Legal Commentary

My Father's Eyes

By Kevin Funnell

My father died 35 years ago this month, a little less than two weeks before his fifty-first birthday.

65 years ago, in the spring of 1945, he was a hospital corpsman in the US Seventh Fleet, assigned to Military Governance Group G-6 of the U.S. Navy, which was part of the 24th Corp of the US 10th Army that invaded the island of Okinawa. His first assignment during that invasion was to scout the location of a hospital (later designated Hospital #51) the be set up close behind the front lines of the US Army and Marines who were tasked with invading and securing the island by killing all of Japanese defenders (inasmuch as by this time of  WWII, it was clear that Japanese troops would not surrender). To secure and protect that hospital location was the responsibility of a platoon of the First Division of the US Marine Corps. and my father was to serve as their corpsman until the hospital was established, after which he would tend to the wounded and assist the surgeons who would staff the hospital.

While my father told me that his unit never intended to be in the thick of combat, they wandered several hundred yards down a road behind enemy lines "and then all hell broke loose." He experienced combat up close and personal and he never forgot it.

I recently purchased the DVD set of the HBO miniseries "The Pacific," which tells the tale of the Marines in WWII in the island-hopping campaign that eventually ended at Okinawa. The series had a profound effect upon me, in no small measure for bringing to life (or at least, as much as can be accomplished without actually living it) the experiences of my father and hundreds of thousands of other men of his generation. So many stories he told my brothers and me were validated:

• The first 30 days were easy, the next 60 were hell.
• Artillery barrages that were constant from Japanese guns wheeled out of caves on railroad tracks, then wheeled back in to protect them form bombardment and counter-fire.
• The heavy slog, ridge-by-ridge, and cave-by-cave, to root out the defenders.
• The heavy use of flamethrowers and satchel charges to burn out or seal in the Japanese.
• Civilians used as human shields by Japanese troops.
• Civilians fearing Marines as animals who raped and killed civilians wantonly.
• Civilian mass suicides.
• The rain, the mud, the dead everywhere, unable to be buried.
• The special targeting of US corpsmen by Japanese troops, including feigning serious wounds in order to lure corpsmen close enough to blow them up with a grenade.
• The utter racial hatred on both sides.
• The night flares and the civilians caught in the open and machine-gunned by the Japanese for trying to enter American lines and safety.
• A Japanese soldier hit 14 times by US carbines before he stayed down and died (prompting my father to discard his carbine and pick up an M-1).
• Constant artillery and mortar barrages.
• Kamikaze pilots wreaking the most incredible losses on US naval vessels.
• The dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan and the initial refusal of US "grunts" to believe it.

I wonder what it would have been like for a 20 year-old man/boy to hear the screams of the wounded and the panicked cries of "Corpsman! I need a f***in' corpsman right now!" And every time you got up to run to the wounded, the Japs threw grenades at you. And when you got there, you'd see nothing below the right knee but a pool of blood expanding with each gushing heartbeat, or intestines sitting in a lap, or "a pile of goo" that used to be a man, all the time the incredible whine, zip, zang, and thwack of bullets and shrapnel surrounding you, as well as the howling and gurgling of the wounded and dying, as well as the enraged shouts of noncoms telling men that if they wanted to live, they had to "get off the f***ing beach, you sons-a-bitches! Get of the beach now!"

I thought a lot about my father as I watched the tales of three men profiled by producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg unfold in the ten weeks that the harrowing, miniseries (the most expensive ever made) lasted. The literate, wise-cracking, New Jersey "Cradle Catholic" Robert Leckie was the closest to my Dad in personality, although my father was never as self-destructive as Leckie. Like Leckie, my father possessed a wild steak and had a fun-loving nature, but he also was sent to, and graduated fourth in his class from, Christian Brothers Military Academy in Albany, New York, where my grandparents sent him because he refused to study at public schoo and where he was captain of the boxing team (in a day when high schools had boxing teams), so he was a tough guy, but one who learned self-discipline. Unlike Leckie, he was never busted in rank. Unlike Leckie, he didn't lose his faith during the war (although he did after it ended).

He definitely wasn't similar on the surface to the other main characters, John Basalone, the most decorated noncommissioned officer in US military history, who won the Medal of Honor on Guadalcanal and the Navy Cross (posthumously) on Iwo Jima, or Eugene Sledge, the pious Christian boy from Mobile, Alabama who kept notes in his Bible that would become a best selling book, and who, in three hard years from his seventeenth to his twentieth years, morphed into a remorseless and highly efficient "Jap Killer." Basalone was one-of-a-kind and Sledge's post-war struggles did not mirror my fathers.

Unlike the three men whose experiences the miniseries dramatizes, no one is left to tell my father's stories but those of us who know them only in bits and pieces.

We can tell of my father turning to his platoon's Gunnery Sergeant when his unit faces a dwelling with Japanese inside firing out at Marines through a phalanx of terrified Okinawan civilians lined up in front and asking, "What do we do, Gunny?" Gunny replies, "What you do, Doc, is you aim low, close your eyes, and empty your clip." My father did what he was ordered and when the firing ceased, the civilians and the Japanese soldiers were dead.

We can tell of my father putting a tourniquet on the thigh of a Marine whose leg has been taken off below the knee by a mortar shell, when suddenly the man stops howling and goes wide-eyed. My father turns to see a Japanese soldier, obviously out of ammunition, moving up to bayonet my father in the back. In panic, my father grabs a machete he has lying on his pack by the blade and whacks the Japanese soldier on the helmet. The wounded Marine yells, "Jesus Christ, Doc, get the f*** out of the way," and as my father jumps back, the downed Marine , who has picked up my father's M-1, shoots the Japanese through the neck and head.

We can tell of a star shell bursting in the black of night to illuminate Okinawans frozen in the field between the Americans and the Japanese, and as the flare flutters down on its parachute, the Marines yelling, "Move! Come here! This Way! Move, damn it, move!" Followed by the light of the tracers of Japanese machine guns moving out across the filed, and the hammering of Marine machine guns and their tracers seeking to find the source of the Japanese bullets. The flare dies out. The firing dies down. In the morning, the torn bodies of the civilians litter the field. "Brains draped across the grass," my father sadly remembered.

We can tell these tales, never as truly or as well as those who lived them, but it is useful that we try. Otherwise, they are lost and so are our memories of the men who lived them. They deserve to be remembered.

A representative sample of all the layers that the film makers sought to plumb: Robert Leckie at the Battle of the the Tenaru River on Guadalcanal.

Full post as published by Counseling Kevin on November 25, 2010 (boomark / email).