Jim Goldsworthy, Columnist
Each time I watch newsreels and TV shows that show old film clips of Americans in combat situations, I wonder if somewhere, somebody else is watching it, and he is seeing himself at a long-ago moment in his life.
What he must feel? What memories does it bring back?
I found out the other day, at a time and in a place I wouldn’t have expected it.
The local Mountainside Detachment of the Marine Corps League occasionally organizes bus trips to the National Museum of the Marine Corps, and I went with them recently.
The museum’s architecture strikes you as soon as you see it, which is at a good distance. Some of the folks on the trip wondered why it looks the way it does — with a long spire that emerges from the building’s roof and tapers to a point as it reaches skyward.
The spire isn’t vertical, but reaches upward at what I later found out is a 60-degree angle. I’d never seen a picture of it, but told my friends that my guess would be it’s symbolic of the flag-raising by Marines on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. This brief moment from one of the bloodiest struggles in World War II is shown in one of America’s most iconic photographs, and it turned out that my guess was right.
The Marine Corps was born in Philadelphia’s Tun Tavern in 1775. The tavern, which was one of Benjamin Franklin’s favorite haunts, no longer exists — but the museum has an exact replica of it. I couldn’t have come home without sharing a beer there with one of my Marine friends ... the man who saw himself at a time and in a place he would never have expected it.
Three and a half hours wasn’t enough time to see everything I wanted to see. There are so many exhibits, so many plaques to read and so many films to watch, that it’s daunting even to try telling someone else about it.
There are artillery pieces, tanks, helicopters, amphibious vehicles, airplanes, photographs and dioramas that depict subjects ranging from women sitting in a parlor, listening to a radio broadcast of the announcement that Pearl Harbor had been bombed, to a firebase in Vietnam. The first flag raised on Iwo Jima is also there.
The mannequins are taken from molds made of real-life Marines, who had to sit motionless in the casting material for 45 minutes at a time. Only when you get close to them do you realize they’re not living — or dead — human beings.
Some of it is not for the faint-hearted, including an exhibit that features a Navy corpsman (the Marine version of a medic) tending to a badly wounded Marine who is covered with blood, grimacing in agony and probably hasn’t much longer to live.
Near the fallen Marine’s head lies his helmet, upturned so you can see the photo of a pretty young girl that is stuck into its lining. There’s a bloody thumbprint on the photo, which leads you to believe he had been holding it, looking at it before the pain became too much to bear.
I thought of a young man I once wrote about who’d been a medic in Vietnam. How many times was he confronted with such a situation? He wanted to become a nurse in civilian life, but this was in the early 1970s, and men weren’t welcome in nursing schools. For that matter, Vietnam veterans in general weren’t welcome in very many places.
I’ve always wondered what became of him.
The air in the room that re-creates a nighttime firefight in Korea was almost normal temperature. Some of my friends who’d been there before said it used to be like walking into an icebox ... the intent being to show visitors just how cold it was in those hellishly frozen mountains.
I walked out of the aft end of a Chinook helicopter, down a ramp, straight into a firebase in Vietnam. Stooping to go through that confining tunnel, I was bombarded by thunderous noises and the sound of men shouting, and the air grew hot and humid.
One teen-age girl asked another why it was so hot in there, and I was tempted to say that based on what folks have told me, you’d need to have been there yourself in order to appreciate it. Fact is, I wondered why they didn’t have it hotter and more humid.
People might look all around them, but they rarely look up. And so, I wondered what percentage of the folks who go through that room — and those I asked had not — ever looked up to see the tail art on the helicopter. Those who do are rewarded by the grinning caricature of a wolf and the words, “GIVE A S***.”
I’m frequently told by those who have been there that when you’re in a situation like that, the only thing you really give a s*** about is your buddies ... specifically the guy who’s next to you in the foxhole. The moment you see him blown to pieces is one of the moments that never go away, but keep coming back in your sleep and even in your waking hours.
You don’t care about God, Country, The Flag or anything else ... just your buddies, who are in the same mess you are. As I was tempted to tell that young girl who wondered about the apparent lack of climate control, this is not something you can explain to someone who doesn’t already understand.
I was doing OK until I saw the exhibit in which a chaplain kneels over a dead Marine who is covered, all but his boots, by a poncho. I have a pair of boots just like those, bought years ago in an Army-Navy store to wear while hunting. They are just as worn and battered as those of the dead Marine. Two of my buddies from high school went to that damned jungle, but didn’t come home alive. I never went.
One of my friends passed me in a hallway and asked if I was learning anything. All I could do was nod my head.
Later, I told him I had found a second place where every American should go at some time in his or her life. The first was Arlington National Cemetery, and now I’ve added the Marine Corps museum.
In the Vietnam section is a wall-sized photo of an amtrack, an amphibious assault vehicle that runs on tracks like a tank. One of my friends told me he thought he recognized a man in its crew and said the numbers on that vehicle matched the numbers of the vehicles in his unit.
“I’ve got a picture at home that looks just like that,” he said. “If that’s my buddy, then that’s me driving it.” Only thing is, all you can see is the back of the driver’s head head.
He e-mailed me a copy of that photo, and it’s a match. Without his being aware of it, my friend became part of something magnificent that will last long beyond the few years that he and I will be alive, something that will inspire Americans for generations to come.
It doesn’t matter that you can’t see what he looks like. To me, he represents the endless ranks of faceless men and women in the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard (that’s the order in which they were formed) who for more than two and a quarter centuries have protected America from far more malevolent wolves than the one on the Chinook’s tail. More than 3 million of them have died to keep us free.
Semper Fi. Welcome Home.
