?”
I laughed.
“Sort of…He’s my Dad”.
Myron went on to tell me he had been part of the 44th Infantry Division, 324th Regiment the same company my Dad was in.
And while Myron Roker was not in my Dad's I & R platoon, he was nonetheless, one of my dad’s closet friends along with Joseph Panamas and James Renfro, the men I told you about in Episode 2.
I talked to Myron several times that week in Glenwood and during the subsequent visits I made to that town.
Of course, the first thing I did after I got back home was to tell my Dad how I had met his old Army buddy.
Myron and Dad had lost touch with one another after the war. Dad didn’t go to a single regimental reunion, something I never understood and another of those ”Why?” questions I wish I would have asked him.
But it turned out that Myron’s work repairing relay towers took him close to Walnut occasionally and the next time he was in the area, he stopped by Dad’s house for a visit. I listened in as he and Dad relived some old war memories on the front porch. It truly was like watching two long lost brothers catching up, almost as if they were right back walking the roads of France almost 40 years earlier.
I stayed connected with Myron through the years, first with a few phone calls then when I spoke at the 2008 reunion of the 324th.
Recently I tracked him down again. I did an internet search and discovered that he was doing what I’m trying to do with this podcast and the programs I present; Keep the history, the stories, and the legacy of World War II alive. The big difference between us was, of course, that he was a piece of living history, his stories first hand.
I learned how very year, until just a few years ago would put on the uniform he wore as he fought his way across Europe with my father. He would visit the local elementary schools to show slides and tell his story to spellbound students. Newspapers and television stations came out of Omaha to do stories on him and they turned him into something of a local media celebrity.
I am extremely thankful that just a couple months ago my wife and I took a couple of days and traveled to Glenwood where I spent an afternoon listening to Myron talk about the war, his relationship with my father, and his effort to keep his story—and the story of World War II in general—alive for the generations coming behind him.
I learned two important lessons that day.
First, I learned that Myron, unlike my father, loved to talk. Especially about the war. But he was like my father in another sense; those months on the front lines of Europe had shaped his life in a way nothing else could. And while his voice was somewhat fragile at 100 you could still hear the passion whenever his storytelling detoured into that part of his life.
Second, I learned that no one, not even those who were considered my father’s closest friends, truly knew him. They loved him like a brother but dad was just quiet; he didn’t let people get too close.
Last Friday night marked an important end of my father’s story and mine as well. Myron Roker was the last of my Dad’s “band of brothers” to die. The last soldier in that group of soldiers who trained together, lived together, and fought together. He was the last soldier in that special group of men who came from ordinary places and ordinary lives, then together experienced an extraordinary season in an extraordinary moment of history, then returned to their ordinary lives and their ordinary dreams.
They were men of peace when I knew them. I seriously doubt that any one of the three that survived the war ever lashed out at another human being in anger.
Nonetheless, for that season of time they were the men Winston Churchill referred to when he said, “We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.” I find it almost impossible to think of them as such but they were. The proof is found in the medals and momentos stashed away in army trunks and boxes in closets and in the stories their sons and daughters now take pride in telling. Sons like me.
“No war is really over until the last veteran has died”. How true that is. For that small group—Dad, Renfro, Myron, and Joseph Panamas—the war is now finally over.
But for a few and steadily declining number of veterans the war is still alive and well. They number less than 50,000 but they are a proud bunch who still enjoy sharing their stories, revisiting the places the war of their youth took them, and walking beside one another just like they did in those war years.
Not all of them, of course. But many do and we need to capture their stories as we hear them. While we can hear them first hand.
God bless those wonderful heroes. Let’s prove that quote wrong by keeping the story of World War II alive long after the last veteran dies, whoever that may be and whenever that day comes.
It is a task worthy of our greatest effort.
Close:
That’s it for another episode of the ORDINARY HEROES PROJECT PODCAST. I hope you have enjoyed listening
I truly would appreciate your support. Please subscribe, like, or write a review. You can also email me at ordinaryheroes@roneckberg.com or visit my website at roneckberg.com/heroes. You can also look me up on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
Thank you again for listening. I’ll look forward to sharing another episode of the ORDINARY HEROES PROJECT PODCAST in two weeks.
See you then.