88 Year Old WWII Veteran Beaten to Death

Wednesday night an 88 year old WWII veteran named Delbert Belton was attacked and beaten by two teenagers outside the Eagles Lodge in Spokane, Washington. He died Thursday of massive head injuries.

During WWII Belton (see picture) had fought in the Pacific, and survived being shot in the leg during the Battle of Okinawa. That's right, he survived the bloodiest battle of the Pacific Theater of Operations; a nearly three month death match where a U.S. service member had only a roughly 50/50 chance of surviving unscathed, a battle part of the bloodiest war in human history - only to be violently murdered over 60 years later in what is ostensibly a modern, first world nation ranking as the most wealthy and powerful in history. As of this writing one arrest has been made. There is no known motive for the killing.

Given what I know about World War II; a war where the good guys knew the Nazi's ultimate racial goals and still turned away tens of thousands of Jews trying to escape Europe, a war where the good guys murdered hundreds of thousands of relatively innocent civlilians via an unrelenting almost indiscriminate bombing campaign that only ended with the use of the most horrific weapons ever invented, and a war the good guys won only by partnering with a genocidal dictator that may have been even more murderous than Hitler* - I am increasingly of a very bleak opinion regarding human nature.

Delbert Belton, a widower, is survived by one son.

* This last paragraph was inspired by a recent comment by Matthew Yglesias that this writer has added to, subtracted from, and otherwise recast but nevertheless paraphrases and follows in the same vein enouth to require the citation and attribution you see here.