U.S. ARMY AIR CORPS Arthur Fiveland   Arthur Fiveland of Lamoine really, really, really wanted to join the fight. “I was going to win the war,” he declared, and to that end he quit West Orange (N.J.) High School and enlisted in the Army Air Corps on July 10, 1943. “I wanted to be a pilot.” He trained in New York state and Mississippi, where he took the aviation exam. Out of his 200-man squadron, only 25 passed the test. He was among the 25. An aviation cadet, he went into pre-flight training in Arkansas. But then came the invasion of France in June 1944 and he dropped his ambition to be a pilot so that he could be sent into combat immediately. The Army kept Fiveland busy at the base driving a 2,500-gallon fuel truck. And all the while, he was spoiling for a fight. He wanted to learn the art of war, but all he had learned to date was the Army motto: “Hurry up and wait.” A girlfriend wrote to him to say that her brother was missing in action. And Fiveland grimly promised: “I’ll replace him.” He continued to press for transfer to a combat unit. Finally, he was sent up to see the lieutenant colonel, who asked him why he wanted out. “Is it the food?” the lieutenant colonel asked. “I’m going to win the war,” said Fiveland. “I joined up to do something.” The brass sent him to a base in Lincoln, Neb., where Fiveland was colder than he had ever been in his life. “I dressed up in my class A’s [best uniform] to go to bed,” he said. Even so, he caught pneumonia and wound up in a hospital in Lincoln. “Penicillin just came out,” Fiveland recalled. But it was early days for the miracle drug and the idea of bad reactions to penicillin hadn’t been explored much. Fiveland had a horrible reaction, lost most of his skin and spent five months in the hospital where he underwent 21 cardiograms, among other procedures and diagnostics. “The rest of the guys went on the England,” he said. “The war was winding down.” It wound down without him. Once he’d recovered, the Army taught him the steamfitter’s trade and put him to work with the post engineers on a number of different posts. Discharged May 10, 1946, Fiveland stayed in steamfitting but he didn’t stay busy. He drifted a bit, spent a lot of time at Louie’s tavern in Orange playing shuffleboard. “You couldn’t get a job because there wasn’t any building material,” Fiveland said. “Nobody was building anything.” So he joined the Marine Corps Reserve in Brooklyn, N.Y. There wasn’t much going on and he was discharged in November 1949. Then the Korean War broke out and everyone still in the Reserves was called up. Once again, Arthur Fiveland missed the war. “The harder I tried the more out west I went,” he said. He married the former Gladys Dawson. He attended Columbia University on the GI Bill and had a long career in the building trades. Arthur and Gladys have twin sons, aged 56, a daughter, 54, and three grandchildren. At 55, Arthur retired and they moved to Lamoine. Why Lamoine? “We just kept following Route 1,” he said. — Stephen Fay