EPILOGUE Every Day for the Rest of Your Life

“No one can imagine what it’s like to be in direct contact with the enemy, killing. The loss of an arm or a leg you can learn to live with, but the loss of your soul is something that you may never recover. You won’t know until your day of reckoning comes.”

—Frank Tachovsky

Back in the States, families went about their day-to-day lives with thoughts and prayers for those overseas constantly in their minds. Families diligently scoured news reels and photographs in magazines and newspapers looking for glimpses of their loved ones. They would see their son or husband in almost any face that bore a vague resemblance.

Having received no letters for a month, the Thieves’ wives and parents had no knowledge of the war in the Pacific except from newspapers or radio broadcasts, which reported heavy casualties.

In August of 1944, Merle Evans was finishing a letter to her son at the Evans home at 1807 East Seventy-Sixth Street in Kansas City.

Dear Donny,

Jean told me she had sent you a big picture of herself, tinted and all, and you didn’t even acknowledge it. Why? Elaine says she writes you regularly. How are you and Dottie getting along?

Your Daddy is the superintendent at the downtown Wolferman’s, but he isn’t very enthusiastic about the job because he wrangles all day with his supervisor.

Otherwise, we all are well. Mrs. Flynn took her boy and your brother on a fishing trip in the Ozarks. They left Sunday night and will probably be back tomorrow. We don’t know what the year will bring for your baby brother, of course. He’ll be eighteen in September and will have to register. Southeast is trying to negotiate a deferment, so he can graduate.

Please write soon and tell us all about you, Tommy, Norman, and all your buddies. We miss you so much.

Much love, Mother

As she was sealing the envelope, a sedan pulled up in front of the house. On the same day, four other sedans visited families, another in Kansas City and one each in St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Detroit. Each car bore the same complement of messengers, two Marine officers and one chaplain, to deliver a telegram.

When the five porch doors opened, Merle and Herbert Evans, Marie and Louis Arello, Mary and Martin Dyer, Sr., Evelyn and Donald Johnson, and Margaret and Fergus Kenny all read the same terse notice.

DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON WAS KILLED IN ACTION IN THE PERFORMANCE OF HIS DUTY AND SERVICE OF HIS COUNTRY NO INFORMATION AVAILABLE AT PRESENT REGARDING DISPOSITION OF REMAINS TEMPORARY BURIAL IN LOCALITY WHERE DEATH OCCURRED PROBABLE YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY FURNISHED ANY ADDITIONAL INFORMATION RECEIVED TO PREVENT POSSIBLE AID TO OUR ENEMIES DO NOT DIVULGE THE NAME OF HIS SHIP OR STATION PLEASE ACCEPT MY HEARTFELT SYMPATHY LETTER FOLLOWS

AA VANDEGRIFT LIEUT GEN, USMC COMMANDANT

The promised letter from the Commandant of the Marine Corps arrived three days later, personalized for each family. By the end of World War II, General Vandegrift would send over twenty-four thousand similar letters.

My Dear Mr. and Mrs. Evans:

It is a source of profound regret to me and to his comrades in the United States Marine Corps that your son, Corporal Donald Lee Evans, lost his life in action against enemies of his country, and I wish to express my deepest sympathy to you and members of your family in your great loss.

There is little I can say to lessen your grief, but it is my earnest hope that the knowledge of your son’s splendid record in the service and the thought that he nobly gave his life in the performance of his duty may in some measure comfort you in this sad hour.

Sincerely yours,

A. A. Vandegrift

Lieutenant General, USMC, Commandant

For those of the 40 Thieves fortunate to return home, the war continued to take a great toll upon bodies and souls. The story of “Paul Lewis” is based on the experiences of a member of the platoon, but the other Thieves were hesitant to share the name of a buddy who lost the emotional battle. They knew it could have been any of them on any day.

In early August of 1944, Marvin Strombo received permission to write his parents and tell them of Oliver’s death. But before he could, an attack of Dengue fever sent him to the hospital in Charan Kanoa. Waking after a week of delirium, he glanced at the bed next to him to see his brother Oliver. Still in a fog, Marvin at first thought that he himself had died. “That’s the only explanation that I could think of for seeing Oliver again,” he explained.

