Fritzie

“C’mon, Fritzie. Ya gotta keep movin’. Ma’ll be worried. Ya know she hates us be’in late for dinner.”

My eight-year-old kid brother can hardly put one foot in front of the other in the blistering heat of a Minnesota summer. I can see you dragging your stumpy, skinny legs as I encourage, cajole and bully you into trudging the last few hundred yards back from fishing for chubs in Heath Creek seven miles east of Northfield, Minnesota—-that fabulous college town on the Cannon River where we spent our entire young lives before going off to win World War II—-I, never to return; you, the responsible, faithful son, coming home to build living quarters for our poor, dear, widowed mother in the basement of the stucco, vine-covered house at 606 East Fourth Street packed with bittersweet memories.

My most vivid recollections of you as a boy are tender and warm, Fritzie, as you were and always will be to me—-when you tagged along behind me and later when you passed me by.

Three scenes are sharply etched: A terrifying bedroom episode. You are five or six and are being circumcised. Doc Seeley is wielding a scalpel on my poor little brother—-unnecessary, barbaric and sadistic. In your anesthetized state you murmur, “Davy, I love you. Davy, I love you.” I can’t hold back the tears. I am so deeply moved by your unconscious articulation of love I flee from the room.

The next scene is bright and sunny. You are on the ninth green of the Northfield golf course, one of four high school seniors contending for the Big Eight championship. That championship is in your hands. You must sink a ten-foot putt on the last hole for a win. If you miss, Faribault ties. If you three-putt, Faribault wins. You study the contour of the green, huddle over the ball and stroke it smoothly into the cup. The small crowd surrounding the green cheers. Your teammates—-Steve Nelson, Ray Pearson and Leland Rowberg—-hug you. That putt is a sports history legend in Northfield, the smallest school in a conference with such “giants” as Albert Lea, Austin, Faribault, Mankato, Owatonna, Red Wing, Rochester and Winona. You are a hero, as you will be again as an infantryman in Europe where you win a bronze star for rescuing a buddy under fire.

Some day, you said, I will grow and be as big as my brother; then I will beat him up. How you punished your body. Unable to buy barbells, you fashioned bicep-building weights from a piece of galvanized pipe to which you attached two heavy cylinders of concrete poured into large tin can molds. Hour after hour you hefted that heavy bar.

As a freshman at Carleton College, you were a ferocious wrestler—-aggressive, agile and powerful. Scene three: We are roughhousing. You pick me up, pin my arms to my sides, invert me like a catsup bottle and lower my 165 pounds not too gently to the floor—-nose first. The crunching sound of my breaking nose and gushing blood send you into a state of panic and guilt. But to me the day is glorious. I’m proud of you and feel only sorrow for your remorse. What irony. Finally, you have the physique to beat the hell out of your big brother who teased you throughout all those growing-up years. And now you have lost all desire for revenge.

My kid brother Fritz was an expert art historian and a creative artist—-witty, loving, caring, droll, thoughtful, brave and brilliant with a masters degree in art history from UC Berkeley and a thirty-five-year career as a beloved teacher at Sierra Community College but dead at 65 with a massive coronary, just like the one that killed our Father at 47 and our sister Jeanne’s beautiful husband at 38. At your memorial service in Auburn, I have never seen such an outpouring of love from teachers and students. Did you really suggest at a faculty meeting that the solution to the problem of too many stray dogs on campus was to buy a lion and let it loose.

Oh, how I love you, little brother. How I miss you and the visits and memories we should be sharing in our golden years. I am 86. Do you believe it? No one in our family has lived so long with so many blessings and fond memories of fishing for chubs at Heath Creek and Wolf Creek with Uncle Maurie Kent and the redolent, sweet smell of his briar pipe. How could anyone ever forget a kid brother who, in a chloroform haze, said, “Davy, I love you?”

I know ten thousand angels carried you gently to some heaven where there is no more pain, no sorrow, no Binswanger’s syndrome, no colitis, no guilt, no hatred, no war, no injustice, no hunger, no homeless—-the kind of heaven you tried so hard to create here on Earth.

