A long-gone soldier still alive in his memory

I am awash this gray morning with memories of Joe Citera, a 19-year-old Marine who died during the Korean War, a lifetime ago. He’d be my age now, maybe retired and with grandchildren. I’m sure Joe would have married after the war, because that’s what he talked about most. He wanted what we all wanted, a wife and kids and a life that had meaning.

Two things got me thinking about Joe the other day. One was the disclosure by North Korea’s Kim Jong Il that the country has a secret nuclear weapons program.

I thought to myself, God, not again. Wars end in other places, why do the lingering threats of hostilities never cease in Korea?

An effort to organize was the second event that revived memories of Joe. I was sorting through a pile of stuff trying to get things in order when I came across his photograph.

It was one of those large studio shots, with Joe in gaudy Marine dress blues, a uniform furnished specifically for the picture. None of us had uniforms like that. We laughed at the image of a white hat and those blue pants with red stripes down the sides in a muddy foxhole.

But that was long ago, and I’m not laughing anymore.

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Humor and courage

The Joe Citera who looked out from the photograph was a face that has burned itself in my memory like the brand on a horse. He was a tall, loose kind of guy with big ears and a self-amused smile that never failed to fit the moment. I remember that grin during the worst times of the war: Joe glancing across at me during a withering mortar barrage and rasping in a Durante voice, “I wonder what the poor people are doing?”

He had an uncanny sense of timing when it came to lifting our spirits. He’d have made a great stand-up comic, appearing on stage in a dungaree cap, his ears sticking out and that faint smile on his face, talking about what it was like to be a private in the Marines. I can still hear him saying, “Oh, the sad indecencies of war,” while trudging up a hill under a relentless sun, loaded down with combat gear.

We thought of him as a buffoon when he first joined the company, a clown among warriors, but he proved himself one day under enemy machine-gun fire when he rose in the face of that firestorm to bring out a wounded comrade. After dragging the man into a ditch, Joe popped his head up and hollered, “Ya missed!” We knew then he was made of special stuff, balancing courage with humor in the face of terrible odds.

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The measure of the man

His sister, Mary Fruehwirth, sent me the photograph and some letters her “Joeboy” had written from Korea when I was doing a magazine piece on the war. They were a close pair, raised by relatives after the deaths of their mother and father. She referred to him as a kid in a letter to me, then explained, “That’s all he really was when he joined the Marines on his 18th birthday, Oct. 18, 1950. He was killed Sept. 12-13, 1951. He never really had a chance to grow up into a man.”

Joe’s letters to her were filled with an underlying loneliness. “Write every day!” was scrawled all over them. “Send plenty of candy, cookies and cake!” He was a high school dropout and his letters, written in pencil, were replete with misspellings, but that wasn’t the measure of the man. What characterized this kid from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, was his grace under fire. In one letter he wrote, “How’s everything at home? We’re getting a lot of mortar and sniper fire here. Well, that’s all for now.”

The only time I saw Joe truly sad was when he talked about wanting a girlfriend to write to. Someone to love. He didn’t have one, he said, because his ears stuck out. Who wanted a guy with big ears? “I’ll have them fixed someday,” he said to me in a quiet moment. “Then you’ll see one handsome son of a bitch.”

Joe was hit by machine-gun fire on a hill called 749, but even then he came through. Although badly wounded in a night assault by the Chinese, he yelled for us to hold on. When the enemy hollered, “All Marines from California go home tonight,” he shouted back, “What about Brooklyn?” He died at dawn, and as we moved on up the hill, we posted a cardboard sign that said, “To Joe Citera, Hill 749. He held our luck as long as we needed it.”

I’m sending the photograph and Joe’s letters back to his sister in New Jersey. I don’t need pictures to remind me of Joe. He’s a ghost that just won’t go away.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.