These three Minnesotans, among the last of the World War II vets, are a fading link to history

They are among the last of their kind.

During World War II, more than 16 million Americans served their country in the military. Just over 1 % of them are still alive. In Minnesota, that translates into 5,000 of the 304,500 who served during the war. Every day, the state loses another four World War II veterans.

Three Minnesota farm boys became soldiers at the war's very end. Somehow, they were fated to outlive almost all of their peers. They are among the remaining witnesses to some of the greatest events in history as well as sources of the kind of wisdom that only comes with age.

At 96, Hollis Schwartz wears hearing aids, has had his hips replaced and his prostate gland removed. But his eyes are sharp and his memory is sharper.

The Chaska resident can rattle off the date he was inducted in the Army (Jan. 18, 1945), where he was trained (Camp Joseph T. Robinson in Arkansas), and the name of the troop ship (the "Juan Flaco Brown") that transported him across the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. The Army trained him to be a replacement infantryman, ready to step into combat when another soldier was killed or wounded.

Schwartz had grown up in a farmhouse lit with kerosene lamps, milking cows by hand and cultivating corn with horses in Le Sueur County's Sharon Township. He saw the ocean for the first time when he enlisted.

After four weeks at sea — sailing under blackout conditions and radio silence — his ship landed in the Philippines on Aug. 28. That's when Schwartz learned that the war was over, that the U.S. had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9 and that Japan had effectively capitulated on Aug. 15.

Schwartz was still sent to Japan as part of the occupation. He remembers the devastation that wartime bombing had brought to the country. "The smell of human bodies was there for months," he said.

Although he'd been trained to use mortars, machine guns and flame throwers, he was put to work typing forms so that the Japanese were properly reimbursed for work and services done for the occupying Americans.

"None of us smoked. None of us drank. None of us shacked up," he said of his three fellow soldiers in his immediate unit. "We played tennis. We went swimming. We'd take a jeep from the motor pool and explored the island of Japan. And we behaved. And we had the best damn time you ever saw," Schwartz said.

After he was discharged, Schwartz used the G.I. Bill to attend the University of Minnesota, where he met and married Patsy Maher, who trained at the U to be a nurse in the Cadet Nurse Corps.

Schwartz had a 38-year career as a manager with the Minnesota Valley Breeders Association in New Prague, pioneering techniques to help farmers breed better cattle.

He and Patsy canoed in the Boundary Waters, skied in western mountains, raised three kids and built a house in Chaska in 1958 for $14,000 where he still lives today.

Life has been good. "I guess I'd better tell you that I'm one of the luckiest damn guys on Earth," he said.

After he retired, he drove school bus charter trips for 22 years. He currently drives for Meals on Wheels. "I needed to be helping people and be active," he said. "You need a reason to get up in the morning. You have to have a purpose."

To this day, he takes yoga classes, uses an iPhone, and gets on Zoom for Bible study meetings. A fan of the "blue zone" books about communities around the world where people tend to live long lives, he drinks a small glass of Sardinian wine every day.

After 67 years of marriage, he's now a widower. The people he knew in the Army and school are gone, too.

"I'm not afraid of dying. I'm ready for the trip," he said. But "I don't plan on moving along for a while, because I feel pretty good."

Edwin "Bud" Nakasone was an eyewitness to the beginning and the end of America's involvement in World War II.

His parents, Japanese immigrants from Okinawa, moved to Hawaii to work on sugar and pineapple plantations, then started their own farm.

On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, the 14-year-old Nakasone was eating an early Sunday breakfast of corn flakes while the rest of the family slept in their home on Oahu.

Looking through the screen door, he saw Japanese planes streaking through the skies — part of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Nakasone saw the Japanese attack Schofield Barracks and Wheeler Army Airfield.

"I saw the planes going up [in flames], I saw the barracks going up. I saw the hangars going up," Nakasone said.

Unlike other Japanese Americans on the West Coast, there wasn't mass incarceration of people of Japanese descent in Hawaii during the war because they were an essential part of the workforce in the territory.

Shortly after turning 18, Nakasone was drafted and inducted into the Army on Aug. 10, 1945, just days before World War II ended. After basic training, he arrived at Fort Snelling on Christmas 1945 to train in the Military Intelligence Service Language School established in Minnesota. It was the first time he had been on the U.S. mainland.

He was shipped to Japan, where he served as an Army interpreter in the postwar occupation. He remembers a country so broken by the war that children scrounged through Army garbage barrels looking for food. "Tokyo was completely devastated, completely devastated," he said.

After his discharge in 1948, Nakasone remembered how welcoming Minnesotans were to the Japanese American soldiers who trained there. He went to the University of Minnesota, then became a history professor at Century College in White Bear Lake.

When he was at the U, he met a young librarian named Mary Costello. The St. Paul couple have been married 66 years.

"It will be 67 years in September," Nakasone said.

"Holy cow, you're lucky, buddy," Mary Nakasone said.

He still has ties to the military. He was in the Army Reserve, retiring as a colonel. He often gave public presentations about the Pearl Harbor attack. He and Mary had two sons, John, a businessman, and Paul, who became a four-star general in the Army. A grandson, David, is now at West Point.

Robert Wieman said he's been happy most of his life. And it's been a very long life.

For the St. Paul man, who turned 100 earlier this month, serving in the military was a high point because it allowed him to fulfill a childhood dream of becoming a pilot.

"I enjoyed flying more than almost anything I can think of," Wieman said.

Wieman was born and grew up on a farm in Arlington, Minn., in a home that had no electricity or plumbing. In the winter, he got to school on a horse-drawn sleigh.

After Pearl Harbor, Wieman interrupted his studies as a chemistry student at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn., and enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps pilot training program. He flew everything from open-cockpit training planes to twin-engine medium-range bombers to a P-38 fighter.

Eventually he was assigned to pilot a heavily armed A-26 attack plane, designed for low-level strafing and bombing. He was to take part in an invasion of Japan, but the country surrendered before the attack. Instead, he flew reconnaissance missions over Japan as part of the postwar occupation. He saw the flattened cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the air.

After the war, he went back to college. He considered getting a job with an airline, but he made more money working as a chemist. He had a long career at 3M. After he retired, he worked as a real estate agent. He became a Master Gardener and wrote and published accounts of his piloting experiences. He rode a motorcycle until he was 93.

He used to keep in touch with a nearly three dozen fellow veterans, but over the years, everyone he knew during the war died.

"It's just the way things go," Wieman said. "Somebody's got to be last. It looks like it's going to be me."