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LAKSHMI SMITH: NPR News in Washington. I'm Lakshmi Singh.

Congressional Democrats have offered their first concessions to President Bush in the standoff over Iraq war funding. In a closed-door meeting with the president's top aides on Capitol Hill today, the Democratic leadership said it would cut billions of dollars in domestic spending from the war funding bill, but lawmakers want the president to accept a timetable for pulling troops out of Iraq. White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten rejected that idea.

JOSHUA BOLTEN: A timeline for withdrawal, whether waivable or not, would be a very counterproductive move. While General Petraeus is pursuing a plan with troops in the field at this moment, that has some prospect for success.

LAKSHMI SMITH: Bolten told reporters after the meeting that "timelines send the wrong signal to Iraqis."

The news on immigration reform, or rather, overhaul, made headlines in Mexico this morning. NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports on reaction in Mexico, which provides the most migrants to the United States.

LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO: So far, there's been no official reaction from Mexican President Felipe Calderón. Mexico, for now, is reacting cautiously.

Victor Aviles, a spokesman for Mexico's Foreign Relations Department, said in a statement, "The Mexican government hopes that the different actors involved in the debate and in the eventual approval of this initiative take advantage of the opportunity it presents."

The front pages of the three main Mexican dailies made short mention of the Senate deal, too. The headline in the conservative paper Reforma showed skepticism. "Another migration plan pitched," it said.

While the main morning broadcast led with the news, the focus was all on American reaction. It was, perhaps, only a little surprising that no one thought to ask Mexicans here what they think about the latest immigration proposal. Critics allege, this is a country that in many ways has not come to terms with its own large migrant population.

Lourdes Garcia-Navarro-- NPR News, Mexico City.

LAKSHMI SMITH: Israeli Air strikes on Gaza continue today, killing at least four Hamas members, and Palestinian infighting is still raging. More details now from NPR's Linda Gradstein.

LINDA GRADSTEIN: Palestinian officials said the Hamas members were killed in two separate Israeli strikes, as Israel continued to try to stop rocket fire on southern Israel. The army said the building targeted in one of the strikes was used as a meeting place for Hamas members.

Yesterday, at least six Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes, and a small force of Israeli tanks and troops crossed the border from Israel into Gaza. Palestinian officials said among the dead were a father and his two sons. An Israeli army spokesman said the army fired a missile at a car carrying a rocket launching crew.

Hamas continued to fire rockets into southern Israel today, wounding at least one Israeli. Hamas and Fatah also continued their street battles in several areas of Gaza, as the unity government between them seemed on the brink of disintegrating.

Linda Gradstein-- NPR News, Jerusalem.

LAKSHMI SMITH: From Washington, this is NPR News.

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STEVEN JOHN: From Minnesota Public Radio News, I'm Steven John.

Northwest Airlines has won approval to emerge from bankruptcy in June. A federal bankruptcy judge in New York today okayed Northwest's restructuring plan. Eagan-based Northwest, has been in bankruptcy protection for the past 20 months.

The Minnesota Senate is back to full strength. DFL Senator Leroy Stumpf, of Thief River Falls, has returned to work, nearly a month after a health scare involving chest pains put him on the sidelines. Stumpf is the chairman of a key Education Finance Committee. His vote could be critical if the legislature attempts to override Governor Pawlenty's veto of a bill that contains a $0.05 increase in the gas tax. The Senate's vote on that bill wouldn't occur if an override attempt fails in the House.

The Minnesota House has passed legislation creating a mandatory statewide health insurance pool for school districts. Lawmakers passed the measure Thursday night after a nearly eight-hour debate. DFL House Majority Leader Tony Sertich, of Chisholm, says the bill is positive news for health care reform. He says 200,000 teachers and other school employees will benefit from the pool.

TONY SERTICH: Our teachers, I think, need this. We've seen far too much increase in health care costs across the state. This is one small step, at least for our school systems, to rein in those costs and hopefully spread that out.

STEVEN JOHN: Critics say some school districts will end up paying more under the mandatory pool than their current employee health care costs. The bill establishes a Minnesota School Employee Insurance Board, which must repay a $4 million start-up loan in 10 years. The Senate has passed a similar bill. Now, a conference committee needs to work out the differences in the two versions.

Sunny to partly cloudy, breezy and warmer today. Some showers and thunderstorms across the far Northwest this afternoon.

This is Minnesota Public Radio News.

GARY EICHTEN: Thank you, Steven. 12:06.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Good afternoon, and welcome back to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio News. I'm Gary Eichten. And this hour on Midday, we're going to hear two strikingly different accounts of World War II, the most destructive war in history. An event that changed the lives of, well, pretty much everybody at the time.

For Mankato native Frank Ario, World War II was marked by death and destruction, loss and victory. For Iona native Rita Stallman, World War II was an opportunity to broaden her horizons and change her life. This hour, we're going to hear both of their stories.

Here's Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson with the latest in our Voices of Minnesota interview series.

DAN OLSON: You need an appointment to see Frank. Ario. There's no grass growing under the feet of the 82-year-old South Minneapolis resident. The retired public school teacher and husband is a doting grandfather. Every weekday, he delivers or picks up grandkids for school. Every Wednesday, he volunteers at the Minneapolis Veterans Hospital. And he's active at his church.

All the activity seems to suit him. Ario's mind is sharp, his body trim. He could probably fit into his World War II uniform.

Frank Ario was also busy as a teenager growing up in Mankato, Saint Peter, and then North Mankato in Southern Minnesota. But he's the first to admit, not all the activities were law abiding. He says he saw the inside of the police station more than once.

