Note: This was posted yesterday on Facebook!
When we think about Memorial Day, we always think first and foremost about those who so often gave their lives and their very souls for the safety and betterment of this nation. And, in our personal recollections, we think about our uncle Otis who served during World War Two in the Pacific theater of war.
Otis was a strapling farm lad from a family of ten who volunteered to serve in the Marine Corps in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. He first saw action in Guadalcanal where he was wounded very severely and returned to the United States to finish out the war. As my mother tells it, there was a mix-up in Otis’s personnel file and he, a winner of the bronze star, returned once again to action in the south Pacific.
On his second round of combat, he ended up serving in the invasion of the island of Tarawa, perhaps the single worst four days of combat seen during the Second World War. The Japanese commander at Tarawa had boasted that the island could not be taken but a determined force of marines took it in ninety six hours of fierce, often hand to hand fighting. When they hit the beach there, my uncle’s unit was pinned down by enemy fire and he single handedly supplied a machine gun position with enough ammunition to keep them going until he was shot through the neck and left for dead on the beach as his fellows advanced. When he regained consciousness, he swam back out to his ship still anchored there and then passed out again. He was sent to a rear hospital where he contracted jungle fever when he ran a temperature that was very high and would have killed him anywhere else in the world but where he was. That event did effect parts of his brain and he was never the same after that time.
They were passing out decorations by the score from the action at Tarawa and Otis got his second bronze star there.
Otis stayed in military hospitals for a time and then was finally discharged and returned to his family in deep southern Illinois. The first thing that he did upon returning home was to take all of his decorations and throw them down the family well. Otis had had enough of war but, unfortunately, the war was never going to be finished with him. He tried to hold down jobs but he so often shook so violently that he could never keep one for very long. He eventually was returned to the Veteran administration’s care where he spent most of the rest of his life.
My mother and Otis were only eighteen months apart and had always been very close. Toward the end of the 1950’s, she got the V.A. to agree to release him to her custody and he came to live with us in Vienna, Illinois. My room had twin beds and, for almost two years, we had one and Otis had the other. At first things went alright but as time went on the dreams that haunted him every night came back in full force and began to destroy both his and my sleep. He told my father, the only one he would discuss anything with, about the contents of those dreams and how the enemy chased him every night. Eventually, my mother had no choice but, for my sake, to return him to the V.A.’s control. They tried every form of medication and proscribed treatment on him, including shock treatment, but nothing ever helped.
Otis stayed in V.A. facilities and outpatient homes for the rest of his life and one day in July of 1979 he got up early and went outside of the one he was currently housed in and, with razor blade in hand, his war finally came to a close. He was returned to southern Illinois and now lies buried very near to the loving parents that he cared so much for until the end. Otis has several children whom he adored and tried to help financially but the same things that drove him from our home had long ago forced his wife to divorce him for the sake of hers and her children’s sanity. She never remarried and lies buried beside him today.
Otis was one of a long line of citizen soldiers who have given all that they possibly had to give in service to this nation. Even though he did not die in combat, the war killed him just as effectively and efficiently as it did so many others who chose to end their personal hell just as he did in the end. Tomorrow I will go to visit his grave and to pay homage to a man that I respect almost above all others. And then I will drive down to the national cemetery at Mounds City where I will walk among the graves of thousands of others who have died in wars from the Civil war to Afghanistan. And when I gaze at those long, uniform rows of headstones my minds eye will see young men through the generations standing at attention by their stones still ready and willing to go do it all again, if only they could. We are certain that any one of them would trade places with a now living young person and take the bullet that might end their lives to prevent any more from ending up where they are today.
We owe these ones so much and we will never be able to repay our debts to those long gray and blue and khaki lines that stretch back to those who endured so much to found this nation of ours. They were the first true Americans even before there was an America and their traditions of selfless sacrifice and service will, we hope, never die.
Regards,
Joe
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