WELCOME TO

DEATH OF A HERO

by

Bill MacWithey

When I was eight years old, we lived in a small house next to the Wabash Railroad in Springfield, Illinois. It was a time when the war had ended and the soldiers were coming home from the Pacific Theater. It seemed when they reached the West Coast, they had to travel all the way to Fort Dix, New Jersey to be processed out of the army, even though they sometimes passed within miles of their homes along the way. My siblings, friends and myself were always outside along the railroad when these trains stopped by our house. Because of two other railroads intersecting the Wabash a few blocks from our house, which had the right of way, it was a rare day for several months when at least one train didn’t stop to await a crossing train on one of the other railroads. This story doesn’t tell of many encounters we had with these heroes returning from the war, but rather about another hero, who always met the trains and visited with the troops while the train was stopped.

This story is dedicated Ernie Mason, a real, honest to goodness hero.

I was but eight years old, and it was the first time I saw a hospital train. Several men got off the train, but they wore civilian clothes, and this puzzled me. What were civilians doing on a troop train? The first thing I noticed besides the civilians was there were no men hanging out the windows laughing and yelling at us and no soldiers got off the train. While the civilians lit their cigarettes and talked quietly among themselves, I brazenly asked, "Where are the soldiers?"

One of the men looked at me for a moment as if he was trying to figure out how to answer my query. Finally he said, "This is a hospital train, son."

Of course, I had never heard of such a thing and asked him how they could have a hospital on a train. You would have to remember, I was but eight years old.

"Well, there are soldiers on board, who were wounded overseas and this is a special train to take care of them until we get them to an army hospital.?"

Being a kid obsessed with knowing all about the war and wanting to know what we did to those lousy Japs, I asked, "How did they get wounded?"

He smiled at me, but at the same time seemed to be on the verge of tears. His voice seemed choked as he answered, "Lots of ways, son, but you’re a bit young to be hearing about such things."

I started to say something about I wasn’t too young, but something told me to keep my mouth shut. About that time, a soldier on crutches was being helped down the few steps at the end of the car by another man in civilian clothes. All these men wore a white short sleeved shirt and blue pants. The man on crutches said, "Man, it’s good to be off there for a bit."

I stepped around the original group of three and reached out to shake his hand. "My name’s Bill." When he smiled broadly, I continued, "Welcome home, Sir."

He got the funniest look on his face and tears immediately ran down his cheeks. "Thanks, Bill. Good to be home and good to get a welcome like that from a stranger. How old are you?"

"Eight." He continued smiling through tears and I noticed all the other men, the civilians, were smiling. In a way, it seemed strange for them to be all smiles, when they had a trainload of wounded soldiers. Some years later, I would come to understand everything they were feeling and the reasons for their smiles.

A number of times, when we were out talking to the GIs on the trains, I noticed Ernie Mason greeting the men stepping off the train about a block from us. Ernie was a neighbor, who served in the navy and returned home a few months earlier. I knew who he was by sight, but had never talked to him. This hospital train stopped where the last car was just behind the one that was right by our house. I saw Ernie talking to a civilian at the back of the train, then step up onto the platform at the rear of that car and disappear inside. For about five more minutes, I was answering questions from the soldier on crutches, such as, "Do you make good grades in school, Bill?" "You have a bunch of brothers and sisters?" "What does your dad do?" Then, the engine tooted its whistle in the all aboard, three short blasts of steam. That meant two minutes until the giant driver wheels on the huge steam engine began turning again, taking these soldiers closer to an eventual homecoming.

Ernie had evidently worked his way through the back car, talking to the wounded men aboard and came down the steps right close to us, as the men I’d talked to climbed back aboard. He had a strange look on his face, evidently disturbed by what he saw on the train; perhaps the severity of the wounds to those heroes I knew lay within.

He stood a few feet from me, as the train very slowly picked up speed, not jaunting off with a hurried jerk like the regular troops trains, in pursuit of freedom to go home for the guys aboard. We both stood silent and watched the train until it disappeared around a curve several blocks from my house. Then, Ernie said, "You’re Billy, aren’t you?"

"Yes, Sir."

"I’ve seen you out here just about every time a troop train stops or goes by." He smiled widely and added, "I’ve also seen you playing chicken with your buddies. Gonna get hurt doing that one of these times."

Railroad chicken, as we called it, consisted of half a dozen kids hanging onto a boxcar as the train started to move. The last one to jump off, as the train picked up speed, was the champion; sort of the king of the hill of the railroad. In all modesty, I have to admit I was usually the last to bail off the ladder on the side of the car, resulting in a lot of scrapes and scratches from the cinder roadbed.