FRANK ARIO: I ran the streets with a gang. I'm not real proud of that, looking back on it, but I got a lot of street smarts from that experience. And the guys that ran around with taught me a lot of things that probably I would never have learned in a textbook in school. But I managed to keep going through school, along with my brother, and then I didn't really start to hit the books until I got into college.

DAN OLSON: Frank Ario graduated from Mankato High School in 1942, well into World War II. He and his twin brother, Fred, and most of their male friends knew exactly what would happen next. If they didn't enlist, they'd be drafted into the military.

Frank and Fred Ario were drafted into the Army. Frank went through basic training in Kentucky. Fred in California. Frank Ario says it was in basic training where he learned about racial segregation and the cultural differences between Southern and Northern whites.

FRANK ARIO: I didn't have any experience with Blacks, and I remember one night we got into a really strong argument with a young guy from South Carolina, And he got so angry, he said, "You freed them, now you live with them."

So there were some of that going on all the time, but I don't think those of us from the North, at least me from the Midwest North, I don't think we-- I don't-- I just remember only in Mankato and counting two or three Blacks, maybe, in the whole time that I grew up, so I had no idea of how this was, except when I went into Louisville, and I found out, well, wait a minute, now.

I went into the train station, said whites only, Blacks only. Whites restroom, Blacks restroom. What's this? And I had no understanding at all that there was that kind of segregation, but that opened at least my eyes a little bit to realize, hey, this is a different world.

DAN OLSON: Some argue the tide of World War II turned against Germany as early as 1942. The Third Reich's invasion of the Soviet Union was a disaster. Even so, the war in Europe was raging when Frank Ario finished his training for duty as a tank crew member in 1944. His twin brother, Fred, finished his training for the infantry. Both were granted time off to return home and bid goodbye to family, before sailing for Europe.

What was that departure like from North Mankato? When you took off, what did you and your brother say to each other?

FRANK ARIO: I can't recall exactly what we said, but we both knew that we were probably going to end up in a battlefield. We didn't choose to be in the same outfit. Somehow or another, both of us felt it might not be a good idea to be together. It might be more of a hardship and a lot of worrying to do, so we just went our separate ways. He went back to the infantry, and I went into the [? army. ?]

So I guess, we just said goodbye in a loving way, and hoped that we'd see one another. And I think both of us were more optimistic, than pessimistic. We were talking in terms of coming back. We were going over there, and do what we had to do, and get back. So I don't think we were thinking death, but it's always in the back of your mind. You don't go into combat that naive.

DAN OLSON: Frank Ario arrived in France in September 1944. He and the others camped outside Paris waiting for the call to go to the Front, which was now in parts of Belgium and Germany. Ario got the call to join a tank crew in the fall of 1944, and virtually overnight, he was in the heat of battle in the most destructive war in human history.

Arrayed before him on his dining room table are old black and White photos of tank crew members.

You were a replacement for somebody on this crew.

FRANK ARIO: Not on that crew. All of us probably were replacements because a lot of the guys that went in on D-Day either were wounded or lost their lives, so crew members were changing quite frequently. I don't even remember the name of the gunner that was the gunner in the tank on the last day of war in Magdeburg.

These two guys, Horus Pepper, from South Carolina, and Cy Field, from Indiana, they stayed with us all the way. But Roy Lance and Cliff Dallen-- no. There were other guys.

That happened quite often. It's amazing. You could have a day of combat and not even remember who was in the tank that got knocked out ahead of you. It was that helter-skelter.

DAN OLSON: So you finally find yourself in a crew, in a tank. What are you finding? What are you encountering? Are you in battle?

FRANK ARIO: Well, the first thing I encountered and I remember that was vivid, I was assigned to a tank, and the driver of that tank was Leroy Myers. Leroy was 35 years old, and he was a coal miner. Very humble guy.

He and I hit it off really well. Leroy was really, a friendly guy. And he had landed on D-Day and survived.

But the guy that really caught my eye was APO, Alexander P. Oski. He was from Minnesota, and he was 35 years old. He was a hardened combat veteran.

Had kind of a mean streak in him, and you didn't cross Oski. So me, a 19 year old, I'm not going to do anything more than what I'm told to do. And if I'm going to survive and everything's going to probably work out the best, I'm going to rely on Oski the tank commander, to take that tank through the thick and thin of battle. And he did, as far as I was concerned, until he got killed.

DAN OLSON: Why was the tank called. The Steel Coffin?

FRANK ARIO: Because if you got hit by a German 88-millimeter or German 75-millimeter high-velocity gun with a projectile, a very good possibility that, that hit the turret. And you were in that turret, you were going to be so badly injured that you were not going to get out of there, and you were going to die either by burning to death or the thing exploding, or if the AP didn't kill you directly, in some cases, it did. It just kind of cut a guy right in half because you're looking at a big projectile about that size.

DAN OLSON: You're showing your forearm now.

FRANK ARIO: Yeah, yeah, yeah. About that size just coming right into the tank. In one side of the tank, right through the tank, and out the other side. And it's not going to-- it's going to just throw all kinds of stuff all over the tank.

And then they had what we call Panzerfaust. That's the same as we would call a bazooka in America. And this Panzerfaust could hit the side of the tank, and then burn itself through the metal, get inside the tank, and explode like a hand grenade inside the tank. So we lost guys that way.

We actually-- this picture here, that shows you, we actually-- when we got in battle, we actually began to put sandbags all around the tank, because the Panzerfaust hitting the sandbag would not stick. It'd fall down, and it couldn't do what I just told you they're capable of doing.

But the only problem with that is after you put all that stuff on while you were in a rest position waiting for the next takeoff, when you got into battle, the artillery would ruin all that. Shrapnel would hit that stuff and all the sand would go pouring out on the ground, you know, and in many cases, it proved inadequate for protection.

