Jun 2, 2017 3 min read

Memorial Day and the weekend preceding it are largely devoted to celebrating military personnel, past and present. Dozens of ceremonies honoring these men and women are staged nationwide, saluting them for their courage and selfless service.

The focus, understandably, is most often on members and veterans of the five traditional branches – Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard. Yet no individual involved in military operations should be excluded from the limelight. That includes a support organization that, for generations, has been barely recognized by the public – and was once actually scorned.

Members of the Merchant Marine serve aboard a fleet of ships that, during peacetime, import and export commercial goods, and during wars, transport troops, weapons and equipment. Their jobs can be thankless, tedious and sometimes dangerous. Of 225,000 Merchant Mariners who served during World War II, 9,000 either died at sea, from their wounds or in prisoner-of-war camps. That is a 4 percent death rate, higher than any of the U.S. services during that conflict.

Merchant Marine vessels, while steaming across the Atlantic Ocean, were frequent targets of German submarines. The U.S. War Shipping Administration said 1,554 Mariner ships were officially sunk during the war.

Edsel Bryner, a sprightly 91-year-old resident of Chartiers Township, is among the diminishing number of surviving World War II Mariners. As a teenager, he desperately wanted to serve his country, but was rejected by the branches because of his red-green color blindness. His one option was to essentially be a housekeeper or cook with the Merchant Marine, so he dropped out of Washington High School in 1944 during his senior year to join.

Bryner was a merchant mariner for a year and a half and made three trans-Atlantic voyages, none of which was perilous. Yet for the young man from Washington and his shipmates, a pitched battle lay ahead.

Veterans from the military branches returned to the States as heroes. The Mariners, Bryner told the Observer-Reporter’s Rick Shrum, “weren’t respected. People called us draft dodgers. No one would offer thanks.” He said he landed a job packing glassware in Washington, but lost it soon afterward to a returning vet.

Merchant Marine personnel were not considered veterans, either, preventing them from collecting government pensions and receiving benefits under the GI Bill. The bill enabled a number of veterans to attend college for free, an option Bryner probably would have pursued if it had been available.

He joined other former Mariners in their fight for veterans benefits until finally, in 1988 – 43 years after World War II ended – they won. By then, more than half of the Mariners who survived the war had died.

Merchant Mariners may not have engaged in overseas battles during the Second World War, but they were valuable teammates in the American cause. They deserved pensions, benefits, glorious homecomings and – most of all – respect. They did not deserve denigration and scorn.

Mariners were, and are, unsung heroes who should be more than unseen heroes.