WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 31, 2007 Last modified: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 4:06 PM CDT

‘Super Marine’: story of Conway WWII hero

By Carol Haynes and Toni Walthall / Staff Writer /



"Super Marine" (left) author Ken Hechler and Margaret Powell, the niece of the book's Conway hero, Sgt. Orland "Buddy" Jones. Hechler, the administrative analyst for the U.S. Bureau of the Budget during President Harry S. Truman's term, Army World War II historian and former West Virginia secretary of state, shared his experiences at the Jacksonville Museum of Military History last Tuesday night.

Sixty-three years later, a story told on a bus ride from Little Rock to Brinkley has brought a gift of history to an Arkansas family — and an appreciation for a man who has told the story of an ordinary Arkansan who responded with extraordinary bravery in service to his country.

On February 15, 1944, U.S. Army 2nd Lt. Ken Hechler was on leave and making his way by bus from Dallas to Memphis, saying good-byes to friends. The military was sending him to Europe to join a corps of combat historians to document developments in the European Theater of Operations.

“I was riding a bus between Dallas, Texas and Memphis, Tenn. and to get from Dallas to Memphis, you have got to cross Arkansas,” Hechler said, Tuesday.

At the Little Rock bus station, a tall redhead boarded the bus, taking a seat next to Hechler. The woman — named Helen — began telling him fascinating stories about her husband, Buddy Jones, a Marine paratrooper. Helen told intriguing stories about the fierce battles her husband had fought throughout the South Pacific, such as at Guadalcanal. She spoke with such pride and admiration for her young husband and his bravery in the worst of battling the enemy.

Helen was going to Brinkley to meet Jones, who was there visiting an uncle, just north of Buddy’s hometown of Biscoe.

So fascinated by the story of this ordinary Arkansas soldier, Hechler borrowed a typewriter and quickly typed as much of the conversation as he could recall.

Then for the next 63 years, Hechler got busy with a political career, which included working as a personal assistant and speech writer for President Harry S. Truman, serving as U.S. Congressman for West Virginia for 18 years, and was West Virginia’s secretary of state for 16 years and marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, Ala.

He also found time to pen five books related to the military or politics. His best-selling book “The Bridge at Remagen” was made into a movie. He also wrote “Working With Truman” and “Hero of the Rhine: The Karl Timmermann Story.”

Then, in the spring of 2006, Hechler came across the notes he had typed from that chance meeting with the tall redhead in Arkansas.

“I began to wonder what happened to that Arkansas marine paratrooper and his wife. All I knew was his last name was Jones and his wife’s name was Helen. And there started a long detective story to find this guy Jones,” Hechler said. “But how do you find a man named Jones in Arkansas?

“That’s certainly a difficult challenge,” he said last Tuesday to the crowd gathered at the Jacksonville Museum of Military History.

Hechler never actually met Jones back in 1944. But during their conversation on the bus ride, Helen told Hechler that Army paratroopers yell “Geronimo” when they jump and she wondered what Buddy yelled. She asked Hechler to shout the word when he saw her husband, and see how he reacted.

Jones wasn’t at the bus door when Helen stepped off. But in just a few moments, Hechler saw Helen run toward a soldier.

“All I could see was a mixture of red hair and deeply bronzed skin,” Hechler recalled with a laugh.

The bus started pulling out when Helen turned to the bus window and cried, “Now you can yell it!”

“Geronimo!” Hechler shouted, and Jones broke out into a huge smile.

He never even got to have a conversation with the young man whose bravery and perseverance so enthralled him.

Sixty two years later, Hechler persisted in unraveling the story of that soldier — and this week the 93-year old has been in central Arkansas promoting his newest book release, “Super Marine: The Sgt. Orland D. ‘Buddy’ Jones Story.”

With the help of the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va., Hechler learned that Jones was killed in action and buried at sea off Iwo Jima March 3, 1945. Hechler wondered about that tall redhead, and about Jones’ family.

“I had such a wonderful time putting together the jigsaw puzzle” of Jones’ life and time in the military, Hechler said.

After six more months, the final puzzle piece came when Hechler looked to the Veteran’s Administration.

Through pension records, Hechler learned Helen was still getting a pension, but the VA could not disclose information. VA employees encouraged Hechler to write an unopened letter to Helen, they would see to it that she received it. Three weeks later, Hechler received a letter from 86-year-old Helen, who now lives in Pocahontas.

Taking “puddle jumper planes” from Dallas to El Dorado to Jonesboro and a 40-mile limousine ride to Pocahontas, Hechler reconnected with the tall redhead that had sparked the story that would become Hechler’s latest book, “Super Marine.”

During his 3-day visit, Hechler asked Helen if she remembered him from the bus ride 63 years prior.

“She said, ‘Not only do I remember, but when you wrote about this, you forgot to mention that just before we got to Brinkley, I took out a little mirror and asked you to hold it up so I could fix my hair,’” he said, laughing. “That’s a woman’s memory for you.”