DAN OLSON: When you're in a tank and the gun is fired, is that as loud inside as it is--

FRANK ARIO: No, no. They're not as loud inside. But it's just, a tank, it's all metal. And those casings are about that long, and they're about that round, and when the fired and the shell falls on that metal, and sometimes you've got maybe five or six of those-- if you're busy, and you keep shoving them in-- this hot stuff is falling all over. It's just noisy.

And then artillery is the other thing, if you get caught in an artillery barrage. If the Germans have you zoned in, and you're kind of right in the X zone, that heavy stuff, that's just noisy. It just blasts into your ears.

DAN OLSON: Frank Ario says, like many World War II veterans, he didn't talk much about his experiences. However, many of them are still vivid in his mind. And even 60 years later, a few come back as recurring nightmares.

One nightmare revolves around events from a day in 1944, outside a town in Germany. There was fierce German resistance to the Allied advance. Ario was the cannon loader sitting in the rear of a Sherman tank. His life and the lives of the rest of the four-man crew that day were saved by Alexander Oski, the tank commander.

They were parked outside the German town, and then ordered to take it. An Allied air and artillery attack had knocked out some, but not all of the German troops and tanks in the town.

FRANK ARIO: Two columns set out to go across that, maybe, a half mile stretch, I remember, and one column went on a road on one side of us, and the first tank there hit a landmine, and that was out of commission. And then our column went in. We usually had, maybe, a half a dozen infantry on the back end of our tank.

We went in toward the objective, and while we were going in, our artillery was going over the top of our heads and landing on what they thought would be the front line for the Germans to hold that territory. And then when we got in close, they would lift that. Then the Germans would come up and start firing, but we were going to go, like, for hell bent into that community before they could reestablish themselves. Infantry to jump off, and then we'd go in and attack them.

Well, our first tank that day got knocked out because they didn't get that Tiger or Panther tank, whatever it was in there, so then that got knocked out. I still don't to this day how many guys were killed, or what happened to those guys.

But we were next in line, and this is where Oski made his great move. I didn't know what he was going to do. I didn't know if he was going to go up behind that tank and stay there for protection, because we were not going to go on in. The infantry had jumped off the tank when that first tank got knocked out so we couldn't go in without infantry.

So I didn't know what Oski was going to do, but then he decided, he was going to do a right turn. And I knew, when he made that right turn, that, that German gunner was just waiting for that, and that I was going to catch one of those. That was-- I shouldn't have survived that.

DAN OLSON: That German tank shot at you-- shot at your tank crew seven times--

FRANK ARIO: Seven times, they said, yeah.

DAN OLSON: --and did not hit you.

FRANK ARIO: The only thing you did is hit the .50 caliber machine gun on top of our tank and knocked that off.

[CHUCKLE]

Yeah.

DAN OLSON: And that's because your tank commander was doing this [INAUDIBLE].

FRANK ARIO: He kept his cool, and he stood up there, "Left, Leroy. And then he'd wait [INAUDIBLE] he knew. "Right, Leroy." And so that guy could not get his gun properly adjusted, so he could hit us.

DAN OLSON: He was shouting instructions to Leroy, the tank driver.

FRANK ARIO: Yes, because we had an intercom system.

DAN OLSON: And you're sitting in back.

FRANK ARIO: Yeah, I'm sitting there. Nothing I could do. We're not going to fire at anybody. We're just going for hell bent to get out of there. We're just going back to where we were. The attack was stopped by those-- those Tiger and Panther tanks.

DAN OLSON: So here you are, a 19-year-old guy sitting in this Sherman tank, thinking that one of these rounds is going to get me.

FRANK ARIO: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. That's it. You always say, well-- I remember, I still have nightmares about sitting there. And I just-- I just knew, that tank was over there, and we were going to come out here, and I'm on this side. I just knew that he-- he had to hit us. He couldn't miss that shot.

He had all that time while we were making up our minds what we were going to do, or what Oski was going to choose to do. And I still can't tell you this day, why Oski chose to do what he did, but he did that.

DAN OLSON: But the tank commander was an irascible guy. You said, you did not cross him. You called him a "hardened combat veteran."

FRANK ARIO: Well, he'd been in prison prior to getting into the service, because he had been involved in robbery. And I think he had spent five years in prison, in Stillwater. And my understanding-- Oski never said much about this, but you picked up little bits here and there, you know? And my recollection was that they told him, if you go in and serve admirably, you will be given a discharge from your prison.

DAN OLSON: Did he make it out of the war?

FRANK ARIO: No, he never made it out. He was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.

DAN OLSON: What was your reaction when you saw your first casualties, wounded and dead?

FRANK ARIO: Sad. Sad. It could be me. It could be somebody else's son. Somebody else's husband, you know.

But the thing that we soon learned is that our own American Quartermaster's Corps, they got those bodies off the battlefield as fast as they could. They didn't want us-- the Germans were scattered around. You'd see them quite often. They lay there sometimes for days.

Even some of our tank drivers would be so angry at times, they would intentionally run over those dead Germans. And there were times-- well, I remember on one occasion, it came over the loudspeaker, "Will you tank drivers quit running over those German soldiers?", you know? So there was that kind of thing.

Some guys were into that kind of stuff. And they were mad, they were angry, or they were just almost savagery when you get into battle. Other guys were more quiet and restrained, so you get a wide variety of behaviors, a wide variety of attitudes.

DAN OLSON: Were you mentally, by this time, hardened toward battle, or did you have episodes where you thought, I don't know if I can do this?

FRANK ARIO: Going into it, there was something about me that said, I want to go over there. I want to be a part of it. I don't want to go home and say, I didn't participate in combat. I rode the thing out.

