CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Stateside, After the War
JIM ANDERSON
The Veterans Administration sent me to a mechanic’s school for six weeks’ training. So I became a mechanic. That’s what I did for a job.
Two or three years after the war was over and we got things a little bit straightened out, I visited Eugene Sledge down in Alabama. I got a picture of him and his wife and me. He was a courageous guy, a good Marine. He did an outstanding job on his book. I couldn’t find one thing in there that I felt different about. He captured it all.
I haven’t seen The Pacific TV series. Combat in the Pacific was a terrible, terrible experience for a human being. I don’t watch Hollywood productions about any of the battles. I do enjoy reading the experiences though, from the men who were there.
DAN LAWLER
When I got home, I found my old friend from training, Jimmy Butterfield, and we went out to visit the family of Harold Chapman, who’d been killed on Peleliu. He was the guy who got outnumbered in a bayonet fight.
We walked up on the porch, and this gal ran out to greet us, a good-looking gal, and threw her arms around my neck. It was one of Harold’s sisters. I never even knew he had sisters. I walked in, and Harold’s Purple Heart was sitting there. Course, his mother was taking it pretty hard. I don’t remember all we talked about, but that was kinda hard. Butterfield did most of the talking. Later on I wrote a poem for the family. It was the only poem I’ve ever written.
I went back to high school and got my diploma and finished that off. Then I got a union job in a bakery. I got married a few years later. My wife, Virginia, was beautiful. When she wore heels she was six foot. I’m about six-foot-two or -three. She was the only girl I knew who could ever put her chin on my shoulder when we were dancing. We have two sons together.
A lot of guys never talked about the war when they got home, but I always did. Right away, I put together a scrapbook, pretty much right when I got home. It’s all beat up today. But anyone who ever wanted to see it, I showed it to them. That’s one thing that got me talking about the war, that scrapbook.
I live near the foothills of the Adirondacks, and I got mountains all around me. These mountains go right into Canada. I’ve got a camp in the Adirondacks right on the end of the lake. It’s a 150-foot lot right on the end of the lake. Everybody who lives around me are doctors and lawyers.
My wife Virginia died a few years back. I miss her greatly.
I have a girlfriend today, Nancy. When she first came up to my place on the lake, my wife’s picture was still there, and I turned it down before she arrived. But Nancy turned it back up again. “Don’t you ever turn your wife’s picture down again,” she said. Nancy’s picture is right next to Virginia’s today.
I go into the local high schools and colleges and talk to the kids today. They’re very interested. The school administrators keep bringing me back in to talk. Of course you have to be awful careful because they’re kids. They ask good questions, and the big one is always “How many did you kill?” You know how kids are? They want to know the number. My answer is: “All that were in front of me.” That is one good answer.
I tell them what made the Marine Corps—the discipline. How we learned to fight alongside each other, on the line. How we had a job to do and we did it. How they started it and we finished it.
STERLING MACE
When I got home, I went to see Levy’s mother. Levy was my friend, the kid who was holding my cigarettes in his pack when he got headshot on a ridge at Peleliu.
Levy had lived in Brooklyn, so I hopped on a train and went down there, knocked on the door. I walked in that apartment, typical Brooklyn apartment. Levy had given me a picture of himself once, no bigger than a postage stamp. In the living room, here was an oil painting done of that picture. Beautiful picture. Christ, it must have been four foot by five. His mother was teary-eyed. We had a chat. When her son wanted to go into the Marines, she wouldn’t sign for him because he was seventeen. He kept asking, and finally she signed for him.
She asked me to stay awhile. All the cousins and uncles and aunts came over. They were feeding me and giving me drinks. What was I going to say to them? Well, it wasn’t going to be any details about how he got it, you know. But I just said that their son went out quick without any pain or suffering. He was a good soldier. That was it. I went out that door and said to myself that was the last time I’d ever go see a dead soldier’s mother like that. I never visited anybody again.
I went to work for a clothing store, first for a tailor upstairs and then down on the floor selling clothes. While I was doing that, I kept thinking of commercial art school. A friend of mine who’d been in the mortars was there, so I signed up for a course in commercial art. I went to school days and worked evenings and did pretty good. I married and we had a son and a daughter.
