Home to the Hill
Postage stamp of ‘The Thousand Yard Stare’
The road snaked up the low hills that overlook Bellaire. Steep at times, the asphalt was cracked and narrow driveways led off from the curves into little houses perched perilously on the slope. Most of the cars seemed to be operable to some degree, and I wondered what the people who drove them could possibly do for a living.
Cresting the hill, I saw a small parking lot near the caretaker’s house, and a narrow gravel trace that lead along the spine of the hill amid the monuments. The Protestant cemetery, not that there is a legal difference anymore, has a splendid view of the Valley.
I drove the Lincoln up the trace, looking for where the Lovejoy plot might be, hoping I had the right cemetery on the right hill. I was about twenty minutes early for the ceremony, cutting it close, so there should be a sign or portent independent of the gray sky.
I saw one down slope, a green awning on a scaffold erected over a deep rectangular hole in the ground. No one was there, though the site was clearly in readiness. I stopped the car in the middle of the trace- there was no place to pull off without running over a Pracht or Mueller memorial.
I got out of the car to investigate and it began to rain, soft cool drops that kissed my skin. I stood behind the Lincoln and looked at a mound of dirt heaped over a fresh grave, waiting to settle with time into a level surface. The sedan appeared a beast out of time here in a place where the months are measured by the settling of the soil.
The rush of the trip began to fall away into something else that called up the folly of our world, measured against the palate of time itself and cut only by the dull brown razor of the great river far below.
Two black vehicles appeared at the pull off to the caretaker’s house. One, a Ford truck with a crew cab, proceeded along the other loop of the trace toward the tent, and the long hearse came up the hill toward me, and glided to a stop. Two men got out, one somber in a black suit and the other in a motley of fatigues from another century’s war.
I walked over and stuck out my hand. “I’m not blocking you, am I? I can move the car.”
“No, you are fine,” said the sober man. The one in fatigues had one wandering eye, and I realized by his attire that he was the gravedigger. I heard doors open and close on the truck down below, and thanked the man and walked down to meet the family.
The death had not been unexpected, though the precise timing was entirely of the Marine’s making. It occurred in Florida, where the Marine had made his life after returning from his first war, and where he lived the rest of it after his second. He was confronting the systemic failure of his kidneys, and the available courses of action to save his extremities had run out. In consultation, the decision was made to abandon the last ditch defense, and embrace the inevitable at Hospice. With the family around him, he spent the last day in peace, watching a NASCAR race on the television, and donning his First Division Association cap. The family was informed that the process might last a week or so, and prepared to dig in. It came a surprise that the end came as the first night of the vigil had turned into the small hours of the second day.
The Marine had declared his intention to return to his boyhood home, and thus the ponderous process of bringing him and us to the hill above the dying town began.
It was not to be an elaborate affair. As I came down the hill I saw the Marine’s three children, the three spouses, and a husky grandson who towered above his father and had the Marine’s bluff features and the confidence of youth. That was how I remembered the Marine, when all out parents were young and the Dads chased us around the century-old log cabins of the Ogelbay Resort near Wheeling, West Virginia, just up the river.
Wheeling had been quite a town, in the day, though it has shriveled awfully of late. Our parents, coming from north and south, brought us there to pay homage to Grandma, and to the Ohio River roots of the Wild Irishman’s lovely three daughters.
They wore white t-shirts, the Dads did, and the Marine’s arms were muscular and tanned. They wore sturdy slacks and sensible working shoes, and we shrieked in the joy of the chase.
My Cousins greeted me warmly. We had been together only a month before, at a wedding in New York City. There could not be any contrast more stark than the bustle of the magical Big Apple and the soft silence of the cold rain on the Ohio River Valley. Dress was casual, and suited for the elements. The grave appeared to be the full six feet in depth, or more, and due to the steep slope of the hill, the casket-lowering frame was made level by a Rube Goldberg stack of timbers at the foot.
The marker immediately upslope was that of another WWII Marine, and adjacent was a column marking the resting spot of a Lovejoy who served in the 32nd Ohio Vounteer Infantry in the Civil War. The Marine would be at home here.
There was no clergyman, and two ladies from the village who remembered the days before the war when everything changed.
Who could have found a man of the cloth from here who understood the Marine? That would only have covered the platitudes. The Marine’s son and daughters would do this one themselves.
The sober man asked if everyone was here, and the Marine’s son said that we were complete, and the ceremony could go forward. The girls took places on folding chair placed on a green carpet next to the grave, and the Marine came down the hill, born by the sober man, the gravedigger and two others from his crew.
A red Marine Corps flag graced the top of the casket. It seemed small to accommodate the man I remembered. The burial detail withdrew to a respectful distance, and the Marine’s son rose to make his remarks. He had worked on them the night before, and he made it through the first sentence before he was overcome with grief.
The Marine’s grandson took the pages from his father’s hand, and read them in his stead. His voice was steady, and the words were true and real.
