NATICK {MA} - It was a 68-year-old photo on a nursing home bulletin board salute to Veterans Day that caught John Kelley’s eye as he maneuvered his wheelchair through the reception area of his nursing home.

In the upper right-hand corner of the poster was a black-and-white portrait taken in 1941 of Army Captain Robert Fulton.

Kelley, himself a World War II vet, took a closer look.

Then, nearly shaking in disbelief, the 87-year-old called over a staffer to share his incredible news: The man in the photo had been his commanding officer for more than a year in the South Pacific.

“I thought, ‘He’s alive!’ I really thought I was the only one left,’’ recalled Kelley, who was a Cambridge boy from a family of a dozen children sent to fight in New Caledonia, a key Allied base in the battle against the Japanese in the wake of their attack on Pearl Harbor.

“They said, ‘Yes. He’s upstairs.’’’



Robert Fulton was indeed alive. At 93, he is partially deaf and walks slowly with a cane. But his memory is good, and he was stunned to learn another member of the 221st Field Artillery Battalion was living in the same complex.

Kelley’s daughter, visiting from her home in Hyannis, asked Whitney Place receptionist Ellen Goodman whether a reunion could be arranged. “She said, ‘Dad really, really wants to see Mr. Fulton,’ ’’ said Goodman.

A day later, Fulton gingerly made his way downstairs from his assisted living apartment to Room 203 in the facility’s intensive-care nursing unit to visit the man he commanded a lifetime ago.

Since that first meeting two weeks ago, the men are slowly reaching across the decades and the distinctions of rank to form a late-in-life friendship.

“He just wanted to get together so he could call me names,’’ joked Fulton during his second visit with Kelley last week.

The two now swap memories of early-morning rev eille, mosquitoes “the size of bombers,’’ the threat of malaria, scarlet and dengue fever, powdered food in their K-rations, long-dead comrades from their battalion, and the terror of the frequent Japanese raids on their outpost.

“We used to say, “Charlie’s coming,’’ said Fulton. “You’d wait, listen for the [sound of a whistle]. Everything shakes, and then you’d get covered in dirt if you were in a hole.’’

“Anyone who didn’t think there was a God certainly thought about it differently while that was going on,’’ said Fulton, a Belmont native who attended Harvard University on the ROTC program, then was starting law school at Boston University when he was called up to serve in 1940.

The two men were on the same slow boat from New York, via Fiji and Bougainville Island, including a slow passage through the Panama Canal, where, Kelley recalled, monkeys jumped onto the ship’s deck.

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