So there was something about my desire to be in it, but I didn't have a desire to kill. I just felt everybody was going, and as near as we knew-- and we didn't an awful lot. I was no political hack at that time, that I knew everything that was going on. None of us knew about the concentration camps until we finally saw them. And then we realized that a lot of the things that had been said about what the Germans had been doing was real, and what the Japanese had done at Pearl Harbor and all.

So there was a sense in which we felt we had to be there. We were doing something that we thought was right. I never-- I didn't come out with a guilt conscience.

DAN OLSON: World War II veteran Frank Ario.

This is Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

Later this hour, I'll talk with Rita Stallman. Her World War II experience was completely different from Ario's, when she worked for the Signal Corps in Washington, DC.

Creature comforts were a rarity in the Allied push into Germany near the end of World War II. There were field hospitals and hot meals behind the lines, but at the front, Frank Ario says they foraged for food and slept where they could. Some American troops defied rules and fraternized with German civilians.

How did you feed yourself? What was sleeping like?

FRANK ARIO: Feeding ourselves, we did that a variety of ways.

When we were, like, in Belgium, as an example, we would never take any chickens or eggs from the Belgian people. But when we got into Germany, we would kill chickens, and somehow or another, prepare them to eat. We would get eggs from the chicken houses that were still standing.

One of the things I really liked was when we went into the German basements, they had red cherries that they had canned, they had canned different vegetables, and we would open those up and eat those. But most of the time, we were eating either C rations or K rations. And C rations, at first, they were just pretty much the same thing. It was always like beans and wieners or macaroni and cheese. Hash was another one.

They tried to develop a variety of C. I liked them, really, because I was a growing kid, and I was hungry, and I could eat two of those.

We always kept a case of K rations and C rations. And the infantry, not having as much opportunity to carry a lot of stuff, we often gave them C rations and K rations from our supply. So I would take a-- I would take a can of hash, let's say, open it up, and I'd take a pair of pliers from the tank and hold it. And then I put a blowtorch on it, and I'd heat it that way, and then I would eat from that way.

The K rations were like a Cracker Jack box. You open the top, and on the top, there were four cigarettes in a little package. And underneath that there would be maybe four crackers. Then underneath that there would be a little can of like a shoe polish can of cheese. And then there was, usually, a chocolate bar.

DAN OLSON: What about sleeping? What were sleeping--

FRANK ARIO: A variety of ways. Many nights, you just stay in the tank. I would try to curl down on the floor on my half of the tank. Sometimes, I had to sleep sitting up on that little chair.

Quite often, if we were back off the front lines, we would pick the best German house that we were near, and we'd go in there and sleep on the kitchen floor or wherever there was a place to sleep that was still standing. Many of them were already pretty well wrecked, but we'd find some place where we could sleep inside.

And then when you're out in the open, I remember that we would dig a slit trench and try to sleep in that.

DAN OLSON: Were there any German civilians around by this point when the American troops were coming through? And what did they-- what was their reaction?

FRANK ARIO: If their house was still standing, they were in the house, or they were in the streets, and they were holding up white flags, surrendering.

And we didn't shoot them. At least, I didn't. Maybe some guys did.

And we were told not to fraternize with them, But that didn't stop GIs. A lot of GIs fraternized with the Germans. They shacked up with them at night, those that wanted to do that.

DAN OLSON: Are you talking about men and women now? And families?

FRANK ARIO: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. A lot of guys, they needed-- they? knew they weren't going to be taken off the front lines so they didn't give a damn, what they did, you know?

They just felt, well, if you want to send me back to jail, fine, that's great, or you can send somebody else up and do my job. So they were pretty insulated from any punishment, you know, they felt. And a lot of guys were doing it.

A lot of guys did a lot of drinking at night. Cognac was a favorite. German Bureau was a favorite. So there were all kinds of stuff going on like that.

DAN OLSON: Frank Ario has a hearing aid in each ear. His hearing was damaged during the war.

There were lots of close calls, he says. One of the closest came during the heat of battle when a misstep by a crew member nearly killed him.

Ario was the tank's cannon loader. He sat in back taking orders to load either AP-- armor piercing-- or HE-- high explosive-- shells.

What happened to you?

FRANK ARIO: We were firing on a German target. I just kind of remember, out of the periscope that I saw a couple of Germans out there with an anti-tank gun, and they were trying to get through where we were. And so I called up to Oski-- "Oski, 11:00."

And then Oski said, "H2, Frank." So I reached down, took an H2, and I was going to put it in the breech block. The shell's about 2.5 feet long.

And as I put it in, what you were told back in basic training is that when you pick that shell up, you put your fist on the back end of it, put the tip in the barrel, and then you shove it through. And as you shove through, get your head and your shoulder out of there. And then you holler to the gunner, "On the way."

And the gunner is not supposed to pull the trigger until he hears your command. But the trigger in a tank is a solenoid, and you step on it. You don't pull it with your finger. And so, Harlan, the gunner that day, he had his foot on the solenoid. And when I put that thing in, the thing came right back. It has a recoil of 13 inches, and it came right back.

But I was lucky. It didn't get my head. It got my shoulder-- the top of the back of the shoulder. And it just went-- my arm just went dead.

And I said, "Oski, I can't function." I said, "My arms, I don't know, it's broke? I don't know." And he said, "Get out of there/"

So it was in the height of battle, so yeah, I got out of the tank. And he said, Green, get up there from the assistant driver spot and take Frank's place. And so I jumped out of the tank, and I didn't know where I was. I didn't have a frame of reference at that point.

So I looked around, and I saw a house across the street. And we'd been knocking out-- I think we knocked out over half a dozen German vehicles or one company did that afternoon. Five of our tanks did that. So I just ran across the street, and as I ran across the street, I got a ricochet off my helmet.

