Posted on Sun, Jun. 06, 2004 (Miami Herald)

 

COMMENTARY

 

'Semper fidelis' to William Manchester

 

 

BY JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY

 

Goodbye, William Manchester. Semper fidelis.  The author was dying even as the nation celebrated the dedication of the granite and bronze World War II Memorial.  Manchester built his own memorial to World War II, and to the memories of infantry combat -- a slim book crafted of his nightmares.

 

He was prolific -- he wrote of slain Presidents, a British lion, the Renaissance, an American Caesar, altogether 18 books -- but if he had written only one book, Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific

War, he would have completed his mission in the eyes of veterans.

 

In it he wrote: “This, then, was the life I knew, where death sought me, during which I was transformed from a cheeky youth to a troubled man who, for over 30 years, repressed what he could not bear to remember.”

 

Manchester had been a Marine sergeant in World War II in the Pacific. His personal crucible was the grinding, bloody campaign to break the Japanese resistance on the island of Okinawa. He was wounded once and left the hospital to go back to the front lines, back to his unit and to almost certain death or a worse wound.

 

In fact, he was wounded again much more severely and spent months in a hospital recovering. Many years later, in for a checkup, an X-Ray picked up a Japanese bullet resting not far from his heart. That

was a wound he never knew he had gotten. Apparently, as he lay unconscious, awaiting triage at a rear-area aid station, a stray enemy round, nearly spent, thumped into his chest.

 

But it was the nightmares, the ghosts, the memories that troubled his heart that led Manchester to begin the journey back to the Pacific islands where he and his beloved Marines fought, a journey that was at the heart of Goodbye Darkness.

 

“Abruptly the poker of memory stirs the ashes of recollection and uncovers a forgotten ember, still smoldering down there, still hot, still glowing, still red as red,” he wrote.

 

Manchester said that he was haunted by the ghost of the 20-year-old Marine that he had been, a ghost that appeared and reappeared to question his every action and decision: Is this what I fought and bled for?

 

So the middle-aged best-selling author began a Pacific journey to remote and almost forgotten islands and atolls, once named in screaming headlines but now again backwaters, where Marines fought and bled and

suffered. Guadalcanal. Tarawa. Iwo Jima. And his own battlefield, Okinawa.

 

Manchester wrote that he and his brothers in arms thought that someday school children would memorize the names and dates of the battles in which they suffered so much for victory, much as they had done for

the wars their fathers and grandfathers had fought. But something happened. After the war's end, America changed, life speeded up and the battles had meaning only for those who had survived them.

 

His words echoed and resonated with the combat veterans of his war and other American wars, especially the veterans of the one in Vietnam. Goodbye Darkness was a slender volume, but they clutched it to their

hearts. There, they thought, it's not just us. Even a famous author is haunted by night dreams of a war and visited by spirits who question whether this was what was supposed to come of all that blood, all that

dying.

 

There was comfort in knowing you weren't the only one who quietly went a little crazy at certain times of the year, on certain dates, when you were ambushed by vivid memories of what it was like to be hip-deep

in death and dying and killing.

 

“I have another drink, and then I learn, for the hundredth time, that you can't drown your troubles, not the real ones, because if they are real they can swim,” Manchester wrote. “One of my worst recollections, one I had buried in my deepest memory bank long ago, comes back with a clarity so blinding that I surged forward against the seat belt, appalled by it, filled with remorse and shame. I am remembering the first man I slew.” He knew what we knew and we loved him for that.

 

“Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction,” Manchester wrote. “They fight for one another.”  At the end, Manchester ran out of time and out of words. He suffered two strokes after the death of his wife in 1998 [this was shortly before their 50th wedding anniversary – dt] and struggled unsuccessfully to write the third and final volume in his epic Churchill biography, The Last Lion. “Language for me came as easily as breathing for 50 years, and I can't do it anymore,” he told an interviewer three years ago. “The feeling is indescribable.” This week Manchester moved on from that darkness with the gratitude of many old soldiers who found comfort and company in his words.

 

Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers.