My uncle Otis was a marine. He was a handsome farm boy from the rural area of southern Illinois known as Flatwoods. He had been raised on a farm with nine other children of various ages and, we suppose, he reflected the values put forth by his very religious parents. Otis was a product of the Great Depression and the additional strains and values that it instilled in so many Americans who would form the backbone of the marine corps and the other branches of the services that would, after December seventh, 1941, go forth and once again make the world safe for democracy.
Otis fought the Japanese in the Pacific from Guadalcanal on through to Tarawa, one of the bloodiest battles that the marines ever fought in their history. He got his first bronze star on Guadalcanal and his second on Tarawa. They became meaningless to a man who threw them down the well of the family farm after he returned from the Pacific the second time to a world that would never be the same for him again.
War changes people in ways that cannot really be comprehended except by those who have gone through the same things as their fellows.
Otis left the farm in early 1942 to go fight an enemy that he really did not know. He would spend the rest of his shortened life fighting them daily and especially after the sun set in the restless and cruel dreams that beset him until the morning that he died. Death was really a blessing for Otis because it set him free from a foe that would not go away and that he could never really ever best in their never ending struggle. Night after night the fight would go on and there was never any relief from the nightmares that he could never escape. Death was, to Otis, the only final relief that he got.
Otis was wounded severely enough in his first experience in the Pacific to be sent home back to the states. He should probably never have been sent back to the Pacific but a mix up in his orders saw him arrive back in enemy waters anyway. Tarawa was a four day battle that saw heroes become common place as two enemies who could not lose locked horns over a piece of an island in the Pacific that the Japanese commander had bragged through Tokyo Rose could not be taken. Otis was on the beach with a machine gun group that was pinned down by incessant enemy fire. They were running out of ammunition when Otis took on the task of going back and forth to bring additional ammunition to them until he was shot through the neck and left for dead. He regained consciousness among the dead and then swam back out to his ship in a delirious state brought on by loss of blood and the beginnings of the jungle fever that would rage in his body and do the work that the enemy could not accomplish. The farm boy from southern Illinois emerged from this trauma a shell of a person who would go through his life at the mercy of the medical system that his grateful nation had put together to deal with those who could no longer cope at all.
Otis would spend the rest of his sixty plus years in and out of Veterans Administration medical facilities, nursing homes, and in the care, for a couple of years in the late 1950’s of my mother and father. My mother was only eighteen months older than Otis and they had always been close out on the farm as children living the life that they so briefly lived together in my grandfathers loving but very strict care. And, that it where I first experienced Otis and the person that he had become. We shared a bedroom with two twin beds in my mothers home and as I lay sleeping and growing, Otis fought the enemy night after night just across from my bed. After a couple of years the nightmares became so bad that my mother was forced to send Otis back to the care of a government that tried to do its best for him with the sometimes primitive methods that they had to deal with hopeless situations like his. He was given injections, pills, and the ever present shock treatments that were the prescribed course for his type of disablement.
Otis had a wife that he loved very much. He also had three children that were the apple of his very eye that were born of their marriage during one of the slack periods when he acted somewhat normally despite the monsters that haunted him each and every night. It finally got so bad that his wife had to leaved him to his fate but she loved him so much that she would never remarry again for the rest of his life. Otis never discussed his experiences in the Pacific with many people nor did he ever discuss the medals that he had thrown down the family well. He once went into the Vienna VFW where he had to listen for a while to those who bragged about what they had done during the war. When they asked him about his experiences he simply finished his beer and left, never to return again.
It was a bright summer morning around Independence Day of 1979 when Otis awoke from his nightmares and went in to look at himself in the mirror over his sink. He shaved very carefully and then proceeded to go outside against one of the homes exterior walls where he sat down and took out a razor blade and ended his nightmares once and for all. They got to him just as he was going but could do nothing for him. They said that he had done a good job of making sure that there would be no hope for his future existence..
They brought him back to southern Illinois, to Flatwoods, where they laid him to rest in a small quiet rural cemetery where his parents and several siblings also ended up in residence. I go there sometimes and remember.
And, that is what I know so intimately about war.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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