And I still don't know, to this day, what that was. But it couldn't be shrapnel because nothing dropped around me. The only thing I could figure it is, is a bullet that had been fired wildly, or somebody was honed in on me. But it had ricocheted off that crazy helmet that we used to wear.

And I got inside that house, and there were luckily a couple of infantry officers. And I was trying to get my bearings. I went over by the window, and the officer said, "Don't go over by the window, soldier." He said, "You're going to get killed."

And I said, well, where do I go? I said, where is the first aid station? He said, down the hill.

So then, I went out and ran, and I ran down that Hill. And at the bottom of the hill was an old railroad depot, and they were using that as a field hospital. And so I went in there, and they tagged me, and took my gun and my helmet, and put me in an ambulance. And I ended up back in Liége-- I don't know where-- Liége isn't on here, but is a big city in Belgium. And from Liége, they moved me to Paris, and I was in a hospital there for three weeks.

It turned out that it wasn't a break, I didn't get a break, but I started to have ear trouble. And my ears started to drain, and they kept me there for three weeks trying to clear an infection or whatever was happening, because I was having trouble hearing.

So then after three weeks, they said, well, what do you want to do? I said, I want to go back to my outfit. Don't send me any place else. Send me back. So then I worked my way back to the outfit and rejoined the outfit.

DAN OLSON: How did you find your way back?

FRANK ARIO: Oh, they know where you are. They knew who I was, they knew who my outfit was, and they knew where that outfit was.

DAN OLSON: Why did you want to go back to that outfit?

FRANK ARIO: I didn't want to go anyplace-- I didn't want to end up in somebody else's unit. And I knew the guys in the unit I was in. I knew what we were doing. I felt comfortable with that, and I felt I should go back.

DAN OLSON: What kind of a reception did you get when you got back to them?

FRANK ARIO: Oh, the guys were-- no big deal. No big deal. Guys were coming and going all the time. Just-- except for a couple of guys that knew me-- "Hey, Frank. Good to see you. What happened to you?"

But it's kind of interesting, you know, we don't really talk a lot about what we did during the day. We didn't sit around at night talking about what happened during the day. We sat around either playing cards, or talking, or we had a lot of work to do to get our tanks ready to keep them going. But it's remarkable that Oski and us, we never sat around and talked about the war.

We just-- because I think a lot of us were thinking, well, we got another day ahead of us. What do you know about tomorrow? What are we supposed to do tomorrow? It's more that kind of a thing, I think, Dan. The more you talk about it, the more it's in your mind. It's harder to sleep.

So you try-- you try to-- I think, that's probably what was going on for me, that I just wanted to not deny it, but I wasn't trying to play macho or anything like that. I think it's just what happens. Guys just kind of internalize more. And if you can have some fun along the way, kidding or doing something, horseplay, with younger guys, you could do that. Older guys have been around long, they didn't care too much for horseplay. They were sweating it out.

DAN OLSON: Oski didn't make it. He didn't make it through the war.

FRANK ARIO: No, because it was just a couple of days after I went to the hospital, our tank was out someplace in the battle, and an artillery shell hit the tank. Oski's head was out of the tank and the shrapnel from the artillery hitting our tank killed him. He just fell right down in the turret.

And our gunner, Harlan, he just wiped out at that point. He just jumped out of the tank, and said, he's never going back again. So I never followed that story up to know exactly what happened. Harlan, I never saw him again.

DAN OLSON: Harlan left?

FRANK ARIO: After the war. Then he made contact with me, and he came to Minneapolis to visit me. And then he came back on another occasion.

I still write to him at Christmas time. He and Johnny Rustad were the two-- Johnny, in particular, was a guy from Billings, Montana. We were probably the-- he was probably my best army buddy.

DAN OLSON: What do you suppose Harlan did when he left the tank? Where did he go to? What did he do?

FRANK ARIO: I suppose, what happened to a lot of those guys that just had too much combat. It's what's going on over in Iraq. I understand that now. They're just-- psychologists are saying, if you're up there four months at a time, that's too much. You're going to have kids with a lot of mental, psychological problems.

And I suppose, we didn't talk that much. Today, they talk about post-traumatic stress. What I remember them talking about back at that time was combat fatigue. Probably, the same thing, but by different names.

DAN OLSON: Harlan deserted, or he just found another unit?

FRANK ARIO: What they do with those guys, if they feel they're not ready to go back into combat, is they just give them a job in the rear.

DAN OLSON: World War II fighting ended for Frank Ario on April 15, 1945. He had survived.

Ario didn't know it at the time, but ironically, tragically, that was also the day his twin brother, Fred, died from his wounds during fighting not far away.

Germany surrendered on May 7. For Ario and many others, the end was not like the newsreels being shown back home.

There were no grinning American troops from Ario's unit shaking hands with Soviet troops. There was no assurance the war was really over. There was still a huge collection of German forces that had not been dealt with. And then there was the prospect, Ario says, they'd all be shipped over to the fighting in the Pacific against Japanese forces.

So on the last day of World War II in combat, where were you?

FRANK ARIO: In Magdeburg, Germany, on the Elbe River. The Russians were right across the river from us, 90 miles from Berlin. And we were not to go over and see them or talk to them, but a contingency from our forces-- I don't know-- from our battalion or from our division, the [INAUDIBLE] who went over, but we never went over to see the Russians. So we ended up on the Elbe River, in Magdeburg, a city the size of Minneapolis.

DAN OLSON: How did you hear about the end of the war?

FRANK ARIO: You know, I'm not absolutely sure that I can tell you how we heard the end of it. We knew we were at the Elbe River, and the only person across from us were the Germans-- were the Russians, so it must be over. I guess, we kind of assumed that. Then the Germans finally surrendered unconditionally on May 12.

