Tarawa

The story of Tarawa revisited by G. D. Lillibridge (October/November 1983) was beautifully written and touched me deeply. I know only one person who was killed during the war. There were others from our small town, of course, but they were just names without faces. My contemporaries and I spent the World War II years in the classroom.

Charlie had worked for my father until he joined the Marines in 1942. On the same autumn day that my father learned of Charlie’s death—killed by our own guns on Saipan—he received a letter from him dated a few weeks earlier. It was brief, as were all his letters, saying only to save his job for him. He’d be back as soon as the war ended because “if I managed to live through Tarawa I know I can survive anything.”