Some didn't think they could ever make anyone understand. These are men who, for years, never talked about what they saw, what they did in the war. Why do they go, year after year, to nondescript hotel convention centers and don matching baseball caps and windbreakers and pin on oversize nametags? Go up to the Navy Armed Guard's hospitality suite, above the sweating bodies in the gym at the Hilton Washington Dulles Airport Hotel, and listen. Navy Memorial, where they laid a wreath and searched computers for their stories, and to the World War II Memorial, Lloyd made sure the five buses would pull up as close as possible to make it easier for those with walkers, canes and wheelchairs. And instead of a full day of sightseeing as in the old days, the bus trip to the Udvar-Hazy Center was the only thing on the agenda Friday. This year, in and around Washington, D.C., there are fewer than 200. Ten years ago, 1,100 veterans went to their reunion in Las Vegas to find their war buddies and relive old times. I'm 80, and I'm the youngest one here." Their counterparts in England have held their last reunion. But this year's reunion, he said, is going to be their last. For 25 years, Lloyd, of Rolesville, N.C., has organized the annual reunion of the veterans of the Navy Armed Guard, the guys who guarded the ships that carried 373 million tons of cargo to and from U.S. Lloyd, are beginning to realize they aren't going to go on forever. The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates 1,000 die every day. During World War II, there were 16.4 million of them, men and women in uniform, ready, as the saying goes, to do nothing less than save the world. You had to have been there to understand. They come together at reunions such as this, the ones who are left and those who can, because they must. Lafferty climbs the stairs and joins other men who served with him in the U.S. They are old, their faces marked with wrinkles and age spots, and the once-easy gait of young men who didn't know any better has become the stiff, cautious step of old men who have seen too much. "I'm about out of steam," he said this weekend at his unit's reunion. One by one, the 81-year-old widower labors up the steps with his cane. Now, it takes all that a citizen soldier such as Eugene Lafferty has to climb the stairs at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. In their day, with hearts clanging in their skinny, young chests, they flew bomb runs, manned the machine guns on 7,000 cargo ships or survived 124 days in a foxhole on an Italian beach surrounded on three sides by German troops. WASHINGTON The Greatest Generation is tired.
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