Being a Guide at Antietam

I love being a guide at Antietam. I literally live for it. With rare exception over the past eight years as a certified guide, I have never wearied of sharing the battlefield with the hundreds of guests who have had me take them out on the field. Generally, I do not spend much time talking about the monuments. My tours evolve around the tactics, the terrain, the weather, and the soldiers’ experiences. It never grows old for me.

I often tell my guests it is like teaching again but so much safer. So far no one has beaten me up or tried to kill me and I get to do what I do best - talk about history and the people who lived it. The average visitor is a first time guest and a great many have a cursory knowledge of the Civil War, neither of which bothers me in the least.

I get to drive all kinds of vehicles – big pick-up trucks, a two-seater jaguar with a standard transmission, a Tesla, and my kind of car (the one I would have to pay someone to steal).  I have toured with parents and their very young children, all ages of school kids, military personnel, and hard core Civil War enthusiasts. I have enjoyed every adventure and unexpected occurrence. I have had guests lay down in the Sunken Road and “play dead.” We have encountered a groundhog that committed suicide by crawling into a hole with a corncob in his mouth and perished because he would not let go of it, and consequently suffocated. We have encountered impressive herds of deer, turkey buzzards on the overhanging branches of dead trees, and an occasional blacksnake sunning itself on the Burnside Bridge.

I really enjoy it when the visitors ask questions. It is a trait I share with the renowned Warren G. Harding, who was just the sort of “damned fool” who would try to answer them. I welcome queries and observations, with the admonition that if I do not know the answer, I will tell them, but, if they insist, I will make something up. I teach on the field the way I taught in the classroom: give and take, questions and answers, and an open exchange of thoughts and ideas. I was the much derided “Sage on the stage” and not “the guide on the side.”

We (the guests and I) do not spend much time discussing generals and what they thought and why they did what they did unless I have documentation for it. The battle was more or less a brawl with large caliber weapons, a whirlpool which pulled everything into the center. Any teacher who has tried to control a fight in the hall will understand the connection. Generally, generals kept their reasons for doing things to themselves. They viewed the combat on a different level than the soldiers in the ranks, much like supervisors operate on a different level than employees. Generals could only control what they could see and at Antietam the terrain and smoke limited their line of sight.

I get asked why the men marched in tight formations and stood up to fight. I explain it was done to mass fire power and to gain fire superiority over their opponents. From there the topic often meanders into the men using available cover when they had it, the rare occurrences of bayonet attacks, and how much weapons training they often received. A very large portion of General McClellan’s army consisted of newly recruited regiments.

We discuss how the farmers planted their fields and what crops they grew. I sometimes mention that Sharpsburg had three major crops – rocks, children, and corn. We talk about the number of foreign born and first generation Americans were in the Federal army and about the German Baptists Brethren (Dunkers). I gear the conversation to the interests of our visitors.

I like being a guide at Antietam because of the excellent individual with whom I work. The guides are some of the most collegial, friendly individuals I have ever had the privilege of working with. All of them are dedicated to the battlefield and to the history of the Maryland Campaign. Each one is well read, and quite a few are published or will be published. A number of them are collectors of artifacts, letters, and CDV’s (photographs). Each one has their own style of conducting tours. Look up Antietam Battlefield Guides on the web and peruse their resumes. They are a great bunch with whom to work.

As NPS Certified Guides we work through Eastern National, whose staff at the bookstore do a fantastic job. They treat the guides with respect and are very helpful with our visitors. I use “our” a lot because we are all there to assist our guests by providing them with unforgettable, positive, lifelong memories of the time they spend at the field.

Going out on the field alone, or with visitors never gets old to me. Whether I am tramping the iconic Cornfield, Sunken Road or Burnside Bridge or exploring the walking trails of the now verdant, pastoral setting, devoid of rampant commercialism, I find myself meditating on the beauty of the place. Sometimes, I will slip into the Dunker Church and quietly sit in one of the plain wooden pews and absorb its serenity. It is unlike any other field I have studied. I cannot explain my attraction to the place. For an introvert, like me, it’s, at times, like slipping into a prayer closet – ironically peaceful and comforting.

