Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire One Fewer - My Memorial Day Post

This is a photo of my Dad, 1940, fifteen years old, New York State, used to hunt and trap to supplement the family income.....



The end of the following year he was sitting on the curb of the small town drug store with his buddy when he overheard the news of Pearl Habour on the radio.

His old brother had already left a Catholic Seminary and joined the Marines, ended up on Guadalcanal, (as one of the "Old Breed" I guess). So my dad dropped out and joined the Marines too, his best friend joined the Navy. My father almost missed combat, being stricken down in the Pacific by mosquito-bourne encephalitis, a thing which would come back to torment him again as Parkinson's disease just twenty-five years later.

He did recover in time to step onto Okinawa as a 20 yo Private in the 6th Marines. He went onto Okinawa as a Private, came off Okinawa as the youngest Staff Sergeant in the Marine Corps. Us kids would pester him for war stories, did he ever shoot any Japanese etc etc.... We could never get anything from him besides the vaguest generalities, we knew the names Shuri Castle and Naha and that he went to China afterwards. The only stories he told us were two that were humorous: the time he was on guard duty one night and opened up on a wandering goat, and the time some guys were using a hillside mausoleum as a latrine and the blast from a bomb dropped from a Japanese plane echo through a cave and surprised those guys from underneath.

Anyways he finally came back home to his mom's house in '46 or '47, his own father having passed on while he was gone. My Dad had a lot of issues with what we call today PTSD after the war and in particular never picked up a gun again his whole life. His best friend was dating a visiting English girl in Brooklyn and one day soon after his return he was asked did he want to come along on account of the girl had a 15 yo younger sister. My Dad went and that first night, him aged 22, told that 15 yo girl that he was going to marry her. It took four years and him pulling up stakes and following a 16yo girl back to a country he had never been to before but he pulled it off

My Dad passed in '97, after years of poor health. Some years later his nephew, this guy, was a teenager working behind the counter at a McDonald's outside of West Point...



One day an elderly gentleman on the line stared at him hard and asked him if his name was O'Birdy. It should be understood that my Dad looked a lot like I do now, 5"7', my nephew OTOH is over 6ft tall, not at whole lot of resemblance that we ever noticed. My nephew had however grown in the same house as my dad until my dad died.

My nephew replied that O'Birdy had been his grandfather's name. The old gentleman then stated my Dad's full name and asked if that had been him. He then stated that he had been my Dad's Commanding Officer on Okinawa and that my Dad had saved his life twice. The gentleman didn't leave any contact info and my nephew was too young to think to ask him. We contacted the 6th Marine Association but it turns out many of the personnel records from Okinawa were since lost. We were never able to find out who that guy was.

You can see my Dad leaned over from paralysis at this photo from my wedding, the pretty girl he followed to England is sitting further back. She's a pretty tough cookie herself, bombed out of her house by the Luftwaffe as a little girl (hence her presence in Brooklyn in '46). Times were tough when my Dad got disabled, at that time we had recently returned from the States and, having little work history here, did not qualify for much Social Security. My mom's income, such as it was, supported all five of us, she stuck to my dad and to us for richer for poorer, through sickness and in health.

Just a few years after this photo was taken my mom took up skydiving to celebrate her 70th birthday. When she turned 87 she jumped twice in the same day