By the time the United States entered World War II, Dr. Benjamin Pers was 37 years old—well past draft age. He was an internist in the Bronx. He’d been running his private practice for a decade and had a hospital appointment to back it up. He didn’t have to go to war, by any means, but he volunteered to serve. 

Pers was commissioned into the Army Medical Corps in early 1943, trained at the Medical Field Service School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and shipped overseas to the European Theater of Operations that June—leaving his practice, his hospital post, and his wife and family behind. He spent the next three years serving as a medical officer across a string of postings in the European-African-Middle Eastern theater. By the time he was released in 1946, he’d been promoted to major. His military paperwork records his religion plainly as "Hebrew"—an unremarkable line on a government form, but also an official record of a Jewish physician serving his country proudly, of his own accord.

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