Blessed peace be yours, little brother, now and for evermore.

Buzz and Ruth Marry

From the Northfield News of 25 August 1916:
Blodgett-Stowe
Popular Young Business Man Weds Minneapolis Girl
Alson B. Blodgett of this city and Miss Ruth Loretta Stowe of Minneapolis were married at high noon Thursday, Aug. 24, in St. Mark’s Episcopal church, Minneapolis. Mrs. Ed. Stowe was matron of honor and the groom was attended by Ed. Stowe. Wm. H. Lee of this city was one of the ushers. Following the ceremony a wedding breakfast was served to the immediate relatives and a few intimate friends.
Mr. and Mrs. Blodgett will spend their honeymoon in Iowa. They will be home after Dec. 1 in the residence being erected by Mr. Blodgett on east Fourth street. The bride is the daughter of Rev. Andrew D. Stowe of Minneapolis. She is a graduate of St.Mary’s in Faribault and studied last year at the Emerson school of dramatic art in Boston. Mr. Blodgett is the son of Mr. and Mrs. C. W. Blodgett of this city, proprietor of the Crystal and one of the city’s promising young men. The News extends congratulations

The newspaper account of this momentous event is short on essential details. For example, Mrs. Edward Stowe is my lovely Aunt Maude, mother of three. Ed Stowe is my mother’s bald headed older brother. Bill Lee is the wacko husband of my father’s wacko sister Mary—devout disciples of Colonel McCormick, owner and publisher of the then far right Chicago Tribune.
Honeymoon in Iowa? Where in Iowa would a honeymoon couple go? Ft. Dodge? Des Moines? Cedar Rapids? How could any marriage that began with a honeymoon in Iowa instead of Niagara Falls survive? Did they motor to Iowa or ride in a horse-drawn surrey?
Where did they live between August and December? Mr. Blodgett did build a house, but it was my grandfather, Charles Webster Blodgett, who built the house and gave it to the handsome young couple as a wedding present. The address was 606 East Fourth Street, next door to “CW’s” rambling homestead dwelling fronting on Nevada but too close next door to 606—a cross my mother had to bear from 1916 to 1938 when my father died of a massive coronary on my little sister’s birthday, November 9. Buzz was duty bound to take every Sunday supper with his doting mother Edna Winslow Blodgett, much to Mom’s annoyance.
Dad’s proprietorship of the Crystal didn’t last long. The Crystal was a soda fountain and candy store, featuring on-site creation of sweets. Vern Trampert bought the Crystal and put it out of business. He also cracked up several homemade airplanes he loved to fly too low.
Why St. Mary’s in Faribault? Because the daughter of an Episcopalian minister paid no tuition, board or room―one of the few perks associated with priesthood. In the twenty-two years I lived at 606—from February 1921 to July 1943—I never saw either my father or mother inside a church—certainly not in Northfield’s All Saints Episcopal Church. My mother detested the church. She equated it with an impoverished childhood and parishioners whose main activity was to run the minister out of town. I believe the only time my mother was inside that church was when she was laid out in her casket. She had no option. Given a choice, I am sure she would have preferred cremation and her ashes scattered in Lake Billesby where my father’s ashes were lovingly cast nineteen years previously; but my little sister Nadia had converted to Roman Catholicism when she married the assistant local postmaster Bob Heibel. Out of deference to Nadia and her Roman Catholicism, my Mom was buried in Oak Lawn Cemetery where my older sister Elaine Hagen placed a simple marker I visit whenever I return to Northfield. I love that cemetery. I courted my wife there. We enjoyed climbing the huge pine trees that guarded the gravesites.
