My Memorial Day column

[Rocky Raab]

One Fewer

I first saw him hobbling down the aisle of a small gun show. He was obviously of advanced age: white-haired, frail and walking with a pronounced limp, his bony left hand grasping one of those spiral thornwood canes that look like a kudu’s horn. It was that cane that caught my attention – without it, the man would have been invisible.

His pained but determined pace picked up when he neared a table only two away from mine. The table’s owner displayed military battle rifles. The old gent stopped there, but I became distracted by customers of my own and did not notice him again.

The promoter held two shows a year in that small town, and I became a regular vendor. After that first time, I started noticing the old gentleman at every show. He always carried that magnificently polished, deep brown cane. He always went steadfastly to that same dealer’s table. He always came on Sunday morning when the crowds were thin.

Clearly not well off financially, the old man’s clothes never varied. His shoes were of brown leather, the toes curled up from age, deep cracks at the toe bend and the heels worn to a smooth curve; but they were carefully brushed to a soft luster. His slacks were khaki cotton, a semblance of a crease still showing down the front of each leg, but an irregular outline on one thigh that bespoke of a liquid stain long ago acquired. His sports jacket was dark brown wool, its herringbone pattern all but obliterated by age. Its pockets sagged as if he’d once limped home –in a driving rain- with oranges in them. The dulled and faded miniature of a military ribbon adorned the jacket’s left lapel. Under the jacket he always wore a white shirt so thin his sleeveless undershirt showed through. On his Western-style bolo tie, a walnut-sized, blood-red stone mirrored the man’s jutting Adam’s apple. A grey fedora hat brought his stooped figure to perhaps five-feet six. Now battered, sweat-stained and misshapen from years of hard use, the hat characterized him as much as the liver spots on his pallid, papery skin.

I could memorize such small details because of his laborious gait. He’d plant the tightly clutched cane, then half-shuffle, half-slide his crippled left leg forward, and finally his still-spry right: tap, drag, step; tap, drag, step. Just watching him brought a dull empathetic ache to my hips and knees.

Neither his appearance nor his habits ever varied: he’d shuffle past my table, spend a few minutes in front of the rifle collector’s display then leave, unnoticed.

And then, one time, he failed to appear.

Just before the show ended that Sunday afternoon, I ambled over to the rifle table. On one end were a few P-17 Enfields and Springfields, a couple SMLE’s, one or two ’98 Mausers and an Arisaka. At the other end were several .30 M-1 carbines, a Garand and even a rare Johnson rifle. It was interesting stuff, but I really wanted to ask about the old man.

“Yeah, I’ll miss him,” the dealer said. “I heard he passed away last month.” He shook his head ruefully and looked down.

“You know anything about him? Your table was the only one he ever visited, as far as I saw.”

“Not much. But it wasn’t my table that he visited. It was this,” he said, pointing to the Garand.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s like this…the first few times he came by, I tried to wait on him. But he never spoke a word – like I wasn’t even there. He’d walk up, stand there a bit, and then he’d lightly touch the Garand. With just his fingertips, as though it was his lover or something, you know? Then one time I said, ‘You seem like you know that rifle. Carry one in the Army?’ He shook his head a little and kept his eyes on that rifle’s stock, but he said ‘Marines.’

“So then I looked at him a little closer. You know that little blue pin in his lapel? That’s the Navy Cross, and it’s the highest decoration they give except for the Medal of Honor. And so I had to ask him where he got it, and he finally looked up at me. His eyes were brimming, as if some nightmare just came back to him, and his voice choked, but he got out one word: ‘Tarawa.’

“After that, I’d sell any rifle on the table, except that Garand. It would have killed him if he’d come in and it was gone. I never will sell it, now.” The dealer stood silently for a second, then concluded, “Those two words and that ribbon are all I know about that old man, but they’re all I need to know.” .

I nodded. As if drawn to it, my hand stroked the stock of the Garand and I whispered, “Thank you.” I meant it, too: for the dealer, for that rifle, and for the hovering spirit of that departed hero.

A note: I read recently that as many as 2,000 veterans of World War II pass away every single day. That’s more than were lost on many days of the war. If you know or even meet a veteran from that conflict, thank them from the bottom of your heart…while you still can.

[Skinny Shooter]

That just hits you in the gut and the heart at the same time...
Rocky, thanks for sharing.

