Shadow box

My father was a Marine Raider on Guadalcanal. He was in the 1st Marine Division. I know from his records that he started out in the 5th Marines, 2nd Battalion, but somehow he wound up in the Raiders, notice the Raider patch he's wearing in the picture. The details of that story, like so many others, I never fully understood. He enlisted in June of 1940, before Pearl Harbor, as he was always fond of telling me. Somehow that distinction mattered to him. The Old Breed versus all the guys who enlisted after December 7, 1941, a few months seemed to make all the difference, though in the end they were all called The Old Breed. In fact Michael had dropped out of school after finishing tenth grade at Belleville High in New Jersey. He altered his birth date on his birth certificate and forged his mother's signature on a parental consent form so he could enlist at 16. Over the years he always talked a lot about the Marines and not much about the war. All I knew about his war experiences, traits that carried over onto his life with his family, were that he hated rain, nighttime, and almost anything Japanese. But he loved the Marine Corps, and he was a good fit as a Marine. He told me he would have made a career out of the Marines had he not suffered so acutely from Malaria. Recruit training was easy for him (as a tenth grader he played semi-pro football on Sundays for the Newark Bears!). The food in the Marines was good and there was plenty of it, and he got to travel and see places he'd never otherwise have seen all over the United States, Cuba, New Zealand, Samoa, the South Pacific islands, Australia, California, the Pacific Northwest and probably many other places I don't even know about. He brought more than just memories home from the Pacific. He suffered terribly from PTSD for the rest of his life after the war and that's a long time when you go into battle at 17. He died of service-connected disabilities at 69, his father lived to be 96, so I guess dad hoped he'd live a long life, but it wasn't to be. He lived longer than a lot of other Guadalcanal vets though.

Bonagura, Michael John, Sr., Cpl