Joseph L. Galloway
is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist.
One of America's preeminent war correspondents,
with more than four decades as a reporter
and writer, he recently concluded an assignment
as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell
at the State Department.
Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent
22 years as a foreign and war correspondent
and bureau chief for United Press International,
and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and
senior writer for U.S. News & World Report
magazine. His overseas postings include tours
in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore
and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow
in the former Soviet Union. During the course
of 15 years of foreign postings Galloway served
four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam
and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War
and half a dozen other combat operations.
In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert
Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division
(Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H.
Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The
finest combat correspondent of our generation
-- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend."
Author William Manchester poses in New York with his book, "The Death of a President," on March 17, 1967. Manchester, author of popular biographies on Winston Churchill and Douglas MacArthur and the controversial chronicler of President Kennedy's assassination, died at his Middletown, Conn., home. He was 82. Eddie Adams, AP, File
WASHINGTON - Goodbye, William Manchester. Semper fidelis.
The author was dying even as the nation celebrated the dedication of the granite and bronze World War II Memorial. Manchester built his own memorial to World War II, and to the memories of infantry combat - a slim book crafted of his nightmares.
He was prolific - he wrote of slain Presidents, a British lion, the Renaissance, an American Caesar, altogether 18 books - but if he had only written one book, "Goodbye Darkness," he would have completed his mission in the eyes of veterans.
In it he wrote: "This, then, was the life I knew, where death sought me, during which I was transformed from a cheeky youth to a troubled man who, for over 30 years, repressed what he could not bear to remember."
Manchester had been a Marine sergeant in World War II in the Pacific. His personal crucible was the grinding, bloody campaign to break the Japanese resistance on the island of Okinawa. He was wounded once and left the hospital to go back to the front lines, back to his unit and to almost certain death or a worse wound.
In fact, he was wounded again much more severely and spent months in a hospital recovering. Many years later, in for a checkup, an X-Ray picked up a Japanese bullet resting not far from his heart. That was a wound he never knew he had gotten. Apparently as he lay unconscious, awaiting triage at a rear-area aid station, a stray enemy round, nearly spent, thumped into his chest.
But it was the nightmares, the ghosts, the memories that troubled his heart that led Manchester to begin the journey back to the Pacific islands where he and his beloved Marines fought, a journey that was at the heart of "Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War."
"Abruptly the poker of memory stirs the ashes of recollection and uncovers a forgotten ember, still smoldering down there, still hot, still glowing, still red as red," he wrote.
Manchester said that he was haunted by the ghost of the 20-year-old Marine that he had been, a ghost that appeared and reappeared to question his every action and decision: Is this what I fought and bled for?
So the middle-aged best-selling author and biographer began a Pacific journey to remote and almost forgotten islands and atolls, once named in screaming headlines but now again backwaters, where Marines fought and bled and suffered. Guadalcanal. Tarawa. Iwo Jima. And his own battlefield, Okinawa.
Manchester wrote that he and his brothers in arms thought that someday school children would memorize the names and dates of the battles in which they suffered so much for victory, much as they had done for the wars their fathers and grandfathers had fought. But something happened. After the war's end America changed, life speeded up and the battles had meaning only for those who had survived them.
His words echoed and resonated with the combat veterans of his war and other American wars, especially the veterans of the one in Vietnam. "Goodbye Darkness" was a slender volume, but they clutched it to their hearts. There, they thought, it's not just us. Even a famous author is haunted by night dreams of a war and visited by spirits who question whether this was what was supposed to come of all that blood, all that dying.
There was comfort in knowing you weren't the only one who quietly went a little crazy at certain times of the year, on certain dates, when you were ambushed by vivid memories of what it was like to be hip-deep in death and dying and killing.
"I have another drink, and then I learn, for the hundredth time, that you can't drown your troubles, not the real ones, because if they are real they can swim," Manchester wrote. "One of my worst recollections, one I had buried in my deepest memory bank long ago, comes back with a clarity so blinding that I surged forward against the seat belt, appalled by it, filled with remorse and shame. I am remembering the first man I slew." He knew what we knew and we loved him for that.
"Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction," Manchester wrote. "They fight for one another." At the end Manchester ran out of time and out of words. He suffered two strokes after the death of his wife in 1998 and struggled unsuccessfully to write the third and final volume in his epic Churchill biography, "The Last Lion." "Language for me came as easily as breathing for 50 years, and I can't do it anymore," he told an interviewer three years ago. "The feeling is indescribable." This week Manchester moved on from that darkness with the gratitude of many old soldiers who found comfort and company in his words.
