Honoring Those Who Dare to Fight
On this night twenty years ago, I was preparing to cross the border from Kuwait into Iraq. At the time I was not thinking about writing a book about my experience there. I was intensely focused on accomplishing our mission and bringing all my Marines back alive. After I came home from the war, I tried to write a memoir and I failed. Last year, I tried again and failed again. I got an agent, a great one, and worked hard on a book proposal. I nearly wrote the whole book. Every single publishing firm rejected it. Some said it was “a story that had already been told.” Some said America and those who might read a niche book like this had “moved on.” The shelf on the Iraq War is already full. It was suggested I come up with some unique angle that would appeal to a broader audience and therefore sell more copies. I refused to change the story just to sell more books. So, I decided to publish with a little help from my friends.
I reconnected with an old Naval Academy friend of mine, Ryan Connolly who had gone to film school at USC after he left the Marine Corps, started a successful media business in LA, and was launching a publishing division. Ryan and I created, Barstool Ballads, in the spirit of Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads, to help veterans tell the stories they’ve always wanted to tell, in their own vernacular, but felt they couldn’t. Later this year, we will publish my memoir, Running Toward Fire: Honoring Those Who Dare to Fight. Through the veteran service organization I joined, Patrol Base Abbate, I met fellow veteran and writer Michael Jerome Plunkett who is editing my memoir. To both Ryan and Michael, I am eternally grateful.
Here, in honor of all who dare to fight, I have published the first chapter of my book. I hope you enjoy this amuse-bouche and when the full meal is ready to be served, you devour it.
Chapter 1: A Call to Serve
“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’” — The Holy Bible (NIV); Isaiah 6:8
Why do some men run toward the sound of enemy gunfire while others freeze or run the other way? I wonder about this all the time. Can it be nurtured? Is it how you were raised? Can you be conditioned to face death and put yourself in harm’s way? Or is it self-selection? Is there something deep in the nature of those courageous few that attracts them to combat and who voluntarily sacrifice themselves once they are in it? Maybe it’s a bit of both. As long as there is evil in this world, we will need men and women who are willing to run toward the sound of enemy gunfire. From a young age, I sorely wanted to be one of them.
My childhood was mostly happy. I grew up on the east side of Gainesville, Florida, a land-grant college town, hidden in the sandy pine tree forests in the middle of nowhere. Some call North Florida “South Georgia” or “the deep, deep south.” “Hogtown” is what my hometown used to be named and it is roughly equidistant from the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. There is no reason to build a town so far from both beaches. Our parents paid around $25,000 for our first home. It was built in 1959 and they purchased it in the mid-1970s. The house was a single-story of cinder blocks painted beige with dark brown trim. All the houses on our street looked the same except for the different colors they were painted. Ours had three bedrooms and one small bathroom we all shared. There were jalousie windows that could be hand-cranked open to let in a breeze during a humid day or cranked shut to keep out the mosquito fog sprayed regularly by a city pest control truck. The house had no air conditioning, but it did have a kerosene heater. My sister and I loved to cuddle up close to the heater on cool winter nights, despite grave warnings from our mom. I grew to love the smell of kerosene because it became what home smelled like.
Some of the house’s best features were the prickly pear cactuses that formed a border on one side of the front yard and a chain-link fence that formed a border on the other side. It made for an exciting front yard to play touch football in as no one wanted to make a diving catch into the sharp cactus tines of the end zone, but many kids did, including me. A green plastic water hose coiled up on the front of the house was perfect for quenching your thirst on hot Florida afternoons. It was also a convenient setup for a homemade slip-and-slide, which my parents crafted out of Visqueen plastic sheeting and Publix dish soap. The backyard had a tire swing made from an old tractor tire that made you feel like you could fly, especially when wearing the Superman costume my mom handstitched for me. The backyard was fenced in, which allowed us to have big dogs from as early as I can remember.