DAN OLSON: So on that day in April, when you were with your fellow soldiers, and you learned the war was over, at that moment, was there a sense of euphoria? What was the feeling?

FRANK ARIO: No, because we had lost some guys the night before, and we were almost killed. Same thing. We all got caught in an ambush, got out of there.

But again, it was sober, and we weren't sure that it was over, that we weren't going to be asked to go elsewhere, because we had gone in a pincer movement way around the industrial area. The decision was made not to go into the industrial Düsseldorf and Cologne and Essen and all those places and hammer out the Germans in that large area there because it was too dangerous to do all that street fighting.

So we went on a pincer movement right to Magdeburg, and from the south, the pincer movement to Magdeburg, and they were all trapped in there.

Well, who's going to clean that out? And are they going to get the word that the war is over? And are they going to quit even if they get the word? Are that going to trust? So we still had the feeling that maybe there's more fighting to do, so there wasn't euphoria.

I do remember that I sat in the tank alongside a large clothing store, department store that was burned out, but it was still-- a lot of us standing. And I heard the radio, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is dead. I remember that, sitting and listening.

So there was some talk about that, but the talk about, who's the president? Nobody knew who the vice president was. I never heard of Truman. Well, we were young, so we weren't that much into politics anyway, but we knew Roosevelt was dead.

DAN OLSON: Frank Ario says he didn't hear the account of how his twin brother, Fred, was killed until after the war. Frank was told that Fred and his unit were ordered to take a town held by the Germans as night fell.

FRANK ARIO: The Germans were in part of the town, and Fred and his outfit in the other part of the town. And then at night, or as it was getting dusk, a couple of Germans ran over, and they usually came at night. They'd run away from their outfit. They always had their hands up.

"Comrade." You would hear them come. I saw that a number of times.

And then they were running away from their outfit, and they trusted that the Americans wouldn't kill them. They were worried about the Russians all the time. They didn't want to fall into the hands of the Russians.

Two Germans surrendered and [? Kitchen ?] said to Fred, Take these guys back to the compound interrogation quarters and bring up some blankets, and some ammunition, and some food for the night, and we'll dig in.

Well, he went back and did his job. Then he went back to get to his machine gun nest, and he made a wrong turn in that community. He just, he got onto no man's land, and he either was shot by a sniper or shot by a patrol, but a bullet entered through his abdomen, came out through his rectum.

He was out in the no man's land hollering out, "I'm hit, I'm hit," you know. And two guys went out and got him. They got medals for doing that.

They pulled him back to the line. He tried to put a tourniquet on that wound, but it was useless. And he got an ambulance, they got him back to the field hospital, but the next day he died of an internal hemorrhage. He just couldn't stop it. Today, if he was in Iraq, he'd had lived, they would have handled that, but not back then.

DAN OLSON: The war was barely over. Displaced people and Allied soldiers from several countries were burying their dead. Frank wanted to find the grave of his brother, Fred, but Europe was chaos. Frank was denied permission to search for his brother, but he persisted.

FRANK ARIO: They told me that they wouldn't let me go up there to visit his grave because it was in Maastricht, Holland-- at that time, it was Holland. Today, it's the Netherlands-- and he was in the British zone. And so I couldn't go up there unless I had a sponsor.

Where do I get a sponsor? Said, why don't you go down to the Red Cross and see if they can help you. So quick like, then I went down to the Red Cross, and they made contact with this guy, Albert Becker.

Albert Becker spoke five languages, lived in Maastricht, and worked in the Dutch underground during the war. And he wrote to the Red Cross and said, sure, I'll be a sponsor. So I took that to the Army headquarters. I got a sponsor.

"Now, can I go?" They said, no, you have to sign up for three more months of active duty in Europe, because you're out of the Army. You should be home. And I said, well, where do I sign?

So I signed, and I thought, well, the least I could do after never having had a vacation from the war, that I could go up there and still not have to sign up for three months. I was interested in getting home too, but I did. And so then I went up to Maastricht, Holland.

This is a picture of his grave. It was a temporary grave. It was-- he had just recently been transferred and put in this cemetery. These are deceased back there in those tents to be buried.

But we found his plot-- ZZ-- and I looked down, I found his grave. And that's-- we took pictures of that.

But this was a big grave that the Dutch people adopted, and they've kept that up for years and years. It's a beautiful, beautiful place. But my mother's wish was that he should be brought back to America, and he was. Was brought back and reburied in Mankato on the family plot.

DAN OLSON: What was your reaction upon finding his grave?

FRANK ARIO: Sad. We were best friends for 19 years, and we both looked forward to being together and doing whatever we would do. I didn't know what we would have ended up doing.

He had a girlfriend that he was pretty high on. He might have come back and gotten married, I don't know. But anyway, that was all obliterated by the death.

DAN OLSON: Frank Ario finally returned to Mankato in 1946. There was no parade. Most of the soldiers were already home.

Frank used the GI Bill to attend college. He married, had four sons with his wife. Georgette, became a social studies teacher and coach. He was an educator for 33 years. 30 of them at Washburn High School in Minneapolis, where he became a favorite among students.

When the Vietnam War rolled around, Frank Ario wrote letters on behalf of some of his former students who were seeking conscientious objector status to military service. Ario is disappointed with the turn of events since World War II.

You're a veteran, an American. Your attitudes, how would you describe them?

FRANK ARIO: Well, I just, guess I never thought of war as a macho kind of thing. I thought of it as a tragedy. I often sat in the tank at night and just perplexed as to why we would be doing what we're doing to one another.

It just seems like you get in war, and some guys just become enraged. They shoot PWs. They just-- you know, just, why are you doing this kind of thing? And why are we doing this to one another?

