Service takes many forms, and all should be appreciated

I’ve been reading my grandfather’s diary.

For the year 1943.

Grandpa McCallum was a chaplain with a U.S. Army unit in the South Pacific. It’s a role I have always found interesting — men and women of peace operating during a time of war.

His diary is sparse, given it’s only 3.5 inches by 6 inches and limited to one page per day. Not a lot of room to elaborate on events. Or provide personal insights, editorialize fears, hopes.

Still, what’s said is illuminating.

Jan. 1 finds him in New Caledonia, waiting with other units for orders. On Jan. 10, he boards the transport ship U.S.S. Macauley bound for an unknown destination five days away.

En route, the unknown becomes the known — a place codenamed “Cactus.” For those in the know, Cactus refers to Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, scene of bloody and ferocious fighting from August 1942 – late February 1943, first by the Marines 1st Division and then by the Army.

If you like your history Hollywood-ized, watch the movie “The Thin Red Line.”

Granddad landed on Guadalcanal in mid-January as Japanese forces were withdrawing from the island. It was still a battle, as reflected by his entries.

Stationed near Henderson Field — an airstrip built by the Japanese that was the reason for the U.S.’s invasion — he endured and witnessed what many others did. Frequent shelling by the Japanese Army as it pulled back — and Navy that sailed uncontested down what was called “The Slot” and took up position offshore of the airfield in what was infamously referred to as “Iron Bottom Sound.”

There were nightly air raids, sometimes multiple alarms, that flung Granddad from his cot headfirst into his foxhole outside the tent. Sometimes, the raids amounted to nothing.

Other times, not so much.

“Had a very bad air raid,” he writes on Jan. 26. “Bomb shrapnel in Talbots and Moulders tents, many of the men. 10 natives killed 200 yards from us and 21 wounded; many are in the hospital with us. Surgery is busy. A bad night.”

Torrential rains that flooded everything with mud, often waist deep. Aerial dogfights overhead as planes from Henderson dueled Japanese aircraft. On one occasion he watched as a bomber attempting to land at the airfield was attacked and sent spiraling nose first into the earth.

His diary records the loss of the ship that brought him there, the McCauley, as the fighting shifted and the Army made its way up the Solomons to other islands such as New Georgia and Bougainville.

His diary also includes other duties, such as censoring letters home — usually dozens a day.

But there is also the distribution of Bibles to those who request them, interviews with soldiers needing comfort and advice, visits to the hospital to comfort the wounded — and in many cases, the dying.

He records attendance efforts to provide a little piece of home in a far-off, strange and deadly land. Attendance numbers for Sunday services (a lot!), hymn sings, trips to the Red Cross to get magazines and newspapers, procuring a shortwave radio to connect with home, setting up movies at night, band concerts and other functions.

Grandad lobbied successfully to build a sort of recreation center, getting services and functions out of the elements and under some protection. He even had a chance to meet and chat briefly with Eleanor Roosevelt, President Franklin Roosevelt’s wife, as she was making a swing through the area on the way to Australia.

All the while, writing home to his wife Helen, Grandma McCallum; my dad — who was busy with his own preparations to serve in the Navy — along with Grandad’s three daughters. He sent home his pay every month to help out, $87.50 at first and then $137.50 once he made captain.

Balancing the sublime and familiar with the unfamiliar and deadly. It seems like it would be hard to switch gears like that, but somehow Granddad and others around him found a way.

Reading his diary has brought me closer to a man I really never got to know when he was alive. And this Veterans Day, it’s also made me think about what we ask our service men and women to do — not only put their lives on the line but limit their freedom to conduct their lives the way most of us take for granted, often under trying circumstances.

It doesn’t matter whether they fight or not, they serve. They make sacrifices, as do their families.

We owe them our thanks — and much more — not matter what they did.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].