Joseph Oberto

Senior Airman served in Afghanistan at Bagram Airfield.

By John Williams, Bucks Local News

After serving nine months at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan, Joe Oberto stepped out of his terminal at Philadelphia International Airport and into the warm embrace of his family.

“Coming home after my Afghanistan deployment and hugging my parents for the first time in nine months,” said Oberto, who is 20-years-old, “it was the happiest day of my life. I’m not going to lie to you – I choked up when I saw them.”

“One thing that I’ve learned since enlisting in the military is to never take your family for granted,” he said.

Senior Airman Joseph Oberto was born in Langhorne and grew up in Levittown. He graduated from Conwell-Egan Catholic High School in 2008 and was a stand-out Lacrosse player, earning Philadelphia All-Catholic Team honors his senior year.

He is the son of John and Susan Oberto (of Levittown) and has two younger sisters, Megan and Stephanie, including an older brother, George.

At age 17, he enlisted in the Air Force. After a month upon graduating high school, he left for basic training.

“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be in the military,” Oberto said. “I’ve served about two and a half years,” he said. “I completed basic training and tech school training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. In December 2008, I was assigned to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.”

The area surrounding MacDill AFB was given to the federal government in 1939 and founded in April of 1941.

He also carried out minor assignments at McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Wash as well as Fort Worth, Texas.

He is a Security Forces Defender in the 6th Security Forces Squadron, which means that he provides law enforcement and security duties for United States Air Force bases. It is a subsidiary of the 6th Mission Support Group on MacDill AFB.

A year after arriving at MacDill AFB, Oberto deployed for his first tour of duty to the militarized airfield in Bagram, Afghanistan located in Parwan province (about 27 miles from the capital city of Kabul). Oberto would spend six months at the base.

Bagram, aptly named the 455th Air Expeditionary Wing, is the temporary home to 5,000 Airman whose mission is “Fighting Terror and Building Peace,” as stated on Bagram Airfield’s official website. The base also has an 11,820 foot runway that was just completed in 2006.

On the base sits Camp Cunningham, an Air Force village that is dedicated to the memory of Jason Cunningham. Cunningham, a pararescueman, was killed on March 2, 2002 while medically assisting fellow soldiers and saving the lives of 10 of them. Posthumously, in Sept. of 2002, Cunningham was awarded the Air Force Cross, which is the second-highest mark of distinction a soldier can receive only to the Medal of Honor.

“Before I went to Bagram, I heard about the story of Senior Airman Cunningham,” said Oberto. “When I was at basic training our barracks (the 324th Training Squadron) was named in honor of SrA Cunningham.” He didn’t lodge in Camp Cunningham, but remembers many memorials positioned around the camp.

“For the majority of time I spent at Bagram it was quiet,” Oberto explained. “It was during the winter so all of the bad guys were hiding in the mountains.” However, he said, when March and April rolled around, Bagram received minor rocket attacks.

He said it was the insurgents’ form of “harassment.”

“Just two weeks after I left, Bagram witnessed a major ground attack,” he said.

In mid-May of 2010, the Islamist militant group the Taliban attacked Bagram Air Field with rocket propelled weapons, grenades and suicide bombers. In all, the standoff lasted eight hours and killed one American contractor, while injuring nine U.S. military members.

His fondest memories are of him and his unit sitting around makeshift tables and playing cards and discussing what they’ll do once they get back in the States.

“We would talk about what we wanted to do once we were home as well as the good times and the bad,” he said. “It was in May and the weather was exactly like spring time in the States. It reminded me of just sitting outside on a spring afternoon, hanging out and talking to my family.
It basically brought me that much closer to seeing my family, but I know I would miss the people I served with at the same time.”

Oberto also abides by a strict training regimen.

“Besides working, I enjoy going to the gym – a lot,” he said. “It’s something that has stuck with me since my deployment. When you are deployed you live by a set schedule. You wake up, shower, get ready for work, work (however long that may be), come home and change into your PT (physical training) gear, hit the gym for a good two hours, eat and go to sleep.

“If you aren’t working, you’re keeping in touch with your family or watching some movies on your laptop,” he said.

Joe is once again stationed at MacDill AFB in Tampa.

When he isn’t performing duties on base or in the gym weightlifting, Joe visits Clearwater, Florida to watch the Phillies in spring training or during the fall, they’ll head to “The Swamp” in Gainsville to watch the University of Florida Gator football team. If he and his friends feel ambitious, they will make the 5-hour haul to Tallahassee to watch the Florida State Seminole football team.

“Sometimes we’ll just go back to my buddy’s house, which is about three and a half hours from base and we’ll spend the weekend there,” said Oberto.

He also leads his flights’ physical training regimen. His task is to create workouts and make sure that Airmen pass their PT test.

In the spring, he will deploy to Riydah, Saudi Arabia and will remain there until the fall.