I know I have engaged in a lot of shameless self-promotion. I make no apologies for it. Should you get the chance, drop by and see Antietam for yourself. Thank you.

Pray That You May Never Know Part 3 of 3

The monotony and the loneliness on the Canal bred a sick kind of humor. The longer they stayed, the less civilized they became. In one particular incident Dad defused and reassembled a grenade. As he walked by a fox hole, he pulled the pin, let the spoon fly and tossed it in. As the frightened Marine scrambled for safety, Dad yelled back, “Sucker!”

Loud farting and belching became competitive sports, in which Dad excelled. After the war he often reserved his better performances for Thanksgiving dinner at our maternal grandmother’s. As a rule, my brother and I flanked him at the table.  He waited until after “Grace,” when everyone had started eating then he would let a horrendous one go. I swear the air changed color as a sulfuric cloud hovered above us. He turned to me and said I had been taught better manners, which often resulted in me having to leave the table. I will never forget the time he told me, “A hiccup is and educated fart that went up an elevator.” I shared that with my grandmother only once.

The humor bordered on cruelty. He would sing “Cool, Clear Water,” when we had to relieve ourselves and had no place to do so or he would eat an entire steak in front of us while we got vegetables. All the while, with each bite he let us know how succulent it tasted.

Life on the island reduced itself to survival from nature, boredom, and the Japanese who sniped at the Marines as they patrolled their perimeters. The enemy tied themselves in treetops and shot down the Marines behind their own lines. As a wire runner, Dad not only had to drag in the dead and bury them but he had to string phone wire between the rear lines and the forward command posts. On one occasion while running a spool of wire with his rifle across his back, he distinctly recalled a Japanese sniper pocking up the dirt at his heels. On other occasions he had to crawl along the wire to mend broken or cut lines.

He feared Japanese pilots the most. For the three weeks after August 7, until the first Navy and Marine planes arrived at the airfield, the Japanese bombed the island and Henderson field every night. The raids generated few casualties but they kept the isolated Marines awake and on constant alert. During the day reconnaissance planes sortied over Henderson. For two weeks the Japanese showed no serious ground opposition.

Did recalled stringing wire in the trees along the airfield when a Zero made a strafing run along the strip. From 10 feet up in the tree he got a very good look at the pilot’s teeth and scarf as the wing tip swooshed by him.

Another time, while on patrol, a Japanese spotter plane swooped low over Dad’s squad. All 13 men, except the lieutenant hit the deck. He ordered them not to go to ground again. The plane flew over again and everyone took cover but the lieutenant. With his back to the squad, he impetuously reached for his sidearm. Simultaneously 13 ’03 Springfields chambered rounds and the lieutenant joined his men on the ground.”He, who lives to run away, lives to run another day,” Dad quipped. The steely glint in his eyes told us that the lieutenant would have succumbed to “friendly fire.”

Death lurked everywhere on the island, which stank of decaying wildlife and vegetation. Dad always grew worse at night, especially during lightning storms. He constantly paced the floor, vehemently curding. He cried and when sleeping woke up frightened and angry. We never approached him when he slept.

The Japanese usually attacked at night. On the evening of October 13, after a day of intense bombing which destroyed the fuel depot and most of the aircraft at Henderson Field, two Japanese ships shelled the Marines along their entire perimeter.  Dad’s eyes glazed over when he described that night. The men crammed themselves into their dugouts. He said they could hear the men in the back screaming as they fought for air as the last men in pushed them into the mud and coral walls. Several suffocated to death. The ground heaved and rolled. Sand sifted down on the Marines’ heads. The concussions jarred their skulls. They covered their ears and bawled uncontrollably for the bombardment to stop. That sense of absolute helplessness plagued him for the 13 years he lived with us. He escaped by taking long walks, alone, at night. One time, when the car blew a hose on a Florida back road, he took off and left us sitting for what seemed like hours.

