When I was eighteen years old I bought a farm. One day the most influential farmer in the community offered me a ride. He was a good man. As we sat on the spring board seat of his utility wagon, he talked to me about religion and said: “Now if we could only kill off all those other wicked people, then things would be all right.”
He meant our neighbors who did not belong to the same faith as his, and mine.
Twenty-four years later, when my own children were more than eighteen, I was an officer in charge of construction for a Seabee battalion. We were on a small island in the South Pacific, seven hundred miles from Truk. The Japs also held Rabaul, sixty miles west of us and Kavieng, eighty miles northwest of Rabaul.
On a hot July day we saw one of our bombers returning from Truk. It was flashing signals for a crash landing. Ambulances and crash trucks came screaming to positions along the shoulders of the flight strip. We all prayed in whispers as the pilot guided this mass of steel and aluminum delicately to the coral surfacing. Its landing gear had been destroyed; Jap zero fighter planes had shot out the hydraulic system which sets the landing wheels in place.
At more than one hundred miles an hour the pilot set the plane’s bottom on the coral. He was hoping it would slide straight down the runway. It did not. Veering to one side it slid about eight hundred feet, crossed the shoulder and ditch, then plunged ahead into a large grading machine. Several of the machine guns began to fire, and we all fell to the ground instantly, Fortunately, the plane did not catch fire.
But the pilot’s control board had been shoved back almost to the center of the plane. We had to use a cutting torch to extricate the bodies. Only a Jewish boy, the rear gunner, was alive. He lived for ten more hours; it would have been better if he had not.
Our dynamite crew worked all night in the cemetery located on a small peninsula jutting out into the Coral Sea. Swaying palm trees watched over the others buried in this lonely place; it was mostly solid rock. When I left at midnight the crew had blasted a trench six feet deep by four feet wide and seventy feet long. The dynamite blasts toppled the crude markers placed on graves of others. Most of them read, “My Buddy, born 1921, 1922 or 1923—Died 1943.”
The next day at noon, officers and men attended the funeral. Perspiration brought about by the fierce jungle heat soaked through the carefully ironed clothes.
The guard of honor stood at attention across the grave from the two chaplains, one a Catholic and the other a Baptist. We officers stood behind the guard of honor, but I had a clear view of the two chaplains standing side by side, a foot from the edge of the grave. The box of the Jewish boy was directly below where the chaplains stood; the others of different faiths were in boxes placed end to end. I had arrived early to direct the placing of the boxes into the long trench. There was no thought of segregation by faiths. Only by accident had the box of the Jewish boy been placed at approximately the center of the long trench.
The Navy hymnal has within its covers the prescribed burial rituals for three faiths: Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. The Catholic chaplain read the service for those of his faith, the Protestant for those of his. The Protestant then turned the pages with the book mark he had inserted, and started to read the service for the Jewish boy. His voice, already husky, became weaker. I knew he had a cold just as many of us did. I leaned forward to catch his words; his voice was almost inaudible.
He was half through reading the Jewish ritual when I noticed he moved his hand holding the book slowly towards the Catholic chaplain. I then noticed the right hand of the Catholic chaplain reaching up toward the hymnal. The bright sun illuminated the faces of the two chaplains as their eyes met. The Catholic chaplain turned his eyes to the hymnal just as the other’s voice failed altogether.
Not a syllable was missed as the Protestant minister transferred the hymnal to the other chaplain’s hand. The Catholic completed the service for the Jewish boy. Then we all kneeled for prayer; as I felt the sun on my neck, I thought of a warm day many years before when I sat on the seat of my neighbor’s wagon.