I got another job, at the Jones Beach Theater, so I did that instead. For five years I drove a barge for them. Then I became manager of the theater. That job was the greatest and I did it for eighteen years. Then, just recently I wrote a book with a talented young writer, Nick Allen. Battleground Pacific. It’s sorta my manifesto of what I saw over there. I figure the survivors owe it to the guys who didn’t come home to speak the hell up.
HARRY BENDER
For fifty years I worked for the Army. I was actually a civilian, working for the Army Corps of Engineers. I went back to Okinawa and stayed there from 1951 to 1956. Then I went to Taiwan until 1958, and then I was transferred to St. Louis for one year.
When I was in Okinawa, I married a girl from Hawaii. Her name was Sin Wai, and she had Chinese ancestry, but she was born on the Big Island. We worked in the same office. She was a maintenance clerk. I was working in the inventory section. We started having lunch together. Eventually we got married.
In those days, mixed-race marriages were not that big, pretty much everywhere you went. It was hard for us to live in St. Louis. My parents lived in Memphis. My wife and I would be driving down to Memphis, and we’d stop at a service station. The bathrooms were white only and black only. My wife says, “I’m not black, I’m not white, where do I go?”
After St. Louis, my wife and I moved to Hawaii. An old buddy from Okinawa got me an interview for a new job. I landed it and worked there in the same Army headquarters for forty years. When I retired, I was director of logistics for the U.S. Army garrison in Hawaii. All the motor pools, the laundries, the supply depots, the maintenance depots were mine.
So we made Hawaii our home. We liked the islands real well and the people there.
When I hear stories today about how a lot of the guys coming home had problems adjusting, I consider myself real lucky. I never suffered any long term effects from the war. I never had any nightmares. Nothing. When I came home, it was over.
My wife passed away in 1994. We had a real good marriage—never went to bed angry. We had two girls together and a whole bunch of grandchildren and great grandchildren.
R. V. BURGIN
Ever since I was a kid, I had dreamed of working for the post office. I was considered a disabled veteran, but I wanted to work and knew I could.
When I first got out of the Corps, jobs weren’t all that plentiful. I couldn’t get on at the post office right then, so I went to telegraphy school, to become a railroad stationmaster.
After a while the post office sent me a letter saying a space had opened up. So I started working for the post office as a letter carrier with a pouch on my shoulder, making 84 cents per hour. It was hot summers and cold winters and bad dogs.
The last time I saw Florence was on September 25, 1943—until she left Australia and we met again on a train platform in Dallas on January 27, 1947. We were married two days later, on the 29th, so we didn’t lose any time. We already had reservations at the church and the cake on order. Her father handled it real well. He gave her his blessing and wished her well. He told her he would come to see her if he had to work his way over on a ship. He never made it—he died in 1948 from the harm of the gassing in WWI. My uncle, Romus, the guy that I was named after, my dad’s brother, he was also gassed in WWI and he didn’t live to be old bones either.
I worked at the post office for thirty-one years and climbed my way up the ranks. The Marine Corps teaches you how to get along with people and to handle situations. It went a long way with me in my post office career.
Little stuff doesn’t bother me. One time at the post office one of my employees shot another and killed him out in the parking lot. A guy come running in there white as a sheet and said so and so shot so and so out in the parking lot. I said, “Okay, I’ll be out there in a minute.” I walked on out there. The nurse was out there, and of course the guy was as dead as a doornail by the time I got out there. That’s not the first dead man I ever seen. It didn’t excite me or frustrate me that one of my men shot the other one in the parking lot.
Another time, one of my employees told me that he was going to “kick my ass.” I looked him square in the eye, and said, “You might want to bring your lunch because it’s going to take a while because I don’t wup easy.” He just looked at me and that was the end of it.
