“You must either conquer and rule or lose and serve, suffer and
triumph...and be the anvil or the hammer."
(Goethe)

I was born in Southern Missouri in September 1947, almost two years to the date of the Japanese Surrender aboard the Iowa class 'dreadnought' U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay. There were four of these heavy weights. The ‘BB’ - Missouri, ‘BB’ - Iowa, ‘BB’ - New Jersey and the ‘BB’ - Wisconsin.


Fifty-three years later the U.S.S. Missouri resides in Hawaii near the Battleship Arizona where the World War II, at least for Americans, began on December 7, 1941. The U.S.S. Missouri now at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii represents where the war ended on her decks. I have lived in Hawaii now for some 30 years following my tour of duty in the war in South Vietnam in 1966.

I grew up in Southern Missouri. As a child I quite literally lived the life of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. A neighbor boy my age was my best friend. Our younger brothers were the same age. We did not have Twain's 'Becky Thatcher', so we substituted our little brothers in constant schemes and plots to get them to do our chores for us. We spent our youth running through the forests while flirting with danger along the James River, using hand made spears to tease and torment the ‘Water Moccasins’.


The railroad trestle crossing the river was a place where we tested our bravery. We would wade into the river and swim to the trestle, climb it and lie there for hours with our ears pressed to the track listening for the vibration; the approach of a train. When one came roaring by we stood on the edge of the railroad ties and it was a challenge to see who would jump first into the river before the train overtook us.

We explored the forest looking for artifacts from the Civil War. We were bold adventurers. By 1861 the great Civil War had reached the gateway to the ‘American West’; ‘The Great Plains’. Greene County, Missouri saw it’s first major clash between the ‘Blue & Gray’ near our home. History recorded it as the ‘Battle of Wilson’s Creek. Union General Nathaniel Lyons died in the saddle having ignored orders from General Grant. Grant was garrisoned in Cairo, Illinois and warned Lyons to remain in Springfield until reinforcements arrived.


Nathaniel in an impetuous lunge for fame and glory ignored Grant and attacked the Confederate encampment only to find his forces vastly outnumbered under the command of Confederate General Sterling Price who destroyed the Union attack then retreated back into the safety of the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. General Grant now had a yawning gap in is blockade to the West. He desperately needed a bunch of new Union guys. Fortune was on his side. It seemed everyone who could hold a rifle wanted a piece of the war. They wanted the chance to get off one shot; fame and glory the illusion of war sang it’s ‘Siren Song’. It’s bewitching sweetness; it’s acoustical temptations marching to the beat of patriotic fervor were not ignored. Many died wearing their ‘hobnail’ boots having ever heard the flag waving chorus of victory.

Our childhood heroes were Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Once we found an old barn, long since burned down. It was deep in the forest along the James River. We explored the rubble and discovered that the old rotting lumber covered a basement. We were surprised to find that a barn had a basement. We even debated it. ‘Basement’ won, beating out storm cellar, fruit cellar, wine cellar, tool shed and ‘Used car’ cellar. It was a basement.


We found a hole and squirmed down a fallen plank and waited until our eyes adjusted to the dark. Sunlight filtered through the rubble overhead. Shafts of light beamed here and there casting laser beams of bright light piercing the dark like hundreds of penlights, leaving the rest of the basement in dark frightening shadow. Overhead was a large hand sawn plank. From it were the remnants of a hangman's rope. Our little prepubescent hearts pounded with the understanding that at some time in the past a man had died here by hanging.


We tried standing on each other's shoulders to reach the rope. It was a treasure find. My foot stumbled over something hard in the dirt floor...we began to dig. In the dirt covered by decades of dust and detritus was an old rusted single shot pistol. We scrambled out of the dark well with our prize and took turns firing imaginary shots at each other as we fell, clutching our chests in mock paroxysms of death.

I lay there on the ground, eyes open, having just been shot, a casualty of the Civil War. I watched the clouds drift lazily overhead. As I followed there fluffy progress I spotted an apple tree heavily laden with bright green apples. We climbed it and began eating them until we became sick. It’s a rule. Pioneer-adventure oriented people always eat unidentified or unripened fruit and get sick. The only place we could hunt for meat was at ‘Billy Bob’s Park ‘n Pork’... and we couldn’t afford that type of frontier cuisine.


