Walter Adkins was just 17 when he joined the Merchant Marine near the end of World War II. He was too young to join the Navy, but a classmate talked him into accompanying him to Chicago to take a physical to join the merchant fleet.

"He flunked, and I passed," and off to sea he went, said Adkins, who now lives in Columbia City.

"I don’t think I knew what the Merchant Marine did," Adkins said.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone. Many people didn’t grasp the significance of the Merchant Marine’s role in World War II. It provided a fleet of freighters that shipped all the materials needed to fight a war – bullets, bombs, artillery shells, planes, tanks, trucks, Jeeps, food – all over the world, including into combat zones.

The merchant fleet was manned by sailors who were regarded as civilians and called mariners. In a way, their life was better than on a Navy ship. They had roomier quarters, better food and better pay.

The drawback was that mariners had to pay many of their own expenses, and the enemy attacked their often unprotected vessels just as ferociously as it attacked Navy ships. If a ship was blown out from under a merchant mariner, the sailor’s pay stopped the minute the ship sank, and if he wanted to get home, he had to pay his own way.

And ships sank. James Von Bargen, now a retired optometrist in Fort Wayne, sailed in the Pacific, delivering ships loaded with ammunition, including one shipload to Okinawa during the battle there. Three other ammo ships that accompanied Von Bargen on that voyage didn’t survive. They were sunk off the coast of Okinawa.

During the war, many people held the Merchant Marine in low regard, saying that its sailors were draft dodgers and imagining that they partied their way around the world. Never mind that many of the merchant seamen were too young to join the military, that many had joined because they had failed physicals for the Navy, or that there weren’t a lot of places to party on the battlefront.

When the war ended, veterans were afforded a basket of benefits, including the GI Bill to pay for education, VA home loans, health care and employment assistance.

The merchant mariners got nothing. It was as though they never took part in the war at all.

That changed somewhat in 1988, when Congress gave WWII merchant mariners veteran status, making them eligible for VA disability payments and health care.

This is where Lisa Wilken, a disabled veteran from the first Persian Gulf war, steps in. The treatment of World War II merchant mariners hasn’t been fair, and the 1988 extension of veterans benefits to these sailors was too little and, for many, too late.

About 1,600 U.S. merchant ships were either damaged or sunk during World War II, according to the Merchant Marine, and about 10,000 mariners were killed, giving the merchant sailors one of the highest casualty rates in the war, 1 in 26.

Surviving mariners, though, were never eligible for the GI Bill, and it’s far too late to offer that. They were never eligible for VA loans, and it’s too late for that, too, Wilken says.

So she’s trying to form a non-profit organization to push for Senate Bill 663, a proposal that, though it has 61 sponsors, has been languishing in the Senate for some time, trying to get out of committee.

The bill would give a belated thank you to WWII merchant mariners who operated outside the inland waterways of the United States and give them $1,000 a month for up to five years as compensation for never receiving many benefits.

"It’s kind of late, to tell the truth," Von Bargen says. "It’s a good bill, but they should have done it years ago."

"Who wouldn’t be in favor of this bill?" Adkins asked.

Oddly, it appears neither Von Bargen nor Adkins would be eligible for benefits from the bill. Both left the Merchant Marine at the end of the war, and both ended up in the regular military. Von Bargen eventually did use the GI Bill to go to school. Adkins served in Korea, eventually came home and spent his career working for the gas company.

Filipino soldiers from WWII have recently been approved for one-time benefits ranging from $9,000 to $15,000 a soldier, and if they are dead their widows are eligible, Wilkens argues. American merchant mariners deserve credit, too, and compensation for the benefits they never received, she said.

"The subs didn’t pick out just military and not merchant ships," Adkins said. "They sunk them all."