Dear Readers,

Monday, May 25 is Memorial Day.

Here on our little corner of the great state of Maine, we celebrate this day in our town squares with parades and speeches. The little parades and get-togethers are a real slice of Americana.

It may be the last time we will be able to celebrate the lives of some of our friends and neighbors who served in our armed forces.

Only a handful of the millions of men and women who served during World War II are still with us. We all know they are not far from the end.

In the past year’s time, we lost many of them. For example, we said goodbye to one of the region's favorites, Dr. John F. Andrews Sr., a Coast Guard veteran. We also lost the celebrated ceramic artist Weston Andersen, an Army vet who married Brenda Nash, a beauty he met in London during a bombing raid, and Alan C. Tindal, a B-29 pilot who flew many missions over Japan.

Just a few years ago, we lost another hero, Jay Zeamer Jr., a quiet B-17 pilot who never spoke of the career that earned him the Medal of Honor, two DFCs, two Silver Stars and two Air Medals.

Not long ago, we lost another notable veteran, Damariscotta's Cordelia Hood, who survived covert missions behind German lines as an agent of the OSS. After the war, she stayed with the agency, which became the CIA, and retired in 1970.

Only a handful of World War II vets are still with us. Many will be at the Memorial Day parades.

They include our neighbors like former Marine Lt. John Druce, who served in the Pacific Theater and in China at the end of the war, Army vet George Whitten, who landed at Normandy two months after D-Day and slogged his way through France into Germany, and The Rev. Bob Zimmerli, a sailor who served and survived tours on U.S. Navy minesweepers.

Of course there were others who made it back home, shook off the horrors of what we now call PTSD, got married, started careers and raised families.

Not only have we raised memorials to honor their service, we enacted the GI Bill and educated a generation.

The celebrated cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who chronicled the career of a pair of ordinary soldiers he called Willie and Joe, and poked his sharp pen at overbearing officers, reminded the folks back home to remember the World War II veterans in his 1944 book “Up Front.”

Here is what Mauldin said about the World War II vets. “Don't forget him — ever. Think of him as a guy who wanted to live every bit as much as you do. Don't let him be just one of ‘Our Brave Boys’ from the old home town, to whom a marble monument is erected in the city park, and a civic-minded lady calls the newspaper 10 years later and wants to know why that ‘unsightly stone,’ isn't removed.”

Mauldin reminded us the World War II vets were just folks who served and did their duty. He called them “ordinary people who just wanted to live and raise a family and pay their taxes and cuss the politicians.”

Monday's celebrations may be our last chance to cheer the World War II vets.