By Emily Williams
Crestline Elementary School Counselor Bonnie Lorino is charged with organizing the school’s Veterans Day program, an event that she dubs close to her heart. Each year, the school invites its faculty, staff and students to invite veterans to attend a program featuring fifth graders and for the past four years, Bonnie Lorino has invited her father-in-law, Mike Lorino.
At 94, Lorino said his memory of his service is just as vivid as it ever was, beginning with his first days as a military man.
Much like his father before him, Lorino had a desire to flee the nest at an early age. Lorino’s father and a group of close friends immigrated from Sicily, Italy at the age of 15, entering the United States through New Orleans rather than New York and settling in Birmingham.
Lorino was sent to basic training with only two or three credits left before graduating high school, but he said he wasn’t much for studying so the exit suited him. After basic training, he was sent to his first station in Canada where he helped make a path through 1600 miles of wilderness for the Alaska Highway.
After his time in Canada, Lorino received orders to go to England as a combat engineer. The days leading up to D-Day were surprisingly jovial as Lorino recalled escaping Manchester pubs to attend dances and forging a short-lived relationship with a young lady who was waiting for him to meet her parents the day he prepared to cross the English Channel.
“It took us three days to cross the 25 mile strip to Normandy,” he said. “It took us three days because of the traffic.”
Lorino landed on Omaha Beach just after D-Day, effectively beginning his legacy of always arriving just a little late to “the party.”
His orders took him through much of Northern France, surveying the area on the back of a Jeep and occasionally enjoying the fanfare of a hearty welcome from townsfolk residing in smaller villages untouched by war.
A small notepad, pulled from his breast pocket as he recounted various tales of wartime, gives brief accounts of his days during the war. The worn pages are scribbled with daily duties and the occasional list of the status of fellow members who were torn from the group with special orders, many wounded in action, some missing in action and a number killed in action.
One of Lorino’s clearest memories of his fellow men was of a “clean-cut and quiet kind of guy,” named Roth. After just three days into his service, Roth left with a group of surveyors, that very well could have included Lorino himself, and was never seen again.
By chance, Lorino and his troop located the Jeep in a barn just outside of a small village. There they found bullet holes in the vehicle and met a farmer who found the car and buried the only remaining body.
“We were able to identify him as Roth,” Lorino said. “If we hadn’t he would have been an unknown soldier.
“I suppose I could have been on that Jeep instead of him, but that’s life. You can make a left turn, or you can make a right.” If his father’s boat had landed him up North instead of New Orleans, Lorino said he may have grown up a Jersey boy.
According to Lorino’s son, also Mike Lorino, his tales of wartime and his life were often met with some skepticism from the family until the internet served as a fact checking resource.
“If you do a little digging you can find all of this on the internet,” Mike Lorino said. “We were able to find the actual account of the Jeep and Roth and I thought, ‘Son of a gun, he’s telling the truth.’”
Through the loss of fellow men and warfare, Lorino was able to find those moments of joy and discovery in every moment – whether marveling over a cable bridge the Navy constructed to carry tanks over the Rhine River as Germans dropped bombs overhead or watching General Patton direct traffic on a French road crowded with tanks and Jeeps.
Lorino’s wealth of memories make his mind a true piece of history, representing the ever-dwindling population of WWII veterans.
Lorino will be among 100 veterans expected to attend Crestline’s Veterans Day Ceremony, providing the students a tangible representation of who and why we celebrate on Veterans day.