Death haunted him. He often cursed God for not letting him die like a large portion of his battalion. (The 2nd Battalion lost all but 45 in killed and wounded on Peleliu.) On the evening of August 22, when the severely wounded native, Sergeant Major Vouza, staggered into Dad’s outpost, he was sent back to get Colonel Pollock at his command post along the Ilu. He returned with the colonel, who stayed long enough to interrogate Vouza before returning to the CP with Dad.

About that time, the Japanese attacked the perimeter along the river. He seldom spoke of the battler, except that three of his friends died there and he had to drag them to the rear for burial. When the attack broke off near dawn, the Japanese lay in mounds in front of the Marine machine gun emplacements. The bodies, in the morning light had already began to bloat and burst, Dad with the other wire runners went out to sort out the bodies and bring in the American dead. Thirty-four Marines had died. He found his three friends, all of whom he had played cards with the day before. They lay in the sun, their distended stomachs gurgling and black. He and another Marine grabbed one of the corpses by the wrists and feet to haul it off when the fellow’s hand tore free into Dad’s. I still see him burying his face in his hands and crying.

By December 22, 1942, the 2nd Battalion had received orders to leave the Canal. Crippled with malaria and weight loss, a lot of the Marines, my father among them, had to be evacuated on stretchers. Every summer after that it literally knocked him flat. I can still see him on the couch, covered with quilts, saturated with sweat, delirious, and freezing at the same time. He suffered so terribly.

He never served in combat again. He spent the rest of the war stateside or in Hawaii. While in Hawaii he was blackjacked and rolled. The resulting brain damage exacerbated his already disturbed mental state. Memory lapses, blackouts, and seizures followed him to his grave.

Dad taught me the history lessons not found in textbooks. He taught me how fragile love and compassion are. He taught me never to forget the “little man.” He showed me that emotion scars run deeper than physical ones and that many men, like himself, have carried and will carry bitter memories and broken spirits to the edge of eternity. They died long before they physically grew old.

A navy doctor who examined the Marines after they left the Canal said they suffered not so much from “a bloodstream infection nor gastrointestinal disease but from a disturbance of the whole organism – a disorder of thinking and living, or even wanting to live.” It is no coincidence that Dad suffered from Survivors’ Guilt. He equated death in combat with sainthood. After the Canal he lived to die – to release himself from the bondage of his memories. He penned his epitaph long before he passed on.

Defenders of the Faith

Out on that burning sand,

Thinking of God, home, and wife,

You gave to your native land:

All you had; your life:

We left you on Guadalcanal,

A bit of America on a foreign shore,

Sleep in peace; John, Joe and Al:

America will honor you; ever more:

When Christ rewards the brave,

After all evil is cast down,

You boys may leave your grave,

And, rightly claim your crown.

Looking back, the years having dissipated but not totally erased the raw emotions which thinking of him resurrect, I am so very thankful that there are organizations, support groups, and doctors available today to assist and treat the veterans and their families with the effects of PTSD. Described as “the melancholy,” “soldier’s heart,” and “insanity,” the veterans of the past just lived with it. Like so many, Laura Ingalls Wilder explained her uncle’s bizarre behavior at a family function with, “He was in the war.” Lieutenant J. Volney Pierce (Company G, 147th New York), writing 19 years after Gettysburg, frankly stated, “The battle is a huge ‘nightmare’ to me.”

Pray That You May Never Know Part 2 of 3

On the night of August 8 a Japanese naval squadron sank several more U. S. ships, including the cruise U.S.S. Quincy. Meigs Comus, a boyhood friend from Winchester, Tennessee, was among the many whose bodies never were found. Worse yet, General Douglass MacArthur had ordered all of the First Division’s supply ships and the aircraft carriers to depart for Australia. The Marines had offloaded less than half of their supplies. Precious food and ammunition was on its way to safety.

