Remembering Dad, who survived WWII, with love and pride

If I could be in Santa Fe on Saturday — the 75th anniversary of the U.S. victory over Japan — I’d visit the national cemetery and the grave of my father, Don Campbell.

The neighboring headstones belong to veterans of many backgrounds, military branches and wars. I think Dad, who lived most of his adult life in Santa Fe, would take pleasure in their company.

And I think he’d like this brief account.

He was a 15-year-old high school student in 1941 when the U.S. entered the war. He lived in a small town in Colorado, was learning how to drive and had no clue how the conflict might affect him.

By the time he turned 18 and received his draft notice, he knew. On a spring day in 1945, his father drove him to the train in Denver.

The new Army private was bound for California, where he’d later catch a troop ship to the Philippine. (More than five decades later, describing that goodbye to my brother, Dad cried.)

Around May 1, 1945, he joined the fighting on the steep, forested hillsides of Balete (now Dalton) Pass, on Luzon. He figured he would be lucky to survive.

A member of Company C, 27th Infantry, he shared foxholes with compadres like Nebraska farm boy Ed Collins, his friend during induction and basic training. Sgt. Walter Little of Atlanta had lied about his age to enlist.

Rudy Majestic, the son of Yugoslavian immigrants to Michigan, was a powerful warrior who thrust his Browning automatic rifle over his head to shoot.

Frenchy Doucet, a Cajun from Louisiana, had served as an extra in The Story of G.I. Joe, a movie based on the columns of Ernie Pyle, New Mexico’s famed war correspondent.

Amid constant gunfire, Dad and his fellows tried to push the enemy back. Japanese bullets zipping in his direction were often the only way he knew the foe’s location. At dusk, the enemy sprayed machine-gun fire over the GIs’ heads — a lethal reminder of their presence. Dad knew he shot at least two men because he saw them fall.

He did not hate the enemy, but he understood it was either him or them.

When the squad learned of Doucet’s death, they fell silent, felt numb.

During three weeks of combat, Dad witnessed terrible things, like an American plane incinerated by its own load of napalm.

He heard terrible things, like the unreal sigh from his friend Ed, shot dead in the same instant that a bullet ricocheted into Dad’s right leg.

Back in the U.S., recuperating from his wound at Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Denver, Dad wrote to Ed’s parents in Nebraska, reassuring them of their son’s mercifully swift death.

There he learned from Sgt. Little that the fierce Rudy Majestic had gone down in combat, firing his Browning as he perished.

The hospital was also where he reunited with his relieved, thankful parents and sister.

When I was a kid, I liked to handle the misshapen bullet that the military surgeon had removed and given to Dad as a grisly souvenir.

But I knew little else of his experience, for he did not talk about the war much (and neither did my friends’ fathers who had served).

At age 73, however, Dad finally poured out his story to a tape recorder, an interviewer (my brother, Doug) and a sympathetic audience (my mother, Shirley). His impetus: seeing Saving Private Ryan.

On this 75th anniversary, I salute all of New Mexico’s veterans of World War II, wherever they rest. And I remember mine, Don Campbell, with love and pride.