I was pretty tough on my employees, but they liked working for me because I treated them like human beings and didn’t roughshod ’em in any way, shape, or form, and never yelled at them. If I had a person that was goofing off and screwing up, I’d just bring them in the office and set ’em down across from me and in a very calm voice tell him what he could expect from me and what I expected from him or her. If I chewed a guy’s butt out today, I looked him up the very first thing the next day when I came to work and spoke to him. I wouldn’t let any awkwardness fester. My boss told me one time, just because you have to get somebody straightened out is no sign you dislike them.
“Fair, firm, and friendly” was my motto. I retired as a superintendent at age fifty-five. It was a good run.
Florence and I traveled extensively, all over the States. We did a lot of sightseeing for a long time and even went back to Australia and lived there for ten months. Marrying Florence was the best move I ever made. We had four beautiful daughters together. After sixty-four years, six months, and twenty-seven days, I lost her to a heart attack on August 25, 2011.
After the war, I never talked about the war to anybody. I mean, nobody—not my parents, not my wife, not my kids, not anybody. There were four combat Marines I worked with for thirty years, and we never talked about the war. We might tell something funny that happened sometime, but that was it.
In 1980, thirty-five years after the war, I went to my first reunion ever of the 1st Marine Division, in Indianapolis, Indiana. There were twenty Marines out of K Company there, and I had done foxhole duty with every single one of them. We’d be sitting around in the hospitality room, and they’d say, “Burgin, you remember so and so?” and I wouldn’t. But they’d start telling what happened and who was involved, and it came back to me just like it was yesterday. The more I went to the reunions, the more I could talk. Each year that I could go, it got a little easier, until I could talk about the war with ease.
Finally in 1991, they had five of us K Company men go to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and do a documentary on Peleliu. That’s about the time in my life when I decided that these stories should be told. They should be written. They should not be forgotten. So I wrote a book of my own, Islands of the Damned, and dedicated it to the men in K Company who fought so valiantly in World War II.
Now, Jim Burke, he has never talked about the war to anybody, period, to my knowledge. Whenever the war was over, he and his wife came down to Texas a couple of times, and Florence and I spent three or four days with them in Iowa. But Jim has always been tight-lipped. He was a damn good Marine, one of the best. I guarantee you.
WAYBURN HALL
I went to school at the University of Houston. Finally got my education. After that I went up and worked in the main office at the local sugar refinery. My dad worked for them, and I had some sisters who worked for them, so it was easy to get a job. My boss in the office, he was a good friend, and he put me out there as manager of one of the service stations.
I managed that for several years. When they sold, I was able to buy that place. I got a real good deal on it, and I operated it for myself for seven or eight years. Somebody came by and wanted to know if I’d sell, too. “I’ll sell anything I got except my wife and kids,” I said. So we made a deal. I made some money on it. We’d bought a nice home in a nice subdivision by then.
My father-in-law had a little ranch going. So when he and his wife got in bad shape, me and my wife helped take care of them. I bought some of the property from them. Then my wife inherited some that was left over. So we ended up with 143 acres of land. We’re running some cows on it. I got about forty-two head right now of cattle.
We live out in the country, just off the main highway. We still run the cattle. Or they’re running me, I’ll put it that way. My wife and I have four boys, and I’ve divided the land four ways, and I’m turning the ranch over to them. The boys all have good educations and good jobs, all for schools or school districts. They come on the weekends.
I’ll be turning eighty-seven years old soon. My hearing comes and goes, and it’s getting worse all the time. Those mortars during the war didn’t help none. Hearing aids don’t do me any good. I can hear sounds, but sometimes the words don’t come out. That’s the problem that hearing aids don’t correct. My wife’s wheelchair-bound, so I’m taking care of her. We’re getting by, and we’ll last a few more years, I’ll put it that way.
All the things that happened, I’m lucky I’m still alive.
CHUCK TATUM
In the years that followed the war, I decided to have all the fun I could take. For a job, I did everything under the sun. If I couldn’t be an officer in the Marine Corps, I was going to become a famous race car driver, which I did for a while. I hung around tracks and finally built a car, became a driver, and won some races with it. In California I was famous, regionally, as a race car driver. Eventually I ran car dealerships and went all over the world—Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Germany. A company hired me to build an automobile dealership in Saudi Arabia, selling Cadillacs and Mercedes-Benz.