Without air cover or adequate supplies, the Marines felt expendable and abandoned. As the days wore on and became numerically forgotten in the stench of the island, he, and others, harbored a bitter hatred toward MacArthur, a hatred which lasted long after the war. We could not speak his name in our home. “’I shall return,’” Dad often growled, “over the bodies of dead Marines.”

From the day the ships sailed out, he held an undying grudge against the Army and Douglas MacArthur. Until his dying day, he believed that the First Division and the Corps had won the war in the Pacific by themselves. The Marines left behind their own version of “Bless Them All.”

We asked for the Army to come to Tulagi/But Douglas MacArthur said, “No.”/We asked for a reason/He said it’s not the season/Besides, there is no USO.

With food and ammunition in short supply, the Marines dug in for a long five months. They plundered the well stocked Japanese warehouses for food. They found cans of raw fish and rice, both of which pretty much supplemented their diets in the early stages of the campaign. Dad never mentions the raw fish but he talked about the rice. Pasty and wormy, it was loaded with harmful bacteria and parasites (probably because of the human and animal waste used to grow it). Dad came away from the island with an infected digestive track.

In 1954, he hemorrhaged so badly one particularly violent attack, he nearly died. Mom kept us boys out of the bathroom. I still remember her shouting through the door over Dad’s retching that the floor was covered with blood. Very shortly after that, he went into the hospital where the surgeons removed part of his pancreas and, according to Mom, 90% of his stomach.  A voracious eater, under normal circumstances, after he came home, he gorged himself and never seemed full.

He loved sea food, a taste which I never acquired. He told us how the men supplemented their foul rice diet with sea turtle. Some of his more exotic tastes included chocolate covered grasshoppers and ants, the latter of which would crawl into the men’s tin cups in which they had melted “pogey bait” (Hershey Bars).

He also introduced us to “Anything Stew.” It consisted of cabbage, corn, and any leftover vegetables resembling food boiled together and finished off with a lot of vinegar to “kill the taste.” He served it steaming hot with a thick layer of black pepper floating on the surface.

The recipe had come from the Canal. While we carefully ladled it up with our throats numb, tongues burning, and eyes watering, he would add with a grin, he said he would have added flied to it, had he had any, to give it some meat. We knew how he hated flies.

He literally went berserk when any got into the house. They had been terrible on the island. He described how they kamakazied into the men’s boiling stews or coffee. He showed us how they vainly tried to flick them off their spoons as they ate. They left big welts wherever they bit. “They sort of crunched,” he added as we tried to swallow his stew.

The Canal, brutal and stinking of rot, hardened my father. It destroyed his capacity to fully love another person. Isolated, exhausted by the innervating humidity and living a mole like existence drained the compassion from him. He replaced it with bitterness and anger.

Besides the flies, MacArthur, and the Army he became hyper vigilant. The Canal abounded in exotic birds and rodents. They filled the nights with their calls and roaming. The jungle rats with their long snouts, stringy coarse fur and beady eyes ran through the foxholes and over the men in their nocturnal raids for food.

The birds, with their sharps, screeching calls kept the men awake at night. There was one particular parrot that only defecated when flying and was known for its big loads. They fluttered through the trees making noises which the Marines suspected the Japanese imitated. Another bothersome nocturnal bird, which apparently lacked night vision, continually flew into the tree overhead with a loud “thunk,” at which point it fell loudly to the ground with an ear splitting scream.

We had to remain quiet in the house – no whistling, no screaming, no shouting allowed. It would set him off. He hated canaries and parakeets. All of ours died mysteriously while we were at school and Dad was off work. We would come home and find the birds dead in the bottom of the cage, with the door open, high above the household cats. Sometimes, he told us, the “fell” off their perches while swinging on them.

Our pet hamsters met a similar fate. I can still see Dad tightly holding the ball of fur in his left hand. With his eyes glistening, he sarcastically teased, “If you hold ‘em by the tail, their eyes ‘ll pop out.” Not knowing whether he was joking or not, my brother and I laughed. Hamsters do not have any kind of tail to brag about. When we returned that afternoon, we found them dead in their cage on the back porch. Mom said they had broken their necks while running on the tread wheel.

