SEMPER FI

His name was John Allen Deahl. He was born in 1920 and died in 2006. I was his friend from 1979 til the day I buried him in a cemetery in South Charleston, West Virginia. I was his neighbor and pastor for twenty-two years. We spent lots of time together because of our love of art, wood working, hunting, and tools. We regaled one another with stories and jokes (not always the Sunday School variety!). He may have been the funniest human being I have ever known- and I have known some funny ones. He was also rough and tough. There was a brutality in him, even though he was a very gentle, neighborly man. I am going to tell you how that brutality came to be in him.

He married his high school sweet-heart, Chloe. She told me once that her father, a German-Swiss farmer, not given to emotional displays, sobbed on her wedding day. He was sure that John was the wrong man for his little girl. But, they enjoyed over sixty years of wedded life, raised six children and sent them to college, working as a glass-cutter and a nurse. Chloe was a girl of film star beauty; even as an old woman who had endured fifteen major surgeries ("My body looks like a road-map," she once said to me.) and the births of those six kids, she was still strikingly beautiful til her last illness. Chloe was tough, too, more than a match for John. For more than sixty years they were faithful Christians, serving and worshiping in the church I pastored.

On Saturday, December 6th, 1941, John traveled from his hometown of Butler, Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh and bought a brand new Oldsmobile sedan with money he had saved working in the glass plant in Butler. On the following day, he took his uncle for a spin in the new car, the radio providing background music for their conversation. When the programming was interrupted with a special announcement, John pulled over on the berm of the country road they were on. They listened in silence as the announcer declared that the American Pacific Fleet had been bombed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

After they had listened for a while, John clicked off the radio and turning to his uncle, said, "I want you to go with me tomorrow to Pittsburgh, take this car back to the dealership, and get my money back. I am going to join the Marines." And that is just what they did.

From the 8th of December 1941 until the 18th of November 1945, John A. Deahl served his country and his fellow-Marines as a combat fighter in the Pacific. He endured some of the most horrific fighting and dehumanizing conditions in places like Guadalcanal and Okinawa. He watched as his fellow-Marines were cut down or obliterated. He suffered the privations and terrors that have been so well documented in the recent HBO series, The Pacific.

"I had this buddy from Baltimore," he told me, "who was always going into no man's land in the lulls between engagements...lookin' for souvenirs. You'd a been like him. Looking for all this Jap junk. Wanted him a samurai sword... Well, we kept tellin' him, 'They're goin' to get you, kid. You keep it up and they're goin' to get you, sure as hell.' Well, preacher, they did get him and we heard him screamin' all night long. Found him the next day. They'd tortured him all night long. Animals. Worse than animals! They'd cut off his privates and stuffed 'em, in his mouth before he died. Animals! I've had a lot of trouble forgivin' the Japs because of stuff like that. I still don't know if I have forgiven them. I know as a Christian I should, but it's hard."

How I came to hear such stories is a story in itself and I will tell it to you...

I am like the "kid" in the story John told. I am always looking for treasures among the junk that other people collect. Some days I am lucky. On this particular day I was very lucky. I was prowling in a real junk store (not an "Antique Mall") on west Washington Street in Charleston. It was a gloomy day and I was about to leave when I spied this plastic bag with something colorful in it. I opened the bag and inside it was a woolen U.S.N. ensign with the battles from the Pacific written in India ink on the canvas rim. Also, there was a home-sewn banner, probably a "kit" from the same period, with the eagle of the American Seal and the words, "Welcome Home" emblazoned on a navy blue ground. I was breathless, as hunters and collectors of such stuff are from time to time. I got both pieces for fifty dollars. I went straight to John's home to show him the stuff. And I asked him if he would sit for me to paint his portrait in front of the flag and banner. He agreed and we started the next week. In the meanwhile, I made a large stretcher and stretched and primed a Belgian linen canvas on it. I let it dry and waited for Tuesday afternoon of the coming week...

To be continued...