In my retirement years, I realized that nobody had ever heard about the death of John Basilone on Iwo Jima. He never had a story about him anywhere. So a friend suggested I write it. So I got a computer and wrote the story of the death of John Basilone, and sold the story in October 1988 to a magazine. My sister Audrey read it and encouraged me to write a book. “You just write a page a day for 365 days, and you’ll have a book,” she said. So that’s what I did. It was titled Red Blood, Black Sand, and I self-published it at first, and it did quite well for being self-published. Many good things happened because of the book, and I traveled all over and gave a lot of talks. I even got to address the officer’s class at Quantico one time. This last year my book was professionally published by Berkley Caliber. It’s been more successful than I ever dreamed. And it accomplished what I started out to do.
CLINTON WATTERS
I was discharged in August 1945. By then, I’d been in the service a little less than four years. When I first got out of the service, I used to have some problems with nightmares, but not anything serious like you hear about. I went out on 50 percent disability for several years due to my leg wound, then I was reduced to 10 percent, then zero.
In 1946, I attended Boston University and majored in business administration. Between my sophomore and junior year, I married Joan, a lovely young lady whom I had met back in the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps]. Joan worked as an airline stewardess for TWA when we first married, but they fired her right afterward, because in those days you couldn’t be married and be a stewardess at the same time. We had a daughter in 1950 and a son a few years later. I worked in finance all my life, and started off at North American Aviation and ended up at Rockwell International, in California, in personnel and payroll. I was corporate payroll manager my final years with them. When I retired, we moved from the hustle of LA to the quiet of Oregon.
I saw Lena Basilone just one time after the war. She lived in Long Beach, California, and my wife and I called and made arrangements to get together and take her out for dinner. We met her at her house and saw that she was living in the past—she had all these things of John’s all over the place and just wasn’t interested in getting married again.
Dinner wasn’t comfortable. I didn’t feel that she was enjoying having us visit her. I don’t know if she felt that she had been cheated out of a lot and here I was living it up, I don’t know. She said she was going to cook an Italian dinner and invite us down again sometime, but she never did. She wasn’t the same person that I knew before we went overseas. She probably didn’t want all the memories being brought back, so close to home. I tried really hard to keep the relationship going, but it didn’t seem she was interested. I never saw her again.
Lena died in 1999 and is buried in Riverside, California. It’s true, she never remarried. John is buried in Arlington Cemetery in Washington, D.C. I visited John’s grave years ago with my children. That was kind of closure. I felt like I needed that.
CLARENCE REA
In July 1946 I was discharged after a year and a half in the hospital. I didn’t want to leave the Marine Corps, but because of my wounded arm I wasn’t able to make a career out of it.
I came home to Bakersfield, California, and started going to a gym. I had a special glove made that held my hand open, because at the time I couldn’t open it. I went there on my own and worked three days a week. Through therapy and working at the gym, I got so where I could open my hand up again, although I still couldn’t use it. I’d played football and baseball in high school; I was always an athlete, so my motivation was simply that I wanted to be able to use my hand again.
After about fifteen years, through the use of working it and working with it, I got so where my hand wasn’t noticeable by anybody. Today, almost seventy years later, it looks normal, but it’s still weak. Since the day I got out of the Marine Corps, I’ve never worn a short-sleeve shirt because of the way my arm looks, but I’m a very lucky man. The guys who didn’t make it home are the heroes of World War II.
I was married about six years after I was discharged, and my wife said I had nightmares once in a while, but I don’t remember them or dwelling on them much. She said that a couple times she’d wake up, and I’d be up, still asleep, wandering around the house. One night I was up under the venetian blinds hollering at somebody. But I don’t ever remember fighting any battles in my sleep. My method of coping? Working. Raising kids. Getting on with life.
At first I didn’t know what happened to Lena Basilone. Then I found out she was living down in Long Beach. I went down to see her and she wasn’t home. I heard she wasn’t interested in rekindling those memories. That’s the last time I attempted to see her.
I was a deputy sheriff in California for a number of years, then I bought some rentals and went into the property management business.
