Lew
May 28, 2012
On November 20 (1942) our regiment took up defensive positions at Point Cruz west of the Matanikau (river)…A slow advance toward objective further west is begun. The enemy is laying down heavy mortar and machine gun fire. They are well dug in and concealed. Due to the terrain of jungle and ridges and the terrific heat, it is very difficult to get supplies, ammunition and water to our troops. They are taxed to exhaustion. Coordinated artillery, air and mortar fire does not dislodge the enemy. They have dug-in in the coral and in draws and are quite secure. Any exposure of our troops draws accurate enemy fire. Casualties are fairly heavy.
-From the diary of Lt. Col. Samuel Baglien, Executive Officer, North Dakota’s 164th National Guard Unit
Alice’s only brother died in this battle the next day. He was twenty-one years old.
Lew
The 164th Infantry North Dakota National Guard had gone ashore at Guadalcanal the previous month, reinforcing U.S. Marines at Henderson Airfield.
Lew’s unit was the first U.S. Army unit to take offensive action in the Pacific. They were all North Dakota farm boys and small town boys. One of them later explained their much-lauded courage under more or less constant bombardment, combat, and sniper fire: “Because if you let down a friend and neighbor, well this is someone you have known all your life.”
Last night Alice talked about Lew to help me conjure an uncle I never knew.
She and her five sisters called him “Brother” for most of his childhood, she said. “We were so glad to finally have a brother.”
Brother
“He loved to dance when he got older, like all of us. And oh, he fell in love with a Catholic girl, to Mama’s dismay, but she didn’t say anything to him about it.” (Martha, never much of a churchgoer, nevertheless stayed faithful to Luther.)
“Our big black telephone was in the dining room,” Alice said, “and I remember Lew walking into the kitchen holding it and then walking back to the dining room, over and over, when he was talking to a girl. Back and forth. Back and forth. So cute. He dressed in pullover sweaters, nice slacks. He liked clothes.”
He was playful. He was fun. He was that odd man out, the happy Norwegian.
The hardest thing for Alice, she said, was to explain Lew’s death to her firstborn, Bruce, who was four years old at the time. Bruce and his uncle had been close. “Lew played with him all the time. Anything Bruce wanted he could have, as far as Lew was concerned.”
“I remember,” Alice said, “that Bruce asked me, Was it a bad man who killed him? And I said No, not a bad man. It was a man who was fighting for his country.”
After a moment she added, “There was no way to explain it, really. Never a way.”
Later, Bruce would die at around the same age, just shy of twenty. (See In the Gloaming.)
What was Lew expecting from life? What did he want more than anything else? Would he have loved to travel, to cook, to read science fiction and poetry or listen to chamber music or Frank Sinatra or rock and roll? Would he have married the Catholic girl as his namesake, my cousin, married a Catholic girl twenty years after Lew’s death, forcing the family to expand its understanding of religion and Rome?
I have a fantasy that Lew’s safe return from Guadalcanal would have meant that Bruce would have chosen life over an early death, that our uncle’s good looks and happy spirit would always have cheered us whenever we came within range, that he could have brought the other warriors in the family, my father and my uncles, back from battle in a way that extended their feelings of brotherhood and disallowed the sour solace of bars and alcohol and cigarettes. Despite the rise of feminism, his sisters would have made a fuss over him right up until the day their only brother died a natural death in his Bismarck back yard or on horseback out in a far corner of his Wyoming ranch or on the deck of his rambling house in Big Sur.
“I’ll never forget, it was early evening when we buried Lew,” Alice said. “They played Taps, of course.”
After the burial, a woman walked up to Martha as she stood next to the grave and reminded her of what a mess it was over there after those battles, how the men did their best, but how could they be careful about details like names in the midst of everything else?
Guadalcanal military cemetery.
“So many boys got dug graves over there,” the woman said to this grieving mother, “and nobody really knows whose body got the right name or whose got sent back home and whose got left over there. It might not even be your son you buried today.”
“Well,” Martha said, turning away, “it doesn’t matter. It was somebody’s son I buried today.”
Lew was awarded a posthumous Purple Heart.
Later, as everyone knows, Guadalcanal was won. The enemy was vanquished.
Hurray. Hurrah.
May 28, 2012 at 2:42 pm
thank you–as always–thank you Andrea
May 28, 2012 at 2:57 pm
yes, sorry to say, it is always someone’s son, brother, father, friend who is buried – thanks to all – and their families – for their service
May 28, 2012 at 3:11 pm
Thank you for such a tender story and helping us all remember who we honor today.