We didn't know the history behind all of this. All we knew is we were up there slaughtering one another, I mean, in large numbers at times. So, no, I guess, I hoped then that maybe we can learn how to negotiate these differences and these problems, that it doesn't have to come to a military solution. Why can't we-- why can't we settle these things? But I guess that was a fairly naive point of view.

I thought of pacifism after the war. I don't want to have anything more to do with it, but I guess, I've rejected that as an unreal position to hold to. I don't know if I'm right on that or not. I just kind of have the feeling that we got to find a better way, and the point is, we haven't. We haven't.

DAN OLSON: 82-year-old World War II Army veteran Frank Ario.

US battlefield deaths in World War II surpassed 291,000. The total casualty count from the war worldwide, military and civilian, is put by some at 55 million.

This is Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio News, I'm Dan Olson.

Rita Stallman says her given name is Emerita, after Saint Emerita martyred in 259. Rita Stallman grew up only a few miles away from Frank Ario in Iona, in southwestern Minnesota, but the two never met.

Stallman is retired and living in Minneapolis now. She's 87, but can pass for much younger. She smiles and laughs easily, loves to socialize, and has a wide network of friends and former co-workers from her many years at Dayton's and then, Dayton Hudson.

Stallman's World War II experience couldn't be more different from Frank Ario's. Before the war, as the Great Depression was just beginning to lift, Stallman bounded from one office job to another in Minneapolis. Then during the war, she found her way to Washington, DC. She worked for the Signal Corps, the US government's huge military communications agency.

Rita Stallman is a child of the Great Depression. She says childhood in Iona, population 350 at its peak and smaller ever since, was idyllic. Kids had the run of the town. But she knew as a teenager, in the mid-1930s, she wanted out.

RITA STALLMAN: Most of the young women who went on to school went to what was called normal versus add or sub-- I don't know where that name came from-- and then they'd come back and teach in a country school, and go to church with their parents on Sunday. And I wanted to get away, so I opted for business school, which meant that I would go somewhere, preferably Minneapolis.

DAN OLSON: So here you are. You're a freshly-minted business college graduate, and what did you do to try to find a job? And what did you find?

RITA STALLMAN: I remember walking University because I was living Southeast, I walked University clear to Saint Paul, and nobody would even accept-- they didn't have an application for them. They weren't taking applications. They wouldn't even take my phone number in case something opened up. It was really tight.

DAN OLSON: This is 1937 and still in the Depression.

RITA STALLMAN: Yes.

DAN OLSON: What was going through your head? Were you starting to get a little panicky?

RITA STALLMAN: No. Well, I wasn't paying rent. This family I lived with were happy to have me stay with them after I graduated from business school.

Well, I was looking for a job. And even after I started working, they asked me to stay and reduced my hours.

Anyway, I answered an ad in the paper, and it was a printing company-- a one man printing company, Elliot Bernard Hoffman. He was a journalism grad from [? U, ?] and he'd worked at the local paper. And he started this printing business, and I was the sole employee. But anyway, he wasn't doing too well financially, so I was let go. And then I had a series of temporary jobs.

DAN OLSON: What kinds of temporary jobs?

RITA STALLMAN: I worked at Sears on the night shift. They started a night shift thinking they could hurry up the filling of the orders.

And I couldn't stay awake. I had a terrible time. I'd come home in the morning, and I'd go to bed, and I'd get up. My roommates-- by this time, I was living in an apartment with roommates. I'd have dinner, and I'd go to work, and I just couldn't stay awake. So that didn't last very long, just maybe two or three months.

DAN OLSON: That sounds dreadful, Rita.

RITA STALLMAN: Well, it wasn't fun.

DAN OLSON: But you were young and knew better, but you could take--

RITA STALLMAN: It was a job. It was a job.

One of my roommates worked for a motor freight company, and another motor freight company in the same building, Southeast, was looking for a dispatcher, so she told me about the job, and I was hired.

Well, I didn't know the city. I'm supposed to dispatch a truck to pick up freight at this location, and I sent a truck out of the way about six blocks, and so I got fired.

DAN OLSON: What was your reaction to being fired? Here you are, a conscientious worker.

RITA STALLMAN: Well, I'm living in an apartment with other girls, and, we're eating. And anyway, I managed. I don't ever remember being really scared.

DAN OLSON: Rita Stallman lived with three other young single women in a Minneapolis efficiency, finally moving on up to a one bedroom. Young people, she says, don't need privacy. In any case, between looking for work, working, and then socializing, Stallman and her roommates didn't spend all that much time at the apartment.

Wherever they went, Stallman says, the radio was always on. And on Sunday, December 7, 1941, when Japanese forces launched their attack on Pearl Harbor, Rita admits, she was not completely aware of how life was about to change.

Was there any sense, with that announcement, that somehow life was going to be different, or what was the reaction?

RITA STALLMAN: I guess, the reaction of my friends, the fellows disappeared. They started going off to war. So social life changed quite a bit.

DAN OLSON: When did you make the decision to pull up stakes and head to Washington, DC?

RITA STALLMAN: It wasn't until 1944, which was well into the war. And at that time, I was working at Montgomery Ward. From Wheeling Corrugating. I went to Warner Hardware, and from Warner Hardware, I went to Montgomery Ward. And this Signal Corps lieutenant was recruiting in Saint Paul, and some of the other young women who were working at Wards were going down, and they asked me to go with them.

And really, I was just listening. I didn't really have the intention of signing up, and I didn't even intend to fill out the form, but the recruiting officer, who was very handsome, said, well, you're waiting, you might just as well.

So on the way home, somebody had a car. And I said, when-- I hate to admit this, how naive I was-- I said, "When do you have to let them know whether you're going to accept?" And they said, "We're signed up, and so are you."

DAN OLSON: The Signal Corps, what is the Signal Corps? Remind us.