I loved the Marine Corps, and I still do. I’m thankful for everything I’ve got out of the Corps. It’s still the number one thing in my life.
CLINTON WATTERS
I knew Clarence Rea way back at Pendleton. We were great friends, born on the same day (just a year apart), and we used to go on liberty all the time together. I have pictures of me and Clarence and Basilone all out on liberty together.
On Iwo, I was heading in on the first wave, and Clarence on the second wave. Just before we landed, we shook hands and said, “Well, see ya when this is all over.” I ended up getting wounded the first day. He stayed on the island thirteen days before getting wounded.
He went to a hospital in Guam where I had been, but they moved you out of that hospital so fast, I’d already been shipped out to San Francisco. When Clarence entered the hospital in Guam, he said to the doctor, “I understand that Clint Watters came through here. How did he do?” The doctor said, “Oh, I’m sorry to tell you, Clint Watters died of his wounds.”
Sixty-five years later, almost to the day, my son, who’s a chiropractor down in California, had a young man come in for treatment. The young fellow said, “I’m going to see my uncle tomorrow. We’re pretty close. He’s a survivor of Iwo Jima.”
“Is that right?” my son said. “My dad’s a survivor of Iwo Jima!”
Now, you got to think that this is in California, with millions of people around.
The young fellow said, “I wonder if your dad knew my uncle.”
My son said, “I don’t know, but we can find out.” So he called me and said, “Dad, there’s someone here who wants to talk to you.” So I got on the phone with the young fellow. He said, “I understand you’re a survivor of Iwo Jima.” I said, “Yes, I am.” He said, “Did you ever know a fellow named Clarence Rea?” I said, “I sure did! He was one of my good friends. I think he’s dead now.” He said, “No, he’s not, I’m going to see him tomorrow. Boy, he’ll be surprised to hear from you!” He wrote down my phone number.
CLARENCE REA
Sixty-five years after the war, I was in Southern California at a party for my grandson. My nephew tapped me on the shoulder, handed me a slip of paper, and said call this number. It had the name “Clint Watters” on it. I hadn’t heard that name since the day we started to go ashore at Iwo. I thought, My God, it must be his kid.
I took the paper. A couple days later I called the number. It was in Oregon. On the other end of the phone was Sergeant Clint Watters, who I had last shook hands with on the LST offshore of Iwo Jima. I couldn’t believe it. And he couldn’t believe it. I’d been told he’d been killed.
So we decided to get together. We arranged to meet at a hotel halfway between Medford and Southern California. He and his wife, and me and my wife.
I tell ya, when we met up there at that hotel, and he knocked on the door, and I opened the door of the room, I tell ya, we both just about cashed it in right there.
We had just a wonderful, wonderful reunion. To this day we keep in touch by phone and e-mail. It’s one of the most wonderful things that happened to me after World War II, knowing that Clint was still alive.
CLINTON WATTERS
Since then, Clarence and I have become very close again. I’d say we send five or six e-mails per day between each other. And we call each other on the phone and talk all the time.
It’s wonderful to have such a good friend.
T. I. MILLER
I got a job in the coal mines. If you stayed in West Virginia, that’s where the money was. After two years of general labor, I worked on the maintenance crew as a mechanic and electrician. I worked for the mines for thirty-two years. Twenty-five years of those were underground.
Civilian life was pretty rough for about the first ten years. Nightmares. Rage. Hepatitis. Malaria. I had forty-two separate malarial attacks. Malaria never really gets out of your system. It camps out down in your spleen. Sometimes I could hardly believe the fevers, chills, and shakes that came with it. I had some problems with my stomach, too, and got so I could hardly eat anything except dry toast, skim milk, and oatmeal.
One day down in the mines I was doing a belt-cleaning job, heavy work, and I swear I saw a dead Japanese soldier ride by me on the belt. Another body came by, then another. I had to shake my head and blink my eyes. When I got to the surface and saw the sunlight, the ghosts went away. The hallucinations were caused by a malarial fever. I was in the veteran’s hospital after that for twenty days.
