When I Get to Heaven . . .

He’s had two strokes, wears a pacemaker, is blind in one eye and can’t hear, but the world’s oldest living Marine still has a handshake like a steel clamp and a voice that rattles windows.

You know when you hear him bellowing at you through the front door, “I’m coming, damn it!” that the Old Man is still in charge.

At 95, Harrold Weinberger--that’s Harrold with two Rs--is a study in lucidity. He remembers everything he’s ever done as far back as World War I, and loves to talk about it.

He can recall in clarion detail the acrid smell of mustard gas seeping up his nostrils on a battlefield in France and the sting of shrapnel entering his tough old hide as though it all happened the day before yesterday.

And he can still see the blood-drenched beaches of Iwo Jima where young Marines lay like abandoned toys on an island too painfully won in World War II, and too quickly forgotten in the years thereafter.

I say he’s a Marine even though he hasn’t been one for a long time, because that’s the way it is with the corps. Once you wear the uniform, you never take it off, especially if you’re a guy like Harrold. He even looks like a Marine.

Sure, sometimes he uses a walker and other times a cane, but when he’s walking on his own he’s tall and proud, and the whispered cadences of past parades beat a marching rhythm in his memory.

When I get to heaven / St. Peter I will tell/

Another Marine reporting, sir / I’ve served my time in hell.

Sound off, one-two . . .

*

I dropped by the other day when a friend said it was Harrold’s 95th birthday. He lives on the Westside, in the same pink, stucco house he’s owned for 56 years. An American flag flies out front day and night.

Inside, his walls are lined with memorabilia gathered over a lifetime of serving his country. “I’m living history,” he said, as he strode with amazing steadiness down a hallway lined with honor.

It was a time of drums and bugles.

Here, neatly framed, was a small, 48-star flag he had carried in his wallet through two wars, and there a photograph of a young Harrold Weinberger in dress blues, looking like an enlistment poster.

He showed me a birthday card he got from Bill Clinton and a letter from the commandant of the Marine Corps and told me about the 85 people who’d dropped by a couple of days before to wish him well.

Harrold had sat upright in a chair for four hours and let them all come to him, like troops passing in review, even though many of them outranked him. Age has a rank all its own and Harrold wears it like stars on his shoulders.

He was a major when he got out of the corps after the war in Korea, his third war, and was one of the best combat photographers the corps had ever seen. He showed me footage of fighting in the South Pacific half a century ago, when the very sky was stained with human blood.

We sat in silence for several moments when the film ended, then I asked, “Are you the oldest living Marine?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is sometimes I feel like I’m slipping over the edge, that it’s all over. But I take some oxygen and I’m OK.” Pause. “I’m not enthusiastic about dying.”

*

We talked about changes in the corps. He thinks it’s all right for gays and women to be Marines. Gay-bashers and sexual-harassers, he told me once, ought to be hung by their . . . well. . . .

When the conversation got to Ollie North, I thought Harrold was going to fix bayonets. A retired Marine lieutenant colonel, North, criticizing President Clinton, made the comment, “Bill Clinton is not my commander-in-chief.”

Harrold called North a damned fool, and then added some other things you’ll never hear in church. “To think I gave money to his defense fund,” Harrold said, shaking his head. “He’ll never get another nickel from me.”

You’ve got to understand this about Harrold. He believes in honor and duty, and in allegiance to his country and to his President. He didn’t abandon them in the most fearful of times, and wouldn’t now for the sake of political expediency.

I know how guys like Harrold think, because I was among them once. They’d charge into hell if that’s where the high ground was, and come back whistling the “Marine Corps Hymn.”

So at ease and happy birthday, Harrold, and thanks for being part of the thin green line through three dark and perilous times in American history. St. Peter, I’m sure, will acknowledge that properly when the time comes. You’ve served your time in hell.