Allen

[multibeard]

Rocky

Very touching story. It brought tears to my eyes.

I notice in the obituarys every day that there are fewer and fewer flags denoting the death of a veteran.

I have coffee a couple times a week with a Pearl Harbor survivor. He was on the Shaw. He is so full of scrapnel that he can not have an MRI. Last week he was itching his breast bone. He said feel that. It was what he thought to be about a 6 mm slug.

He said they want to take it out but it has been there so long now it is a part of me.

The neatest thing is that he is "carrying". Buck will be 85 in July.

[Aim to maim]

Timely, appropriate and ever-so-well written. Thanks and a meaningful and fulfilling Memorial Day to you, sir.

[Thargor]

Great post
Thanks For sharing

http://www.tarawaontheweb.org/

Tarawa is located approximately 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii. It isn't an island but a series of barren islets formed by the exposed tips of a submerged mountain sticking above the waters of the blue sea. The military importance of Tarawa lay in its strategic location at the gateway of the US drive through the central Pacific towards the Philippines.
The largest of Tarawa's islets is Betio measuring less than 3 miles in length and 1/2 mile in width. Here, the Japanese built an airstrip defended by 4,700 troops dug into a labyrinth of pillboxes and bunkers interconnected by tunnels and defended by wire and mines. The task of dislodging this force fell to the Marines of the 2nd Division. The resulting struggle produced one of the fiercest and bloodiest battles in Marine history
The landings began on November 20 and immediately ran into trouble. Coming in at low tide, the assault boats were forced to disgorge their men far from shore. Wading through waist-deep water over piercing, razor-sharp coral, many were cut down by merciless enemy gunfire yards from the beach. Those who made it ashore huddled in the sand, hemmed in by the sea to one side and the Japanese to the other.
The next morning, reinforcements made the same perilous journey bringing with them tanks and artillery. By the end of the day the Marines were able to break out from the beach to the inland. The fierce combat continued for another two days.
The cost of victory was high for the Marines who suffered nearly 3,000 casualties. The toll was even higher for the Japanese. Of the 4,700 defenders, only 17 survived. Their willingness to fight to the last man foreshadowed the fierceness of the battles to come.
Bombardment Before Landing - "Surely...they would all be dead by now."
Robert Sherrod was a seasoned war correspondent having covered the Army campaign in the Aleutian Islands and the Navy raid on Wake Island. However, nothing from these experiences prepared him for the brutal terror of Tarawa. His observations of one of the most costly battles in US Marine history were published as a book in early 1944.
In the early hours of November 20, Sherrod was among a contingent of Marines aboard a Navy transport - the Blue Fox, - waiting for the order to board a landing craft for the beach. We join his story as the bombardment of the island begins:
"Now, at 0505, we heard a great thud in the southwest. We knew what that meant. The first battleship had fired the first shot. We all rushed out on deck. The show had begun...
Within three minutes the sky was filled again with the orange-red flash of the big gun, and Olympus boomed again. The red ball of fire that was the high-explosive shell was again dropping toward the horizon. But this time there was a tremendous burst on the land that was Betio. A wall of flame shot five hundred feet into the air, and there was another terrifying explosion as the shell found its mark. Hundreds of awestruck Marines on the deck of the Blue Fox cheered in uncontrollable joy...
The next flash was four times as great, and the sky turned a brighter, redder orange, greater than any flash of lightning the Marines had ever seen. Now four shells, weighing more than a ton each, peppered the island. Now Betio began to glow brightly from the fires the bombardment pattern had started.
That was only the beginning. Another battleship took up the firing - four mighty shells poured from its big guns onto another part of the island. Then another battleship breathed its brilliant breath of death. Now a heavy cruiser let go with its eight-inch guns, and several light cruisers opened with their fast-firing six- inch guns. They were followed by the destroyers, many destroyers with many five-inch guns on each, firing almost as fast as machine guns. The sky at times was brighter than noontime on the equator. The arching, glowing cinders that were high-explosive shells sailed through the air as though buckshot were being fired out of many shotguns from all sides of the island. The Marines aboard the Blue Fox exulted with each blast on the island...