The first five Blodgett babies came in rapid succession—Elaine, June 25, 1917; Jeanne, September 5, 1918; Mary, November, 1919; Charles David, February 19, 1921 and Frederick Winslow, October 30, 1923. Nadia Patricia was a love child not born until November 9, 1931. Dad turned down an opportunity to own and operate a motion picture theatre. He didn’t see any future in the movie business. The Dilleys converted the town’s Ware Auditorium to the Grand Theatre and made a fortune. Dad went into the major appliance business in the 1920s and at one time employed seven salesmen who canvassed a wide area selling refrigerators and console radios. He mounted a platform on the rear of a Model A Ford to make hundreds of deliveries. His large appliance store had a radio repair shop manned by two technicians. The whole business went bust in the Great Depression. Dad moved a few appliances into Helen Crary’s Bookstore, but his major income was from a general insurance agency and collecting speed trap traffic ticket fines for the city as its municipal court judge. When I was fourteen, I went to work as his bookkeeper and insurance policy writer. When I was seventeen he died, and I was a general insurance agent and principal support of my family. Of course, Dad had no life insurance. The business brought in about $200 a month―significant earnings in 1939. Gradually Mom took over and was in full charge when I was graduated from college in 1943. The biggest mistake of her life―aside from marrying Buzz―was selling that business to the Northfield National Bank and moving to California to be near her daughter Jeanne. A big mistake. I mean really BIG!
Let’s continue with the genealogy. As municipal court judge, Buzz married my oldest sister Elaine to a Norwegian St. Olaf football player named Henry Robert Hagen whose greatest joy was to physically humiliate his two much younger and weaker brothers-in-law—me and brother Fritz. Henry could subdue us simultaneously; but he was not impregnable, taking several gunshot and shrapnel wounds as a U. S. Marine storming the beach at Iwo Jima. Like Chester, our Chesapeake Bay retriever who was run over by a car, Henry survived and came home to live out his life as a high school teacher of commercial subjects—including shorthand and typing—in Chisago City, Minnesota. Elaine gave birth to two children—Karen and John. Karen married a Hanson and had three daughters—Katherine, Susan and Elizabeth.
All three Hanson girls were married and bore nine children. Elaine’s granddaughter Beth has four children and teaches fourth grade in Cumberland, Wisconsin. Beth Sommerfeld loved her grandmother, and we keep in contact on the Internet. She is a sweetheart. John married Suzanne Buckholtz and had a baby daughter named Leeanna.. A train killed poor John as he drove to work. He was thirty-one years old. He drove the same route every morning. He crossed the same tracks the train came down at the same time each day. It’s a mystery.
Jeanne married a brilliant Englishman, David Hedley, in San Francisco. He opened the Los Angeles’ branch of the left wing California Labor School. They had two boys—Michael and John—but their father died at 38 from a massive coronary diagnosed as “psychosomatic” by his friend and physician Asher Gordon. They dined together the night David died. Jeanne was an excellent student at Carleton and was graduated in the class of 1940. She was an organizer for the CIO’s Federal Employees Union. Unfortunately, she never quit smoking and died painfully at age 60 with lung cancer after a long career as a beloved teacher of retarded, blind, teenage girls at the California State School in Sonoma. Since Jeanne’s death in 1978, we have had almost no contact with Michael and John. John was his mother’s son and also taught at the Sonoma State School for learning challenged children—a tough job.
Sister Mary was the most unruly of Ruth’s six. I can see my Mother dousing my ten-year-old sister with a pan of dirty dishwater to snap her out of hysterics. She had two marriages—a brief one with Ed Pixley that produced one sweet little girl and a long marriage to a high school classmate Lyle Wing who sang tenor in our state champion mixed octet. Bud Engen and I were the basses. Lyle was a career army sergeant stationed in Texas. Although we had little communication over the years, I believe the Wings had four additional children—all beautiful and bright for all I know. When I turned down a plea from Mary for a loan of $200 I didn’t have, she broke off all further communication; but I know that whenever I sent our Mother a check, the money was forwarded to Mary in Texas. I guess Mom felt guilty about the pan of dirty dishwater.
My little brother Fritz married a San Francisco left-winger—Marjorie Weiss. Born with spina bifada, Marjorie could not have children. They lived most of their lives in Auburn, California. Fritz taught fine arts and art history at nearby Sierra Community College and was probably one of the most popular teachers. He was a private first class rifleman who saw much action in France and Belgium and was awarded a bronze star for bravery in saving the life of his buddy. We grew up together as close friends, and his early death at sixty-five was so tragic. I had hoped to spend long hours in our golden years reminiscing about our great childhood adventures, but Fritz died of a massive coronary on December 20, 1988. Marjorie does not communicate. She is not a happy camper.
