The youngest of my father’s siblings was a tie-breaker after a pair of boys was followed by a pair of girls, the only one who wasn’t born on the family farm in southern Illinois. Paris was named after his father’s older brother and his mother’s mother. My father was the oldest of the siblings, William Wesley Fields Jr., who everyone called Bill. By the time Paris was old enough to go to school, his father, who everyone called Wes, was the school’s principal and Bill was on his way to California. Paris was the best socialized of the three Fields boys because he was closer to his gabby sisters in age and grew up in the village of Enfield around other children. Although he died before I was born, it has always seemed to me that Paris, the baby of the family, was the most loved.
Like many adolescent males in America’s heartland during World War II, he dreamed about joining the fight without understanding it’s true nature. He registered at local board of the Selective Service on the first day he was eligible, the eighteenth anniversary of his birthday on October 13, 1925. He was working at the South Side Grocery in Carmi and had probably graduated from high school earlier that Spring. He was the first six-footer in the family but still a spindly 140 pounds. His older brothers had registered for the draft when it was established in 1940 but neither of them served in the military before Paris. The U.S. government had stopped allowing men to enlist by December 1942 to avoid depleting the workforce needed for the massive wartime production effort. But work-related deferrals for men under twenty-six began to dwindle as attrition thinned the ranks of the American armed forces; Paris’s older brother Karl was drafted into the Navy the month after his kid brother joined the Marines. The Marine Corps had begun relying on the Selective Service at the beginning of 1943 but it was still permitted to accept seventeen-year-olds who wanted to enlist. Paris may have wanted to volunteer but it’s unlikely that Wes and Dolly, his mother, would have approved of their youngest child signing up when he was underage. But many local boards operated with a wink or color-coded registration forms to get young men into the service branch they preferred. Once drafted, young men like Paris could still sign up for the Marine Corps before their induction day.
By January 1944 he passed through the recruitment station of the Marine Corps in San Diego. His basic training was just up the coast at Camp Pendleton. I lived in a nearby beach town for half of my life and loved the base, which extends from the ocean through the coastal range. (If it weren’t the west coast home of the Marines, two hundred square miles north of San Diego would be worth hundreds of billions to developers.) I never thought about my father’s youngest brother – my son’s namesake – being stationed there until I researched his military records. Growing up in northern California, the closest Marine in the family was my cousin, who flew helicopters in Vietnam before becoming an international airline pilot. I always admired the choppers from Pendleton that flew up and down the coast, knowing that the hours they logged off the beaches of the Golden State were fitting rewards for crews rotating back from the Gulf Wars.
For a long time I have known that I am wired to serve, to be part of something bigger than my own life. Later in my career, when I buzzed my bald head and preferred scrubs in military colors, people I met in the ER assumed I was ex-military. As bad at taking orders as I would have been, it doesn’t surprise me that the uncle I never met signed up for the Marines as soon as he didn’t need his parents’ consent. But the darker truth is that the American military has always preferred younger enlistees because they are more durable and easier to train.
Paris was assigned to the Second Battalion of the Fifth Regiment of the First Marine Division. They shipped out to Australia from San Diego. The area around Melbourne would have seemed like an appealing extension of southern California, with plenty of booze and English-speaking women to excite young American men. But then his unit was transferred to Pavuvu, a fetid corner of the Solomons with cat-sized rats and dog-sized crabs, to train for island-hopping in the Pacific campaign. Summers on the Seven Mile Prairie, where his family had lived since his ancestors fought in the War of 1812, wouldn’t have prepared Paris for the heat and humidity on Pavuvu, where recruits began to commit suicide at night; only a hint of what lay ahead.