Not knowing what to say, I stood smiling at the railroad tracks to avoid looking him in the eye at his admonishment to quit playing our dangerous game with the trains.

He stared back down the tracks in the direction the train moved out of our sight and said, "Lots of wounded men aboard that train. Damned shame."

"I talked to one of them that got off the train on crutches. Those civilians doctors?"

"Some are. Some are army medics."

It was a rather hot day, and I told Ernie we should move toward his house a short distance where a huge tree shaded the track and sit down. I wanted to talk to him. Word was around the neighborhood he had been given some medals for bravery. Many times, when I saw him out to greet the men on the troop trains, I wondered if he would mind talking to me about it; tell me the story of how he got his medals. Maybe now was a perfect time to budge against our conversation to push it in that direction.

Ernie smiled and said, "Yeah, it is kinda hot, isn’t it?"

We sat down the rail and said nothing for perhaps two or three minutes before I got up the nerve to ask, "Did you get a medal for bravery?"

He smiled at the cinders on the railroad roadbed and asked, "Where did you get that idea?"

"Uh… well, lots of people have said something about it."

He shifted slightly sideways and asked, "You know what bravery is, Billy?"

"Sure! It’s when you do something that’s dangerous to save someone."

"Well, I suppose that’s one type of bravery, but there’s lots of ways to be brave. Lots of people who never got shot at or anything like that can be called brave. Heck, sometimes just living and getting along with things and people can be an act of bravery. Shoot, look at your mom. I know your family doesn’t have much, but she works herself to the bone doing for her kids. I’ve seen her scrubbing clothes on a washboard out in the yard. All you kids, that sure as heck isn’t easy or fun, but she does it. That’s facing life and doing what you have to do. That’s bravery in itself."

Boy, this Ernie sure was smart. At least he talked like he was. Yeah, I guess mom was a hero for taking care of all us kids. Sure as heck we didn’t give her a lot of help by way of saving her worrying about us. We did so many things that must have worried her sick, but she kept on keepin’ on, as they say. Day after day, she did so much to keep things going.

When he stopped talking, I asked, "Well, are you going to tell me about your bravery?" Then, once more, I suddenly realized how stupid I was to be asking him about something that might be really hard for him to talk about. "Uh… sorry, I…"

He chuckled and said, "That’s okay. Heck, Billy, you know I was a life guard out at the lake beach before the war, so I was a good swimmer. I was an anti-aircraft gunner on a destroyer, the USS Weldon. Damned Kamikaze came outa nowhere. You know what a kamikaze is?"

"Yes, a guy that flies his plane into a ship and kills himself."

"Yeah, well, he kills lots of others doing it, too. But this bastard sneaked in on us at low altitude, skimming the water. He climbed up to about five hundred feet real quick and dived straight into the middle of our ship. Took us by surprise, coming right outa the noon sun. Didn’t get a single shot off at ‘im."

Ernie hesitated for some time, and I knew he was reliving what happened off some island in the Pacific. Finally he said, "To make a long story short, he damned near cut our ship in half. They say he had a couple bombs triggered to go off when he hit. Seemed to know exactly where our ammunition stores were below decks. Hit right smack atop them. Over a hundred of my shipmates gone. Just like that, they disappeared. She was goin’ under fast. Not even time to get any lifeboats in the water. Thank God for the rafts."

By now, every time Ernie hesitated, I was about to jump out of my skin waiting for him to tell the rest of the story. Again, he was evidently reliving the horror of that scene, as I tried to picture it in my own mind.

"Anyway, I got thrown from my gun position to the port side rail and found myself in the water as the bow went under. I think it was just an automatic reaction that I swam as fast and as hard as I could away from the ship. Something that big sinking can pull you right under with it. When I finally quit swimming and turned back toward the ship, it wasn’t there anymore; nothing but a bunch of debris bobbing around on the waves. Couldn’t believe my ship had gone down so fast. I turned around in circles for a few minutes, looking for other survivors. When I began to think I was the only one that got off her, I spotted a raft with one man aboard and swam toward it."

The raft was one of the larger ones and we managed to get ten more aboard, then spotted three other rafts with several people each. Some others we found in the water were beyond help."

I swallowed hard at this pronouncement, knowing exactly what he meant. They were dead!

"So, there we were four rafts and twenty-three people total, a million miles from nowhere, or so we thought. When we tied the four rafts together, I recognized the man who could tell us where we were if anyone could. Lieutenant Griggs was our ship navigator. I asked him where we were and he said we were about forty miles off the island of Samar, to the west of our last location. At least that was the last position he logged before the kamikaze hit. In fact, he didn’t even know it was a kamikaze attack until I told him. Then, he said we could possibly make the island, because the current was in our favor as was the breeze.  But, he informed us, ‘It’s held by the Japs.’ Well, hell, a lotta good it would do us to make the island just to be shot or taken prisoner by the enemy. When I asked if there was anywhere else we could steer for, he told me all the islands were held by the Japs. Didn’t seem there was much future for us about then."