During the Banzai that had been launched against Oliver’s outfit on July 1, a grenade exploded near him. The force knocked Oliver unconscious, sent his dog tags flying, and embedded shards of shrapnel in his upper back and head. Corpsmen found him alive among the dead. Surviving the Banzai would lead to a lifetime of pain for Marvin’s older brother; the shrapnel in his head could not be removed, and it caused severe headaches that would never go away. Oliver attempted to lead a normal life and got married, but the relationship lasted for only a year, and he self-medicated with alcohol until his death.

If Bill Emerick had died on that ridge, he would have been remembered as a hero by his wife and child. Instead he returned home and battled with alcohol as well, driving away his wife and child. Physically and mentally scarred by the war, he was unable to fit back into the world he had fought to preserve. Two more failed marriages and estranged children left him with little of the swagger that he had exhibited as one of the 40. He drove away those who tried to love him, and most considered alcohol to be the cause of his death at forty-five.

Life also proved cruel to the smiling artist from New Orleans, Lieutenant Joe Dulcich. After multiple unsuccessful surgeries to repair his severed spinal cord, Joe had wasted from a one-hundred-sixty-pound Marine to a seventy-seven-pound skeleton. The sniper’s bullet that struck Joe on Saipan in July of 1944 finally did its job, and he died on December 22, 1950.

Fitting into civilian life back home proved difficult for many of those even without physical scars. Gone was the regimentation that had governed their lives for the past four years; there were no more corporals or sergeants growling out orders, no more lieutenants to revere, no more living side by side with buddies who had grown to know each other better than anyone else in the world. The skills that kept a Thief alive in the war didn’t translate into peacetime success.

When Smotts and two other Thieves received a month’s leave for Christmas 1944, they were first sent to Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay for thirty days of psychological reorientation. “They felt the Scout-Sniper Platoon needed to be reoriented,” Smotts said, “to face civilian life again. They told us that if we shoot anybody now, if we kill some poor ol’ defense worker, at best we’ll spend the rest of our lives in prison, and at worst we’d be in front of a firing squad.” None of them made it home for Christmas.

Before their train ride from Treasure Island to the Marine base in San Diego, the three Thieves acquired some bottles of booze. Smotts and his buddies settled into the baggage car and proceeded to get soused. By the time the train reached San Diego, railroad workers found the three Thieves dead drunk and summoned MPs to roust them. Upon seeing Scout-Sniper stenciled on their dungarees, the MPs refused to wake them, and they warned the railroad workers to leave them alone. They recommended that the car be uncoupled and the baggage left alone until Smotts and his pals woke up on their own.

The pride and self-worth that came with being one of the 40, the elite of the elite, now meant nothing. The former Thieves competed for jobs with other returning troops who swamped the country with their search for work and security.

“You start out cleaning toilets,” Smotts recalled, “and if you’re lucky, digging ditches for ninety cents an hour. There were no good jobs. You had to do what no one else would do.”

The GI bill provided some help for the returning Thieves. Hal Moore enrolled at Oklahoma A&M and joined the wrestling team. He excelled at the collegiate sport, vastly different from the life-and-death wrestling he had done during the final banzai. In 1948 Moore wore a different uniform while representing the United States, as a member of the Olympic wrestling team in London.

The lack of jobs and the Korean Conflict were good reasons to re-enlist and return to the lifestyle in which the Thieves had felt comfortable. Frank Tachovsky, having risen to the rank of major, would be stationed on Formosa, training troops for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army. Hal Moore, Marvin Strombo, and Walter Borawski rejoined the Corps, and all three accepted promotions to sergeant.

On January 13, 1953, Sergeant Borawski’s platoon, assigned to the Jamestown Line, participated in an assault on a strongly defended enemy position. When his platoon commander was wounded by enemy fire, Borawski assumed command and was immediately injured as well. Although critically wounded, he refused evacuation and led his platoon to victory. Borawski died on the trip back to camp.

Walter Borawski joined Martin Dyer, Jr., as the second of the 40 Thieves to be awarded the Navy Cross.