The love child, Nadia Patricia Blodgett Heibel—by far the best looking of Ruth’s six children—has five super children. Her husband Bob was assistant postmaster in Northfield and a jolly good fellow who also died too young. I talk with Nadia quite often. She suffered a severe, paralyzing stroke several years ago that was devastating. She now lives alone at a nursing home in a suburb of Minneapolis. Four of her five children live within thirty minutes. The oldest, Roxanne Lange―my Mother’s favorite grandchild―has power of attorney to manage Nadia’s affairs. Roxie is married to Richard. They have a talented son Christopher. Cathy Heibel Stover’s husband is a professor at the University of Minnesota. Their one child, Colin, is a bright boy. Nadia’s one son Charles is with the Hennepin County Social Services Department. Her daughter Anne Borell and her successful husband are dealing well with two teenagers. The missing daughter is little Mary way off in Texas experiencing a second marriage. Mary, as I understand her, is the only Heibel offspring who is politically conservative, having been assimilated and acculturated by the frontier, rugged individualism characteristic of so many Texans. Ten years younger than I, Nadia will hopefully celebrate her 76th birthday November 9, 2007.
That’s a wrap on the Buzz and Ruth legacy, physically centered in the sturdy frame-stucco, three bedroom, one bath house given as a wedding present by my Grandfather to his wife’s favorite son, Alson Bertram Blodgett, who swung from the right wing GOP to the left wing Farm Labor Party in the Great Depression and put up a strong fight to build a sewage disposal plant and garbage incinerator in Northfield by taking over the Northern States Power Company. The day after the town narrowly voted down his “socialistic” scheme for the second time on November 8, 1939, he died. We had finally become friends. Built a fourteen-foot rowboat together that found its way to the failed hunting and fishing resort of Elaine and Henry Hagen.
I was the one who found Dad’s body early on November 9 and screamed to Mom who was downstairs preparing our breakfast. Ruth died from medical malpractice on October 16, 1957, at age 62. A Northfield surgeon had removed a large benign tumor from her overworked uterus and left a malignant tumor behind it unscathed. She could not survive the second operation and bled to death. Five of her six children were present for the funeral service at All Saints Episcopal Church in Northfield. Mary called from Texas, and I told her Mom would understand why she could not be with us to put our little Mother in her grave.
As for me, I lucked out. Married a saint―Jean Murray, a Carleton College classmate. We were graduated May 23, 1943, married in the cloister garth of the Bethany Union Church on Chicago’s far south side on June 12. I went on active duty in the Navy July 1. From our happy union came a son David, now 63, and a daughter Anne, 59―mother of two Harvard grads, Winslow and Margaret Taub―our treasured and overachieving grandchildren. David and his bride Liska gave us four grandchildren―William, “athlete of the year” in Laguna Beach in 2000 and a Yale graduate in 2006; Laska, a senior at the College of Wooster in Ohio; Robert, a freshman at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon and Monika who will enter Skidmore College in New York this fall. Winslow married Kara Thomas who bore our two great grandsons, Gavin Thomas Taub on his grandfather Russell’s birthday, October 2, 2001, and Justin Riley Taub, July 26, 2004 . Winslow is an intellectual property lawyer with the oldest firm in San Francisco, Heller and Ehrman, after a year as a federal law clerk in San Francisco. His sister Margaret is in her fourth year of a doctoral program in statistics at UC Berkeley. We are truly blessed.
That’s the story of Ruth and Buzz who were married at high noon on Thursday, August 24, 1916, in St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Minneapolis, honeymooned in Iowa and died much too young at 62 and 47.

