At 100 years old, Bernard Greenberg sat on a chair at his small Bradenton apartment with a reporter hanging on his every word.
“I guess I could lie, but I never saw actual combat,” he said of his time as an Army staff sergeant in World War II’s Pacific Theater. “You could find guys who did more than me. The last time I marched in a parade was in 1935 when I was a member of the Boy Scouts. They gave me a flag to hold. It was Memorial Day in the Bronx.”
Greenberg was speaking of his selection as the grand marshal for the Tribute to Heroes Parade that will be held Nov. 9 at Main Street at Lakewood Ranch.
While technically, the combat part might have been true, Greenberg served a key role at a time when approximately 160,000 U.S. soldiers in the Pacific Theater died with 111,606 being killed in combat with the rest dying because of illness or poor living conditions…