might be draft dodgers. So it just took time to get all the information that you was okay.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to know.”
I was twenty, not yet of draft age. But the war had already thrown its shadow across my path.
My story is the story of hundreds of thousands who fought for our country in World War II. In a way, there’s nothing special about it. In another way, everyone who fights for his or her country has a special story to tell.
In 2004 and 2006 I was asked to present the Old Breed Award for distinguished service in the First Marine Division. At these gatherings there are always five or six World War II vets. The young guys, young Marines, always gather around to hear our stories.
One of them, a mortarman, asked me, “They don’t shoot mortarmen, do they? I mean, you’re always behind the lines.”
“Let me tell you something,” I said. “They don’t discriminate. They shoot
But I understood what he meant.
I have a photograph on my wall at home. There we all are, what’s left of K Company, on the beach at Peleliu. We’re waiting for the ship to take us somewhere, anywhere away from the battle. That young mortarman could be any one of us.
I look at that picture today and I think, I don’t remember I was ever that young.
CHAPTER 2
Mortarman
I’d made up my mind that when the draft caught up with me I was going into the Air Force or the Navy or the Marines. Anything but the Army.
I was a year out of high school and the war was on. I’d been on the road with the crew, selling personalized engraved stationery from the company based in Columbus, Ohio. Everywhere we went I saw the Marine recruiting posters in front of post offices. They didn’t show them in their greens. They always had them in dress blues. I thought the Marines looked like a sharp outfit. Disciplined. Elite. I was from a farm. I was used to hard work and discipline. The Army seemed sloppy to me.
Sometimes folks on the road would ask why I wasn’t in the service. The truth was, I wasn’t of draft age. But that was complicated to explain.
So I told them, “I’m going to join the Marines next Friday.” It was always next Friday, no matter what day or week it was. And always the Marines.
When the draft finally did catch me, in September of 1942, our crew was in Kentucky. The notice had arrived several weeks before at my parents’ farm near Jewett. I was ordered to report to the local draft board over in Centerville, the Leon County seat. By now there was no time. So I went to the closest draft board I could find, in Catlettsburg, Kentucky, and explained my situation. They said they couldn’t process me. I pointed out that it was all the same military and the same U.S. government. Why couldn’t they process me and send the papers to my local draft board?
We argued for what seemed like the better part of the day. Finally they gave in and examined me and promised to forward the papers to Centerville. After that I quit selling and went home to the farm and waited. The next notice I got was that I was being drafted into the Army. I was to report November 12 to Centerville.
Instead I went down to Houston on the tenth and bunked overnight with a buddy. The next day the Air Force told me there was a six-week waiting list. The Navy recruiter was a smart aleck. So I walked across the street to the Marine Corps office. They examined me, poked and prodded, and then filled out the forms. But I wasn’t twenty-one yet, and the recruiting sergeant told me I needed written permission from a parent or guardian before I could enlist. I figured I was either in the Marines or I was in trouble with the draft board.
That afternoon the recruiter sent a telegram to my father up on the farm. I spent another night with my friend, then got to the recruiting station the next morning just as the recruiter was turning the key in the lock. We stepped inside together. During the night someone had poked a telegram under the door. It was from Papa: Permission granted.
The Marines fed me breakfast and put me on a train to San Antonio. I may have slept on the train that night; I don’t remember. But I do remember that the next morning, November 13, I was sworn in along with dozens of others, mostly kids like myself from hardscrabble farms and small towns all over south Texas. They fed us breakfast and then put us on another train and shipped us west.
Our second day out, somewhere beyond El Paso, we got our first taste of life in the United States Marine Corps.
We were in New Mexico or Arizona, I figured, rolling through the desert toward California. The whole train was full of recruits. So were dozens of other trains that day, carrying young guys like me to training camps, bases and ports. The railroaders called them “main trains,” because they had priority over everything else on the track.
There were sixty or so of us in our coach, mostly dozing or staring out the windows. We were still wearing our civilian clothes except for one Marine in uniform. He was sitting three seats back from me and across the aisle, and his armband identified him as an MP. A younger man in street clothes was sitting beside him. I assumed he must be some kind of prisoner, because he was doing his best to give the MP a hard time. His mouth had been going since San Antonio. And he was a jitterbug. Every few minutes, it seemed he had to go to the restroom. He’d jump up and the MP would march him to the end of the coach and wait in the aisle while he finished his business, whatever he was doing in there. Then they’d come back down the aisle to their seats. The fellow would flop down and pretty soon his mouth would be running again. If it wasn’t the restroom it was a drink of water or a smoke or some other thing. He had the whole car on edge.
Finally he stood and said something—I didn’t catch what—that pushed the MP over the edge.
“I want you to sit down, shut up and don’t be aggravating me anymore,” the MP snapped. “If you don’t sit down and shut up, I’m going to knock the hell out of you.”
The prisoner kept yacking and the MP got up, billy club in hand. There was a loud
The rest of that day word went up and down that coach among the recruits: “Yeah, you don’t argue with authority.”
Sometime around eight or nine o’clock the second night out the train pulled into boot camp. We were ordered out of the cars and told to stand with our toes touching a white line on the pavement and with our bags on our right. Then they read out our names and marched us to the barracks.
We couldn’t see a thing in the darkness. That’s the way they always tried to do it with recruits, bring you in at night. You’re disoriented, you can’t get your bearings, you don’t know what’s coming. They’re in charge.
I was apprehensive, but I wasn’t scared. I didn’t think they could dish out anything that I couldn’t handle.
Bunks were double stacked along both walls. Beside each bunk was a wooden chest, which we learned was our locker, and a galvanized pail. We’d find out what the pail was for the next morning. We were in our bunks before midnight. It seemed like I had just closed my eyes when they sounded reveille, right inside the door. And it was loud. The drill instructor was hollering, “Hit the deck, you bunch of sorry punks.”
And we did hit the decks. Guys were banging on the floor, metal bunks were rattling. For the next six weeks those were the sounds that started off every day, our alarm clock: reveille and clanging bunks and the DI shouting at us “punks.” We were never Marines. We were the sorriest bunch of human beings they’d ever set eyes on.
It must have been six a.m., still dark outside. I thought, What the hell have I got myself into?
We marched to the chow line and got breakfast. Then we were ordered to pick up our pails and follow the sergeant. Next everybody lined up for a haircut. In those days long hair was not the style, even if you weren’t in the