I was a witness only, and a representative for my Mother, the last in-law of the Marine’s immediate family, but the words startled me. I remember sitting next to him one time, long ago, watching a scratchy black and white newsreel of the war in the Pacific. A young man in green fatigues marched stoically across the frames, a canister of jellied gas on his back, and in his hands a wand that emitted shooting flames.
“That was me,” said the Marine, and then we all went on and did other things.
The grandson read that the Marine had survived Palau. I had recalled Iwo Jima, dimly, but my memory was wrong. The Marine’s unit had been in the thick of it, from Guadalcanal through Cape Gloucester to the bloody subjugation of Okinawa at the end. But I had not recalled the vicious fighting on Peleliu, the home of the Thousand Yard Stare.
Thomas Lea, a war correspondent dispatched to travel with the troops, painted a Marine who had it. He made notes at the time, clinical, about what it was like on the little island. He described the subject of his painting like this:
“Last evening he came down from the hills. Told to get some sleep, he found a shell hole and slumped into it. He’s awake now. First light has given his gray face eerie color. He left the States thirty-one months ago. He was wounded in his first campaign. He has had tropical diseases. There is no food or water in the hills except what you carry. He half-sleeps at night and gouges Japs out of holes all day. Two-thirds of his company has been killed or wounded but he is still standing. So he will return to attack this morning. How much can a human being endure?”
The Marine and his comrades of the First Division landed at 0832 on September 15 on "White Beach," on a mission that his General confidently predicted would last only a few days. The Navy supported it, since it kept the 1st Marines out of the hands of Douglas MacArthur, whose staff had notoriously sticky fingers, and would preserve the integrity of the force for other priority tasks.
It did not really have to happen. Peleliu could have been by-passed. But the decision was made that it would be contested, and in the month that followed, the most vicious fighting of the Pacific War unfolded. The Japanese positions on the coral promontories guarding each flank punished the Marines with 47 mm anti-boat guns and 20 mm machine guns. By 0930, the Japanese had wiped out 60 landing craft-tank and amphibious DUKW's.
The 1st Marines were quickly bogged down by heavy fire from "The Point." Their Colonel, the legendary Chesty Puller drove them forward. The Marines suffered 1,100 casualties on D-Day alone. After capturing The Point, the 1st Marines moved north into the Umurbrogol pocket, nick-named "Bloody Nose Ridge."
The Marines took increasingly high casualties as they slowly advanced through the ridges. In place of the massed banzai attacks they had conducted on Guadalcanal, the Japanese would infiltrate the American lines at night to attack the Marines in their fighting holes. The Marines adapted, and dug two-man positions, so one could sleep while the other kept watch in the impenetrable darkness.
The fighting on Hill 100 went on for over six days. The units engaged suffered over seventy-percent casualties. Puller's 1st Marines lost 1749 out of approximately 3000 men.
Not to mention the Japanese. Of the garrison of 11,000 men, only a few dozen surrendered. The rest were killed where they stood. The 1st Marines had been so savaged that the unit did not return to action until the invasion of Okinawa in March of 1945.
The defenses of Peleliu were so formidable that the last of the hold-outs did not emerge from the cave system until nearly two years after the war had ended.
By that time, the Marine had been demobilized, and married my Aunt. The eldest of my cousins was a babe in arms when he was called back to service in Korea. I have no idea what people would say about that sort of dislocation these days. The Marines of this generation know something about sacrifice, and they are as proud now as they were then.
There are just fewer of them.
The immediate family made their recollections of their father, since the month on Peleliu and a return to Korea marked only a portion of a life lived simply and with peace. But what happened on that island so far away in time and space were what annealed his heart, and steadied his hand. The tears flowed. When the words were finished, they looked around for what might happen next. Reluctant to leave, the youngest daughter asked if we might stay and watch the casket be lowered into the vault.
The sober man I black shrugged deferentially. It was their service, he said, and they could as they wished.
There was a question about the flag. What did the Marines think about burying it? I suggested that we might do what they do at Arlington, and fold it respectfully in a triangle, and present it to the senior surviving family. They agreed, and I tried to imitate the solemn ceremony as best I could, producing a fair example of the tight triangle the honor guards make of the national flag.
The gravediggers cranked the casket down into the concrete vault below, and then horsed the hydraulic vault lift down the hill, and into place over the grave. The lid went down with eerie grace, and the vault was closed.
Each of the Cousins said a last word as they pitched a shovel of dirt upon it. The older daughter paused, and recited a poem from a Child's Garden of Verses that the Marine had liked and meant a lot to her. It was written by Robert Lewis Stevenson, and it went like this:
I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.
The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow--
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,
And he sometimes goes so little that there's none of him at all.”
When they were done, they asked if any of the rest of us had something to say for their Father. I said that I did, and took the shovel and scooped up some dirt that was not frozen.
“Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote another poem that I think I remember, and might be appropriate.” I cleared my throat and started to stumble through it.
“Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig my grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live, and gladly die,
And I lay me down with a will.
This be the verse that you grave me me,
Here he lies where he wished to be,
Homeis the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter, home from the Hill.”
I pitched the dirt from the shovel down into the hole and small stones rattled on the vault.
“Semper fi,”
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com