A couple of years earlier, in 1952 Dwight D. Eisenhower had been elected the President of the United States. He was catapulted to the highest office of the land because of his military victory in Europe during WW-II. At the time the war began for us in the Pacific he was only a major. A graduate of West Point. A nobody from the Midwest. He had an unusual flair for tactics and was promoted from major to Commanding General of all allied forces in Europe. A promotion that angered many General Staff Officers at the time. He was a brilliant Commander, but as President he was a political disaster.


In the early '50's while Senator Joseph McCarthy was busy destroying lives based on rumor, spreading the hysteria of the communist threat, Ike had a choice to make. He could accept the hand of friendship from communist China following the resolution of conflict in Korea in return for a pact of noninterference between China and Taiwan. After the Japanese defeat in Asia, the truce between Mao's communists revolution and General Chiang Kai Shek's so-called democratic republic ended as they resumed the conflict. A civil war to see who would rule China. In 1949 Mao won the war for China thereby driving the army and followers of Chiang Kai Shek to Taiwan.

Ike chose Taiwan, and made an enemy of the largest populated country in the world. China. Chairman Mao's version of the communist state spread like a virus. The vector for the disease was carried to other countries by his devoted followers in the '30's during his famous ‘Long March’ during the war against the Japanese. It was during these times that the struggle for survival against a technologically advanced enemy, the Japanese Army that the future Chairman Mao wrote the book on guerrilla warfare. One of his lieutenants, Ho Chi Minh took this experience with him and returned to his home in Hanoi.


He created the Viet Minh and his purpose was to overthrow the French controlled colonization of the Indochine, destroy the existing French controlled Vietnamese puppet government and bring Chairman Mao's political theory to reality in Democratic Peoples Republic of Vietnam. The war in Vietnam had begun. He elected to ignore the 1954 Geneva Accords and attempt to unite South Vietnam with the North and eradicate the French colonialization that seemed to occupy Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.


When the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu I was 7 years old. I was not aware of this significant event.

I was busy running barefoot through the Ozark Mountain forests. Everyday was an adventure, we continued to test the limits of danger, swatting hornet's nests; then running for safety. On the 4th of July we would find fat green grasshoppers feeding on the the mid-summer corn and rubber-band 'black-cat' firecrackers to their backs and light the fuze. At night we would fill mason jars with lightening bugs and use them as biochemical lights to find our way in the scary darkness of the cornfield just yards from home.


Then just when the day's adventure was at it's zenith, a whistle blew. It was a signal from ‘Mom’ to come in for the night; eat dinner and then suffer the agony of a bath. It was a daily agonizing and pointless ritual. Child abuse. Torture. We would get just as dirty the next day. What was the point?


As our Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn summers gave way to the coming Fall, we were tortured, held captive again... and forced to return to school. A two story red-brick prison. It was insidious. We were forced to write, read and learn basic Math. None of this applied to our real world. It was of no use in the forests were we ran and played, gradually and unknowingly shedding our youth. By the time we could read the adventures in Mark Twain’s stories that paralleled our boyhood adventures; our lives were already giving way to other interests. Girls.

In high School I was, like most boys, interested in war. Our father's had been through the second world war. My father was a ‘power plant engineer’ on B-29's out of Saipan in the Pacific bombing Japan. My friend's father was piloting B-24 Liberator's, bombing the Ploesti oil refineries in Nazi occupied Romania.


I read and scanned the pictorial anthology of WW-II in the high school library every day over and over until I had it virtually memorized. Then I began reading the individual stories of the war. 'Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo' by Hershey, an account of the 'Doolittle' strike off the carrier Hornet using sixteen B-25's to bomb Japan. It was a surprise raid to show the Japanese that they were as vulnerable to attack as we were in 1941 and it also served to raise the morale of the United States following the massive loss at Pearl Harbor.


In retaliation for the surprise attack on Japan the Japanese forces in China executed over 250,000 Chinese for aiding the downed Doolittle pilots.


I read 'Guadalcanal Dairy' and many more stories of the war. It was a heady experience. I lived the days of glory vicariously through war novels hoping someday, somehow I could live the experience. In my last year of high school I had already signed up to join the Navy through their preenlistment program. I was 17. The year was 1965.