The house was only a couple of blocks away from Metcalfe Elementary School and Howard Bishop Middle School. My sister and I frequently walked to school together and back home with friends. We could also walk or ride our bikes to Gresham’s drug store, the Knights of Columbus pool, or the “pick-a-flick” movie rental store. We knew our neighbors and we looked out for each other. Halloween had a personal feel to it. You knew which house was going to hand out the full-sized candy bars and which ones were going to give you pocket change, raisins, or even worse, a toothbrush. When my mom had to work late as a “seven on, seven off” shift nurse, we would stay at our next-door neighbor’s house until mom came home. We would ride bikes up and down the street for hours and hang out at friends’ homes until my stepdad would step outside and loudly whistle for us to come home. Some of my best memories were made at this unremarkable house, on this unremarkable street, in this unremarkable neighborhood. It is my earliest childhood memory that still haunts me.
When my parents were still married, my biological father frequently came home from work and would drink beers until he passed out, sometimes on the shag carpet floor of our living room. At three and a half years old, I was potty training and woke up in the middle of the night to use our shared family bathroom. My father had broken a beer bottle on the bathroom floor and left shards of brown glass everywhere. I stepped on a large piece of glass that became lodged in the bottom of my foot. I screamed for my mom as I hobbled to their bedroom leaving a trail of small bloody footprints in the hallway. My mom tended to my wounded foot as she verbally berated my dad and kicked him out of their bedroom. With my foot bandaged up, I was able to make my way to the kitchen where I stood just outside the doorframe and saw my mom on the phone threatening to call the police on my dad. Later, I found out that she called my grandma, my dad’s mom, instead but pretended she had called the police. Shortly thereafter, my dad moved out and my parents got divorced.
In my family, the instinct and will to fight skipped a generation. My mom raised me to be a kind, peace-loving young man. She would not allow me to own or play with toy guns or weapons. Despite this, one day she found me in our backyard hurling a wooden spear at a bird’s nest like a javelin. I had broken off a branch of a tree and sharpened one end of it by sanding it down on our concrete driveway to form a tip that could kill a bird. Both of my grandfathers were World War II and Korean War veterans. They wanted to fight, they fought, and they experienced unspeakable things. To me, they were like Roman statues, larger than life and resolute in their silence. On the other hand, my biological father was a draft dodger. He conscientiously objected to the Vietnam War based on his conveniently newfound new age religious beliefs.
On the Friday before Labor Day weekend in September of 1967, just after the Summer of Love, my dad was busy bringing a “dash of Haight-Ashbury” to Yellow Springs, Ohio by opening a psychedelic art gallery at the Epic book shop on Xenia Avenue in downtown. He was twenty-one years old, prime fighting age, and had dropped out of college. At the exact same time, in Vietnam, the fabled 5th Marine Regiment, that I would later serve with in Iraq, was about to engage in Operation Swift in the Quế Sơn Valley. On Labor Day, September 4, 1967, at 4:30am, around 2,500 People’s Army of Vietnam soldiers attacked the position of 1st Battalion, 5th Marines. By early morning, 26 Marines were confirmed dead and reinforcements from Companies K and M from the 3rd Battalion were called in. By the end of all the fighting, there were an estimated 127 Americans, 28 South Vietnamese soldiers, and more than 600 enemy soldiers killed.
Lieutenant Vincent Robert Capodanno Jr., affectionately known as the “Grunt Padre,” was a Catholic priest and Navy Chaplain serving in Vietnam with 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, the same infantry battalion I would cross the border with into Iraq. When Capodanno heard two platoons from his battalion were taking casualties and were about to be overrun, he ran, unarmed, toward the enemy gunfire to get to the wounded and dying Marines to provide them with comfort and read the dying their last rites. During the ensuing firefight, the Grunt Padre was killed and posthumously awarded the highest U.S. military award for combat valor, the Congressional Medal of Honor. The citation reads:
“For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty as Chaplain of the 3d Battalion, in connection with operations against enemy forces. In response to reports that the 2d Platoon of M Company was in danger of being overrun by a massed enemy assaulting force, Lt. Capodanno left the relative safety of the company command post and ran through an open area raked with fire, directly to the beleaguered platoon. Disregarding the intense enemy small-arms, automatic-weapons, and mortar fire, he moved about the battlefield administering last rites to the dying and giving medical aid to the wounded. When an exploding mortar round inflicted painful multiple wounds to his arms and legs, and severed a portion of his right hand, he steadfastly refused all medical aid. Instead, he directed the corpsmen to help their wounded comrades and, with calm vigor, continued to move about the battlefield as he provided encouragement by voice and example to the valiant Marines. Upon encountering a wounded corpsman in the direct line of fire of an enemy machine gunner positioned approximately 15 yards away, Lt. Capodanno rushed in a daring attempt to aid and assist the mortally wounded corpsman. At that instant, only inches from his goal, he was struck down by a burst of machine-gun fire. By his heroic conduct on the battlefield, and his inspiring example, Lt. Capodanno upheld the finest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life in the cause of freedom.”