The Japanese had colonized the Palau Islands in 1914 with the secret blessing of the British Empire, who were more concerned with the French and the Dutch in the Pacific on the eve of the Great War. For decades, the consensus of the U.S. military establishment had been that Palau would have to be retaken on the way to conquering Japan. Roosevelt had refereed a debate about the objective between General MacArthur, who was in charge of forces in the South Pacific, and Admiral Nimitz, who was in charge of military units in the North Pacific. The president had sided with MacArthur, who had famously promised to return to the Philippines after the fall of Corregidor. But by the time the First Marine Division was sailing from Pavuvu to Palau, Admiral Halsey had established air superiority over the region and tried to persuade Nimitz, his commanding officer, that their fighters and bombers could neutralize the Japanese airfield at Peleliu, the primary objective of Operation Stalemate. Nimitz, however, was not the sort of leader who entertained last-minute changes to strategic objectives, especially after the president sided with MacArthur, who demanded that his eastern flank be protected from Japanese attack.
Major General William Rupertus, the commander of the First Marine Division, predicted that the invasion of Peleliu would take four to five days. But he didn’t know that the Imperial Army had changed their approach to defending its islands in the Pacific. Twelve thousand Japanese soldiers had been ordered to fight to their death for the honor of the Emperor and were dug into hardened positions on Umurbrogol Mountain, a ridge of coral and limestone honeycombed with caves and mineshafts. On the morning of the attack, nothing would have prepared Paris for the bombardment of Peleliu by the U.S. Navy, or the Japanese artillery and machine guns trained on their landing craft. But the Fifth Marines were able to advance through the jungle between the beaches on the west side of the island and the airfield. A counter attack by Japanese tanks and troops was destroyed. By nightfall, with temperatures over a hundred and humidity to match, the lack of water was a serious problem for the Marines, who only carried two canteens each. And the only water they could find had been stored in fuel drums that still tasted of oil and rust.
On the second day, the Fifth Marines ran across the tarmac to capture the east side of the airfield still held by the Japanese. The men who survived the shelling and withering machine gun fire said that it was the most frightening experience of their lives. The Fifth had less trouble capturing a secondary airfield on an outlying island after a second amphibious landing. But control of the airfields had little impact on the hidden Japanese forces on Umurbrogol. Navy fighters armed with napalm dropped their bombs on the ridges within seconds of taking off from the airfield. Flamethrowers became the Marines’ weapon of choice to kill the Japanese hiding in the mile-long network of caves, tunnels, and reinforced positions on the high ground. As the days turned into weeks, American pilots arriving at Peleliu could smell the rotting flesh when they were still a thousand feet in the air.
The Fifth Marines were relieved by an Army division after a month of fighting. An analysis published by the USMC Command and Staff College in 2011 summarized the losses: “The assault on Peleliu began on 15 September 1944 and…would not be officially secure until 27 November 1944. US casualties totaled 9,740 including 1790 killed in action. The total number of Japanese casualties was 10,695, almost all being killed in action…until the final Japanese forces committed suicide on the northern end of the island.”
More than half of the devastating American losses in Peleliu were incurred by the First Marine Division. But they were soon eclipsed by the carnage of Okinawa. Technically, the fighting on Peleliu continued until April 1947, when the last thirty Japanese soldiers in the caves were finally convinced to surrender by an ex-admiral from the Imperial Navy. Yet the Marines who survived the campaign, as well as military historians, concluded that little if anything of strategic value in the Palau Islands justified the profound loss of life. In the end, the Mariana Islands, which Nimitz and Halsey had already captured before the First Marines landed at Peleliu, were the launching point for attacks on the Japanese mainland. Nearly a century later, Tinian is remembered as the base for the bombers that dropped atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Guam remains a stronghold of American forces in the western Pacific.
I don’t know the details of my uncle’s injuries but it’s easy for an emergency physician to imagine the differential: some shrapnel that didn’t penetrate internal organs or major nerves, a through-and-through gunshot that missed long bones and blood vessels, a blast injury that didn’t cost an eye or a limb – even if it damaged his brain. When Paris recovered he was promoted to Corporal and returned to regular duty with his unit. By then the top sergeants had convinced his superior officers that he was neither a hunter or a killer – a nice kid who was lucky not to have been killed on Peleliu, unlikely to be effective as a rifleman. Like his father, oldest brother, and sisters he was more suited to a classroom or an office. He had a better chance of helping the Marines defeat their enemy with accurate typing, superior filing, and good humor. By the time of the invasion of Okinawa, he had been assigned to the headquarters company, where he clerked for the commanding officer. That is why he survived until the war ended, no matter how deep the emotional and physical scars of Peleliu were.
