Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.As his landing craft plowed through the waves toward a small island, the young Marine prayed.
He prayed for his safety. For the safety of the troops. For a successful mission.
The year was 1945, and the island was Iwo Jima.
Richard Wolbach, a south Omaha boy, was the 20-year-old Marine gripping his rifle.
Wolbach would survive that bloody battle and go on to become a Roman Catholic priest, a vocation that has spanned more than 50 years.
Monsignor Wolbach, 86, retired last month after 30 years as a chaplain at the VA Medical Center in Omaha.
His military background connected him to veterans no matter their age, no matter whether they fought in the jungles of Vietnam, the rocky ranges of Korea or the streets of Baghdad.
His experience in war not only shaped his priesthood, but led him to it.
"I thought if I got spared on Iwo Jima," he said, "it would be a good way to show my gratitude."
The smell of pierogies and cabbage. The sounds of the Polish language. Both filled Wolbach's home when he was growing up in south Omaha in the 1920s and '30s.
He was raised with two brothers and two sisters in a small frame house at 36th and E Streets. He still lives in the home that's covered in yellow siding and sitting on a tidy lawn.
His parents spoke Polish, as did many of the neighborhood's big families whose children spilled into the street to play.
Wolbach and his buddies spent hours smacking baseballs and zinging footballs. They made baseballs out of socks stuffed together and tied with twine. They batted the makeshift balls with a picket from an old fence.
Chet Stefanski grew up across the street from Wolbach, and they have remained lifelong friends.
Stefanski, 84, remembers his friend as a loyal and kind boy, but tough on the sports field. He was a sturdy, broad-shouldered youth who yanked down passes during rough-and-tumble football games.
When the boys from 38th Street showed up for a game, Wolbach wanted to win. But he never shouted at his teammates. If someone dropped a pass, Wolbach would call out, "Good try."
"He was always positive,'' Stefanski said.
Wolbach attended St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School and served as an altar boy.
Some altar boys would become distracted, their eyes darting around the church, Stefanski said. Not Wolbach. He focused on the priest, the Mass and the liturgy.
"He was absolutely adoring the Lord,'' Stefanski said.
Wolbach was impressed with the young associate priests who taught students the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
The priests didn't just talk religion. He remembers them joining students for baseball games and attending the big Polish wedding receptions filled with the sounds of polka music.
Though just a boy, Wolbach realized the priesthood would be a wonderful way to serve the Lord.
He attended Omaha South High School and graduated in spring 1942, six months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. His older brother enlisted in the Air Force, but Wolbach was drawn to the Marines.
Neighborhood friends had joined that branch. Wolbach heard their stories. He knew the Marines were a tough bunch.
Wolbach enlisted in 1943, completed boot camp in the fall of that year and eventually shipped out to the war, a path that would take him and his 4th Marine Division to a speck of an island in the Pacific.
***
Wolbach still remembers the sounds of Iwo Jima.
Explosions pounding. Men screaming. Artillery shells whistling.
He was part of the sixth wave that landed.
The battle started Feb. 19, 1945, when parts of three divisions, the largest force ever committed to a single battle in Marine Corps history, landed on Iwo Jima.
Wolbach saw shrapnel rip friends apart as they stepped off the landing craft. Mortar blasts killed other buddies.
Fear rippled through his body as he bolted up the beach. He threw himself to the ground and crawled on his belly through the black volcanic sand.
Around him, medics dragged wounded men.
Wolbach served in a communications unit. As the battle raged, he and a fellow Marine grabbed a tire-size spool of communications wire. They laid the wire along the beach so officers could coordinate the attack.
As night fell, flares fired from U.S. ships lit the sky. He worried that the enemy was planning a counterattack.
The island was the first U.S. attack on Japanese soil and was one of the war's bloodiest battles. Iwo Jima was declared secured 35 days later, after more than 24,000 Marine and Navy casualties. More than 21,000 Japanese soldiers were killed.
He spent nearly a month on Iwo Jima. His survival convinced him to become a priest.
After his discharge in 1945, he enrolled at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan., and completed seminary training in St. Paul, Minn., and Dubuque, Iowa.
He served more than 25 years as a parish priest in the Omaha area at such churches as St. Adalbert, St. Cecilia and St. Stanislaus.
When he had time off, he loved hitting the ski slopes of Colorado, whacking a tennis ball or casting a fishing line.
In the early 1980s, he began helping another priest as a chaplain at the VA Medical Center.
As he worked among the veterans, as he listened to memories that sounded like his own, he knew he had found his true calling.
***
Janey Armbrust of Omaha will never forget how Wolbach healed her brother's shattered spirit.
Her brother, John Bruning of Omaha, fought in Vietnam as an Army infantry soldier.
Health problems plagued him as he grew older.
Lung cancer. Blood disease. Heart problems.
He had been in and out of the hospital. In June 2008, near death, he was admitted to the VA Medical Center.
Armbrust thought her 63-year-old brother, gripped by pain, had just days to live.
But he hung on.
He told his sister he couldn't die. Not yet. He needed forgiveness for what he had to do during the war. He never talked specifically, but Armbrust knew those acts gnawed at him.
"He just couldn't get over that,'' she said.
Armbrust, an executive secretary at the Medical Center, told Wolbach about her brother. She asked the priest to talk with him.
Wolbach went to Bruning's room, heard his confession and gave him communion.
That evening, Bruning died.
"I feel in my heart," Armbrust said, "that monsignor helped him transition from this life to the next."
Veterans often confided to Wolbach their guilt over actions in battle. Some were anguished over civilian deaths. Some still grieved for friends who had died in their arms.
It didn't matter whether the veteran saw battle 50 years ago or five years ago. The stories and the emotions were the same.
"War has the same footprints," Wolbach said, "no matter when it was fought."
Wolbach knows the healing and forgiveness he offers come straight from God. As he walked the hospital's long halls all those years, he knew the Lord walked with him.
A few days before he retired, Wolbach started his regular morning rounds. He stepped into the room of a veteran who wore his long gray hair in a ponytail.
The man, in maroon pajamas, sat on the edge of the bed.
Wolbach and the man spoke for a few moments. Wolbach told him he was retiring and might get some time to fish for trout in Montana.
The man told Wolbach he deserved the break.
Wolbach smiled.
As sunshine filtered into the room through shades, the priest placed his hand on the man's head and offered a prayer.
"May almighty God bless you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen."
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