Lager Larcency

“You goddam, dirty, rotten, thievin’ bastards!”
After a twenty-eight day voyage across the Pacific from San Francisco to Port Moresby, New Guinea, the Liberty ship is preparing to unload. The tarps and timbers covering the main
cargo bay are removed revealing a huge, gaping hole in what had been a fully-loaded ship’s belly. Missing are about 600 cases of beer, and Captain Johannson knows exactly who stole his most precious cargo.
“I know who done it! I know!” the 70-year-old, raw-boned Swedish ship’s captain screams at the four Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Thirteen captains whose seventy-eight-feet-long boats are sitting snugly in their cradles on the ship’s deck.
“I go on board your boats and find that beer,” he shouts.
“Be our guest,” the boat captains reply, knowing Johannson will never find the cases wedged between the top of the boats’ huge gasoline tanks and their solid oak decks—just enough space for a single layer of cardboard beer cases.
Working in well-coordinated teams, night after night, the PT crews had climbed down the ship’s ventilator shafts into the hold and—one case at a time—liberated case after case of beer. A search and rescue mission of the highest priority. Forming a conveyor chain, the boat crews moved each case silently and swiftly along the ship’s deck and up into the PT boats, down into the gasoline storage tank compartments and into their secure and safe new home.
Johannson searches every possible accessible hiding space to no avail. He can only conclude the crews had consumed 600 cases of beer over the last few weeks of the long voyage.
Thus the PT crews got their revenge on the merchant crew of the Liberty ship for their overly enthusiastic initiation ceremony when passing the equator two weeks out from San Francisco. With no love between the ship’s merchant marine crew and their U.S. Navy passengers, the ship’s crew put their guests through hell—slipping and sliding through a gauntlet on greased decks, blasted with high pressure, salt water hoses and forced to swallow raw herring marinated in bilge water. Then a drunken orgy. With no one at the wheel for eight hours, the ship swung 180 degrees and was headed back to San Francisco before the course was corrected at dawn by a hungover bosun’s mate.
Finally, giant cranes lift the four forty-eight-ton PT boats from their cradles and gently lower them to the sea—loaded with lager. They roar away from the Liberty ship with their three 1,350-horsepower engines gunned at top speed, toss up ten-foot high rooster tail wakes and thumb their noses at the frustrated Captain Johannson.
The search, rescue and revenge mission is successfully completed; and the PT boats are now armed and ready to battle the Japanese fleet.

His lean, coiled, six-foot frame bursts full tilt from the LST’s bow onto the sandy beach of Mindoro Island in the Philippines—a jaunty pheasant feather fluttering from the band of his Robin Hood felt hat; two twelve-inch, razor sharp knives strapped to his legs and a fully loaded Thompson submachine gun clutched lovingly in his powerful arms. He finds his prey—two half-dead Japanese soldiers huddled in a concrete pillbox. He waves them out and methodically crushes their skulls with the butt of the submachine gun. He is the Silver Star commanding officer of Motor Torpedo Boat Task Unit 70.1.4, and he is quite mad.
The Silver Star? He gathers a small, volunteer group of enlisted PT boat crewmen, hops on board PT75, roars full throttle to the stricken, burning PT boat tender, the U.S.S. Orestes, sitting about 400 yards off the beach in Mangarin Bay, ready to blow its load of aviation gasoline and several dozen torpedoes at any minute, climbs on board with his crew, puts out the fire, rescues several wounded officers and crewmen, hurries them back to our two waiting doctors, searches for the Orestes’ commanding officer¾one of the first to abandon the doomed ship hit by a Japanese suicide plane¾and tears his face to bloody ribbons with his bare fists.
That night Tokyo Rose makes her daily broadcast. “We hit the Orestes today. She is still afloat, but we’ll be back to finish her off.”
That night “Putt-Putt Charley” makes his usual visit at about 0200 hours. We never know where he is going to drop his 500-pound, daisy-cutter bomb with the extended percussion fuse set to explode the lethal device well above the ground to mow down anyone not flat on terra firma. Some of the surviving crewmen of the Orestes hear the rifle shot warning of the Japanese bomber’s impending arrive, jump and run about aimlessly. The bomb drops in their midst killing five. Although close by, we roll off our cots onto the sand and are unharmed.
The following morning the Orestes’supply officer begs me to retrieve vital records from his office in the bowels of the crippled ship. Accompanied by my faithful storekeeper, John Butts, I board the Orestes from a motor launch by climbing a Jacob’s ladder. The stench of rotting flesh almost knocks us down. Remembering Tokyo Rose’s promise, I expect a kamikaze attack at any minute. We scurry below deck where the damage from a 500-pound bomb bursting in the belly of the converted LST leaves tangled wreckage, find the payroll records and get the hell off the ship and back to shore as fast as we can.
An ocean-going tug takes the Orestes in tow and hauls it back to San Diego. Several months later on a supply replenishment trip to Samar Island I see the ill-fated ship, now rebuilt and sparkling. I see the commanding officer at the helm. He is the same ship’s captain whose face N. Burt Davis cut to ribbons on the bloody beach of Mindoro Island nine months ago. How ironic.
Although certifiably insane, Lt. Commander N. Burt Davis, Jr., who loves to go ashore as we work our way up the New Guinea coast to “get in a little hand-to-hand combat” with the remnants of the Japanese army, who walks the blacked out, night beach on Mindoro with a brilliant flashlight guiding his path¾much to the consternation and dismay of his comrades in arms¾is the most heroic warrior I encounter in World War II and certainly deserving of the Silver Star Medal for gallantry under fire.

