A brief note on my 4th in your in box. I grew up in the rural South, where Independence Day was “The 4th” and barbecue meant pork. My family always had a big one, and I learned early the way we cooked our baby ribs: a concrete-block pit, 3′ x 6′ x 4′, with a stainless steel grill; wet/green hickory fire with an oak starter base (keep flames sprayed down); a dip tub of several gallons of vinegar, equal amount of water, and 2-3 boxes of salt; a case or two of as fresh and as young swine ribs as my general-store-owner grandfather could get; ;15 minutes to a side, dip and flip, for 5 hours or so, until the ribs began to tear easily as they’re forked to flip. (Shoulders and butts stayed on 8 hours or more.) The result was a “dry” rib, with little residual fat, which would be a tad tough to people who think a rib is the kind of parboiled and burned-on ketchup-sauce putrescence you get at a Chilli’s, Friday’s or even a Tony Roma’s.If you wanted wet you put on a sweet/warmish and thin tomato-vinegar-brown sugar-lemon-mustard-cayenne sauce. 30 or so people ate ribs, tangy, meaty and smoky beyond any other in my experience. Empires could be built on meat like this. Sorry, I love it so I couldn’t resist.

Anyway, we don’t do so big so often now. Yesterday we had a quiet affair. Sitting at the “men’s table” was my father, a brother, my 18-year-old son, and two of my family’s long-time friends. We got around to how I had been slyly urging my son to follow his Iraq-bound 22-year-old cousin to USMC OCS when he goes to college next month. One of the men mentioned he had been a Marine in the Pacific in World War II. And that turned the conversation. I learned my own father had manned an Army 155 mm howitzer in the Pacific, becoming a 19-year-old three-striper (he joined at 17 to “get in before the war ended”).. The other man had been and a soldier at Schofield Barracks at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and then a Sherman-tanker in the Army’s Pacific island campaigns, The Marine had island-hopped in the Pacific, starting in 1942 at Guadalcanal.

I’d never heard these things, and I don’t think these men had ever talked to each other about their service. Because everybody had done it, I guess. Their campaigns were not the high profile ones like Iwo Jima or Okinawa, but they could talk about “Guadal”, Bougainville, Makin, Rabaul, Rendova, Kwajalein, the Philippines, Saipan. They talked very little of actual combat experiences: a still-amazed description of how Japanese troops swarmed wave after screaming wave at night across the Tenaru River until they were slaughtered a few feet away from entrenched Marines; the body of the 6′ 4″, 250 pound Japanese (they still called them “Japs”) officer on Saipan, and how the U.S. troops there were full of talk of a tribe of Japanese giants from Hokkaido. Mostly they talked about related details: how good a rifle the 1903 30-06 bolt-action Springfield was for new Marines; the pitifully inadequate 37 mm “pack howitzer;” the equally poor “Grant” tank; how ecstatic one was to see a palm-covered Kwajalein Island he was to land on in a few hours reduced by pre-landing bombing and shelling to a smoking, treeless wasteland; the way infantrymen stuck like fleas to the tanks in a symbiotic relationship; how the morale of Pacific Theater troops went sky-high with news of the successful air ambush of Pearl Harbor mastermind Admiral Yamamoto; how the Seabees didn’t have a military bone in their bodies, but could take jungle and turn in into a functioning airfield in a few hours; how poor National Guard divisions usually were; how the Marines took an island (and higher initialcasualties but shorter canmpaigns) by advancing indivdual units as quickly as each could move and ignoring unprotected flanks, but how the Army units slowly moved linked together in an unbroken line.

Their memories of occupation duty in Japan were delightful to them: a 2-cent haircut in Osaka, with neck-massage by fenale masseuse included; how the Army’s rowdy 11th Airborne was confined to their base for weeks after they drunkenly destroyed a barracks; the 40-year-old Australian career-private who started out a friendly drunk but ended the night raging at my boy-soldier dad’s rank; their (eventual) fondness for the Japanese people, and respect for their discipline. Each of these old men retained enough Japanese to converse with each other. In my youth I had heard my dad say only an occasional “arigato.” They apparently did not trust themselves to breathe a word about the friends they lost or the bad dreams I know they sometimes still suffered, even 60 years later.