A ‘regular guy’ reflects on life and war: World War II veteran Joseph Guiliano

To hear him tell it, Joseph Guiliano has lived an unremarkable life.

The Glenwood Village resident, who turns 90 Dec. 5, will tell you he’s a Brooklyn native who worked for 30 years in NYC factories, fixing machines that manufactured envelopes. He’s been married for 62 years and raised a family of 10 children in a house in Hicksville. He and his wife Marie have 32 grandchildren and, when asked, debate the number of great-grandchildren they have so far. He retired 28 years ago and in 1997 moved to the Riverhead mobile home park. He enjoys gardening with his wife and, thanks to the lingering physical impairments of a stroke he suffered two years ago, which left him dependent on a metal walker, he’s mostly limited to watching her do the work.

“I’m gonna beat this,” Guiliano says, slapping his leg, smiling broadly. “Make my leg better. I’m gonna walk again.”

Spend enough time with Guiliano to peel away the layers and you learn something about the roots of his determination and grit.

His mother died giving birth to him, leaving his father with six young children to raise alone. After the Great Depression had America in its grip, the widower could no longer provide for his family. At age 8, Joseph Guiliano entered an orphanage.

He lived in the orphanage until he turned 18, when he found himself on his own in Brooklyn. It was one year after Pearl Harbor and within a month, Guiliano was drafted into the Army.

“I was 5 feet tall and I just made it. I could have ducked a little bit and I would have gotten away with it,” he says with a chuckle.

But the Army wasn’t a bad alternative to the streets of Brooklyn and institutional life was the only thing he really knew. He was comfortable with it.

“Everybody else used to cry with their families when they were going in and saying goodbye. But it didn’t bother me,” he recalls. “I was used to it.”

After basic training in South Carolina, he shipped out of Fort Meade in Maryland, traveling for 43 days on a merchant marine ship through the Panama Canal to the South Pacific, where his regiment would be part of the effort to retake the Philippines from the Japanese.

On January 9, 1945 he was one of about 68,000 men in the Battle of Luzon, the U.S. effort to take control of the largest island in the Philippines, which had been captured by the Imperial Japanese forces in 1942. On January 20, in an assault on a hill controlled by the Japanese, Guiliano took shrapnel in the right shoulder and skull.

While confined in a mountain hospital, his wound became infected and, he later learned, gangrene set in. He was shipped to the base at Hollandia, New Guinea for treatment and from there to an Army hospital Tacoma, Washington, where doctors unsuccessfully attempted a skin graft to his back. Several months later, after a cross-country trek by train to Halloran General Hospital in Staten Island, the war-era U.S. Army Hospital that would later become the Willowbrook State School, Guiliano was awarded a Purple Heart and honorably discharged.

The medal is framed and hanging on a wall in the couple’s living room.

“And that’s about it,” Guiliano says nonchalantly, palms turned up.

“I was a good boy. I didn’t know what was going on,” he says. “I was so used to being in a home, you just do it. You know what I mean? You do as you’re told. You don’t ask no questions.”

Guiliano was back in Brooklyn. He was able to find and reunite with his family and at the wedding of one of his brothers, he met Marie.

They were married in 1952 and bought a house in Hicksville, living out the post-World War Two vision of the American Dream.

“It’s been a good life,” Guiliano says, as he watches his wife flip through the yellowed pages of an old family album containing black-and-white photos taken at 1950s weddings. He laughs and shakes his head as his wife excitedly shows off the large display of Christmas decorations that threatens to overtake their small living room on the Saturday before Veterans Day.

“It’s too early for this, but she loves it,” he says.

Now that he can’t drive or walk without assistance, his wife is his lifeline, Guiliano says. She walks to Stop and Shop to buy necessities and does all the cooking, cleaning and laundry. She also tends their flower and vegetable gardens — and plants and takes care of the yards of the mobile homes on either side of theirs.

“She’s almost 90, too,” Guiliano says, the admiration showing in his eyes.

Suddenly turning the table on a reporter, he has a pointed question of his own:

“Here’s what I want to know. Why do you want to write a story about me?” he asks. “I’m nothing special, just a regular guy.”

Do you know a World War II veteran living in Riverhead?

There are fewer than two dozen surviving World War II veterans on the rosters of the Riverhead VFW and American Legion posts. No one knows how many more Riverhead residents, like Joseph Guiliano, are not members of either organization.

Do you know a World War II veteran living in the Riverhead area? The Riverhead Veterans Advisory Committee is beginning work on an oral history project and would like to learn about WWII vets living here for possible interviews. Even — no, especially — “regular guys” like Joseph Guiliano. Submit information about a WWII veteran using the form below, including a contact phone number for both the veteran and yourself.

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