Wow! I had never had the chance to talk about such things to anyone who had actually been there. I guess one can imagine how the mind of an eight year old patriot, who hated the Japs and the Germans, because they were the enemy and the bad guys, reacted to Ernie’s story. Now, he seemed to wear a permanent grin as he continued.

"’Course, we didn’t have a hell of a lot of choice. We couldn’t survive more than maybe a week out there on the ocean if another American ship didn’t find us, and the attack was so quick and devastating, I doubt like heck the signalman got any sort of distress call off, so it might be some time before anyone even knew our ship had gone down. Nope, we didn’t have much choice to try to make it to the island."

Now, Ernie laughed and said, "Would you believe, Billy, out of the twenty three men on those rafts, no one had any kind of weapon. Not even a pocket knife. Some fighting force we’d be if we made it to the island and had to fight for our lives. Like I said, though, wasn’t much else we could do but try to make it to the island."

We decided we couldn’t depend on the current and the wind alone to steer us to the island. Heck, the shoreline of the islands were almost solid for hundreds of miles, so we knew we’d hit some island, but we didn’t want to land on one of the real little islands. If we did manage to land undetected, we wanted the chance to hide out and survive, so a small island wouldn’t work. The lieutenant said Samar was a big island, with lots of jungle and hills. Might be able to survive there if we didn’t get caught. We had one problem we had to figure out. How to steer them rafts. A mess cook who had somehow survived, even though he would have been down in the lower decks of the ship came up with an idea we tried, and it worked. We put all but two guys in the one of the rafts into the others. We reconfigured the layout of the rafts by retying the ropes, so this raft was in the middle of the other three and had some slack in the ropes between us and them. When both men moved to the port side of the raft, that’s the left side, we would slowly turn to port, because the edge of the raft dipped into the water and acted as a crude rudder. When they moved to starboard…"

I interrupted him, "That’s to the right, right?"

Ernie laughed and said, "Yeah. You catch on fast. Anyway, when they moved to the right side of the raft, it turned us to the right."

"Pretty darned smart."

"Yeah, and best of all, if we were going to hit the island before dark, we could keep turning back and forth in a zig-zag pattern to keep us out a ways until it got dark. Didn’t want to go sailing up there in broad daylight."

"Yeah." I’ll have to admit, I imagine I seemed pretty weird to Ernie, I was so wrapped up in his story and trying to guess ahead what he was going to tell me.

"Most of the guys in the rafts were young guys. Me, I’d been in the navy for six years when the war broke out and, other than the lieutenant, I was the ranking swabbie aboard. Well, we had been in the rafts and slowly drifting toward the big island for about twelve hours and the sun was just beginning to turn the sky purple when I realized I didn’t know what most of these guys did on our ship. When they were all awake, I asked and found we had a signalman – radioman with us and didn’t think too much about it at the time. Another gent was fire control. Not like a fire control, but a targeter for the guns. Told them where to aim and when to shoot."

I asked another of those dumb questions I should have known the answer to on my own. "Didn’t you get hungry and thirsty?"

"Yeah, but the rafts were designed for as many as twenty men each, and had emergency rations and water for that many, so we had plenty. Of course, the water had been in metal cans for a long while and tasted more like pee than water, but it was drinkable. Rations tasted like crap, but were designed to give you lots of nutrients in a bad situation."

Anyway, that navigator lieutenant turned out to be one sharp cookie. Four days of drifting and turning every now and then as he figured we should do, and darned if that island shoreline loom some four miles or so ahead of us in the moonlight. And, the best of things happened shortly after we spotted the outline of the hills , it clouded over and poured rain like a cow pissing on a flat rock."

I burst into laughter and laughed so hard my sides hurt. A cow pissing on a flat rock! I’d never heard that one. Ernie realized he’d said something funny that I hadn’t heard and laughed with me.

Finally, when I’d wiped the tears from my eyes and got myself under control, he continued, "The rain was good, because if it was still raining this hard after we hit the beach it would erase our tracks real quick and any lookouts might be staying in out of the rain instead of patrolling on the beach. And, any patrol boats they had out might also head for the beach in that heavy a downpour. As it turned out, nothing could have gone any better than our landing. Dark as hell and pouring buckets. We were all soaked to the bones, but we didn’t mind. It helped wash the salt from the sea off us."

