A World War II vet who fought at the Battle of the Bulge finally got his high school diploma last week — at the spry young age of 98.
Anthony Simeone, of Cranston, Rhode Island, quit high school at just 16-years-old to go to work, he told ABC 6 on Thursday.
“My family needed money,” he said. “I grew up during the Great Depression, which was not easy … I had to do what I had to do.”
Just two years later, in 1944, the US government drafted him into service as one of the millions of American men sent to face down the Axis powers.
The 18-year-old infantryman spent months in the snow and cold as part of the 14th Armored Division, trudging through France and Germany and fighting in the infamous Battle of the Bulge — Hitler’s last-ditch attempt to shatter the Allied armies clamoring at his country’s gates.
Simeone — born on the Fourth of July in 1926 — eventually earned a Bronze Star for heroism under fire. But he never talked much about the war.
“I don’t think he wanted to relive it,” his daughter, Diane, told the Providence Journal.
He spoke of it now and again to her husband, retired firefighter Steve Bifulco.
“Just all the death around him,” Bifulco told the outlet. “Some of them [were] his best friends.”
The retired soldier relayed one particularly distressing time that he and other American troops were trying to cross a river on two heavy metal cables — the men shuffled their feet along one as they used the overhead line for balance.
But their glacial pace made them a pleasant target for German sharpshooters, who picked off the defenseless troops as they wormed their way across.
“The soldier in front of him was shot and killed, [and] the soldier behind him was shot and killed,” Bifulco said. “He could see the bullets hitting the water.”
“He had nightmares,” Diane added. “He’d wake up screaming and tell my mom, ‘I thought I was back there.’”
His wife of 73 years, Virginia, would try to calm him down when the night terrors struck.
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“I would just say Tony, Tony, you’re all right,” Virginia, 94, told the newspaper. “It was a terrible experience for him. God bless him.”
Throughout the European campaign, Simeone carried his house key with him — a lucky charm of sorts that he used to remind himself that one day, if he was lucky, he’d get to go home to his parents and three siblings.
“I didn’t mind the military,” he told ABC. “But the combat part of it … that’s something else.”
Eventually, the oldest son of blue-collar Italian immigrants did get to go home.
He forged a new life out of the hell he’d endured, earning his GED and training at the New England Institute of Technology before working as a lifelong machinist — a job from which he retired in 1991.
He also married Virginia in 1951 and raised two children.
But something was always missing, he said. He wanted that small scrap of paper that said that he’d graduated.
“It just feels great because I was like an outcast,” Simeone said. “Everybody around me had a diploma, and I didn’t have it.”
On Thursday, about 100 people gathered at the Cranston High School East gym to watch a ceremony for the diploma.
“Today we gather to honor Anthony Simeone, a remarkable man whose life exemplifies service, resilience, and dedication,” Tom Barbieri, the school’s principal, said at the presentation.
Simeone’s family helped him stand and walk to the podium, where Superintendent Jeannine Nota Masse presented him with the long-coveted document.
“I never expected to be honored like this,” he told the crowd. “I am so honored.”