My wife, Recie, and family were a big help. Recie and I had three children together—two boys and a girl. We were married sixty-two years before she passed. At the same time, getting better is something you gotta just do yourself. The secret, I found out, is just to stay busy. There were no government programs to help back then. No therapists to see. Nothing like that. I was born and raised out in the country. So after I came back from the war, I built me and Recie a house out there close to where I’d grown up. I got out there and roamed around in the mountains. That’s what helped.
One time they closed the mines down for three months. Someone said, “Where you gonna go look for a job?” I said, “I ain’t. I’m gonna spend the summer out in the sunshine.” And I did. I took a two-pound double-bladed axe and walked a half mile up above where I lived. We had a field there, and I cut down big trees and cut them into fence posts. I got me a half acre of ground, plowed it up, and had a field. That summer I grew potatoes, corn, and beans. The whole summer I spent growing things I wanted to. I’d be out in the woods at daylight. I just worked like that and built myself back up.
Faith helped, too. I was never a Christian growing up or throughout the war, although a chaplain gave me a New Testament once and I used to read it sometimes during lulls in the combat. I’d say there aren’t any atheists when you’re getting shelled. I always did like to sing, from the time I was young. My cousin and her husband and my sister were singing around in the churches, and one day they heard me singing and asked me to help them. I got to singing with them and we sang at various gospel conventions and even on the radio. I guess those spiritual songs got me thinking about the hereafter and all that. I decided to start living a Christian life, and so I did. I’ve been a Christian for about sixty years.
Today I live in the same house as my daughter and son-in-law. I just turned ninety-two last November.
ART PENDLETON
After the war, my wife and I went to Quakertown, Pennsylvania, to visit John Rivers’s parents. There, I found they had long died and he had been adopted as a kid. So there was no one to accept my condolences. I did find the brother of the man who had adopted him, and he took us into his home. It was a worthwhile stop because I found out that they did in fact celebrate John Rivers every year at Memorial Day. I think they even put a monument up to him in the town.
I think a lot about how I missed Peleliu. My closest friend, Stretch Campbell, who was my gunner, took over my squad when I went to the hospital on Banika. I later learned that on Peleliu, Stretch got hit in the head and had gone on a hospital ship. Stretch was bandaged up but insisted on going back. Finally they let him go back because he became a pain in the neck.
Stretch was a basketball player for the University of Pennsylvania. When he went back, his leg was badly injured. When they talked about amputation, he said, “No, I will not have my leg amputated. I’m going to die.” So he wished himself dead and it happened.
They all got killed on Peleliu. My whole squad, including Stretch.
After the war, somebody recommended I get checked out for PTSD. I had no idea what they were talking about. Years later, I went to the White River Junction Veterans Affairs medical center in Vermont. This middle-aged woman did an interview with me for about an hour. My wife was with me and it was a pleasant interview.
As we’re walking down the hallway on the way out, the interviewer stopped, turned around, and said to me, “I understand completely what you’re saying and going through. I’d lost a job one time and it really messed me up.” We looked at each other and that was the end of that.
After the war I went back to school, got a degree, and became an occupational therapist. I worked in the mental health field and even ran a couple of private businesses that I started.
RICHARD GREER
I studied business administration in college. My folks had been furniture manufacturers, so I set out to learn that and had some of the top jobs in furniture managing all over the country. When I was sixty-two, I retired from management and went into consulting, and that took me all over the world. I did that until I was seventy-six. It was good living. If you were a big corporation or a country and had a big forest and didn’t know what to do with it, I could tell you.
I was married and we had two children. My son is a minister today, and my daughter is a trustee of Emory and Henry College. She’s well educated and spent time at Oxford and Cambridge universities. Neither one of my children ever gave me a nickel’s worth of trouble.
After I retired, I got involved in a lot of stuff, the National WWII Museum, reunions, working for the State Department. I started doing volunteer work, nation building projects. I did several in South America, several in Central America, Africa, and Asia. I hate airplane travel anymore, because you’re so packed in like sardines, but anytime somebody calls, I see if I can make it.