My dad claimed to be a pacifist, for religious reasons, and I guess, in many ways, he was one. He was just not the courageous kind of pacifist like Chaplain Capodanno. Do I think less of my dad for avoiding the Vietnam war? No, I think less of him because he never found anything greater than himself worth fighting for. Is a man a man if he does not know what or for whom he would die? I think less of him because he gave up his parental rights to my half-sister, Sasha. His name was removed from her birth certificate and her last name was permanently changed to her stepfather’s last name. Most things are forgivable, for me, this is not one of them. Now, as a father of three children myself, I cannot imagine ever giving up my rights to my kids. I would kill for them and if necessary, I would die for them. My dad, I am convinced, would not have died for me.
My dad’s dad, William Nelson Boaz, Jr., served in World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. He never talked about what he did during the wars or on any of his deployments. My grandmother had a corner cupboard with a set of glass doors and backlighting in her dining room which she used to proudly display my grandfather’s military accolades. Over time, I would ask him about them. Getting war stories out of my grandfather was like trying to cut down an old oak tree with a rusty butter knife. No matter how hard I tried to get him to talk, he would always find a way to deflect or redirect the conversation. He was impenetrable. He would say, “oh, those old things? They mean nothing to me.” Sometimes I would get bits of information from my grandma or other family members. Eventually I noticed he had been awarded a Soldier’s Medal. I asked around and found out it was for peacetime heroism and typically lifesaving heroism. I pried some details out of him about what had happened. Maybe it was my persistent pestering that wore him down or maybe it was his impending mortality — he knew he must die — that convinced him to open up to me. It didn’t matter why he told me, it only mattered that he told me.
Every other Wednesday night my dad had parental visitation rights with my sister and me. Not being much of a cook, our dad would take us to our grandparents’ house each week for dinner. Upon arrival, our grandma would always greet us in the same way. We would run to her door and say, “Hi grandma! How are you doing?” She would reply, “Better now that you are here.” When we would arrive, grandpa was always back in his office “working,” which typically meant writing an angry Op-Ed piece for the Gainesville Sun local newspaper. I remember one of his rants in the early 1980’s was about how Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did not deserve to have a federal holiday in his name. More than anything, I believe it agitated my grandpa that President Ronald Reagan, his political idol, was the one that had signed the bill into law. I wonder if my grandpa knows just how much his grandson respects and looks up to Dr. King and how he has the Letter from Birmingham Jail framed and up on his office wall.
When dinner was served, grandma would ring a small porcelain bell and grandpa would make his grand entrance, weaving through the kitchen to the dining room, on his little Rascal electric scooter to the head of the table. He was a shell of the man he used to be. The stale aroma of Newport cigarettes clung to every piece of clothing he owned and the big floor-to-ceiling glass windows in their house were covered in a thick yellow film of tar and nicotine. His typical uniform of the day was a stained, stretched-out V-neck white undershirt and cotton boxer shorts with an easy-access front flap. My grandmother would discretely tuck his penis back into his boxer shorts whenever it would poke out. Against his doctor’s orders, he still drank heavily and smoked several cigarettes a day. A barrel-shaped stool with a turquoise cushion screw-off top hid his cartons of cigarettes and bottles of vodka from my grandma or anyone else who would have thrown out his contraband. Breakfast for him consisted of black-as-midnight coffee, cigarettes, and an extra-large screwdriver to get his morning buzz going. His favorite lunch was bacon and mayonnaise sandwiches made on my grandmother’s homemade sourdough bread and grilled on a George Foreman grill. He knew his health was failing and he didn’t care. How do you get someone who has narrowly escaped death on more than a few occasions to fear a long slow decline? You don’t. You help them enjoy the ride.
