Remembering What We're Fighting For

Two years ago, my son and I were at the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Va.

It was right around his 33rd birthday and we were attending a conference on the Marine Corps 100th Anniversary of World War I.

Four of our kinsmen served in World War I and three with the storied 4th Brigade, Marine, of the 2nd Infantry Division, American Expeditionary Force. One of them, Pvt. Joseph Otto Turley, was killed at Armistice, shot the last day of the war, Nov. 11, 1918 and died the next day.

Our “Uncle Otto” and his two brothers Tom and Jess, were with the Marines from the end of the Battle of Belleau Wood, to the end of the war. Tom got shot, too, but he lived to return home in Auburn, Wash., where he was joined by Jess when he finished serving in Occupation Germany.

Jess was in the Rhineland, until June 1919, a few dozen miles from where I was stationed more than 50 years later with the 8th Infantry Division. Three out of four brothers survived the Great War, one killed, one wounded.

After the conference, my son and I went to visit the grave of our kinsman, Otto Turley, at Arlington National Cemetery. We walked a mile or so from the visitor center in a drenching summer rain and it didn’t bother us much, because we knew the Turley brothers marched dozens of miles, maybe more, through pouring rain of summer and autumn in France in 1918.

We got to Otto’s grave and paid our respects. Next, we walked to the grave of a battle buddy killed in Iraq.

We saluted there, too and the rain was squishing out of my desert boots from a hole formed from wear.

Another of our Iraq battle buddies, a lieutenant colonel who was a lieutenant when the Iraq War launched in 2003, took us to see the evening retreat at Marine Corps Headquarters in Washington, D.C.. The USMC silent drill team, with its tossed rifles, will send chills down your back.

This all came back in a rush with one of those social media “memories” things that shows you the snapshots from a couple of years ago.

We went to the Quantico conference to find out what it took to correct an ancient error on Uncle Otto’s nearly 100-year-old grave marker.

Mission accomplished, truly. We got it done. Arlington corrected our kinsman’s date of death on the headstone.