Some of you know his With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa: an enlisted man's tale of some of the worst fighting in the Pacific. What happened when the war ended and it was time to come home?
As the book's title hints, he didn't come straight home. His unit was sent to China to help demobilize the huge Japanese armies there, and try to help the Chinese Nationalists get control of the country back from the Japanese, and try to stay out of the way of the growing civil war.
He met wonderful people there, and found himself in strange situations--cultures clashed quite a bit sometimes. And then he finally came home, where people were busily trying to forget the horrors that few of them had actually seen. A veteran was a veteran--but some had been on the bleeding edge and some hadn't heard a shot. (My father spent his Navy time typing paperwork on Manus Island so other guys could come home.) (Bill Mauldin drew about coming home too.)
He found his personal peace becoming a biologist.
Read it
4 comments:
From the title of the post, I expected this to be about the Horse Marines. If you don't know the story, they were a China-based USMC unit that was the only horse cavalry the Marines ever fielded.
https://www.amazon.com/China-Horse-Marine-Angstadt-1934-1937/dp/0764348906
Nice photo here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/usmcarchives/16693828183
No, I'd never heard of them before. I'll have to have a look. Thanks!
More pictures and some history
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