After the Japanese surrendered, the First Marines were transferred to northern China to forestall the advancing communist forces. But Corporal Fields was heading home by January 1946. Only two years after he left, the twenty-year-old was a different man when he returned to Enfield. He had seen enough human suffering for a lifetime and cheated death. He had spent nights under fire in tropical jungles that he thought would never end. He had had his share of drunken nights with his comrades and plenty of chances to say yes or no to the kind of women who seek out men with money in their uniforms. But most of all, he had defended his country, done his part for his comrades in arms, and made it back home in one piece. But he didn’t go back to the grocery store where he had worked in Carmi. Unlike his father or his uncle or his older brother or millions of other veterans covered by the GI Bill, he didn’t go to college. Like generations before him, he went back to farming on the Seven Mile Prairie.
I can only hope he found some peace, working the land with his friends and extended family, doing the same chores that his forefathers and fellow warriors had for centuries. But the farming equipment in White County was a problem: the manufacturers of tractors and other heavy implements were heavily regulated during the war. Priority for military tractors and transmissions had trumped demand for domestic farming equipment. Restrictions on aluminum for lightweight components and rubber for tires were even more severe during the war. Farmers had made good money as demand for produce and livestock increased, but the price of used equipment increased faster as wait times for replacements grew longer. Like many other industries after the war, it would took years for companies like John Deere and Allis Chalmers to retool and expand production of civilian equipment.
There are no records of the farming accident that resulted in Paris being severely burned. Every farmer in White County was working long hours as the end of planting season approached in May of 1948. Paris may have been too fatigued; lots of war veterans slept poorly. He may have been distracted; he may even have been drunk. He might have been prone to flashbacks about the worst moments he remembered from Peleliu or Okinawa: Japanese women jumping off of cliffs as they clung to their children, American men who had been mutilated before or after they died, the extraordinary stench of dead bodies after a few days in the jungle, regardless of race.
Paris may have been haunted by his memories of the flamethrowers on Peleliu. Some of the Marines wore portable units on their back and carried wands instead of rifles. Some of the Marine tanks were fitted with more powerful flamethrowers instead of cannons. In either case, the flames could be directed into caves and tunnels where the Japanese were hiding. If the defenders were lucky the flames ignited the grenades they were carrying. But most of the Japanese soldiers would have remained conscious and ambulatory when their clothing and skin caught fire. Reflexively, the human body attempts to escape fire, even if it is fully involved. Tens of thousands of enemy soldiers in the Pacific became Roman candles, trying to outrun the flames that engulfed them, screaming at their killers as they died.
Regardless of the cause of the accident, Paris was mortally injured when the tractor he was working on caught fire. Military napalm was nothing more than thickened gasoline, the same fuel as the old tractor. There may not have been witnesses to the accident; the time between the fire and the first response would have been terribly long on the farm. Most of the fire departments in rural America are still volunteer brigades. More likely, someone saw the accident but was helpless to do anything but call my grandparents at their home in Enfield – someone had to take Paris to the hospital in Carmi.
My father didn’t tell me that he was the one who drove his kid brother to the hospital until I had outlived Paris. Nearly forty years after my father died, I still don’t know if Bill was visiting his family or if he had already moved back Enfield. But I think he was invisibly scarred by his memories of his brother’s injuries. There are few forms of trauma that are more terrifying for bystanders than burn victims. Apart from the surreal appearance of human beings on fire, there is the smell of burning flesh when the flames are extinguished. There is the way second-degree burns separate congealed skin from the raw flesh of the limbs and torso. There is the strange look of charred skin after a full-thickness injury, when victims no longer look human.
