Introduction

Leon Trotsky

It seems that war has shown an undue interest in my family (but I suppose that is the experience of most families on our troubled planet):

• One of my great grandfathers, Jonathan Ingraham, fought the British in the American Revolution.
  
• My great grandfather, David Ingraham, was a Union soldier who was wounded at Antietam in the American Civil War.
  
• My grandfather, Robert L. Ingraham, was a member of a National Guard unit that was nationalized in 1916 and sent to hunt for the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa.
  
• My Uncle Phil served in the U.S. Army Air Force in the South Pacific during the Second World War.
  
• In 1966, I found myself in combat in Vietnam, serving as a hospital corpsman with the 3rd Battalion, First Marines.

All of us survived our experiences, but, unfortunately, almost nothing of my ancestor's David Ingraham's or my grandfather's stories can be easily documented. However, this web page fully explores Uncle Phil's adventures, and another one, With 3/1/1 in Vietnam: A Navy corpsman goes to war", tells of my short, deadly tour of duty with the U.S. Marines.

I first became acquainted with my Uncle Phil — Master Sergeant Philip Ingraham for the purposes of this narrative — in late 1945 or early 1946. He was a recently returned veteran of the Second World War; he had spent most of the war in the South Pacific, where he was one of a group of radio repairmen who maintained the complex web of communications equipment used by the U.S. Army Air Corps.

Uncle Phil was the perfect uncle — friendly, generous, and funny, and the owner of wonderful toys: he was a ham radio operator, and I clearly remember his call sign — "W2 OSY," with "OSY" spoken phonetically as "Ocean Sugar Yesterday" or, more memorably, as "Old Sleepy Yokel." (In conversations with my aunt in the summer of 2006, I learned that before the war his call sign had been "W8 MRA" — "Mice, Rats & Applesauce"!)

I never knew much about Phil's wartime experiences. Indeed, I was never particularly curious about them. They had nothing to do with me; the young think of little except themselves.

In 1998, at my request, Uncle Phil recorded his memories on tape and sent the resulting cassettes to me, along with a few photographs and other artifacts from the war years. They form the nucleus of the following narrative.

Phil's story is not one of blazing guns and derring-do. He didn't earn a Purple Heart, and never fired a shot except in basic training. But on a few occasions, like millions of soldiers before him, Phil came face to face with his own mortality, and knew for a certainty that his own life might be one of those sacrificed in the war against the Axis. And, without question, he helped to save the lives of many Americans.

Phil grew up and lived in small communities in Western New York State, surrounded by hills and valleys and other small communities; his military training and service took him back and forth across America and then halfway around the world. It was a broadening experience for a young man who until then had lived an insular and safe life.

From January, 1942 until the summer of 1945, almost everything Phil did was focussed on the greatest imperative of the 20th Century, the destruction of the Axis. Along the way he saw life at its best, and worst. He learned how men behave in combat, and how they die, and how their minds can become irrevocably shattered. And he learned how he himself would cope when bombs fell from the sky. During the war he became a member of an elite brotherhood of men around the world, from all countries and all periods of history, who have marched into harm's way, and come away from their experiences as changed men, often better men.