Mickey Mantle Never Knew the Man Beside Him Had Pulled Bodies Out of the Water at Normandy

The stadium was booing, and it was booing a coward. That’s what they’d decided. Mickey Mantle had been rejected by the draft board more than once, called back again and again, and Yankee Stadium had made up its mind about him. Mantle never said a word in his own defense. He never once held up his medical file.

And a few feet down that bench sat a man who never said a word about where he’d been, either. Which was strange, because he was the only person in that ballpark who had actually been shot at. What the record books never tell you is that the quietest man in that dugout had a scar on his left hand,    and no paperwork anywhere on Earth to explain it.

He’d been offered the paperwork. One page. He turned it down, and the reason he gave was seven words long. It cost him more than he could have known. 80 years later, someone in his family is still trying to undo it. To understand why a man would do that, you need to understand the world both of these men were standing in.

It’s the early 1950s. America has just come out of the largest way war in human history, and walked straight into another one in Korea. 16 million Americans served in the Second World War. Every block had a gold star in a window. Every ballpark had men in the stands who’d left something overseas. A friend, a brother, four years of their own lives.

And in baseball, service wasn’t an abstraction. Ted Williams flew combat missions. Bob Feller walked into a Navy recruiting office within days of Pearl Harbor, and gave up four seasons of his prime. Whitey Ford went. Willie Mays went. Billy Martin went. When the Korean draft came around, roughly 40 major leaguers went with it.

So, when a 20-year-old kid from Oklahoma with legs like a racehorse kept showing up in center field instead of a uniform, people had questions. Loud ones. Here’s what they didn’t know. When Mickey Mantle was 14, he got kicked in the lower leg during football practice at Commerce High School. Within hours, the ankle had swollen to three times its size, and his fever hit 104.

His parents took him to the local hospital, and the doctors told them the leg had to come off to save the boy’s life. They refused. They drove him to Oklahoma City, to the Crippled Children’s Hospital, where a second set of doctors offered a different plan.  Eight injections a day of a drug most Americans had never heard of.

Penicillin. The leg was saved.  The disease had a name. Osteomyelitis. A bone infection that can go dormant and come roaring back for the rest of your life. That’s why the draft board classified him 4-F. Not connections. Not money. A bone disease that nearly killed a 14-year-old. And Mantle never said any of that to the crowd. Not once.

Before one of his physicals, a reporter asked him what he wanted to happen. Mantle told him he hoped his leg would come back clean. He said he’d play baseball for the Army, or fight for it, whatever they wanted. The board kept calling him back. Again, and again. One newspaper columnist finally wrote that repeated re-examinations after multiple rejections amounted, in plain language, to persecution.

Mantle never used the word. He just took the booze. Now, walk down that bench. Lawrence Peter Berra grew up on the hill, the Italian immigrant neighborhood in St. Louis, in a house where his father hadn’t wanted him playing ball in the first place. He came into the Yankees organization as a teenager and played a handful of minor league games.

Then he stopped and he enlisted in the Navy. He trained in Bainbridge, Maryland. He trained at Little Creek, Virginia. He trained on amphibious operations, which in 1943 was the Navy’s polite phrase for the job of getting men onto a defended beach. Then a call went out for volunteers for a secret assignment and a kid who was 18 years old put his hand up without knowing what he was volunteering for.

The assignment was rocket boats. In the early months of 1944, he crossed the Atlantic and was assigned to the attack transport USS Bayfield. On the morning of June 6th, the Bayfield was the flagship for the Utah Beach landings and Lawrence Berra, Seaman Second Class, 5 ft 7 in tall, 19 years old, was on a 36-ft boat with a six-man crew 300 yd off the coast of Normandy.

Their job was to be the first thing the Germans saw. The boats spread out 50 yd apart. A lead boat fired a single rocket to find the range. If it hit the beach, everyone opened up, 12 rockets aside, 24 in total, into the German positions so the men in the landing craft behind them would have a chance. Berra manned a machine gun.

He said later that when the planes came over, he thought it looked like the 4th of July. He was a teenager, and it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and he stood up to watch it. His officer told him to get his head down if he wanted to keep it. Nothing hit their boat that day. He always said that.

 He always said he was lucky. It’s the days after that he couldn’t talk about. His son Larry described it decades later. On the second day and the third day, they were still off that shore, and the job had changed. The bodies had begun to surface, and the small boats went out to bring them in. That was the assignment for a 19-year-old from an Italian block in St.

Louis. Go out on the water. Bring them back. His son said that when he finally spoke about it, he got emotional. And then he stopped. And then he never went further. In August, Barra was off the coast of southern France for the invasion of Provence near Marseille. A German machine gun position had been set up inside a hotel on the seafront.

Barra’s boat went in on it. He was working twin 50-caliber guns. A round caught him in the left hand. He kept firing. He never reported it. Wounded under fire, he was entitled to the Purple Heart. There was a form. His superiors told him to fill it out. He said, “No.” And the reason he gave, the reason he was still giving eight years later when it went into print in his 1952 biography, was seven words long.

He didn’t want to scare his mother. Paulina Barra was in a kitchen in St. Louis. If the paperwork went through, a telegram would come to that kitchen. Her son had done the arithmetic and decided the medal wasn’t worth what the telegram would do to her. So, he went back to his gun and he came home with no record of it at all.