Pray That You May Never Know - Part 1 of 3

The British poet, Sigfried Sassoon, in his heartbreaking poem, “Suicide in the Trenches,” concluded it with the bitter line, “Pray that you may never know the Hell where youth and laughter go.” When I walk the fields at Antietam or Gettysburg and work my way through the seemingly endless records that the survivors left behind, I sometimes find myself haunted by the poetry of the “Great War.” And it saddens me. They put in verse what others could not pen. They remind me of growing up the son of a troubled World War II veteran. The following post is going to be the first of several from an article I penned in 1985 to deal with the ghosts of the past.

            It is not an attempt to garner sympathy but rather an attempt to understand “why.” Dad passed away in March, 1972 at the age of 50 from pancreatic cancer, in Florida. I did not attend his funeral nor did I cry. That occurred a year later. The sadness overcame me out of nowhere. It took me another 13 years to put his story on paper. It takes some veterans a very long time to talk about the past. Quite a few never speak about what happened. So it was with me.

            I did not fight in a war, nor did I serve in the military. That does not mean I did not viscerally experience it. I learned history from the people who lived it. World War II never ended because the shooting stopped. No war ever does. The following is the story of a veteran and the events which changed his life and the lives of those that knew him.

Once a Marine

            “I’d rather be a live coward than a dead hero,” my father used to mumble. “Semper Fi-ee! Semper Fi-ee!” he would snarl. “Boy, when I say, ‘Jump!’ you say ‘Sir! How high, sir!’”

            My father, Ira Lee Priest, never left the Marine Corps, or for that matter Guadalcanal. Like many men, who had seen too much combat, he seldom talked about the war. Yet, when he did, we knew he was not telling us a “sea story.” His eyes reflected the deep trauma he had experienced. They would dilate and turn black, distant, the frightening “Thousand Yard Stare.” The memories of the six months in the South Pacific haunted him the rest of his life. They literally siphoned the soul out of him and entombed him in a mental grave from which he could not extricate himself. His loneliness, anger, and nightmares affected the entire family.

            Ira Priest, who preferred being called “Pat,” enlisted in the Marine Corps at 5:00 p.m., May 12 in Nashville, Tennessee, three days before his 20th birthday and the day he would have graduated high school. The next day, he bussed out to Parris Island for boot camp. He finished seven weeks later on July 28, 1941. During the next ten months he was stationed at Quantico, Virginia; Burns City, Indiana, and New River North Carolina. The war started while he was in Burns City. He reached New River at the end of April, 1942 where he became a wire runner, Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division. (He sarcastically referred to being in the “intelligence” company.)

            The Division left New River on June 12, 1942 for a 10 day train ride across the U.S. to San Francisco. There they boarded the U.S.S. George F. Elliott for a miserable three week voyage to New Zealand. The men spent a lot of the time below decks in the hold of the Elliott, which had also served as the 2nd Battalion’s supply ship. The bulkhead had been fitted with tiers of racks (beds) suspended by chains and bunks ran fore to aft in through the center of the hold. The place reeked of soured milk or cheese and puke, which washed under the bunks as the ship rolled with the sea. The propeller shaft, which ran the length of the ship over the top racks, banged and clanged incessantly. Sleeping became an acquired skill.

On July 11, the ship docked in Wellington, where the 2nd battalion hastily unloaded, reorganized, and reloaded their supplies in a back breaking 11 days. Despite the cancellation of all overnight leaves, Dad managed to avoid some of the work to strike up an acquaintance with a young lady on Peter Street.

Like Lincoln’s father, my grandfather, apparently, had taught his son to work but never to love it. His high school year book, which his sister sent him, contains a log of every female he encountered from Burns City to Guadalcanal, and back. It reads much like the cartoon of a sailor explaining to his crying girlfriend, “Honey, I ain’t got a girl in every port. I ain’t been to every port.” On his page of “flames” he scrawled: “Ira Lee Priest, His Hand and Pen, He Will Be Good, But God Knows When”

On July 22, the First Division set sail for the Solomons, South Pacific. Once again, under the threat of possible attack, the majority of the men, over the next 16 days, stayed below decks in the swill choked holds.

