Even as a teenager, Gerry Jutras knew that serving in WWII almost certainly meant death.
Young and self-assured, he believed he could escape the fate that met over 400,000 other American military personnel. Like so many others, he was eager to serve.
He was 14 years old on the day Japan struck Pearl Harbor, spending Christmas at his family’s home in Lawrence, Mass. Jutras’s uncle, a U.S. Army soldier five years his senior, knew what the attack would mean for his enlistment term. “He got all upset when he saw that,” Jutras said, “because he says, ‘Now I’m stuck for good.'”
His uncle’s bleak attitude didn’t dampen his own, though, and when the soldier returned to combat in Italy, Jutras sent him letters saying how he couldn’t wait to serve his country.
“I used to write to him and I used to tell him, ‘I’m anxious to get in the service,’ and he used to say, ‘Stay home, you fool!'” Jutras said with a laugh.
In those days, Jutras sported a callow confidence.
“You thought that you wouldn’t get killed. You were only 14, 15. You think you’re going to live forever,” said Jutras, now 99 years old. “I almost did.”
Eighty-one years have passed since he enlisted in the Navy in 1945, near the end of the war, when he was 17. He served one year before he was discharged in 1946.
Life barreled on after he left the military; he got an education, married a childhood sweetheart and raised a family. His time in the Navy wove through his century-long life, influencing but not defining it.
Jutras has been a resident of the New Hampshire Veterans Home in Tilton since 2025, living beside other former members of the military. They hold memories of brotherhood, service and sacrifice. They can name friends they lost along the way.
A soft-spoken 81-year-old, Stephen Sayewich is among them. After serving in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, he has struggled to accept his role in the conflict. He says he feels ghosts of his past that he still carries with him.
Though separated by time and the fissure between two conflicts, their stories reveal how service to their country fits into the broader context of their lives, before, during and after their time in the armed forces.
‘We grew up in a hurry’
Jutras remembers when he was a child in the 1930s and ’40s: He and his friends ran through the neighborhood after school. In the winter, they went sledding down snowy hillsides and ice-skating at the rink across the street.
“The only time we’d come in [was] time for supper, something to eat,” Jutras said.
Jutras’s childhood was happy, but short-lived. Coming of age during a World War meant the days of rushing through homework to play with the local boys had ended.
“We grew up in a hurry,” Jutras said. “In boot camp, they didn’t treat you very good over there. They used to give you a hard time all the time because they knew you were going to have trouble.”
As a Navy quartermaster, Jutras had to learn how to operate the ship’s machinery and enjoyed the times they docked in Cuba or Venezuela. Some stuffy days, he would steal away with a bugler from Brooklyn to sit on a railing in the fresh air.
“We probably would have got caught. They probably would have given us a hard time, but no, he used to know how to get there. It was only a little small trap door,” he said.
By the time his service ended, he said, he had learned how to be responsible: to manage his money well, to hold down a job. After returning to Massachusetts, still a teenager, he married Helen, a woman he had known since they were kids.
Jutras kept up with friends he made in the Navy, and with other veterans lucky enough to come home. He’d play sports and go fishing with his old neighborhood friends, at least for a time.
“They’re all dead now, I’m sure,” Jutras said of his Navy brothers, fellow servicemembers and boyhood companions.
‘God, it was beautiful’
Before he guided aircraft as they dropped explosives over Vietnam, before he was commissioned an Air Force officer upon graduating from the College of the Holy Cross, Stephen Sayewich was a teenager in Fair Lawn, N.J., dazzled by a world he was only just beginning to know.
“Oh, God, it was beautiful. I really blossomed,” Sayewich said. “To me, it was a chance to really fly and try everything. Sports, music.”
Once he enrolled in ROTC and later joined the Air Force, Sayewich winces to remember some of his wartime orders. He was given high-level security clearance and told that he could not share what he did as a radar maintenance officer — not with his wife, his parents, his friends.
He served until 1974, but it wasn’t until 33 years later that he began to process what he’d felt, seen and done over the course of the Vietnam War. The journey started when he entered a New Mexico VA hospital.
“They started giving me a program to help me process the stuff that I did,” Sayewich said. “It’s been a process ever since then because I never admitted to myself some of the stuff that I did.”
In the years since, Sayewich has begun to grapple with his punishing regret.
“I was good at what I did. I was very quick,” Sayewich said. “I never realized what it was taking out of me at the time, but I did everything. I was very good at what I did in releasing ordinance. But that’s very sterile. Bottom line is, there’s some people … underneath those bombs.”
The day before Veterans Day, Sayewich gave a presentation to serveral state and federal public information officers. He’s an eloquent speaker, but repeating the words never gets easier.
Regarding the holiday itself, Sayewich parses the actions of the government from those who served.
“It seems to me that it’s a good thing that people genuinely understand that you don’t have to believe in what the country is doing, necessarily, to respect the GI,” he said.
‘I hope I did a good enough job’
Six months before his 100th birthday, Jutras is still trying to understand why he has lived so long. Raised Roman Catholic, he said he believes God may have some purpose for his life.
“How come I’m still here?” Jutras asked. “I must be useful for something.”
He didn’t take long to venture an answer: “Maybe it’s because I’m talking to my kids.”
He has eight children, two deceased; nine grandchildren; two great-grandchildren. His wife Helen, whom he still misses dearly, died almost 20 years ago.
“It feels kind of funny because everybody I know is gone,” Jutras said. “So I’m the last one.”
Jutras said he doesn’t fear dying, though he does want to be remembered — not for his service or his valor or his brawn, but for raising his children.
“I want everybody to remember me,” he said. “That I did what I had to do and I brought everybody up like I was supposed to do, and I hope I did a good enough job taking care of them.”
Fifty-two years removed from war, Sayewich remembered his outlook from when he was a younger man.
“I had to give back. I had to find a job. I had a wife and a child,” Sayewich said. “And that was duty. I had to produce. I didn’t have time to think about it, you know.”
At the Veterans Home, though, Sayewich lingers in his thoughts. On Wednesday, when they serve lunch and have a celebration, all will be invited to participate. Sayewich will still be trying to bring meaning to it all.
“Here, I can reflect,” he said. “I’m coming to some sort of revelation.”
