It is Memorial Day weekend and I'm thinking of a cousin of mine who died fighting on Iwo Jima in 1945, Reid Carlos Chamberlain. He is a war hero. He was a 1st Lieutenant in the Army and could have stayed stateside but he wanted combat so he resigned from the Army and joined the Marines. He was a Sergeant when he was killed by a sniper on the island of Iwo Jima. He was buried in a trench and his body has never been found.
Thank you just isn't enough, but I will say it to all those who lost their lives fighting for the United States.
The Pain of War And Remembrance
By Alvin M. Josephy Jr. columnist & author
Published: December 25, 1999 in the New York Times
During World War II, I served as a Marine Corps combat correspondent on Guam, Saipan and Iwo Jima. When I came back to America after Iwo, I was riddled with guilt that although I had survived, I had left behind many brave friends who would never return home.
One of the men buried on Iwo was my foxhole buddy. He was a quiet, self-effacing sergeant named Reid Chamberlain who had a war record almost too melodramatic to be true. A career marine, he had been in the Philippines at the time of Pearl Harbor and had fought under Gen. Douglas MacArthur at Bataan and Corregidor.
When Corregidor finally fell, Reid escaped to the Philippine island of Mindanao, where, commissioned as an Army officer, he led a Filipino guerrilla band behind Japanese lines. Meanwhile, the Marine Corps told his mother that he had died at Corregidor, but she refused to believe it, insisting that one day he would show up at her front door.
After a year and a half, suffering from jungle illnesses, Reid was taken from Mindanao in a submarine. Back in the United States, he was accorded a hero's welcome, receiving the Distinguished Service Cross. He returned to his mother's home, just as she had known he would.
Although he could have spent the rest of the war stateside, he resigned his officer's commission in the army, told his mother once again that he would come back safely, and re-enlisted in the Marines.
He ended up in my outfit in Guam. By the time we left for Iwo Jima, we had become close friends, and once ashore, we shared a two-man foxhole, one of us asleep while the other kept watch at night for infiltrating Japanese.
One morning he and I were walking across an open area that we thought we had secured. Some shots rang out, and Reid fell dead, hit behind the ear by an enemy sniper hidden among some rocks. In an instant, the Japanese had claimed one of America's best men.
When the Marines once more informed his mother of his death, she refused again to believe it, and when I visited her after the war, she was still certain that he would eventually be coming home. A year or two later, when Congress authorized the return of the remains of servicemen buried overseas, Mrs. Chamberlain asked for Reid's body. During the battle, however, he had been buried near the Iwo beachhead in a long trench, and the Navy informed her that it could not find his remains. For years, Mrs. Chamberlain saw this as proof that Reid was still alive.
Meanwhile, like many other combat veterans, I found I could no longer talk about the war with anyone who had not been in combat. I could not reminisce about my experiences, even with my family, without great pain, and my eyes would become teary. So I became silent, too.
For long years, the generation of World War II veterans lost its public voice, and the patriotism and sacrifices of the war were largely forgotten by nonveterans.
Again and again, one could hear the common complaint at the funeral of a veteran: ''Our father never told us anything about his war experiences.''
Inevitably, some sort of a reversal was due, and it began, I believe, five and a half years ago with the attention paid to the 50th anniversary of the Normandy landing. Family members traveled to France with fathers, uncles, brothers and others who had been in the inferno of the D-Day landing, and in the military cemeteries they saw the aging veterans finally break down and weep at the graves of remembered comrades and then talk for the first time proudly and openly of their war experiences.
In a 50-year anniversary observance in the Pacific, I saw similar scenes in Guam. Though it came late, the sudden willingness of the World War II veteran to talk was a beneficial development.
Remembrance can still be painful and perhaps will always be so, for it continues to tap a deep feeling of guilt in those of us who survived while others never came back. But it has a good side, too.
With the willingness of the veteran to tell of his experiences, the younger generation, the one that will lead us into the 21st century, has come to understand and better appreciate the sacrifices made in World War II by Americans like Reid Chamberlain. After all, they gave everyone the right to live freely, which was possibly the noblest achievement of the 20th century.
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The article from the New York Times tells only a small part of Reid's World War II involvement. You can read more about him here:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/56117554/reid-carlos-chamberlain