RITA STALLMAN: Flags, but this was an intelligence installation.

DAN OLSON: What was your job? What were you going to do?

RITA STALLMAN: Well, I was a clerk. The civil-- I was civil service, although I was working for the Army. And they have a classification called clerical administrative and fiscal-- CAF-- and we were recruited at, I think, CAF two or three, a low grade clerk, basically, but then I was re-evaluated and assigned to a higher grade as a steno. And then I went back to clerk at a higher grade, and I, basically, did personnel work in a branch.

I had to have top security clearance, but I did not handle documents. The branch I was in was doing research work to help the people who were trying to break the codes.

DAN OLSON: Who were your co-workers? Who were your fellow workers?

RITA STALLMAN: Wonderful people from all over the country, because part of them were military, but there were a lot of civilians. And they hired mathematicians and language majors and all these people who are not career social service-- that's not the word-- civil service. They were not career civil service people so they were real fresh to Washington. They were from all over the country.

DAN OLSON: Washington must have been a very lively city, to say the least, at this time.

RITA STALLMAN: Well, it was, but it was still segregated, which is amazing to someone like me.

DAN OLSON: What was that like? What was living in a segregated environment like?

RITA STALLMAN: Well, you accepted it. That's the way it was. So--

DAN OLSON: Were any of the office workers African-American men and women?

RITA STALLMAN: Yes. Yes. We hired one man in my branch who had a doctorate degree, and we hired him as a mimeograph operator. Couldn't fill the position, it was just a low grade, and I said to headquarters, "Why don't you send a Black person?"

DAN OLSON: Why did you say that?

RITA STALLMAN: Well, because I could see that these are people that are qualified, but they're not even considered.

DAN OLSON: So you made a stab at breaking the color line?

RITA STALLMAN: Well, I guess so. I did send-- I sent a memo to headquarters, and someone from headquarters called me, and they said, we're sending the memo back. They didn't want it on their record. I mean, this-- this statement, but they said that they would pursue that.

DAN OLSON: What was the wartime footing like? I mean, rationing and other things going on.

RITA STALLMAN: Yes. I lived in this boarding house, and everybody turned in their ration stamps to the boarding house, and that's how they bought their food.

DAN OLSON: There was a sense, was there not, by this time already that the war had turned. Hitler was losing.

RITA STALLMAN: Yes.

DAN OLSON: And what did that create? What emotions did that create?

RITA STALLMAN: Well, I'm. embarrassed to say, I think, I lived on the surface. I was not-- I mean, my brothers were OK. My family was OK.

By this time, I had met-- turned out to be-- the love of my life, who was a civilian. He was an engineer, but he was working for the Maritime Commission. And he was exempt from the draft because of the work he was doing with the Maritime Commission.

So I had a date several nights a week. We went to ballgames, the old Senators, and went to movies, went to plays, went for long walks, just went to museums. You know, it was not-- it was not hard.

It's amazing how many people really had a fairly good life. I mean, they had family that were in service abroad, and so on, but there still was a big part of the population that really wasn't-- well, like our war? No. How many of us are really suffering?

We're living our lives. We worry about it, and we think it's terrible, and we'd like to-- wish it had never happened, but we're still going on, going to orchestra hall for concerts, and having social outings of various kinds. That's sort of the way it was there, for me.

DAN OLSON: This young man, what's the rest of the story?

RITA STALLMAN: My mother became ill and I had to come back. When the war was over, his job at Maritime Commission was over, and he was looking for a job. And he was hired by the Commerce Department of Public Roads. He found out after he accepted the job that their purpose was to send him to the Philippines to design superstructures for bridges that had been bombed, and he did not want to go to the Philippines.

And my mother became ill again, so we were sort of on the horns of a dilemma.

Anyway, I came back to Minnesota, and we stayed in touch for a while, but eventually, he married, and that was the end of that for many years. And then 1981, I got this call, and he called me by a nickname he had used for me. I can't believe this. So we got reconnected.

Here he is, the finest man I've ever known.

DAN OLSON: Is he still around?

RITA STALLMAN: No. He died in '84. So we had four-- I say we had four years in the '40s and four years in the '80s. We didn't marry. He wanted to marry, but I thought, it's too late. I missed the good years. Let's just be friends. Very good friends.

DAN OLSON: Rita Stallman, a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for your time.

RITA STALLMAN: You're welcome. Dan.

DAN OLSON: After the war, Rita Stallman eventually took a job with Dayton's, which would become Dayton Hudson. She worked 35 years for the company, eventually working as an office administrator with one of the company's top executives.

This has been Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio News. I'm Dan Olson.

GARY EICHTEN: And that does it for our Midday program today and for this week. Gary Eichten here. I'd like to thank you for tuning in.

Sara Meyer is the producer of our program. Curtis Gilbert, our assistant producer, and a happy birthday to Mr. Gilbert. Randy Johnson, our technical director. And Thanks also to Kate Smith, Michael Osborne, Rick Kopczynski, Susan Leme, Tim Pugmire, and Tom Scheck for their help this week.

Now, Talk of the Nation is coming up right after some news headlines-- Talk of the Nation Science Friday-- then a new program-- new program at 2 o'clock this afternoon, How's the Family? A new program about family-related issues, and I think you'll find that pretty interesting. You can hear that program 2 o'clock this afternoon so do stay tuned.

Also, I hope you can join us for our Midday program on Monday. Monday, we head back to the capitol-- the state capital-- Midday tradition. End of the session program, we'll be talking with many key legislative leaders. Mike Mulcahy will be joining us at the broadcast table-- political editor here. Pam Wheelock-- former top aide to Governor Ventura-- will be on with her analysis. That's Monday on Midday.

Again, thanks for tuning in today.