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Every #MemorialDay I re-read the Medical Report of Action written by my late grandfather, Abraham Lenzner, about the events of September 25, 1943. He was the Senior Medical Officer on LST 167 when it was attacked as it unloaded supplies on the island of Vella Lavella. 1/ 
He was standing next to a close friend as three Japanese planes came “diving at the ship out of the sun.” He scrambled onto the main deck and ducked inside to grab his helmet as bombs rocked the boat. 2/
The spot where he‘d been standing was destroyed; his friend, killed. My grandfather was hit by shrapnel. The lights went out. The ship was engulfed in flame.
“All this action,” he wrote, “was but a matter of seconds.” 3/
“All this action,” he wrote, “was but a matter of seconds.” 3/
He led a rescue party through the burning decks, as ammunition and fuel exploded around them. The elevator was broken, and the hatches weren’t designed to carry injured men on stretchers. Still, they evacuated the wounded. “No living casualties were trapped aboard the ship.” 4/
The Senior Medical Officer, my grandfather, identified the dead and treated the injured.
He was 26.
5/
He was 26.
5/
What he saw and did during the war inspired him to be a psychiatrist rather than a surgeon; he’d seen enough broken bodies and wanted to help broken minds. But he was a proud veteran, and he marched in the Memorial Day parade every year... 6/
...including his final year when, apparently, he had a heart attack while marching...and kept going. The damage got him a week later. 7/
He was tough and stubborn and smart and sensitive, and he loved this country, which his father had come to from Lithuania. And I think of him today. He survived the war but surely some part of him was lost on September 25, 1943. 8/
I’ve thought of him a lot of days over the last couple years – the son of an immigrant who lived an American Dream. Sometimes I wonder what he would think of the traitorous, bigoted, draft-dodging criminal who currently serves as commander in chief. 9/
Or of a @GOP (my grandfather’s party, Nixon and all), that has become a refuge for pedophiles, religious zealots, and con artists; and that enables daily insults to the values he and his brothers fought to defend. 10/
The man I knew as my grandfather would be disgusted. The Senior Medical Officer I never met would be angry. I hope to honor both of them this #MemorialDay by carrying that disgust and anger for them. Abe Lenzner served for a better country than this. /end