Dr. Bill Murray, Hero

Veteran of the World War II Iwo Jima blood bath as a U. S. Navy surgeon who fought to save the lives of as many as a hundred wounded U. S. Marines every day for six weeks beginning February 19,1945—surgeon, psychiatrist, neurologist and humanist Bill Murray honors us with two visits from his home in San Diego, so I can assist him in writing a 28-page, single-spaced documentation of his “War Story.”
“How did you survive the bloodiest battle in Marine Corps history?”
“By concentrating entirely on my work and shutting out everything else. I had a job to do, and I did it to the best of my ability. I was so busy I had no time to think about the danger and horror surrounding me every minute of every day.”
At 87, Bill decides to write his story of Iwo Jima, but his failing sight is an obstacle. He graciously allows me to type up 51 pages of manuscript, keeping it in his words, so he can scan it with a new electronic device that takes the letters, increases their size and projects them onto a large TV screen.
We pick him up at the Irvine train station, drive him to our modest manor in Leisure World where we spend ten hours over three days side-by-side at my computer, hammering out his incredible story. He is a warm, gracious, gentle and brilliant man. I feel privileged to assist him in recording this important chapter in his life. Sunday, September 17, my wife Jean proofreads the “finished” draft, finds several typos I correct. I print two copies and mail them the next day to San Diego. The next chapter will be about his experiences during the U.S. military occupation of Japan.
Born February 3, 1919 in Japan, where his father was sent by the YMCA to set up primary schools, Bill Murray is my wife Jean’s first cousin once removed. He attended our wedding in Chicago on June 12, 1943. He and two of his three older brothers went to Monmouth College where their father, David Ambrose Murray, was a professor. Bill raced through medical school at the University of Chicago in three instead of the usual four years, served a shortened internship at Los Angeles County Hospital and went on duty as a Lt. (jg) in the Navy in September 1944.
At the height of the battle, Iwo Jima, a tiny island half the size of Manhattan, is the most densely populated place on Earth with 100,000 fighting men—70,000 U. S. Marines and 30,000 Japanese dug into underground bunkers. The command post of Japanese General Kuribayashi was 75 feet below ground with five-foot thick concrete walls and a ten-foot thick ceiling. U. S. forces suffered 6,821 killed and 19,217 wounded. Nearly all Japanese troops were killed by flamethrowers, napalm and hand grenades aimed through narrow crevices into an estimated 1,500 bunkers and 16 miles of tunnels. The Marines fought above ground from totally exposed positions. The Japanese fought underground. Some historians describe the U. S. attack as “throwing human flesh against reinforced concrete.”
To me this photo of a dead Marine with 550-foot Mt. Suribachi in the background epitomizes the horrible price paid for this tiny island that was to become an emergency landing field for B-29 bombers returning from fire bombing missions over Japan’s main islands—the totally insufficient military rationalization for the horrendous slaughter of U. S. troops who captured this 7.5-square mile speck half way between Saipan and Tokyo. Our military intelligence about the Japanese fortifications on Iwo Jima are as faulty as our national security intelligence prior to 9/11 and the disastrous Iraq invasion.
“I’m assistant surgeon of a Marine infantry battalion a few weeks out of my internship,” Bill writes. “The corpsmen with me are mostly teenage high school graduates.” Bill describes the landing on February 19. “Ahead the gray-black sand sloped up gradually for about two hundred yards to a ridge with the appearance of a smoking slagheap. Nothing else is visible except an abandoned jeep mired in the sand and on fire. The only plan we have is to get off the beach, so I start slogging across the heavy sand cratered and broken by the Navy’s artillery barrage that
