A few weeks ago I discovered a document written by my father on the island of Guadalcanal in February 1943, in his distinctive cursive handwriting, attesting that Corporal Lewis
was “killed in action” as a member of my father’s company (250 marines) and that my father had authorized the return of the corporal’s personal effects, along with $10.
Allowing for inflation, that’d be $181.67 today. I don’t know whether $10 was the going rate for kids dying in battle in jungles so thick and barbed and venomous that every palm-tree crown might hold a sniper and every spider or snake could ruin your day. I’d prefer to think that the USMC never sent cash to a dead kid’s parents so the cash bonus was dad’s idea. Seems like maybe not much money, but maybe he thought the Pentagon wouldn’t approve any more substantial amount. His added, more authentic bonus was recommending Lewis for a medal.
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I know for certain that dad cared enough for the marines he commanded for three years on four South Pacific islands to go out of his way for them. At a First Marine Division banquet at the Waldorf some years later, being honored for something he’d done in the war, he refused to sit at a table that had been reserved for other officers unless some of his enlisted men from Guadalacanal, New Britain or Peleliu could join him. He ended up sitting with enlisted men at a table out in the hallway. But they presented him with a cool engraved silver bowl anyway because of the medals and for somehow never being wounded, even though, I guess ironically, he’d die 15 years after the war in a mid-air collision between a United DC-8 and a TWA Superconstellation over Staten Island coming home from a business trip for his paper-bag company which took up one floor of a factory building in Long Island City on the E train.
“Your father had a horseshoe up his ass,” one of his men told me, at a 50th-anniversary of Guadalacanal banquet in Las Vegas in 199,. “Luckiest man I ever fought with. He’d tell us we were going to move up, he’d take the lead, we’d say, `Captain, are you crazy?’ Never caught a bullet.”
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Dad’s recommendation for Milton Lewis to get a medal was later honored when Lewis awarded a Navy Star, the highest medal given in the Navy/Marines (the Medal of Honor is first, for every service).
The text accompanying the awarding of the medal was based on my father’s account of the battle Lewis died in. Dad was never a writer, or student; he graduated with a terrible GPA at Dartmouth, but this is pretty evocative; even if someone in the editing department of the USMC awards department wrote it, dad had to have provided the details about what Milton Lewis did on that day:
“With courageous disregard for his own safety, Corporal Lewis determinedly led his squad against a hostile machine-gun position which threatened to halt his unit's advance. Despite his imminent peril, he tenaciously continued his relentless fighting and, although fatally wounded, so inspired his men that they succeeded in silencing the enemy gun, thereby removing this perilous obstacle. He gallantly gave his life for his country.”
Epilogue: Doing the math on the death statistics from the four campaigns my father was a commander on— Tulagi, Guadalcanal, New Britain, Peleliu — I’d say somewhere around 80 of his kids were killed in action, most, of not all of them three or four years his younger.
Once he told my mother he’d wish that he could take a bullet instead of the marine he knew was going to take one the next day. One way or another then, he died 80 or so deaths. So also, in Memoriam, Harold Thomas Almond Richmond.