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thedrifter
10-27-02, 08:05 AM
By KEITH WHEELER
(1944 - Chicago Times and North American Newspaper)

SAIPAN - Today I saw two live Marines bring a killed Marine down from Mount Tapotchan in a jeep. The killed Marine lay on a litter; swathed formlessly in ponchos, and stale blood dribbles from his wrappings leaving splatters along the road. The body was lashed with strips of torn dungaree, but it rolled in drunken abandon on the lurching jeep.
There was no doubt that he was a killed Marine. But suddenly I had a feeling that this killed Marine was not dead. He was not dead any more than were those Marines who lay shattered on Beachhead 3 more than two weeks earlier while succeeding waves of Marines crept grimly past them toward hammering Japanese machine guns around the Charan Kanoa radio station. He and they were not dead.
I know this is a strange assertion, but I believe the Marines in battle do not die, though their bodies are rent in shreds. It is something peculiarly Marine that you do not feel in other armies. This is a delicate thing and I don't want to talk about it unless I can get it right. I am not talking about mysticism, and I don't mean immortality in a religious sense. Killed Marines may survive in the hereafter or they may not. I don't know about that. I meansomething probably no more palpable, but more immediate, thoroughly visible and intensely practical.
It is practical because it has the power to sustain the living unto death. It is a battlefield continually or immortality if you wish, conferred on killed Marines in the instant by death, by those who still live.
Marines do not treat their dead as do civilians nor as so the men of other armies. When a civilian dies, he ceases. His body is washed and painted and dressed into a grotesque imitation of life that emphasizes death and he is marked for dead with flowers and pomp and prayer that were not his habit in life.
In other armies, men accept their dead only with fear or anger or sorrow and - most tragic of all - with disbelief as though it were a monstrous thing that men should actually be killed in - action but Marines are casual about the fact of death and toward their own dead they are companionable.
They do not banish a dead man from them because a shell has torn him in two or a bullet has smashed his head. But they bury his body when there is time for burial. But when there is not, they have no compunction about sleeping beside him. And when there is time, they fashion him a cross for his grave, but even then they do not mark him for pointed segregation. There is a big Marine cemetery in Charan Kanoa, but there are also isolated crosses gleaming whitely in the midst of Marine activity on Saipan.
I think of three Marine graves together - a Protestant, a Jew and a Catholic - which lie between a medical station and a busy message center in a division command post. I think of a Marine who gave me a lift in a jeep in which he carried two newly painted crosses. "We're just getting around to fixing a couple of guys' graves before we leave 'em."
Marines are not angered or awed by deaths among them nor do they try to primp the shattered bodies into shabby facsimiles of life. They do not have time for the last, and they cannot afford the first. The casualty figures mount and you hear that friends have been killed in strange ways. One Marine says: "You remember Jim, the guy they called Pony Boy? He got his last night while they were taking that hill. Drilled him right through the eye. But they got that hill."
"But they got the hill." And there, perhaps, you have it. Pony Boy was mortgaged to death when he went over the side of the transport and he knew it because Marines accept the necessity that man shall die in battle. He lived to reach the beach, although others did not, but those who died in the water helped him reach it. He lived many days and he lived to kill. But last night, taking the hill, he got it through the eye.
"But they still got the hill." Sometime today maybe he'll be buried, but other Marines will be going on to the next hill, and they'll know they are also mortgaged to death. Pony Boy is killed, but the job he was doing still lives, and other Marines live to carry on the job from where he had to drop out with a bullet in the eye. And while the job lasts, while there are still more hills to take, and more Marines to take them, Pony Boy will not be dead. He will die perhaps when the last hill is taken.

Sempers,

Roger

USMC0311
10-27-02, 12:47 PM
True!!! Marines in battle will be with their Brothers forever!!! In Mind, Heart and Soul. Semper Fidelis

wrbones
10-27-02, 12:54 PM
A toast to that last hill, Marines.

May it never be taken. May we never forget.

mrbsox
10-27-02, 05:25 PM
Bowed Head...

Raised glass...

The Last Hill

Semper Fidelis Marines.
Tell Chesty to save me a seat.

JAMarine
10-27-02, 05:59 PM
May the Loving Hand of God Touch These Who Have Gone Befoe Us.

May and Least We Never Forget.

Amen.

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