Lifetime of helping the Marines

CHERRY POINT AIR STATION — When retired Brigadier Gen. George L. Bartlett began his career at Cherry Point Air Station as a B-25 navigator in 1943, he likely could not imagine he’d be back in the navigator seat there 67 years later.

Then he was an 18-year-old enlisted man. Now he is an 85-year-old retired high-ranking Marine Corps officer with a lifetime of experience. But, he’s still able to don a flight suit and volunteer his time to the Disabled American Veterans.

Bartlett performed navigator duties over the weekend in the B-25 nicknamed Panchito, as it took to the skies at the Cherry Point Air Show. The DAV sponsors the aircraft at air shows to draw attention to their services and to the veterans for which they work.

“They’re wonderful. They really help the veterans,” Bartlett said Sunday afternoon. “I’m sure there’s a lot of things that these veterans, if they talked to (the DAV), would find a lot of things for which they qualify. It would behoove the veterans to check with the DAV.”

Even Bartlett learned through the DAV that he qualifies for certain services and benefits from the Veterans Administration, he said, based on his more than 34 years in the Marine Corps.

He is a military success story, venturing into service as a young private and reaching the general rank in just over 34 years of active duty service. The feat is still possible, he said.

After completing boot camp and training as an aviation machinist mate, Bartlett arrived at Cherry Point. During World War II he wanted to become a pilot and learned that it would take about 18 months to get into the flight school. Meanwhile, he completed the navigator bombardier school. World War II soon ended, and the opportunity for flight school had passed. He left the Marine Corps and went to college at the University of Oregon, earning a bachelor’s degree in architecture. The military called him back into service when war broke out in Korea.

“Being a navigator, they needed navigators,” he said. “Six days from the day I got notified, I was in California taking a plane over to Hawaii.”

For the next six months he flew back and forth between California and Japan.

“I was a navigator on the B-25. Then when I came back in 1951, I was a navigator on transports,” he said.

The second time around, Bartlett decided to stay in the Marine Corps, completing a tour of duty in Korea and two in Vietnam. Later, he spent most of his time at Marine Headquarters in Washington, earning rank and taking on progressively responsible positions. Along the way he earned his master’s degree in 1955, becoming one of only 150 Marines at the time to hold an advanced degree.

“So, I always got the really good jobs,” he said.

He retired from the Marine Corps in 1977, and worked for the next 10 years as the director of the Marine Corps Association, a service organization.

“I could do more to help Marines in that job than I ever could do in the Marine Corps,” Bartlett said. “We had the assets and I could employ them immediately.”

Cherry Point is much different at the present than it was in 1943, he said, as is the navigation job aboard the B-25 Panchito.

“When you navigate now you have a little black box that says GPS,” he laughed. “But when I did it you had to have a sexton, sun lines, moon lines … It was a little more complicated.”

Bartlett, who lives in Potomac, Md., attends several air shows per year with Panchito and its owner-pilot Larry Kelley, sponsored by the DAV.

“It’s here to honor all those veterans that have given so much for us,” said Lynn May, the event coordinator for the DAV’s aviation outreach program. “We bring in the B-25 … we reach out to those veterans to say, ‘Do you need help? We’re here to help you.’”

The DAV is a not-for-profit organization that provides its services free to veterans. They provide veterans advocate services, transportation, benefit guidance and more, May said.

The Craven County Chapter is located in New Bern.

P. Christine Smith can be reached at 252-635-5666 or pcsmith@freedomenc.com.