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.