John Sekulich learned at a young age what it meant, and how it felt, to be responsible for others.

The only son in a Penrose farming family of eight daughters, he grew up fast — but happy, with “no complaints” — in the years after World War I.

As a senior in high school, he remembers riding his bike to an empty campus before the sun rose to pick up the bus and then driving around the rural community collecting his classmates. When classes were over and everyone dropped off, he’d park the bus at school and bike several miles back to his home. In the winter, the journey that earned him $1 day was so brutal it froze his ears.

“Oh man, talk about hurting. I had cauliflower ears for quite a while,” he said.

Sekulich, who turns 106 on Nov. 17, would suffer much more in the service of others in just a few short years, as the wars in Europe

and Asia escalated and — on Dec. 7, 1941 — reached U.S. shores.

America hadn’t yet entered the war, however, when Sekulich was drafted into the Army as part of the nation’s first peacetime conscription. He left for basic training, but a crisis at home soon called him back. His father was sick, and he was needed back at the farm. That’s where he was, contemplating whether to take the Army up on

its offer of a permanent furlough, when Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor.

Sekulich turned to his father for advice about what to do next.

“My dad said, ‘I served in the Army over there in Austria and you can go serve your country, too,’” Sekulich said.

On the discharge paperwork, in the spot where he was meant to record his reason for leaving the service, he instead wrote: “Where do I report?”

Retired Army Special Forces soldier Mitch Utterback puts that decision into perspective.

“Because he was the only boy the War Department offered him a discharge to go home and help take care of the family farm,” said Utterback, who struck up a friendship with Sekulich, who now lives in Lakewood, after attending his 100th birthday party in 2016.

The son of a neighboring family in Penrose was given the same opportunity for a discharge early in the war and took it, Utterback said Sekulich once told him.

“John’s patriotism and integrity was evident. He always took care of his men,” Utterback said. “When you’re doing the right thing when nobody’s looking, that’s called integrity.”

After training at Fort Crowder, Mo., Tech Sgt. Sekulich went to war overseas with the 114th Signal Radio Intelligence Company, leading a team whose official mission was to run — and repair — cables so American commanders could communicate with each other on the battlefield.

At the time, the classified mission was a secret even to those who were tasked with making it happen, Utterback said.

“It was a unit that, really unbeknownst to the troops at the time, was spying on German communications,” Utterback said.

Project Ultra — so named because of it’s supersecret classification — set out to intercept and decode communications sent by the Nazis.

“John was quite literally part of a very important top secret program that allowed us to intercept German radio communications, where if a wire broke, they would have to go towards the enemy and fix it or string new wire,” Utterback said.

“But to John, they just put poles in the ground, they climbed trees and strung wire.”

Not that that job was an easy one.

The men of the 114th were self-taught climbers.

“We wore climbing spikes, with a spike on the inside, and you had to be careful,” said Sekulich, who recalled once watching a man from another company tumble from a pole he’d scaled to run a communication line. “They always told us if you fall, push yourself away from the pole, and that’s hard to do. He was pulling slivers out of his chest with a pair of pliers.”

On average, 10 miles of cables, strung between poles, connected American generals during the war. A concussion blast could destroy a day’s work, and require days’ more to repair, often costing a night’s sleep.

“They’d go out at night and cut our cables,” Sekulich said. “The switchboard operator would say, ‘Sarge, I can’t reach so-and-so.’ So I knew that cable was cut. So I’d have to go out there with the crew and we’d trace it till we found it, and splice it back up again.”

Sekulich and his unit spent countless nights sleeping unsheltered in subfreezing temps, in bushes, the woods, or “anywhere we could find a place to lay down,” as they pursued their mission to keep comms up.

Requisitioning new cables or poles through the military to replace the destroyed infrastructure could take weeks, a timeline that was unacceptable and deadly.

“Our captain told us once, you can beg, borrow or steal anything you need,” Sekulich said. So they did.

Sekulich arrived in Normandy after the costly but pivotal operation on June 6, 1944, that would help turn the tide of the war in favor of the Allies.

“There were still lots of bodies in the water,” Sekulich said. “I saw bodies stacked up like a bunch of logs.”

He and the men in his unit narrowly escaped the Malmedy massacre on Dec. 17, 1944, when soldiers with the Waffen SS gunned down more than 80 POWS in a farmer’s field in Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge.

“When you’re doing the right thing when nobody’s looking, that’s called integrity.” Mitch Utterback, retired Army Special Forces soldier

“The Germans would say, ‘Anybody hurt, raise your hand?’ And if anyone did, the Germans would go over and shoot them in the head,” Sekulich said.

Two American POWS who played dead during the massacre managed to escape, and warn inbound troops.

“These two guys came running — one guy’s neck was bleeding. He told the jeep full of John’s people, don’t go down there, they killed everybody,” said Charlotte Sekulich, John’s wife and proud partner in the chronicling, and recollection, of his history. “They saved John’s life, and the lives of many other Americans that day.”

Heroism and sacrifice aren’t relative, though.

Sekulich’s friends and loved ones sometimes have to remind him there’s a reason his generation is known as “The Greatest.”

“He’s so humble about (his WWII service) and makes it all sound so unglamorous,” Utterback said . “But I tell him, ‘John, you were stringing wire that helped the Americans listen to the Germans. Communication is what drives coordination in a war.”

If Sekulich and his men hadn’t driven toward enemy lines to find and repair broken comms lines, putting themselves at risk of “death or capture,” that coordination would have been impossible, Utterback said.

Sekulich sacrificed his hearing in service to his country, after months spent in a military vehicle with a machine gun hammering away inches from his head.

Utterback helped him fill out the paperwork, and Sekulich finally began receiving VA benefits a few years after he turned 100. He is considered 100% disabled by the VA.

“That is how we became and stayed connected,” said Utterback, who’s now working with the family to receive Sekulich’s French Legion of Honor award, bestowed to Americans who fought in France during WWII.

Utterback says they’re still waiting to hear back from the consulate in California that handles such requests.

Meanwhile, the Greatest Generation continues to eclipse, and with their passing goes a wealth of history that cannot be reclaimed. The VA estimated that America was losing 234 WWII veterans each day, in late 2021.

Sekulich is thought to be the second oldest WWII veteran in Colorado. Army vet Harold Nelson of Aurora turned 107 in February.

“Our World War II veterans are going fast, and unless you take time to visit with them and talk with them, so much is going to be lost,” Utterback said.

He encourages everyone — on Veterans Day, and every day — to go deeper than gratitude.

“If they have a baseball hat on that says WWII veteran, ask them about it. Take another step, if you have the ability,” he said.

So not just “thank you for your service,” but “tell me more.”

“Ask if they drink coffee. Say, ‘I’ll come pick you up and we can get together over coffee,’” Utterback said. “Take the time to get to know them better. Wouldn’t we all be better for