On August 7, 1942, following the predawn bombardment of Guadalcanal, the Marines went over the sides into their bobbing Higgins boats. The 5th Marines were in the first wave, followed by the 1st Marines, several hours later.

The entire landing force landed on Red Beach, east of the Tenaru River, and moved west toward their objective, the recently constructed Japanese airfield. The 2nd Battalion pushed through a coconut grove west of the beach and disappeared into the jungle.

It took hours to hack through the dense vegetation to get to the Tenaru. Dad and another Marine, being just as lost as the rest of the Battalion, accidentally became the squad point. They found the river by accident. In the thick undergrowth, they stepped into the open air along the steep bank and fell into the fungus covered water. Without thinking, they started slapping the filthy water, until their lieutenant warned them to watch out for crocodiles.

Once across the “river,” the Marines pushed further west to the Shallow, swift running Ilu River. Quite a few of the sweaty Marines lapped up the water as they forded it, despite warnings that it might be polluted. By nightfall the battalion reached the Lunga River and secured the nearby abandoned airfield. The 1st and 3rd Battalions established a perimeter on the ridges and in the jungle south of the airfield. The 2nd Battalion occupies and abandoned coconut grove near the mouth of the Lunga where it emptied into the Pacific.

A steady, hot rain fell that night as the men dug in. Headquarters issued the password “Lilliputian” to every man. Based upon somewhat faulty intelligence, they assumed that no Japanese would be able repeat it without substituting “r’s” for the “l’s.”

The darkness overwhelmed everything that night. No moon.  No stars. Just the sticky, unrelenting rain rapidly pattered their helmets, inundated their foxholes, and rolled into their eyes. Dad said the razor sharp kunai grass, the coconut trees, and the impenetrable darkness made it impossible to see more than an arm’s length to the front. The jungle came alive with the terrible noises of the wild birds. Each man fell prey to his own imagination. Every shadow harbored a ruthless enemy, capable of supernatural stealth. Dad’s eyes got distant when he talked about the coconut grove. Once again, he was along in the unending rain listening for the Japanese.

As the night wore on, occasional shots whizzed over the Marines in the grove from behind, fired from someone sniping at the shadows. Around midnight, a rifle cracked along the front of the Headquarters section, followed by the popping staccato of a Reising submachine gun, then scattered rifle shots. It quieted down within 10 minutes, leaving the men chattering among themselves about what had just happened.

Colonel Alvin Pollock (the 2nd Battalion’s CO) sent Dad, who was one of his runners, into the kunai grass along the perimeter to gather whatever intelligence he could. With his Model 1911 45 in his right hand, Dad crawled very slowly on his belly through the razor sharp grass, feeling in the darkness for whomever or whatever caused the one sided firefight. His eyes grew darker, more aloof and his voice more tense and slower as he described the incident to us – my brother and me. He said he kept reaching out, with his free hand, cautiously probing everything within reach.

Suddenly, he froze as his fingers walked into something sticky and warm. His fingers traced over the invisible mess. They found broken bone, a neck, teeth, a nose and a helmet. He very cautiously felt fro tags. They were oval – American. He stopped there, leaving no details about how they returned the corpse to Pollock’s command post or how they identified it. Tears streaming down his tanned cheeks, he rasped it was a friend of his with whom he had been chatting not half an hour before. (Robert Leckie in Helmet for My Pillow identified the deceased as a navy corpsman who had had trouble with the password.) Dad speculated that he had wandered beyond the perimeter to relieve himself.

The war became immediately personal at that moment. The situation worsened the next day when word arrived that a Japanese Val had dove into the open hold of the George F. Elliott and had sent it to the bottom of Iron Bottom Bay. The battalion had off loaded only eight days of supplies.