May 28, 2012 at 3:37 pm
I didn’t think I had any more tears, but I do. I’m struck today by what a waste war is, in so many ways. What a beautiful boy he was. My Dad was lucky – he came home from Gaudalcanal, ruined but alive.
May 28, 2012 at 3:59 pm
Oh Man!!!! What a story on this day that we remember our military. There was a bigger than usual crowd at the ceremony in the cemetery today. Why? Maybe we are all wondering how our own Bruce’s would have lived out their natural lives.
A big thank you to all the Bruces . I love my freedom and my Country.
Bon
May 28, 2012 at 4:44 pm
Oh my, Andrea, what a sweet loving story this is. Your grandmother Martha was something else. Or maybe something not all that rare which is my favorite thought of her. Her saying “I buried somebody’s son today” and, after Lew fell for a Catholic girl, “Martha didn’t say anything about it to him.” and “No it wasn’t a bad man who killed him, but, a man fighting for his country” perhaps, could have fallen from many Mothers’ lips and maybe, today still fall across the universe.
Martha surely had a finely functioning heart.
The first headline I saw on this Memorial Day was “Soldier’s mother says ‘Barbecues are the last thing on my mind’”.
Thank you for giving us this story of Lew and your imaginings
of possible futures for him. You have lived him onward.
Love you,
Dee
May 28, 2012 at 4:45 pm
This is a moving story about Lew and the photographs reinforce the tragedy of war.
May 28, 2012 at 5:26 pm
So sad. And so fitting as we memorialize all these lost souls today. Thank you, again, for sharing your family’s rich history with us.
May 28, 2012 at 6:07 pm
Here’s to Lew, who left too soon. Here’s to Lew, for the brave service he gave to his country. Here’s to Lew and the memories that remain.
Thanks for this story Andrea. It’s nice to remember our vets, and the families they came from. It’s not just your story, but the story of us all.
May 28, 2012 at 6:25 pm
He looks so happy and bright … Kind of like Alice, full of curiosity for what would come next. I’m sorry he, and all the hope and positivity he carried, was killed in that war.
2,000 Americans killed in Afghanistan I heard today. And NATO soldiers? Afghanis (citizen and soldier)? So terrible.
May 28, 2012 at 10:01 pm
This post makes me so sad. And I love the long loved dancing Norweigan Lew that you conjure up. He feels real and true. More so than war, that thief conjured up by men to…what?
May 29, 2012 at 2:53 am
This brought tears to my eyes…for the inhumanity of war and for the courageous humanity of the mothers who can bury another mother’s son as her own.
May 31, 2012 at 8:48 am
A beautiful tribute to an uncle you never knew Andrea and a moving account of one family’s war. I especially liked Martha’s reaction to the thoughtless comments of the woman at the cemetery. A dignified response indeed. (Somehow, I feel sure she did bury her own son though)
June 1, 2012 at 9:29 pm
Thank you, thank you, thank you for reading and for understanding. People always say they sympathize with families who have lost someone they loved in a war, but really the family must be mourned too because it dies as it was and as it might have been. This is the first time I’ve really looked into Lew’s death. I spent many days reading about Guadalcanal, looking at photographs from those battles, and going over his last letter home, in which he joked a little and made it sound as if he was spending time at a boys’ camp with some slight hardships. He did not reveal at all the horrors of the mess that he found himself in or that there was good reason to suppose very few would find their way out of it. As I pieced the various parts of his story together, I also looked straight on at the quality of love he was fortunate enough to receive every day of his life. “Yes, we just adored him,” Alice told me when she read the post. Would that more could be so beloved.
June 3, 2012 at 12:44 pm
I am a little late in my reading of this entry but not too late to be moved by Lew and your family.
July 4, 2012 at 4:49 pm
This is a verty touching story, and a tribute to the memory of a WWII soldier who gave his life saving the world. Lew not only earned a Purple Heart; it appears that he earned a Silver Star as well. The citation is not available, but I have a picture of the engraved medal. Go ask Alice if she’s interested in the book about the heroic 164th Infantry Regiment. “They Were Ready” is an excellent account of the unit’s activities from the soldier’s perspective.
July 4, 2012 at 8:25 pm
Thank you so much for this information. Alice said she thought he’d earned a Silver Star, but since I could not find a record and had never seen it, it didn’t feel right to include it. I saw the book you refer to, and I offered it to Alice, but she just shook her head and said that it would make her too sad. I may get it one day. Thank you for reminding me about it, and many thanks for stopping by and adding to Lew’s story.