One day, shockingly, he shared with me the true story behind his Soldier’s Medal. He told the story to me with a lucidness I had not heard from him in a long time. He would tell other stories repeatedly, forgetting he had already told them, and leaving out key facts he was no longer able to recall. On this night, something was different. He seemed eager to tell me, as if he was passing along to me an important inheritance that he could no longer keep for himself. The incident happened when he was 25 years old, and he was finally telling it to me in his seventies. He relived the events as he spoke, and I could tell the details were seared somewhere deep inside his memory. It was as if he was transported back to the scene of the crash in 1942 and was reporting on it as a witness. “We were flying an experimental bomber outside of Los Angeles and the landing gear stuck, so we had to crash land the plane on a busy street just past the airport.” I had so many questions. “How do you land a plane without landing gear? How do you land a plane on a busy street?” He continued with the story, “The plane caught fire. I jumped to safety and then heard the pilot call for my help. I ran back into the burning plane and helped him carry out all our other crew members, including our engineer who was knocked unconscious. Just as we all made it to safety, the plane exploded.” The story sounded impossible. It sounded like something straight out of an action thriller. It did not sound real.
Shortly before my grandfather died of a heart attack in late July 1991, he sat me down in his office to give me a meaningful gift. It was worthless and priceless all at the same time. It was a laminated lapel pin of a Desert Shield / Desert Storm U.S. Postal Stamp. It was not worth more than the 29 cents on the stamp and perhaps less because you could not use it to mail anything. At the top, it said, “Honoring Those Who Served.” On the stamp was the military medal for serving in the first Gulf War. As he pressed the pin hard into my hand, my grandfather said to me, “Son, I don’t care what you do with your life as long as you do something that serves something bigger than yourself.” Do something that serves something bigger than yourself.
After my grandfather died, he was buried at Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell with full military funeral honors. There was the folding of the American Flag presented to my grandmother and the 21-gun salute by the soldiers assigned to his funeral detail. When we made it back to my grandparents’ house, my grandma helped me find the presidential citation for my grandfather’s Soldier’s Medal signed by then President Franklin D. Roosevelt:
“William N. Boaz, First Lieutenant, Air Corps, United States Army. For heroism displayed near the Los Angeles Municipal airport, Los Angeles, California, January 10, 1942. When a North American experimental bomber was forced to land with a retracted landing gear, it crashed and burst into flames before coming to a stop. Lieutenant Boaz, the co-pilot, immediately jumped to safety. Hearing his pilot call for help, with utter disregard for his personal safety, he re-entered the burning airplane and assisted the pilot in removing a member of the crew who had been injured and rendered unconscious. The airplane was cleared just in time to avoid a terrific explosion.”
“…with utter disregard for his personal safety, he re-entered the burning airplane…” That line awakened something deep inside of me. The plane had already burst into flames. My grandpa had already jumped to safety. As a pilot and an engineer, he must’ve known the plane was about to explode, yet he did not hesitate to run toward the fire. I hoped, in this way, I would turn out to be more like my grandfather than my father.
Years later, I found a front-page article in the Los Angeles Times from January 11th, 1942, that does a better job than his Soldier’s Medal citation describing the details of my grandpa’s harrowing crash landing:
Crippled Army Bomber Crashes
Plane Overshoots Field Here and Catches Fire; One in Crew Injured
Forced into a crash landing when its retracted wheels jammed, a twin-engine Army bomber overshot Municipal Airport yesterday, smashed through a heavy wire fence, slithered across Sepulveda Blvd. and burst into flames, critically injuring one of its crew of three.
The wild, careening crack-up ended in a field 1,000 feet west of the airport with Maj. M.J. Lee, pilot, and Lieut. W.N. Boaz, co-pilot, leaping clear of the blazing ship and helping to rescue L. Sibilsky, civilian flight engineer, who was badly hurt in the smashed aftersection.
Wrecks Army Truck
In its wake the warplane left a wrecked Army truck struck by a wing tip, a flattened billboard and a swath of metal parts sheared off by the long belly slide.
Maj. Lee received minor burns and Lieut. Boaz a cut forehead. Sibilsky’s injuries were not disclosed. All three are from Wright Field, Dayton, O., according to Maj. E.K. Merritt of the Western Air Corps Procurement District, who said the North American craft was on a routine check flight when the main landing wheels locked in.
Engines Torn Loose
The crash landing also brought slight injuries to a soldier who was seated in the military truck clipped by the bomber and minor burns to a North American fireman who helped extinguish the blaze.
Both engines were torn from the wings as the ship swept through the billboard and bounced across a small hollow.
With the gas lines snapped, fire broke out in first the right wing tank and then the left. The blaze reached 150 feet up into the darkening sky and attracted thousands of spectators.
Sepulveda Blvd. was jammed with motorists and Army squads, factory police and State Highway patrolmen were ordered to surround the burning wreckage to keep sight-seers away and clear of broken telephone wires.
Flares Ignited
As a climax of the crash a series of magnesium flares ignited and showered fireworks over the scene, hampering the efforts of firemen who extinguished the blaze in an hour.
The bomber crew and the injured soldier and fireman were treated at Centinela Hospital, Inglewood.”
Later in life, a bit of internet sleuthing helped me confirm something my grandfather had mentioned at the time, but the newspapers did not report. According to the flight records, there were five people in the aircraft and my grandfather, and the pilot had helped get everyone, all three other passengers, to safety before the explosion. My grandfather had said there were a couple of dignitaries on the flight in addition to the pilot and the engineer, so maybe that is why they were not mentioned in the newspaper articles. I was also able to track down the type of aircraft they were flying: a brand-new B-25C Mitchell, the first of its kind.
The B-25B was the aircraft used in the April 18th, 1942, Doolittle Raid to bomb mainland Japan only four months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Based on the serial number of my grandfather’s aircraft, it was the first B-25C ever produced, built in Inglewood, California. There was only one B-25C produced in 1941 and it received its first test flight on November 9, 1941. The plane was accepted by the U.S. Army Air Corps on December 29th, 1941, and my grandfather was flying it less than two weeks later on January 10th, 1942. It was number 1 of 1,625 B-25Cs produced. The plane weighed 20,300 pounds empty and could reach a max of 34,000 pounds. The bomber could carry over 2,000 gallons of fuel and 3,000 pounds of bombs over 1,500 miles. It had a .30 caliber nose gun and four .50 caliber turret guns.
The B-25 bomber was named after William “Billy” Mitchell, a World War I hero, who is regarded as the father of the United States Air Force. Mitchell was busted down from Brigadier General to Colonel and court-martialed for insubordination for speaking out against a lack of investment in military aviation by government and military leaders. Colonel Mitchell resigned, his vision of the future of warfare moving to the skies eventually became true, and his namesake bombers helped turn the tide of World War II for the U.S. and allied forces.
My maternal grandfather, Keith Merwin Deal, served in WWII and the Korean War. He retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force’s Judge Advocate General Corps. The Air Force helped pay for his law degree at the University of Miami, Florida. He stayed in the reserves and practiced as a defense attorney with a focus on family law. Faith, family, and serving others were core to his being. Legend has it he would take payment for his legal services in whatever form his clients were able to pay. In rural Florida, that was often a bushel of oranges, a flat of tomatoes, or a few farm-fresh watermelons. War was not something he spoke about. NASCAR races, Dale Earnhardt, and politics were more his style. He loved playing long card games and munching on salty snacks. I do not ever remember him not being hunched over with a slow gait. Fresh watermelons and boiled peanuts purchased from a roadside stand were what he would always bring to our family potluck suppers. I would help him carry the watermelons in from the trunk of his dark blue Cadillac sedan, which was essentially two couches on four wheels with a trunk big enough for two dead bodies. At family events, he would always volunteer to say grace before the meal, and he regularly went to church on Sundays.