The first streaks of dawn crept through the sky. The warships continued to fire. All of a sudden they stopped. But here came the planes-not just a few planes: a dozen, a score, a hundred. The first torpedo bombers raced across the smoking conflagration and loosed their big bombs on an island that must have been dead a half hour ago! They were followed by the dive bombers, the old workhorse SBD's and the new Helldivers, the fast SB2C's that had been more than two years a-borning. The dive bombers lined up, many of thousands of feet over Betio, then they pointed their noses down and dived singly, or in pairs or in threes. Near the end of their dives they hatched the bombs from beneath their bellies; they pulled out gracefully and sailed back to their carriers to get more bombs. Now came the fighter planes, the fast, new Grumman Hellcats, the best planes ever to squat on a carrier. They made their runs just above the awful, gushing pall of smoke, their machine guns spitting hundreds of fifty-caliber bullets a minute.
Surely, we all thought, no mortal men could live through such destroying power.
Surely, I thought, if there were actually any Japs left on the island (which I doubted strongly), they would all be dead by now."
To the Beach - Wading Through Hell
At 0635, Sherrod and a 30-man, Marine assault force board a Higgins landing craft and head for the enemy beach. It takes an hour and a half for the landing craft to reach its rendezvous point off the beach where it joins other assault boats for the landing
It is here that Sherrod gets his first warning that something is going terribly wrong with the attack. He can see no landing craft on the beach - four assault waves should have previously gone ashore. At this point, the commander of the landing craft announces that he can go no further as the water is too shallow. The assault team will have to transfer to a tank-like amphtrack for the rest of the journey. We rejoin Sherrod's account as the Marines scramble aboard the amphtrack under intense enemy machinegun fire:
"We jumped into the little tractor boat and quickly settled on the deck. 'Oh, God, I'm scared,' said the little Marine, a telephone operator, who sat next to me forward in the boat. I gritted my teeth and tried to force a smile that would not come and tried to stop quivering all over (now I was shaking from fear). I said, in an effort to be reassuring, 'I'm scared, too.' I never made a more truthful statement in all my life.
Now I knew, positively, that there were Japs, and evidently plenty of them, on the island. They were not dead. The bursts of shellfire all around us evidenced the fact that there was plenty of life in them!... After the first wave there apparently had not been any organized waves, those organized waves which hit the beach so beautifully in the last rehearsal. There had been only an occasional amphtrack which hit the beach, then turned around (if it wasn't knocked out) and went back for more men. There we were: a single boat, a little wavelet of our own, and we were already getting the hell shot out of us, with a thousand yards to go. I peered over the side of the amphtrack and saw another amphtrack three hundred yards to the left get a direct hit from what looked like a mortar shell.
'It's hell in there,' said the amphtrack boss, who was pretty wild-eyed himself. 'They've already knocked out a lot of amphtracks and there are a lot of wounded men lying on the beach. See that old hulk of a Jap freighter over there? I'll let you out about there, then go back to get some more men. You can wade in from there.' I looked. The rusty old ship was about two hundred yards beyond the pier. That meant some seven hundred yards of wading through the fire of machine guns whose bullets already were whistling over our heads.
The fifteen of us - I think it was fifteen - scurried over the side of the amphtrack into the water that was neck-deep. We started wading.
No sooner had we hit the water than the Jap machine guns really opened up on us. There must have been five or six of these machine guns concentrating their fire on us... It was painfully slow, wading in such deep water. And we had seven hundred yards to walk slowly into that machinegun fire, looming into larger targets as we rose onto higher ground. I was scared, as I had never been scared before. But my head was clear. I was extremely alert, as though my brain were dictating that I live these last minutes for all they were worth. I recalled that psychologists say fear in battle is a good thing; it stimulates the adrenalin glands and heavily loads the blood supply with oxygen.
I do not know when it was that I realized I wasn't frightened any longer. I suppose it was when I looked around and saw the amphtrack scooting back for more Marines. Perhaps it was when I noticed that bullets were hitting six inches to the left or six inches to the right. I could have sworn that I could have reached out and touched a hundred bullets. I remember chuckling inside and saying aloud, 'You bastards, you certainly are lousy shots.'
After wading through several centuries and some two hundred yards of shallowing water and deepening machinegun fire, I looked to the left and saw that we had passed the end of the pier. I didn't know whether any Jap snipers were still under the pier or not, but I knew we couldn't do any worse. I waved to the Marines on my immediate right and shouted, 'Let's head for the pier!' Seven of them came. The other seven Marines were far to the right. They followed a naval ensign straight into the beach - there was no Marine officer in our amphtrack. The ensign said later that he thought three of the seven had been killed in the water."
For more information go to…
http://www.tarawaontheweb.org/

[Rocky Raab]

Thanks.

