FIRST PERSON / TOM REINKEN : In a Name, Clues to a Marine’s Glory

Exactly 50 years ago, my father, his buddy Thomas Perry Rutherford and several thousand other Marines landed on Okinawa to open what would become the final battle of World War II. Like some kind of fugitive from the law of averages, my dad survived that carnage unscratched.

I arrived a couple of years later and enjoyed something close to an idyllic boyhood--lots of baseball, excellent credit with the Good Humor man. So my adolescent angst found another outlet. I couldn’t fathom why my parents didn’t come up with a better name for me. It didn’t help that I went to school with a guy named Carter Mills. Plenty of style there.

But Thomas Perry Reinken? The only Perry who came to mind was Perry Como. Perfectly fine singer, but not what I had in mind for my image. Hollywood exigencies aside, there’s a good reason Marion Michael Morrison changed his name to John Wayne.

At some point, it dawned on me I was named after my father’s buddy. Didn’t really know much about him except that he was from Mississippi. But some years later, looking through pictures my father had brought back from the war, I found one of the two of them taken on Guadalcanal--smiling, relaxed and, it seemed to me, oddly nonchalant considering where they had been and where they knew they were going. Figuratively face-to-face with the man whose name I shared and didn’t much care for, I decided to discover who he was.

*

Several calls to the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis finally yielded his Marine Corps file. Born in rural Blue Mountain, Miss., about 70 miles southeast of Memphis, Tenn., Tom Rutherford was 16 on Dec. 7, 1941. Less than two years later, two days before 1943’s Fourth of July celebrations, he enlisted.

On Oct. 28, newly promoted PFC Rutherford sailed off to war. Embarking from San Diego on the USS Rochembeau, he crossed the Equator on Nov. 6 and arrived in New Caledonia on Nov. 16. Must have been pretty exotic for a kid from rural Mississippi. There, in the South Pacific, my dad’s and Tom’s lives finally converged.

Tom was a good Marine, conspicuously “squared away,” according to his service records. An expert rifleman, he also got outstanding marks for military bearing, efficiency, intelligence and sobriety--a mild exception for a Marine, if you believe the stereotypes. He fought at Guam and Emirau before arriving at Okinawa for the war’s climax.

Nearly 50 years later, we finally met, in a way.

The Memphis National Cemetery is not Hollywood’s idea of a military burial ground. It occupies a 3.6-acre pocket in an otherwise unremarkable section on the city’s northeast side. Approaching on Jackson Avenue, you can easily miss the entrance despite its ornate iron gates and flag pole.

America has buried its honored fallen there in Memphis since 1867. But there are no rows of stark white crosses like those at Arlington or Normandy’s Colleville-sur-Mer, just subdued granite headstones. Tom earned his on May 25, 1945, when he was killed a month before the battle at Okinawa ended.

I found grave No. 5574 on a languid spring Sunday afternoon. Tom Rutherford lies 20 rows in from the path that circles the grounds, shaded by a stand of pin oaks near the center of section H, surrounded by fellow Mississippians. I don’t care for even conversational confrontations with mortality, so it was unsettling reading a grave marker with a name so much like mine.

*

Kneeling there in the late afternoon shadows, I pondered a rush of disconnected questions for which I had no answers.

American troops on Okinawa were commanded by a general who was named for a South American revolutionary hero. How would Tom have felt about being a namesake?

Was he philosophical about war’s risks, the sometimes arbitrary nature of its death? Or did he even think about it? Did he appreciate the irony of this battle opening on what was at once April Fool’s Day and Easter?

The men buried around him all lived into their 60s; two of them into their 70s. Tom will be 20 forever. Why did I resent their longevity?

My dad wasn’t nearby when Tom was killed. He found out only later, when another Marine who knew of their friendship brought the news. How did he die?

My father doesn’t openly talk about Tom, but he seems willing if I initiate the conversation. He obviously worked through Tom’s death; 50 years removed, I have a harder time with it.

Alone in the gathering darkness at the cemetery, I said both hello and goodby.

I wondered, too, if he died with a fear that afflicts many men--that he would be forgotten. He needn’t have worried.

I can’t get to Memphis on Memorial Day or Veterans Day. But I can salute him in my heart and mind for his honor and courage. And perhaps when my kids are a little older, I’ll try to explain the enormity of the task he undertook that April 1 a half-century ago.

And the name? As the song says, if it gets me nowhere, I’ll go there proud. The name of a man who died ridding the world of a real evil empire should be good enough for anyone--boy or man.

Semper fi, Thomas Perry.