rolls across the island ahead of us. Hard going. I am relieved to find the ditch on our maps, deep enough to kneel in out of the line of fire—a Japanese antitank ditch. Several of my corpsmen join me, and I am about to ask Jack a question when I have my first shocking realization of what we are experiencing—strange quiet. I hear no gunfire or any other recognizable sounds, but when I ask Jack a question no sound comes out of my mouth. Then I realize that far from being quiet the sound of battle is a tremendous, continuous roar so overwhelming we can hear nothing else, and at times my body is vibrating from its intensity.
“Our first objective is to capture Mr. Suribachi at the south tip of the island where underground Japanese emplacements put every square inch of Iwo Jima into their gun sights.
“Finally, fairly close to the base of the volcano . . .we find four Marines. One is a company commander, Captain Bo, in the bottom of the trench. Nearby a dead Marine is sitting without any obvious fatal wound but who appears tattered and shredded by shrapnel, his skin a greenish-gray color that soon becomes a familiar sight . . .Bo is barely conscious and in shock. He has a penetrating neck wound and is unable to talk. He also has a bullet wound in the abdomen and probably internal bleeding. By kneeling I can get below the line of fire, and I start an IV with a can of plasma and soon got him out of shock. . . .Now another Marine walks up with a gaping chest wound. A wedge sliced out of one side, taking part of two ribs. I can see his lungs moving as he breathes. He sits quietly and without complaint while I try to close his chest with what is left of skin and muscle. . . .When he insists on walking back to the beach I can’t stop him, but I doubt he will make it. Two months later he walks into sickbay back in camp returned to full duty.” Bo’s story ends tragically. Four Marines carry his 250-pound linebacker body in a poncho to the beach for evacuation, but a foul-up leaves him stranded on the beach under heavy enemy fire that kills him.
Bill describes a particularly bad day. “The day is filled with terrible wounds for which we have nothing. Two cases are typical. One is a young Marine who was fielding hand grenades the enemy rolled down a slope into the foxhole at him and his buddies. By fielding I mean he is grabbing the incoming grenades and throwing them back. He isn’t quick enough. One grenade blows his right hand off. He continues fielding with his left hand until that too is blown off. He is brought in with his left hand still attached by a shred of skin. Nothing we can do. Later they carry in a boy in shock with a gaping hole in his chest and a severely bleeding abdomen. I am pouring IV fluids in as fast as possible and trying to keep his liver from falling out. He is bleeding faster than I can run in fluids, and he dies quickly. The whole day is like that, and when we are finished I feel terribly useless.” However, the next day one of my corpsmen tells me he overhears two Marines talking. One Marine says, “That Doc Murray is really good. He took a guy’s liver out, sewed it up and put it back in.”
This is not the famous photo taken by Joe Rosenthal, but it is the only flag Bill Murray sees on Iwo Jima—raised on February 23 when the Marines climb to the top of Mt. Suribachi. A larger replacement flag that Rosenthal shot becomes the most widely reproduced photograph of the war in the Pacific.
Jean and I consider Bill Murray warm, sensitive and caring. We can’t imagine how he survived his Iwo Jima ordeal. Although suffering a minor wound when struck by a piece of shrapnel, he did not bother to report his Purple Heart injury, but he is awarded a Silver Star for bravery under fire.
Jean and I are grateful to have Dr. William Harry Thomas Murray back in our lives, and we look forward to many more inspirational visits with him here and in San Diego. Although he strongly objects, we consider him a hero.