On Memorial Day, I will be at a Trapshoot, and they will start the day with the National Anthem.

As I do every single time, I will cry.



Another note: Both my parents were WWII vets, and my mother always got a stripe before my father did. She was in Special Services, the in-uniform USO if you will.

He drove trucks. In Belgium. During a little thing they called the Battle of the Bulge. They called it the Red Ball Express. I didn't realize until after he had died what that really, really meant.

They're gone now.

Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad.

[Jack]

Terrific column, Rocky

[Montana Cowboy]

Howdy Folks
Rocky, Your post brings me to share this with all of you good folks.
One Saturday while waiting for my wife to pick me up at the gun show I was sitting on a bench in the parking lot when an older gentleman much like the one you described pulled in and parked. What caught my attention was how much trouble he had getting out of his van, walking around to the other side to get his cane, you could tell he was in a great deal of pain, so much so that I asked if he could use some help. No,he said I'll be ok once I get my medication in, it will help some.
I asked what he was looking for at the gun show, thinking at the time that given his condition it would be impossible for him to fire a rifle, as he was in bad shape. He said "Just lookin young man"
He sat down next to me and said he just drove three hours to get to the show. I sat and talked with this old fella as he really seemed hapy to have someone to talk to. He never complained once about the pain he was in, but it was very clear that he was hurting.
Come to find out that he was a sniper in the south pacific during WW 11. He said the the one thing he could remember so clear like it happend yesterday was the japanese sniper that he didn't shoot. He said that one of the things that would get you ( A Sniper )shot real quick by another sniper was movement that was qiuck and deliberate.
He knew that the sniper was in the general area but couldn't locate him,so he was just lying still looking for him. All of a sudden about forty yards away this guy jumps down out of a tree in front of him throwing his arms all over the place,yelling and slaping himself all over. Turns out he got into the wrong tree which he didn't see had a big bee nest above him. The old fella said he worked his way around to the Japanese soldier and took him prisoner, said he didn't offer any resistance as the bees took all the fight out of him.
The old fella went on to tell me about all the bugs in that jungle that had bit him during the time he was there and said some of them would scare ya half to death just looking at them let alone getting bit by em.
After the war he returned to the states bought a house in a the country. He said he couldn't believe that after all he went through during the war that one little bug,a tick coud do all this to him.
What amazed me most about him is he had such a good outlook on things, seemed so positive about everything. He said he was lucky to have what he has as he knew other folks that didn't have it so good and he tried to help them when he could.
My wife finally showed up and I had to go. I often think of him and hope he is doing ok. I can only hope that I would have such a positive attitude if I ever found myself in a condition like his. MC

[gd357]

Thank you Rocky for sharing that. It certainly puts things into perspective. Also thanks to Thargor for enlightening us on the conditions under which the fighting took place.

My grandfather fought in the Phillipines, and both of his brothers were also deployed, in Africa and Europe. One of them was at hand when several concentration camps were liberated. Two of them are deceased, and only one great-uncle remains. While they were able to discuss some of the things that they went through later in life, it was clear that it took something from each of them. My father still has some difficulty discussing Vietnam, and the effects of the time he spent there sometimes show themselves to this day.

To all the veterans here, and those currently serving in the military, thank you for your service. We would be remiss to forget the sacrifices made by those who served us all, as easy as it may be with the burdens of everyday life.

gd

[Rocky Raab]

As coincidence would have it, our city is being visited this week by not one but two different flying B-17s.

The first one leaves today and the second one arrives tomorrow. They allow unlimited ramp pictures, a small fee for a walk-through of the plane, and 40-minute rides for $200.

I went yesterday (had to swallow hard to NOT take a ride) but took pictures.

While I was snapping away, a petite lady walked up to me and asked if I knew anything about this plane.

Then she asked if this was one that was used in the war. By her white hair, I didn't have to ask which war, and said "Yes, it certainly did."

Then she got a bit bright-eyed and said, "Then maybe I've seen it before, from my home...in France. They flew over by the thousands."

I turned to her and said, "Then you must appreciate this plane more than the rest of us. It gave you your freedom."

She just nodded, and then she squeezed my hand gently.

She didn't have a camera with her, but she does have an address. She'll get some of my pictures. It's the least I can do.