The perversity of fourth-degree injuries is that they are painless because the nerve endings in the skin are destroyed. But wherever the burn is partial thickness, especially when the entire body has been exposed to the flames and the heat, the nerves scream and the sounds emanating from the victim are beyond hope, beyond suffering. Explosions of petroleum distillates are worse because some of the components enter the airways and lungs as aerosols, then gradually inflame and destroy the windpipe and the lungs. Patients who may be able to breathe for a few minutes then become irreversibly distressed as the swelling in the respiratory tree worsens.
Any and all of these things would have been going on for the better part of an hour while Bill was taking Paris to the hospital. At some point he wouldn’t have been able to drive any faster, no matter how much he loved his kid brother, no matter how much he wished that anyone else could have been the one that took Paris to the hospital, no matter how much Bill wanted to ease his suffering.
Victims of penetrating trauma die when they’ve lost too much blood. The average adult only has five liters of blood in their body. But most of our body weight is actually water filled with minerals and proteins: a burn victim can lose countless liters once the integrity of the skin – a biological wetsuit – is destroyed. Victims of severe burns without lung injuries die more slowly as the losses of plasma and interstitial fluid accrue and organs fail or become infected. Paris may have become unresponsive while he was still in my father’s car. If so, it might have seemed like a blessing. He may have died in the car without the hospital staff admitting it to his older brother. More likely there were still signs of life when they arrived at the small hospital in Carmi – the same place where their father would die eleven years later. They would have given him morphine to ease his pain. They would have covered the parts of his body that were burned with dressings soaked in saline. They may not have been able to manage his airway if the swelling was too advanced. So soon after the war, whatever the military had learned from medical care hadn’t trickled down to a rural hospitals. The big advances in trauma care wouldn’t happen until the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam catalysed the birth of emergency medicine.
For my father – who had spent the war in San Francisco, supplying electrical equipment for Liberty Ships – the most important battle of his life was filled with anguish, fear, pain, suffering, and death. For everyone in the family, the day was so terrible that it was never spoken about, the day when the youngest of their five children was taken from Wes and Dolly, along with their hopes for what he might have become. If not for the war, if not for the fire.
Paris was still shy of twenty-three on the day he died. If he was not the same kid he was when he left Enfield at the end of 1943, he only had two years to find himself, to put Peleliu and Okinawa behind him and move on with his life. Until the fire, it had been enough for his parents and his siblings that he was back among them, that he had a Purple Heart and two arms and two legs, and that the war hadn’t taken him from them entirely – even if he had lost the twinkle in his eye, even if he was lost at times in melancholy like others in his family.
Perhaps he would have remained a farmer like so many of his forefathers. Perhaps he was only a few months away from getting bored and beginning college at Carbondale or somewhere highfalutin. Perhaps he would have met the woman whose love would set him free, the kind of girl who would make Paris a father and Wes and Dolly grandparents. But in the end, it was hard for anyone to feel as if Paris hadn’t died in the war somehow, even if it was over three years before the fire.
For good reason it is said that human beings never really recover from grief they feel after the loss of a loved one – a parent, a spouse, a sibling. But for my father, it was far worse to witness his kid brother’s death in the rearview mirror, helpless to do anything other than drive faster, telling Paris that he was going to be okay when Bill knew he wouldn’t be. Whether my father was a problem drinker before that day or only after, there would never be enough liquor to make Bill forget what he had seen, heard, and smelled, never be enough liquor to dilute the hurt, the loss that was compounded by having missed so much of Paris’s life when he was in California. His kid brother had a lot of gall, outgrowing Bill, and a lot of guts, volunteering for a war that his older brothers ducked. For the rest of their lives, Bill and Karl were silently shamed by the bravery and sacrifice of Paris.
I wouldn’t be born for another five years, but I believe that one of the things that came between me and my father was that I was too much like Paris, whether it was my eyes or my laugh or my stature. I think he was afraid to love me unconditionally because he was afraid of losing me. I think he felt as if he didn’t deserve me any more than Paris deserved to die. Grief doesn’t just get in the way of moving on with one’s life. It gets in the way of being among the living. And so the youngest child of Wes and Dolly, named for his older brother and her mother, was buried a decade before them in the cemetery in Enfield that contained all the other Fields who fought in all the other wars since they arrived on the Seven Mile Prairie.