DUTY HONOR COUNTRY

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the last public speech of General Douglas MacArthur. It was given at the United States Military Academy at West Point from where he was graduated and later served as Superintendent. His audience was the Corps of Cadets. His theme was simple.

We ask men to become part of something greater than themselves. We ask them to volunteer to become a counterweight on the scales that free men must always bring back into balance, into harmony.

One of these men was Corporal Leonard W. Putnam, my wife Amy’s uncle.

On May 25, 1945 “in the Pacific area” as his scroll says, a 42 year old piano salesman from Jersey City, NJ was hit by a Japanese mortar shell. Eye witnesses tell of the upper right quadrant of his body being blown up and away from the rest of him.

In the song “Young Willie McBride” a question is asked at the headstone of a 19 year old Tommy. “Was it quick and clean or was it slow and obscene”?

Corporal Putnam was dead before the rest of him hit the ground.

I’ve been doing these tributes since 1997. He and his wife had no children. It was my attempt to keep his name alive. This is the first time that Corporal Putnam’s niece, my wife Amy, is not here with her handy blue pencil.

She had more than a passing interest in my efforts what with both the Japanese Navy and the German Navy trying to sink the ship her father served on as a surgeon. It is worth noting that the “RESET” button that the Kellogg-Briand Naval Treaty, a treaty that earned its architects Nobel Peace Prizes did not work. It proved to be no impediment to war. A case can be made for it hastening it.

In Macarthur’s speech he says that the American soldier has “drained deep the chalice of courage”.

A bit of homework revealed that Amy’s cousin, Andy Safner, was about 100 miles North of Okinawa on May 25, 1945. He was a radio man on a Destroyer Escort. His job was simple. His ship, slow and not well armored, had one job. It was to be the little yapping dog that wakes up the big dogs. His ship was the first American Naval vessel to encounter incoming Kamikazes. They were offered up as bait. The more the little ships engaged the kimonoed killers the better it was for the bigger ships, especially the carriers. Andy earned the naval equivalent of the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, an honor given only to those who have been engaged in armed combat with the enemy. Several of his shipmates had been killed by Kamikaze attacks. He had “seen the elephant”.

In what has become a story unique to America, in a tribute to “American Exceptionalism”, Andy came back from combat to a bartender’s job at Amy’s grandfather’s saloon. He went to college at night to earn a degree in accounting. Before becoming a partner in a Big 8 accounting firm he married Alice Ozimek and they lived happily ever after.

In the 35 years that I knew him we spoke of many things. 10Ks, Tax Court, kids, debits and credits, inter alia. He never once spoke of his time on the razor’s edge of life, of death. The wheel, having turned in his favor, was never mentioned.

Sipping also from the “chalice of courage” was my uncle John who went everywhere that MacArthur went. The first time he fired at the Japanese his rifle was 39 years old. A glass is raised to my uncle Frank. He made 3 forced landings. He learned that, yes, you can eat flies.

A glass of whisky, to be precise, a glass of single malt whisky, is raised to Dennis Greenhough. He enlisted at the age of 17 in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment at Manchester, England. He landed on Sword Beach on D-Day. He too was wounded by artillery. When he was mustered out he was a Captain.

My uncle Adam, a Scot of some note, said that “more good has come from an inn than any other invention of mankind”. I met Pink in a saloon in Antigua in 1979. We celebrated the coming of Lady Thatcher and the certain arrival of the great Reagan. He was with Barrie Cooper who had also “taken the King’s shilling” but for a later conflict.

I mentioned MacArthur’s speech to a friend in Massachusetts. He told me that he will be burying his father-in-law in June in the cemetery at West Point. Both were graduated from West Point. Both were Colonels. Both were combat veterans. Both will be together for all time.

From a corporal on Okinawa to two field grade officers in the same grave the sacred chain that MacArthur spoke of, “the long gray line”, is made clear yet again.

“In their youth their hearts were touched by fire”

My job, “to remember them with honour”, is simple.


KS


I add two names: A teammate, Greg Koch, and a fraternity brother, Bill Sauer.

God rest their souls