A Marauder’s tale

“The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work, / And if it take the second must refuse / A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark” (“The Choice,” William Butler Yeats).

Not having saved my Beatles albums or my brother’s baseball cards, I had at least the foresight to see the value in interviewing, if I could, a veteran of Merrill’s Marauders, WWII special operations deep penetration forces in the China-Burma-India theater, where the Japanese were trying to block the British overland connection to China. The Philadelphia Inquirer front page featuring their 70th annual reunion showed only 14 survivors of an original band of 3,000, so I had to act fast. Someday my grandson would thank me.

One of the vets was easy enough to track down, and I wrote him a letter. Five days later I got a call at work from my father-in-law saying, “There’s a gentleman named Gilbert Howland sitting in our living room.” I was unprepared. We chatted about golf (he still plays weekly) and set a date, and I located a tape recorder.

Mr. Howland has a lithe and tenacious memory, and I let it romp freely all afternoon before the whirring wheels of the old Sony on the kitchen table. He said he found my BLT and coconut cream pie a vast improvement over the K rations dropped every three days by air transport.

This is terrific stuff, I was thinking, as my lunch guest rhapsodized about the Marauders’ maneuvers behind enemy lines, disrupting supply convoys using unconventional weapons; brushes with malaria; burning leeches off their bodies with cigarettes; friendly Burmese hill people tapping into Japanese wired conversations; the severe elegance of belt-fed, air-cooled machine guns; the uses of radio and cryptology; and the antics of pack animals on razorback Himalayan passes along the thousand-mile trek through Burma, all the while outnumbered by Japan’s 18th Division.

Mr. Howland has a lithe and tenacious memory, and I let it romp freely all afternoon.

The aforementioned mules are a significant detail: Howland had lived as a boarder from age 5 at Hillside School in Massachusetts, where he milked cows by hand, which proved an edge in his selection in the all-volunteer unit.

What a contribution to posterity I will have in my hot little hands when this is done! I mused.

Then I suddenly looked down and noticed that the recording machine was not on. I had lost the best 45 minutes of the interview (a fact that only partly explains why I am not the news end of this magazine). Names of towns, anecdotes about Wingate, Stilwell, and Mountbatten, would now be forever forfeited for future generations—or at least until the next time Mr. Howland comes for dinner. (He has expressed a fondness for apple pie.)

But my conscience now got to me. All this fuss about bagging an interview with a man who is 93 and doesn’t know the Lord. I mustered nerve and said (this part is caught on tape): “I have a personal question for you: Where do you think you will be in 10 or 20 years from now?” “You mean where will I be buried?” he asked, and I explained that I didn’t mean that.

Disappearing into the next room, I returned with a Bible and opened it to the verse he might have seen at baseball games: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” He found this very informative, so we read on: John 14, and the whole of Revelation 21 and 22, as I felt led.

One hundred thirty Marauders out of an original 2,997 remained by war’s end who were not claimed by malaria, dysentery, typhus, hunger, other diseases, or combat. Forty-one mules and no horses survived. Is it conceivable that Gilbert Howland somehow escaped all this, only to be the casualty, in 2016, of a Christian woman too chicken to give him the gospel that tells men how to be saved from mankind’s greatest enemy?

Yeats may be right: We choose perfection in a worldly work, or choose real life: “Rescue those who are being taken away to death” (Proverbs 24:11). Who knows that it was not for this that God ordained our paths to cross at such a time as this?