Now, hold on to something. When Bob Feller finally learned the truth about Yogi Berra, he didn’t learn it from Yogi Berra. Somebody else had to tell him. Remember that? Because who ends up telling this story and when is going to matter before we’re done. Berra came up to the Yankees in 1946 and Bob Feller wouldn’t speak to him.

I want to be careful here. This account comes from Berra’s son, Larry, told in an interview decades after the fact. Bob Feller died in 2010 and isn’t here to give his version and we should say that out loud. But this is how the Berra family tells it. Feller was the most famous pitcher alive. He had walked away from a 100 mile an hour fastball within days of Pearl Harbor, enlisted in the Navy, and spent the war aboard the battleship USS Alabama.

He gave four seasons he was never getting back. And he had one rule about young ball players who hadn’t done the same. Another Yankee pitcher finally asked him about it, “Why won’t you even say hello to the kid?” According to Larry Berra, Feller’s answer was this. He didn’t talk to young guys who didn’t fight for their country.

And the kid he was talking about had been 300 yards off Normandy pulling bodies out of the water. Berra didn’t correct him. Sat there and let it stand. The other Yankee had to explain it. When Feller heard the whole thing, the two of them became close and stayed close for the rest of their lives. But, that’s not the part that stays with you.

The part that stays with you is what happened 5 years later when a 20-year-old from Oklahoma walked into that same clubhouse with a bone disease he never mentioned and a crowd outside that had already tried and convicted him. For 13 seasons, from 1951 to 1963, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra shared a dugout. 13 seasons, 11 pennants, seven World Series championships in that stretch alone.

 And that’s still not the part that gets you. Picture the actual bench. It’s a summer afternoon in the early ’50s. Mantle strikes out and the sound comes down off the upper deck and he walks back down the steps and sits. He doesn’t say anything. He’s 20 years old and a stadium full of Americans has decided he’s the kind of man who let other people go in his place.

3 ft away, a stocky catcher is putting his shin guards on. He’s been to Normandy. He’s pulled dead men out of the channel. He has a scar on his left hand from a German bullet and he turned down the paper that would have proved it because of what a telegram would have done to his mother. He says nothing. He buckles the strap.

He goes back out and catches nine more innings. That’s the moment.  Not a speech, not a confrontation, not a headline. Two men on a bench, both being read wrong by the same crowd and neither one of them reaching for the thing that would have fixed it. In all that time, in a clubhouse crawling with reporters looking for a story every single day, neither of these two men ever put the  record straight about himself.

Same instinct, different reasons. Explaining yourself is asking for something, and neither of them was raised to ask. Here’s what nobody saw coming. Years later, Yogi Berra changed his mind about the medal. Not for himself. His family wanted it, and he applied. It couldn’t be found. The military personnel records he needed had been lost.

 And without them, the Navy could not confirm the wound. Letters came back from the Department of Defense saying the same thing in different words. We wish we could, and we can’t. He had a distinguished unit  citation. He had battle stars. In 2009, the Navy gave him the Lone Sailor Award. And in 2010, he received an award named for Audie Murphy.

 And at the end of 2015, the President of the United States awarded him the Medal of Freedom 2 months after he was buried. He never got the Purple Heart. What he had instead, he’d hold up for his children. A mark on his left hand. His son remembers him showing it and saying six words. This is where I got hit. That was the entire record.

 A scar and a man’s word. And now, the last part. The one that makes this a story that isn’t over. Berra died in 2015 at the age of 90. And his granddaughter, Lindsay, picked it up. She has spent years going after that medal for a man who never went after it for himself. Writing, calling, asking on the radio, telling anyone who’ll listen.

She has said she’ll keep ringing the bell until somebody actually helps. Somebody else always had to tell it. That’s the detail. He would not tell it, so it fell to a teammate in 1946, and it fell to his son in an interview. And it falls to his granddaughter now. That’s what modesty costs. It’s not free.

 The bill comes due 70, 80 years later, and somebody who loves you has to pay it. And nobody ever  paid Mantle’s. There was no campaign for him. No granddaughter writing letters. The booze happened, the years passed, and the file with the fever and the amputation and the eight shots a day just stayed in a drawer in Oklahoma where it had always been.

He died in 1995, and most of America never learned why he wasn’t in Korea. He never told them. He didn’t think it was anybody’s business what a bone infection had done to a 14-year-old boy. Here’s what I want you to remember. We’re used to a certain kind of hero now, the kind who tells you, who explains, who corrects the record, who gets in front of it.

And there was a generation of men who did the exact    opposite, who took the booze and the wrong assumptions and the silence, and who died with the truth still folded up in a drawer somewhere. One of them chose his mother’s peace of mind over a medal, and spent the rest of his life without either the medal or the credit.

The other let a country call him a coward rather than explain a scar he’d carried since he was 14. They sat 3 ft apart for 13 years and never once compared notes because there was nothing to compare. They both already knew the answer. You don’t get to decide what people think of you. You only get to decide what you’re willing to trade to change it.

If this one got to you, if you had a father or an uncle or a grandfather who came home and never talked about it, leave his name in the comments. Just his name. I read them. And there are people watching this who need to see that list. And if you want to know how deep this goes in that one clubhouse, there’s a man I haven’t told you about yet.

Mickey Mantle’s manager. Ralph Houk led men through the Battle of the Bulge, took a bullet through his helmet, and came home with a Silver Star that he never mentioned to a single player he ever managed. That story is next.