Remembered

Merl Holm was 22 when he waded into the jungles of Papua New Guinea, 8,000 miles from home.

Folks described him as “an average Iowa farm boy.” He’d grown up on a farm outside Lake City, one of Andrew and Anna Holm’s 12 children – six boys, six girls. He finished one year of high school before the planting and ploughing called him away.

No one seems to remember if he had dreams for anything beyond farming, or even just for a few acres of his own. If he saved up to buy a car. If he had a girlfriend he took to the local dances … one who wrote to him, maybe, when he shipped out to the Pacific.

They do say that, after Pearl Harbor, Merl felt like his country needed him. He wanted to serve. We don’t know if there was anything more to it than that. Maybe he was eager to see a world beyond Iowa’s cornfields. He could have gone for duty, or adventure, or both. But one day he was gone.

One less place at the crowded Holm family table. But that was true of a lot of family tables in 1942. There were so many more farm boys, where Merl came from.

On Thanksgiving, maybe, his absence was felt more than usual. They probably prayed especially for him that day, and maybe for another brother or two, and some neighbor boys, gone to war.

Merl became a Private, First Class, in Company K, 3rd Battalion, 126th Infantry Regiment, 32nd Infantry Division. In September, 1942, his regiment was the first sent into Papua New Guinea with training, most officers agreed, insufficient to what they were facing … though, in truth, it’s hard to imagine what training could have been sufficient.

Merl and his comrades slogged their way through swamps and knee-high mud and virtually impenetrable jungle, where blades of grass growing six feet high sliced at them like knives. Temperatures reached 122 degrees. Eight to 10 inches of rain fell, day after day.

Within a week, more than 85 percent of Merl’s company were infected with malaria. A quick survey of the front lines found that every single serviceman was running a fever, many as high as 104 degrees. Leaving the lines was not an option. The entrenched Japanese forces were fighting to the last man.

To combat them, Merl and the other Americans were given everything they needed for battle but maps, reconnaissance, food, ammunition, artillery support, and effective commanders.

Somehow, eventually, the Allied forces of American and Australians won, anyway. By the end of January, 1943, the Japanese in New Guinea were beaten.

Merl was one of the many who didn’t live to see it. He'd died two months earlier, on Thanksgiving day. No one recorded where exactly, or how. Maybe a bullet brought him down. Maybe malaria did. He could have been charging a Japanese pill box. Or just sagged down into the mud of a boggy trail.

No one had time or strength, in those hellish conditions, to identify him, or to hack out a shallow grave. The war ground on. Seven years later, he was declared “non-recoverable.” What was left of his anonymous remains was interred, along with what was left of so many unknown others, in a Philippine military graveyard.

Eighty years is a long time to hold on to a memory. Maybe, in his parents’ living room, they kept a fading photo of him, looking solemn in his uniform. Or smiling with his brothers and sisters for a Christmas snapshot, out by the then-new Studebaker.

But years pass, and a lot of those pictures wind up in an album on a bookcase, to be brought out and quietly thumbed through, now and then. “This is your great uncle Merl. He fought in the Pacific.” And the grandchildren try to be respectful, while wondering when they can go back out and play.

The girlfriend, if there was one, married someone else. The empty place at the table became less noticeable, except on holidays. Like Memorial Day.

The purpose of Memorial Day is to remember. To be thankful for men like Merl, who thought they ought to go. Who stood in a pouring rain, gnawing bad food and nursing a high fever and watching the windy grass for signs of an enemy rifle. We offer a moment of respect, at least, for the so-many so long, long forgotten.

This year, a few more will remember Merl. Last month, the U.S. military managed, at last, to identify his remains. He’s been awarded, posthumously, the Bronze Star “for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in battle.” On July 9, he’ll be buried in Lake City.

Sometimes, in quiet moments, a lot of us have reason to wonder how much – if at all – we’ll be remembered, once we’re gone. How long will they tell the stories, smile at the memories, try to explain to polite friends and distracted grandchildren who we were and what made us, for a little while, special.

In this world, even memories can’t last forever. But some of us are bound for another, where every day is Memorial Day.

Our names may never adorn a marble slab in a quiet soldier’s cemetery. But “the solid foundation of God stands,” Paul assures us, “having this seal, ‘The Lord knows those who are His.’”

He’ll know 80 years from now. He’ll know a thousand years from now. And He knows today.

And so, on this Memorial Day, a salute to Private Merl Holm, and to all those others who have died, and will, in the service of our country … and in the service of our God. May they know as they are known.