From northeast Arkansas to southwest Arkansas and points in between, Hechler found members of Jones’ family eager to learn more about the family’s “unknown soldier” — including North Little Rock’s Director of Community Relations Margaret Powell, who is Buddy’s niece.

Jones’ death was particularly difficult on his mother, said Dena Reynolds of Little Rock, his sister and Powell’s mother. At the time, Reynolds was expecting a child and her husband was also in the military and serving overseas. She was living with her parents, Samuel and Cora Belle Jones, at the time.

“When they came with that news ... it nearly killed my mother,” Reynolds said. “She just couldn’t get over it. She was never the same.”

Because of their grief, his parents rarely spoke of Jones. But Powell remembers a large picture of him in a oval bubble frame that hung on the wall over the piano at her grandparents’ home.

Powell accompanied Hechler to the museum Tuesday, where he told his story and autographed books for an eager crowd.

“He’s given our family such a wonderful gift,” said Powell. “I was so caught up in the book. I learned what a rugged, tough and dedicated Marine Buddy was. The sad thing is I found myself reading the book hoping the story wouldn’t end the way I knew it would. I wish it could have ended differently.”

On that fortuitous meeting 63 years prior, Helen had told Hechler the story of her life with Buddy — their courtship, the good times.

Hechler would also learn about young Jones from his surviving siblings, sister Reynolds and brother Stanley Jones of Texarkana. Another sister, Faye DiMassimo, has been in declining health for several years, but her daughter Lisa Griffith, who religiously kept all of the letters Buddy wrote to her mother during World War II. Copies of those letters are included in “Super Marine.”

He learned about Jones’ military life from his Marine records after Stanley Jones arranged to have them made available to Hechler. In his book, Hechler has gathered details of the rigorous training, the deplorable conditions and the unbelievable physical endurance of Jones and his comrades.

“It’s very, very important for generations to realize that we have freedom in this country because of people like Buddy Jones,” Hechler said. “Otherwise, we would be controlled by vicious dictators.”

Reynolds recalled the last visit with her brother. He was on leave and had already fought in numerous battles, and had lost many friends. Depressed about going back into battle again, he told his sister, “I’ve seen my buddies around me killed … my number has got to be up.”

“He did not want to go back,” she said. “He was, for the first time, resistant to having to go back.”

He was killed shortly thereafter. Reynolds said it as if he knew he would not return home.

Jones’ mother was extremely upset that he was buried at sea, and she would have no grave to visit. She requested the Marines place a wreath of gladiolas - his favorite flower - at the exact same latitude and longitude where his mortally wounded body had been dropped into the sea just off the shores of Iwo Jima.

Three months later, a man walking along the beach at Oceanside, Calif., found this same wreath washed up on the shore, with his mother’s note attached. Hechler said it was “almost as though it was drawn like a lodestone rock at the place where Buddy had trained as a Marine at Camp Pendleton before being sent to Iwo Jima.”

His mother, needing a place to leave remembrances for her son, placed a headstone for Jones, at the family cemetery near Choctaw in Van Buren County.

“It reads, ‘Our Buddy. Marine Paratrooper Sgt. Orland Duncan Jones, Co. H, 3rd Battalion, 26th Marines, 25 Div. Born: Aug. 19, 1920. Buried at sea off of Iwo Jima March 3, 1945,’” Hechler read aloud.

“Because to her, more than anybody else, his death had wounded her so deeply,” he explained. “That’s halfway through the Iwo Jima conflict.

Providing an “idea’ of the killing fields of Iwo Jima were, Hechler said that 52 of the 56 in Jones’ machine gun platoon were either killed or wounded in Iwo Jima.

“The Air Corps bombed and the Navy hammered away for days before the first marines landed,” he said.

Jones and his comrades found no opposition on Iwo Jima.

“They thought that they had all been wiped out,” said Hechler. “But the Japanese were very clever people. They dug underground caves - seven stories high - beneath Mount Suribachi that were so impenetrable that the bombs, shells and artillery had never touched them. Everywhere the marines went, they were vulnerable.”

Hechler said there were Marines who protested the title of his book, citing there were and are many super Marines. But the dedication of his book explains — “To Orland Duncan ‘Buddy’ Jones, who symbolizes the thousands of Super Marines — enlisted men on the front lines — carrying out the orders of their superiors and, in Tennyson’s words in The Charge of the Light Brigade, ‘Theirs is not to reason why, theirs is but to do or die,’ as they risked life and limb with that special valor necessary to achieve ultimate victory.”

Buddy Jones and his fellow marines attacked Guadalcanal against superior Japanese forces, Hechler said.

“Marines never are afraid of being outnumbered. They stick together and win,” said Hechler. “That’s what they call the Semper Fi spirit and this heroic Arkansan had it.”

Ellie