“My future plans are to separate from active duty, but stay in the reserves,” he said, “and hopefully attend Penn State University for Kinesiology. Once I’m finished, I want to get commissioned as a Second Lieutenant, reserves or active duty, and continue a military career.

As of now, he is attending the American Military University, an accredited online university. His ambition is to go to medical school and earn his doctorate in physical therapy.

Bernard Lens

Army Pfc. helped liberate Dachau concentration camp

By Petra Chesner-Schlatter, BucksLocalNews.com


Telling the story of the Holocaust is necessary, so it will never happen again.

That's what people who teach the lessons of the Holocaust strongly believe.

One of those people is U.S. Army Pfc. Bernard Lens of the Makefield Glen section of Lower Makefield Township. He served in Europe during WWII.

Lens, who turns 90 this month, talks with students, telling the story of the Holocaust and what he saw and experienced during The Liberation of Dachau concentration camp.

"We go to schools," Lens said. "We were invited to Washington D.C. two years in a row to present our program."

Lens is a member of Post 697 JWV (Jewish War Veterans.) The group meets monthly and has more than 100 members from Levittown, Bensalem, Yardley and Newtown.

He was part of the American Liberation of the Nazi's Dachau concentration camp.

"We walked in," Lens recalled. "The gates were open. We go in and the first thing we hit is a building. It's an administration building. I see 12 maybe 14 bodies."

Lens said the bodies were civilians who kept records. He said they had been killed so they wouldn't talk.

"We walked around the corner," Lens said. "There were maybe 20 or 25 dead bodies lieing around.

The people, frail and malnourished, needed help. "I asked the captain, 'What do you want to do?' He said, 'Let's get them out. Some need medical care.'"

He approached a building. "God, the door opened -- the stench just threw me back. They looked at me scared. They had never seen an American soldier," Lens said.

When Lens told them he was a Jewish American soldier, he said they seemed relieved.

Lens talked a little slang with them. The thought was "to just take them out -- get them out to the air."

Some were given IVs. "Some could walk," he said. "Some died in my arms -- that's the one thing I'll never forget.

"They would be just walking. They would just fall. They were nothing...The weight of their body was the weight of there bones," Lens said.

"That's what they did to them - starvation," he said. "The things that killed them were TB, malnutrition, not getting medical attention and slave labor."

Lens can attest to being part of the Liberation of a Dachau concentration camp. A photographer he was with took his picture. He is holding a rifle while standing amidst bodies covering the ground beneath him.

One of his jobs was to stand watch over a road leading to the concentration camp. The barbed wire stretched around the camp. He was to shoot with a machine gun if any German soldiers approached.

Before World War II, Lens, a graduate of Central High School in Philadelphia, worked at the Sun shipyard in Chester.

When he came home from the war, he would be in expediting in the clothing industry. He would also work in the sales room. Sometimes he went to New York City when the company had shows. Most recently he worked for a fur company that sold ladies fur coats. Lens retired when he was 70.

Lens has lived in the Yardley area for a dozen years, but lived in Levittown for 35 to 40 years.
His sense of humor is infectious. When asked what he did in the service, he replied, "Run like hell when they wanted volunteers. I was infantry.

"I had special training," Lens said. "I never knew where I was. I moved so fast I didn't get paid for four months."

He was in the 546 Battalion. "I did a stint with General Patton," he said.

Lens said he never regretted being in World War II. "I was single when I went in," he said.
"But I remained a good old 'doughboy,'" he said. "That means you're infantry at the ground -- you're eating the ground. That was a slang expression for infantry.

About being part of the Liberation of Dachau concentration camp he said, "I did what every service person did," Lens said humbly. "We went in, were trained, we did our job.

"The only heroes are those buried with crosses over their graves -- that's my personal opinion," he said.

Lens has been collecting photographs of the Holocaust. He has some very graphic pictures of those who perished in concentration camps. He has pictures taken at Auschwitz concentration camp.

There are bodies upon bodies. They look like skeletons piled one on top of each other in many of these pictures. The mouths of the victims are open. He has photographs of skeletal bodies being put in the crematoria.

Bernard Lens will never forget.

Dachau concentration camp was the first Nazi concentration camp opened in Germany, located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory near the medieval town of Dachau, about 10 miles northwest of Munich in the state of Bavaria, which is located in southern Germany.

It is believed that 25,613 prisoners died in the camp and almost another 10,000 in its subcamps, primarily from disease, malnutrition and suicide.

The Americans found approximately 32,000 prisoners, crammed 1,600 to each of 20 barracks, which had been designed to house 250 people each.

Over its 12 years as a concentration camp, the Dachau administration recorded the intake of 206,206 prisoners and 31,951 deaths. Crematoria were constructed to dispose of the deceased. These numbers do not tell the entire story, however.

Prisoners perished from poor sanitation, deprivation of medical care, withholding of nutrients, medical experiments, or beatings and shootings for infractions of the rules or at random.

