“If Barney was in the room, you knew it. He lit it up,” Ed Reynolds, head of the veteran’s group Wings Over Wendy’s
He stood a shade over 5-feet-tall, but to those who knew World War II veteran Barney Leone he was a giant of a man — in war and in peace.
His passing in his sleep last week at age 99 hit the people who knew him hard.
The thought of never sitting down with Barney again and listening to his riveting stories, never hearing his laugh or seeing his smile brought tears that Barney would not have accepted.
Why cry when you can smile and laugh at all the good times we had, he would have said. Enjoy the memories.
“You could not help but love Barney,” said Maria Rodriguez, who spent every Monday morning for more than 15 years with him at Wings Over Wendy’s, a local veterans group where Barney held court.
“He was genuine and people loved that about him,” she said.
You’d find him most afternoons sitting in the front yard of his West Hills home singing along with arias from his favorite Italian operas, said neighbor Tom Thorley.
“He had a youthful spirit,” he said. “When we walked past, he’d turn off the music and regale us with jokes or stories about his past.”
WWII Veteran Barney Leone is honored during the 31st Canoga Park Memorial Day Parade Monday May 29, 2023.(Photo by Andy Holzman, Contributing Photographer)
Stories that Melissa Giller knew well. She interviewed dozens of World War II veterans for the “Secrets of World War II” exhibition in 2022 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, ultimately choosing six to be honored with special display cases. One of them was Barney.
“I will never forget his interview,” she said.
He was a 23-year-old motor machinist mate second class on the USS Nemasket, a fuel ship anchored 150 yards offshore of Iwo Jima — the last ship the Marines in landing crafts would see before hitting the beach.
As the first wave of Marines passed by, Barney gave them the high sign. Not one Marine looked over and acknowledged it. They just stared straight ahead, clutching their rifles straight up in front of their faces.
They knew what was waiting for them, a hell storm. Almost 7,000 Marines were killed and 17,000 were wounded in the battle for Iwo Jima. It went on for five weeks.
Finally, one morning around 10:30 a.m., Barney fixed his binoculars on the top of Mount Suribachi as six Marines used every last ounce of strength in their weary bodies to raise the American flag.
Barney let out a yell, “Hey, it’s our flag up there, guys — OUR FLAG! We won!”
In that emotional moment as everyone cheered, he turned to look at his own ship’s weather-beaten flag.
He knew it would be taken down and burned in a flag retirement ceremony soon. He couldn’t let that happen.
They had been through too much together. He went to the quartermaster and asked if he could have it. He could, but don’t let anyone on board know.
When Barney got home from the war he put the flag in a box in the back of his closet and never talked about it again.
“As Barney shared his story with me, he was holding that flag to his face, as if he was on that Marine landing craft, and the flag was his rifle,” Giller said. “It was so intense and emotional. I’ll never forget it.”
For more than 60 years, that war flag had been in mothballs until Barney took it out and used it as a message of peace when he was invited by local high school teachers to talk to their senior classes on how we won the freedoms they enjoyed.
Barney wanted the kids to see the tattered flag and touch it as it was gingerly passed around the classroom.
He fought for that flag he told them, but when he came home he became a man of peace — a minister.
Then he ended with a story of two Chinese men arguing angrily in the middle of the street in Shanghai where he was on shore patrol duty.
“It went on for 20 minutes and I thought for sure they were going to get into a fistfight, but they never did. They just broke up and left. I asked a well-dressed Chinese gentleman standing near me how come they didn’t fight?
“In China, he said, if two people are arguing the first person to raise their hand to hit the other automatically loses the argument because they have nothing more to say.
“It’s okay to debate one another, you can have a difference of opinion. But if you think you’re going to convince someone by beating them up, you’ve already lost.”
Did the kids get it, I asked Barney?
He smiled. In the back of his closet with his old flag were a dozen shoe boxes filled with handwritten notes from students thanking him.
They got it. Bullies always lose in the end because they’ve run out of words.
You’re going to be a hard man to get over, Barney Leone.
Funeral arrangements have been set for 3 p.m. Sunday, March 10, at Calgary Community Church in Westlake Village.
Dennis McCarthy’s column runs on Sunday. He can be reached at dmccarthynews@gmail.com.
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