For those of the 40 Thieves who lived, terrible nightmares plagued them all to their deaths. Frank’s young bride met him in Chicago at the Great Lakes Naval Station in August of 1945. It had been three years since they had seen each other. Roxie had planned a romantic reunion at the Palmer House. She cried when her husband was reticent about going to bed and preferred to sleep in a chair. “What’s wrong with us?” she asked. He could not explain.

“It’s a funny thing,” Frank would say. “When you’re first overseas you dream about going home. But after you’ve been in combat, in direct contact with the enemy, killing, you’re afraid to sleep, afraid to dream.”

For the rest of his life, Frank never slept at night; to get any rest, he managed short naps throughout the day. On his death bed, he dreamed of a dark figure standing at the foot of his hospital bed. “It’s the end of the world for me,” he muttered.

Every night while they were growing up, Alfred Yunker’s children awoke to the wild screams of their father tearing his bedroom apart in his never-ending battle with the trauma of the war.

Heavy drinking was one, perhaps the only, means of coping. In his nineties, Roscoe Mullins’s nightmare of the officer’s tomb ebbed in frequency, but certain sights, sounds, and smells triggered it once again. At first, “I thought I’d have to spend the rest of my life a drunk, like my Old Man,” Mullins told a buddy. The nightmares became so bad he didn’t want to sleep.

Also in his nineties, Bob Smotts recalled, “When I first came home, I shared a bed with my kid brother. The first night, I had one of my nightmares, where I’m fighting with the enemy. I had my brother by the throat, and I almost killed him. My dad had to pull me off.

Martin Strombo in Japan delivering Captain Sadao Yasue’s Good Luck Flag to his younger brother Tatsuya. Courtesy of Marvin Strombo

“The dream is the same every night: I see Kenny get killed, and then I start chasing the Japanese through the elephant grass as hard as I can run. I catch up to one Japanese soldier, and we fight, hand-to-hand. When I wake up, my heart is racing.”

Newlywed Alma Jean Smotts would be startled awake at night by Bob’s choking her. She soon became familiar with the early warning signs of Bob’s nightmare and could wake him before the hand-to-hand combat began.

Marvin Strombo also had nightmares after the war. Sometimes it was something as innocent as the tone of a voice that made him dream of his first banzai. When Marvin’s wife left him shortly after their fourth child was born, he found that being the single parent of four was the best medicine in the world to help him ease his demons.

Time marched on, decades passed, but year after year one thing weighed heavily on Marvin. The promise he had made to the dead Japanese captain in the field of corpses on the outskirts of Garapan remained unfulfilled. But finally, thanks to a series of articles written for the Missoulian by Kim Briggeman under the title Honor among Thieves, the family of the Japanese captain was located.

In August of 2017 the ninety-three-year-old Strombo made the arduous trip to Japan, kept his promise, and delivered Captain Sadao Yasue’s Good Luck Flag to his younger brother Tatsuya.

Upon receiving the sacred heirloom, Tatsuya held it to his face, inhaled deeply, and said, “You have taken good care of my brother.”

Honor among Thieves

“I wouldn’t want to live it over again, but I wouldn’t trade my life for all the gold in the world. And I pray every day for the people I’ve killed.”

—Roscoe Mullins

“None of us ever talked much about the war because killing is nothing to brag about. I’ll tell you one thing that’s guaranteed, those that brag the most did the least. The reason I had trouble talking about what happened was that I feared I was beyond forgiveness for the things I had done.”

—Bob Smotts

“If one has never been in combat against the enemy, one should shut the hell up concerning war.”

—Jerome “Doc” Webber

“I have a hard time putting into words my experiences and feelings. The young men that I served with for years, that had their lives snuffed out in such quick order on those islands, they were just kids. Evans, Dyer, Kenny, Johnson, and Arello never had a chance at life. And so many Japanese boys who were just like us.”

—Bill Knuppel

“For every Mother Theresa, there are many more Stalins and Hitlers. We are an odd species in that we can create Sistine Chapels and centers of great learning, yet consistently find ways for extreme cruelty to one another. You hope that someday the world will grow tired of war.”

—Frank Tachovsky

“War is an awful thing. But if there were another, I’d go. I’d go so my sons wouldn’t have to.”

—Jesus Orozco

Roster of the Scout-and-Sniper Platoon, showing the dead and wounded. From the collection of Frank Tachovsky