JAY – Some heroes remain unsung and prefer it like that.

Decorated veterans Francis “Red” Therrien, 85, of Livermore Falls, and Roland Therrien, 81, no relation to Red, and Don LeSuer, 87, both of Jay, experienced combat during World War II against the Germans and Japanese.

They continue to serve and, while seeking no glory of their own, they help recognize and remember the sacrifices of others. They are the last of the original members of the Veterans of Foreign War Post 3335 Color Guard in Jay.

Called an Honor Guard when conducting military funeral services, it originally had 13 members. Some were lost to poor health. Others to death, LeSuer said.

Today, there are only nine, many of them advancing in years.

Still they are called upon two or three times a week to conduct services at military funerals in the area, Red Therrien said.

“It is difficult to go to all the funerals, especially when you know the person,” Red Therrien said. “I buried my brother not too long ago.”

Now, the men of Post 3335 Color Guard wonder who will perform the details when they, too, are gone.

“World War II veterans are dying off at a rate of 1,800 a day across the country because we’re all in our 80s,” LeSuer said.

Their own war experiences, including the invasions they were involved in, the names of the ships they sailed and the islands they fought on come back easily.

All three volunteered as young men to serve their country.

Red Therrien entered the U.S. Navy in June 1942 and served on the USS Osmond Ingram, seeing duty in the North Atlantic and in the invasion of southern France, among other places.

“I’m pretty proud of having three Presidential Unit Citations,” he said, plus four stars for other invasions.

The citations represent being part of a unit that sank submarines. The submarines were sinking merchant ships traveling from America to England with supplies, Red Therrien said.

Roland Therrien also served in the Navy in the mid-1940s on board the DMS 464 Destroyer, The Hobson, and saw duty in the North Atlantic, invasion of Normandy in France, the Middle East and Africa areas, as well as the Pacific, earning six star citations.

“My ship got one submarine and four Kamikaze planes,” Roland Therrien said. “There was a fifth one, too, but I don’t count it because it hit us. I remember it, but I don’t count it. We shot the plane and it went down into the water … two bombs skidded across the water and went right through the fuselage of the ship and took old Pop. … We had to pick him up in baskets. The only way we could tell who it was, was by his serial numbers on his false teeth.”

A lot of these submarines came up shooting, killing several personnel and injuring others, Red Therrien said.

Sometimes the Japanese would put junk in the torpedo tubes and shoot it out to make it look like they were hit, Roland Therrien said. But the Americans were smart enough to know that when there was no oil floating, the enemy sub was likely undamaged, he said

LeSuer joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1942.

“I saw action in the South Pacific Theater,” LeSuer said. “We were the 911 Signal Corps attached to the 5th Air Force and we went through seven different island invasions.”

LeSuer took care of radio equipment and radar for the planes, he said.

“Whenever necessary, if they dropped Japanese parachute marines, we had to go in and eliminate them,” LeSuer said. He was injured in the war, but rejected the Purple Heart medal.

“I wasn’t afraid of dying,” LeSuer said. “I didn’t want to be buried in one of those islands.”

All three wondered at times, if they would make it back home.

“It wasn’t so much the enemy in the North Atlantic,” Red Therrien said. “It was the weather. It was cold, wet and rough.”

He would pray his rosary as they rode out storms, said Roland Therrien, who suffered from chronic seasickness for seven months in the North Atlantic. He could only eat salt crackers and ended up losing a lot of weight, but once the ship hit the Pacific he never got seasick again, he said.

Red Therrien and Roland Therrien came home to work at the paper mill for 40-plus years. LeSuer returned to the shoe industry in Massachusetts and later moved to Maine in 1954 to work at Livermore Shoe. He retired after 52 years but, at age 87, he is the only one of the three still working.

While they remember the good and bad of the years they served, the ugly, more painful memories they keep mostly to themselves, Roland Therrien said. “The rest is best left unsaid.”