One local family spent the week leading up to July 4th learning about the meaning of service to the country.

Virgil Myers, 90, stopped in St. Joseph for a family reunion after coming back from Luxembourg and a visit to sites where he fought in World War II. The widower from St. Joseph lives in Lakeland, Fla.

After the war, Mr. Myers didn't talk about those years, he just went back to work for Quaker Oats. It wasn't until about 2002 that he started opening up when a granddaughter asked him to talk to her history class in Florida.

Drafted in May 1944, a 26-year-old Mr. Myers had 12 weeks of boot camp and physical training at Fort Hood, Texas, before receiving orders for Europe. A couple of days in a replacement depot on the coast of France resulted in orders to Company G, 317 Regiment of the 80th Infantry Division. German artillery barrages in a forest became his introduction to combat.

"My friend from St. Louis, Ken Maurer, and I were sitting on the ground as tree tops exploded all around us," Mr. Myers said. "We would yell at one another, pointing at what a shell did, and then another and another."

Later, Mr. Myers came upon another recruit from the replacement depot. "He was one of the guys on the truck who hadn't fired his rifle," Mr. Myers said. "The complete top of his head was cut off. It had been his first mission and it was over in not more than 10 minutes."

Later in the war, having survived German ambushes and Bouncing Betty exploding mines, he crossed the Rhine River under fire in a wooden boat and saw more than half the soldiers in his company killed, Mr. Myers discovered another horror of that war. G Company marched into Wiemar, Germany, in 1945 as a police force.

The soldiers started seeing men with ragged black-and-white-striped uniforms.

Capt. Mike Damkowitz told First Sgt. Percy Smith; John Smith, a Jeep driver; and Mr. Myers to find out where the strange fellows were coming from. Civilians wouldn't tell them anything, but some children pointed to an area north of Wiemar.

"Coming around a hill, we looked and saw 300-foot-long, three-story-high barracks buildings, all over a hill with 10-feet-high barbed-wire fences," Mr. Myers said. "There were men leaning against the wire, staring out at nothing. They didn't even see you."

The soldiers found the back gate to Buchenwald, a German concentration camp, where prisoners were murdered by work, torture, beatings, starvation, medical experiments and executions. They found a prisoner from Lithuania who spoke English. He told them about the death camp. The three Americans were inside the camp for about a half hour and saw bodies lying stacked outside the doors leading into each barrack.

The SS soldiers had fled the camp, and the three soldiers reported back to their captain to inform him about what they'd found. By May 8, 1945, the war had ended, and in January 1946 Mr. Myers was headed home to America and a return to St. Joseph.

Perhaps the strangest part of Mr. Myers' story is that he didn't have to go.

After he graduated from St. Joseph Junior College in 1939 and married Emma "Bobbie" Tracy, he went to work for Quaker Oats. The couple had a little girl, Ronna Jean. Quaker got a contract producing cereal for the troops, and Mr. Myers ran a special machine used in the production process. Because the cereal was vital to the war effort, Mr. Myers had an exemption from the draft. In 1944, he voluntarily gave up the deferment and allowed himself to be drafted into the Army.

"For all this and more, Virgil is our family's American hero on Independence Day," said Houston Myers, a cousin who lives in town.

Marshall White can be reached

at marshall@npgco.com.