I was used as a consultant for the series The Pacific. They wanted to put me in as a character, but the thing they wanted me to sign, hell, I wasn’t going to sign that for anybody. Too much legal-speak. So they slipped me in as “Manny Rodriguez” instead. And then they killed him off. That’s where our stories go their separate ways.
Last year, the National WWII Museum presented me with a silver service medal for a lifetime of service to the nation. I have it and it’s a beautiful thing. I noticed the year before, Elizabeth Dole got it.
I’m in good shape, but I’m coming up on ninety-five, and I’ve got enough sense to know that when you’re ninety-five you don’t have that much longevity. My health is good and I’d like to live to a hundred. That’d be nice.
JIM YOUNG
About five months after I came home, I became ill with something I picked up in the jungle and spent twenty-nine days in the Quantico Naval Hospital.
After the war I worked at a cotton mill in Pennsylvania as a weaver and then for the government as a civil servant at an Army shipping facility. Ultimately, I ventured into business for myself. I stuck my neck out and bought a small motel/hotel/restaurant and bar in Pennsylvania. My wife worked as the head of the kitchen. I worked on that for eight years. It was a heck of a mess and I ended up bankrupt.
I moved down the road and retired. I’m done working. Now I’m kind of comfortable. I never fully recovered from the illness I picked up during the war so am on disability benefits from the VA. I give talks about World War II on occasion and even reunited with Roy Gerlach and Sid Phillips recently at a local air show. Seeing my buddies reminded me, if I had to do WWII all over again, I would do it. I don’t regret one minute of it.
ROY GERLACH
I had exactly four years in the Marines when I was discharged. I had no ill effects of being in the service. I never got in any firefights and never was in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy either, which I’m glad about.
I started farming for a tomato farmer. I was a sharecropper. The man who owned the farm bore the expenses, but I worked and got a share of the crops. I signed a three-year contract with him when I started. We raised a lot of tomatoes, but they weren’t paying a thing. So after three years, why, I gave it up and bought a house in town for me and my wife Florence, who I married in ’44. I got a couple of jobs. I delivered milk to homes then I wound up delivering something else—oil. I became a home delivery oil man. I worked by the gallon. The more you sold, the more you made. For every gallon delivered, we got three-quarters of a cent. We made 75 cents for every one hundred gallons sold. When we would complain about the wages, they would say, “Well, get another customer and you’ve got yourselves a raise!” (laughs). I made it work and did that for the next thirty-one years.
SID PHILLIPS
I married Miss America—Mary Houston—on April 15, 1946. Eugene Sledge had just come home from China, and he was my best man.
I was determined that the war was not going to whup me, and that I was going to go on with my life. Some of the boys seemed to have that attitude, and some didn’t. I know Eugene seemed to be so haunted by the war afterward. We’d sit out on the porch at night, and I’d tell him, “Gene, just forget about all that crap. You got to put it aside and forget it.” And he never really could.
Sure, I had nightmares after the war. Mary told me I did. My nightmare was always that the Japs were overrunning us, and I couldn’t find my damn weapon, and didn’t have any ammunition. That was the one I had over and over again. I’d wake up, and she’d be beating on me to wake up, wake up, wake up.
I laugh about it now. I have to. It doesn’t do any good to whine about it.
I went on to study medicine and became a doctor. Mary and I eventually had three children together, twelve grandchildren, and I don’t know how many great-grandchildren anymore, it’s in the teens.
After the war, Shirley and I still exchanged Christmas cards and things like that. Maybe one letter a year, just like we pledged. We both got married to other people and had families. I’d always tease my wife, “I got a letter from Shirley!” Shirley married an Australian Spitfire pilot named David Finley, who was a very fine man.
One day, years later, oh I was probably in my forties by then, I was at the office, and my wife Mary called me on the phone. She said, “I’ve got some news for you, are you sitting down?”
“Okay, let’s hear it,” I said.
“Shirley is here.”
I said, “Shirley? Shirley who?”
Shirley and her family were visiting the United States, unannounced to us. They’d rented a car and were driving all around, and they popped into our home in Alabama for a visit. Mary wouldn’t let them leave. She kept them with us for two weeks.