"Like a cow pissing on a flat rock!" The laughter was just a chuckle, now. I don’t think I had ever enjoyed anything as much as this conversation, sitting in the shade on the railroad track.

Ernie continued, "Well, as we moved into the trees and brush at the back of the beach, we see these lights, blurred by the rain, but they look like lights from a house. I guess I was the ranking man outside the lieutenant, or I was so used to telling my gunnery crew what to do, I automatically took over." I motioned to Russell, the only swabby whose name I knew. When he was beside me, I whispered, "Look, See if you can find out what the lights are. We’ll move inland about half way from here to the lights. Too close to the beach here."

"You got it, Erne."

You couldn’t imagine how exciting this was for an eight year old boy to hear all this. It was summer and Ernie finally said, "Let’s walk over ta Vespa’s. I’ll buy us a coke."

Ernie continued to talk about how the lights were indeed Japs. They had a pretty big camp at that location, so they decided to move as far from there as they could, after gathering the supplies from the rafts and burying them. I couldn’t wait for Ernie to tell me the part that won him the Medal of Honor, but I somehow knew he wouldn’t tell that part of the story. He and the men who landed with him on that island survived there for fourteen months, stealing food, weapons and other supplies right out from under the nose of their Japs. They lost only one man, but that was from an illness, which they never did understand.

We were back sitting on the railroad when we heard the unmistakable blowing of a whistle, as another train approached about a half mile away. I had played on the rails so much, I could put my hand on the rail and, feeling the vibrations, could estimate pretty accurately how far away the train was and how fast it was moving. This one wasn’t going to stop. Moving much too fast. We moved away from the rails as we saw the train come around the slight curve two blocks away, and it was moving fast.

Men in uniform waved at us from the twenty-two car train, some from open windows, others from the small platforms at the front and rear of each car. The train moved much too fast for one to focus on a single face or figure. The uniforms seemed to fly by in a blur of flesh and khaki. Probably three or four hundred men on just this one of what seemed like a thousand troop trains that passed in the last couple of months. It seemed there would be no end to them.

When the train had passed, I finally got up the nerve to ask again, "What did you do to get the Medal of Honor, Ernie?"

He gave me a look that reached far beyond this nosy young boy, all the way back to that island of Samar in the Philippines. But he never spoke, except to say, "Billy, I have some things to do. We’ll talk again.  Really enjoyed talking to you."  With that, he walked up the railroad, never looking back.  I couldn't wait to talk to Ernie again and learn about his heroics that earned him the country's highest medal.

But, we never did. A week later, about three blocks west of our house, Ernie was struck and killed by a train. Everyone said it was an accident, but how does one accidentally step directly into the path of a freight train traveling seventy to eighty miles an hour? I wondered how many passing troop trains Ernie waited for until a freight train came along. I was sure he waited for a freight, so as not to traumatize the heroic returning fighting men aboard the troop trains. Also, I was sure Ernie was a war casualty, as sure as if he’d drowned when his ship sank. I thought long and hard about Ernie  Also, I wondered how many others saw and done things so horrific, they had a limit on the time they would allow themselves to live with the awful, painful memories of their own war. While battles are won or lost by armies, an army begins with one man with one weapon and one enemy in his sights. Even as a young boy, I knew how hard it must have been for people not all that much older than myself to kill people and face enemy fire that could take their life at any moment. I found myself wondering what I would do. Until Ernie, a sure enough bona-fide hero, chose to take his own life, I suppose I had a glorified picture of war and had never thought of war on the scale of just one soldier, one weapon, one enemy.

Ernie’s death and the story of his heroism was the front page lead in the newspaper two days after he stepped in front of that train. The newspaper told of his single handedly fighting off a squad of Japanese soldiers, so his comrades could escape into the hills. As it turned out, he killed all the enemy, who chased them for miles until Ernie had enough and decided to stand and fight. The worst feeling came over me as I walked toward town to attend his funeral; had I brought up memories he couldn’t handle by asking him about his medals? For some time, I was sure his death was my fault but, some weeks later, as I talked to his mother and told her about my feelings of guilt, she assured me Ernie was quite disturbed from the moment he arrived home from the war. "He thought about the war for some time before you ever spoke to him. He never said as much, but I could tell. Ernie was a wonderful man and liked you. He told me about talking to you and said it made him feel good." When I was somewhat older, I realized the things she said were to make me feel better, rather than necessarily being the truth, although, I have always hoped she was being honest.

I suppose there is still a bit of that eight year old boy in me, admiring the heroes who defend  not only our country, but the downtrodden people of other countries around the world.  Every day, as I raise the flag on the flagpole in my front yard, I think about Ernie and still mourn the passing of a true American Hero.