Beginning in 1942 more than 3166 prisoners in weakened condition were transported to Hartheim Castle near Linz and there were executed by poison gas for reason of their unfitness.

Glenn L. Hall

Navy vet went to become Bucks County Community College dean.

By R. Kurt Osenlund, BucksLocalNews.com


Glenn Hall didn’t know it at the time, but while he was serving with the U.S. Navy at the end of World War II, he was being groomed for a career in education that would lead him all the way to the highest ranks at Bucks County Community College (BCCC). A Doylestown resident, Hall is now retired, living quietly with his longtime wife, Gloria. But ask a great many people how he’s known in Bucks, and they’ll tell you he saw a lengthy stint as BCCC’s Dean of Academic Affairs. His experience in the Navy lent itself to his experiences as both a teacher and an administrator, making him, among other things, a savvy judge of character.

Hall was born in 1925 in York County’s Windsor Township to parents Charles and Rosetta. Raised, primarily, by his uncle and his uncle’s wife, Hall grew up in Windsor and attended Red Lion High School. He graduated in 1943, and went on to attend summer and fall semesters at Lebanon Valley College. Then, his plans were interrupted.

“I turned 18 in December,” Hall says, “and Uncle Sam said, ‘Welcome.’”

Hall was drafted into the Navy in February 1944. In March, he went to boot camp at New York’s Sampson Naval Base. Soon after he was assigned to hospital corpsman school in Bainbridge, Md., and then to a hospital in Bainbridge, where he tackled “everyday nursing duties.” Bored with that work, he urged a Chief Petty Officer to put him on a ship, and got his wish when the USS Granville (APA-171) needed men. Hall took a train across the country to Astoria, Ore. and joined “a new ship and a new crew.”

After some spirited escapades (such as tending to the sore throat of Irish tenor Dennis Day, who was on board the Granville as part of a traveling singing group), Hall and his shipmates left Astoria to undergo various training exercises. In January 1945, the crew left the U.S. for Pearl Harbor, then traveled all over the Pacific.

“Our primary job was to carry troops and their equipment,” Hall says. “We’d unload them to go into battle, and if there were casualties, we would wait, bring them back to the ship and take them to bases to be treated.”

Hall says he always felt grateful that he wasn’t one of the men climbing down the nets to meet the enemy in combat. Another thing he felt was loneliness, despite the company of his shipmates.

“You don’t know what distance is, or what loneliness is, until you’re in the South Pacific,” he says. “There’s the occasional small island, but it’s mainly thousands of miles without any land or anything. The Pacific is so vast.”

Hall says his ship sometimes took troops to Okinawa, and during one such run, in August 1945, after the war had technically ended, the USS Granville was credited for shooting down a remaining kamikaze and aiding in the destruction of another. In addition, the ship took on a lot of wounded soldiers from the battleship New Mexico, which suffered a kamikaze attack.

According to Hall, he served as a “dirty nurse,” working in the sick bay and an adjoining operating room, collecting instruments and cleaning up messes from surgeries. He continued in that position for some time after the war, as his ship continued to travel the South Pacific and recover soldiers. He was discharged in June 1946 as a Pharmacist’s Mate Third Class, and soon after, he returned home.

He went back to Lebanon Valley College, completing his bachelor’s degree in social sciences. He then went to grad school at George Washington University, where he studied history. In the early ‘50s he got a job teaching in York County, where he met Gloria, a nurse. The couple married in 1952.

Hall began frequenting Penn State for summer sessions, earning credits toward a doctorate. He was offered a graduate assistantship, whereby he’d conduct small sessions with students under the supervision of a professor. Shortly thereafter he got a job teaching at a junior college in Florida, and moved there with Gloria. While in Florida, he made good on a Fulbright grant he received to teach in Europe, and from 1961 to 1962, with Gloria in tow, he lived and worked in the Netherlands.

He returned to Florida, taught two more years at the junior college, then saw an ad at an educator’s meeting in Miami for teaching jobs at the newly-forming BCCC. Hall sent in his application, went for an interview with the school’s freshly-appointed president, and became BCCC’s first faculty member. He says it was difficult, the process of getting a new college off the ground, but the rewards far outweighed the hurdles. Hall was teaching what he loved – history. He soon became the department chair, then the division chair, and by 1972, he was the Dean of Academic Affairs. He kept his position until 1987, at which time he returned to the faculty before retiring in 1989.

And as for those special skills Hall applied to his professional life? Gloria says her husband was constantly involved with hiring and interview processes at BCCC, essentially from its start. He would interface with individuals on a regular basis, be they students, colleagues or employees. Hall says that, all along, he’s had a keen knack for reading people, and he has the Navy to thank for that.

“One thing I know is that the Navy increased my sense of being able to perceive phoniness,” Hall says. “There were always hustlers in the Navy, and I developed, very quickly, an ability to detect phoniness.”

And that’s no bull.