Well, during that visit, my daughter met Shirley’s son, when they were just children. Then, years later, when my daughter was in her twenties, she and Shirley’s son reconnected. They hit it off and were married shortly after. They have three children today—my grandchildren—and they live in Florida, where Shirley’s son is a doctor. So my former Australian girlfriend is my daughter’s mother-in-law.
Shirley and I will still write to each other every so often, even now. Her husband died a few years back, and of course my wife has also passed. In fact, I need to write Shirley a letter.
I stayed in touch with my buddy W.O. but his story is tragic. He survived the war, married a real fine registered nurse, and had four little boys. We stayed good friends. About fifteen years after the war, W.O. was going to North Carolina, to a church conference, with two of his little boys and was driving a Volkswagen bus. Some drunks came over a hill and hit him head-on and killed everybody on board, W.O. and his two sons. It was rough, of course, on his wife. We had an all–1st Marine Division pallbearer crew. There were still a lot of us around. It was a bad event.
I tried to reach our squad comedian Carl Ransom. I had his mailing address and sent him a Christmas card shortly after WWII but received a notice that said, “Moved, no forwarding address.” About ten years ago, O’Leary, who was in our mortar platoon, said he happened to meet Ransom’s sister, who said he had died. I made a lot of attempts, but there was no Internet then, no easy way to trace people.
After the war, my wife Mary and I hosted reunions at our home for H Company. She would cook for all the men and their wives, and that’s a tall order, but they loved her cooking. Everyone loved getting together, and we saw the old gang.
Now, Eugene Sledge didn’t have as much fun at reunions. I went to a 1st Marine Division reunion in Washington, D.C., with him. He would come up in my room and stay because no one could find him there. He had become such a celebrity that everyone wanted to talk with him. Everyone wanted him to sign their book. Everyone wanted their wife to meet him. Of course he was polite to them all. He said he didn’t have any fun at those reunions at all and should have just stayed home.
Before Eugene wrote his book, he’d shown me the manuscript and I’d given him some feedback. One of the most treasured things I ever received was a five-page handwritten letter from him. It’s dated January 17, 1979. In this letter, Gene thanked me for my notes and explained how he came to write his yet-unpublished manuscript—the one that eventually become With the Old Breed.
In that letter he made a startling statement. He said he’d written a lot of academic articles by then as a professor at the university but claimed that writing this book was far different than anything he’d ever written. Even the process of writing was different for him. It was mysterious, almost bordering on the divine. He felt the book was dictated to him from above. I believe him. (Author’s note: This letter by Eugene Sledge appears on the author’s web site).
Today I’m in my late eighties, and in some ways I don’t think I’ve ever been happier than I am right now. I love being the age I am now. You never get any criticism. People open doors for you. They go out of their way to be polite to you because they think you’re old. As long as the Lord gives me good health, I intend to keep this thing going.
I have a piece of property I live on—sixty acres—and I spend a lot of time working around that. I have a lot of woods, and I’m always planting trees, cutting down trees, Bush Hogging. I had cattle a while back, but we gave those up because the hurricanes around these parts gave us so much trouble with our fences. Mostly today, I just keep up my property. But I’m truly enjoying my old age, I really do.
My sister Katharine and I are closer than ever. We’re only fourteen months apart. We live maybe fifteen miles apart and see each other two days a week at least. We have a brother, John, who’s seven years younger than me, and we’re still close, too.
Katharine and I were both featured in Ken Burns’s 2007 documentary The War, and Katharine became the real star of that. Then two years later, HBO’s The Pacific heated up.
Bruce McKenna, who wrote much of The Pacific, was searching for information about the main characters in the series—my lifelong childhood friend Eugene Sledge, and then Robert Leckie, who was in my company. He also wanted to know about Basilone. I knew Sledge very well, and I had spent two years with Leckie in the Marine Corps. I did not know Basilone personally. I had seen him from a distance, but that was it.
The young man who played my part in The Pacific, Ashton Holmes—he looks more like me than I do. I met him on several occasions, and we had a wonderful time together. He was perfectly cast to play me—handsome, brilliant, charming (laughs).