I no longer was interested in the stories of Mark Twain, Brett Harte, Stephen Crane. In the Fall of 1965 I entered boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Training Center. The Marines had landed in ‘Quang Nam’ in 1965 and began setting up the first base that was to be called ‘Da Nang’ in the third province South of the DMZ. Then they swiftly expanded North and established a foothold at ‘Phu Bai’ in the second province of ‘Thua Thien’. I arrived in Vietnam as an ‘FMF’ (Fleet Marine Force) ‘ Corpsman’ attached to the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment North of ‘Chu-Lai’ in the province of ‘Quang Tin’.


By the time I arrived several major battles had been fought and the Marines now occupied positions in the remaining provinces (totaling 5 provinces) of 'I-Corps'; in the south ‘Quang Ngai’, in the North ‘Quang Tri’. I was in the middle of war.


In a matter of days I quickly realized that the war in Vietnam did not hold the boyish attraction and the imaginary glory that I had read about in the books about WW-II. This was worse. There was no glory; there were no marching bands. There were no long romantic delays between campaigns or tactical operations were the soldier could visit exotic places then return to the war for a few days and drop out again for weeks of liberty and fun.

The war in Vietnam was daily; it was literally non-stop. It was a vicious struggle at the personal level. Each day was a concentrated effort to remain alive and unhurt. It was a private war.


I was witness to the bloodbath. I was a willing participant to the chaos and carnage. It was terrifying and it was exhilarating; almost narcotic. Villages were obliterated, people were vaporized in a pink mist, or burned to a charred black mass in the hellish fire of napalm. Bodies were blown into pieces. With the slaughter there was no honor, no glory. It was humanity reduced to it's lowest level. Survival at any cost. Brutality was a common daily experience. The ubiquitous bloated corpse was a normal sight. Death was ever present. You could reach out and touch it.


War was not supposed to be this way. It was supposed to be dignified, civilized like the war of independence against the British, where the armies faced each other and the staff officer's from the opposing armies met casually, under civil, even friendly circumstances and had tea served, perhaps a luncheon buffet laid out. After the pleasantry's were observed they calmly returned to their troops and and almost yawningly ordered them to open fire. At the end of the day, the opposing officers met again and discussed the day's events.


I survived the senseless slaughter, thousands were killed, maimed and and lost on both sides for nothing. A few political boundaries changed, a new government took over which will evolve as the economy dictates. The debt is increased and the currency devalued. It is temporary. All this that is lost or gained will eventually change at some point in the future. The cycle will eventually demand yet another war.

Since the beginning of human history people have worshiped something or someone. Over the centuries the historical accounts of the human experience can be written or measured by war. There have been countless wars, for countless reasons. The one constant in these campaigns as two armies engaged in battle was that each believed that their God was on their side. Therefore they were insured victory and protected by the shield of a divine being. The victor came away with God's divine blessing.


It only served to reinforce the army that won that they were invincible. For the army that lost. God had not been on their side. For some reason unknown to them they had fallen from grace. Regardless; it would seem more people have fought and died in wars founded in and fought over religious conviction than any other cause. More lives have been lost in the name of religion than all the other causes together yet the wars continue and each army follows it’s religious standard blindly into battle.


For those who have fought more than one battle winning some and losing some know that the faces of God are, if anything variable. Lives are saved and lost to a whimsical belief. Unless you belong to the Salvation Army and wage war with senseless acts of charity, don't count too heavily on God.

I live on the Big Island of Hawaii. Just South of me around the southern tip of the island is a small Hawaiian village called Naalehu. There is a small restaurant and gift shop for tourists. It is called ‘Mark Twain Square’, or something like that. The little business just off the highway is surrounded by ancient Banyan trees and Monkey Pod trees...some of them were planted by Mark Twain during one of his visits to the islands. Robert Lewis Stevenson also traveled through here, followed by a host of other writers and celebrities of the period.


I was surprised to find my childhood author had been here before me as he had been in Missouri when I was a kid. I seemed to be unknowingly following him. On my last visit to the village a couple of weeks ago I returned home and pulled out an old dog eared book. A collection of Samuel Clemens stories. I thought of him and of me as a child growing up in the Ozarks and as always I thought of the war in Vietnam. I knew the page by heart and opened it without searching. I never tire of reading passage. ‘There are always many sides to war. You can't have some without the other’.