When I visited him at his house, I would make my way upstairs to a small, finished room above his office in the attic. There was a short wooden ladder up to the room and shag white carpet on the floor. He kept his stamp collection up there in photo albums and I would lay there for hours and devour the plastic-covered pages of stamps like a normal kid would read an entire collection of comic books. The stamps marked time in history and told a story about what was important at each moment. Letters connected generations of people across time and distance and stamps made it possible to stay in touch. Mixed in with his stamp collection were old photographs from his time in World War II. I noticed some photos which looked like they were taken from aircraft, high up in the sky, above cities at night.
When I pestered him about the photos, he would try and minimize their significance. He would say, “oh, those are just some old souvenirs from my time in the Pacific.” Overtime, I pieced together he had been stationed near the Philippines. He had been a technical officer on a B-29 Superfortress, the same type of bomber that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. They called his role the “triple threat” since he was the bombardier, navigator, and radar technician all in one position. He had participated in firebombing Japanese military installations and civilian cities. You could tell bombing civilians took a toll on him. He was quietly proud of his service and knew there were grave consequences to what they had done, but even graver ones if they hadn’t done it.
The only war story that I could consistently get him to tell me was about how he and his fellow squadron mates played a prank on one of their senior officers who was particularly annoying to their entire unit. This officer would wake them up early, every morning, even if they had not had enough sleep, which was bad for their combat readiness and mission execution. So, to send this asshole a message, they set all their windup alarms on the hour and the half hour to go off throughout the night while he tried to sleep. They hid them all around his bunk so that he would only find one at a time, turn it off and fall back to sleep, only to have the next alarm go off less than thirty minutes later. Every time my grandpa would tell me this story, we would both laugh until our bellies ached. His childlike grin let me know that deep down inside he was a prankster.
The one war-related thing he did admit to me was that he flew in the same type of bomber as the ones that dropped the atomic bombs and that he was in the air, on a mission over Japan, when the A-bombs were dropped. I confirmed that he was deployed from the U.S. to the Pacific from July 17, 1945, until April 5, 1946, and then I found an Air Medal citation for my grandfather:
“For meritorious achievement while participating in aerial flights as combat crew members in successful combat missions from a base in the Mariana Islands against the Japanese Empire. All missions were flown without fighter escort under rapidly changing and oftentimes-adverse weather conditions. The flights were subjected to intense enemy anti-aircraft fire and fighter opposition. There were constantly present difficult navigational problems, danger of engine failure and consequent ditching many miles at sea. Under prolonged periods of physical and mental strain, and undaunted by the many hazards, faced regularly and continuously, each crew member displayed such courage and skill in the performance of his duty as to reflect great credit on himself and the Army Air Forces.”
Citations Air Medal, 497th Bomb Group
From 28 July 1945 to 9 August 1945
Second Lieutenant Keith M. Deal 0872754, Air Corps, United States Army
The atomic bombs were detonated over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945, respectively. This was the exact timeframe my grandfather was flying B-29 Superfortress missions over Japan. “The flights were subjected to intense enemy anti-aircraft fire and fighter opposition.” My grandfather flew on missions directly into enemy fire, “without fighter escort,” risking his life every time. It is obvious that not everyone who flew on these missions made it back alive. In fact, when my grandfather returned home to Bedford, Iowa, he met and eventually married the widow of a WWII veteran who was killed when his B-17 bomber was shot down flying over Berlin, Germany. The wife he left behind, Marjorie Mae Keith, would become my grandmother on my mom’s side and their daughter Karen, my aunt. Captain Gordon Davidson was a navigator, like my grandfather, but he flew missions in the European theater. His plane had penetrated deep into Nazi territory when it was shot down by anti-aircraft fire on May 24, 1944.
Like both of my grandfathers and Captain Davidson before me, I hoped I would be one of those men who, without hesitation, runs back into the flaming experimental bomber knowing it’s seconds away from exploding. I hoped I would be one of those men who would voluntarily fly sortie after sortie into enemy territory knowing I would once again face intense enemy anti-aircraft fire and fighter opposition. I hoped I would be one of those men who runs toward the sound of enemy gunfire while other men freeze or run the other way.
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