The Ordinary Heroes Story of Gordon Larsen
INTRODUCTION:
World War II left scars that extended far beyond the rubble of the great cities of Europe and Japan or the bomb craters that dotted so many battlefields. The millions of soldiers who fought the war on the ground, on the seas, and in the air, carried their own kind of scars, each in their own way, each for the rest of their lives.
Today, on Episode 8 of the Ordinary Heroes Podcast, we hear the story of one of those battled scared veterans and how his war experience colored his life. This is the Ordinary Heroes Story of Gordon Larsen.
BODY:
Gordon Larsen was a small town kid who quit high school in 1941, enlisting in the Marines. After training in San Diego he shipped out for the Pacific theater and an experience that he never could have imagined and would never completely heal from. He would see some of the worst combat as his 3rd Division worked its way across the Pacific as part of the island hopping campaign.
Along the way Larsen was reunited with his older brother Jim and together the brothers landed at Bougainville on November 1, 1943, as part of Operation Cherryblossom. The younger Larsen watched in horror as his brother was hit by enemy fire crossing the beach. Larsen could only watch his brother suffer as he lay on the sand in the unrelenting heat. Unceasing and extremely accurate Japanese fire made it impossible to reach him and give aid. Eventually he was rescued and evacuated from the island but died two weeks later from his wounds.
Bougainville was just one of many stops, however, for men like Gordon Larsen. The Island hopping campaign was difficult and costly. From Guadalcanal to Bougainville to Guam to Iwo Jima Larsen and the Marine 3rd Division kept punishing the Japanese and pushing them back toward their home islands.
In August Larsen was back on Guam awaiting orders to board ship for Operation Downfall, the invasion of Japan. Everyone knew this would be the most terrible of battles. American casualties were projected at one million, a figure that may have been conservative. It was on Guam that Larsen and his fellow soldiers heard the news of the dropping of the Atomic bombs and the surrender of Japan.
The fighting was over. Larsen shipped out for home, one of only eight—eight—men from his original unit of 240 men to return home alive and unwounded.
Like hundreds of thousands of other combat soldiers, for Larsen the war was a wound that would never completely heal. He came home, started a business, and raised a family. He was friendly and outgoing, the man everyone loved and respected.
Few could know or understand the thoughts and memories that he tried to bury behind that exterior.
And—again, like so many who shared his experience—he spoke little, if at all, about his days in combat, maintaining an almost devout silence about his war experiences.
“I didn’t talk about the war much,” he said in an interview later in life, “I spent most of my time trying to forget it.”
In fact, Larsen would distance himself from any talk about the war. He never listened to others talk about combat. He felt the same as my own father about those conversations.
“If they were bragging about combat”, my father would say, “I doubt very much they were in it.”
Gordon Larsen would agree.
So intent were men like Gordon Larsen to forget the war that information about them or their service in World War II is hard to find, in Larsen’s case a couple of sentences in his obituary and—thankfully— the recollection of a young man from Yankton, South Dakota who would become one of the best known names and faces in all of America.
Future journalist and television icon Tom Brokaw spent part of his early days in that small South Dakota town at the same time as Gordon Larsen. They were a generation apart yet Brokaw, like everyone in Yankton, knew Larsen. Few, however, really knew the story behind his jovial exterior.
In his seminal book, The Greatest Generation, Brokaw remembers one particular incident that helped him as a young man understand what Larsen and others like him went through. It happened in 1953.
It was the morning after Halloween and Larsen entered the Post Office where Brokaw’s mother worked, and he was complaining about the “rowdiness” of the kids around town the night before.
Brokaw recalls, “My mother, trying to play to his good humor, said, ‘Oh, Gordon, what were you doing when you were seventeen?”
Larsen’s response was sobering.
“I was landing on Guadalcanal.”
17. If you have a 17 year old son or grandson look at them carefully and try to imagine them in the shoes of Gordon Larson or the millions of others like him. Imagine him charging across the beaches of Normandy or Iwo Jima, watching his buddies dying within arm’s length of him, or perhaps experiencing the sheer terror of knowing a bullet has just torn into his body. Imagine him lying, dying alone thousands of miles of home calling out for his mother with his last agonized breath.
17. Most 17 year olds I know now are playing football on Friday nights, hanging out with friends playing video games or pursuing their most recent girlfriend.
That seems like the right and proper life for a 17 year old, doesn’t it?
The times, however, dictated otherwise for Gordon Larson and his generation.
They would experience war, the most terrible of life’s experiences as teenage boys then would spend the rest of their lives haunted by those memories, desperately trying to bury them.
It’s interesting isn’t it? Most men spend their life remembering, relishing memories of Friday night football—the “glory days”—while others spend the rest of their lives trying to forget those same years.
Men like Gordon Larson.
CLOSE:
Gordon Larsen died on August 19, 2007 in a nursing home in Pierre, South Dakota. He was 82 years old. Men like him are the reason the Ordinary Heroes podcast is being produced so we might never forget what he, his fellow brothers in arms, and his generation did to protect and preserve the freedom we hold so dear.
Again, thanks for listening to Episode 8 of the Ordinary Heroes Podcast, a podcast dedicated to the generation that shaped my life and the war that shaped theirs.
If you want to know more, visit the podcast website at
ordinaryheroesproject.transistor.fm/
or visit me at
www.roneckberg.com/heroes.
This podcast is a labor of love and the fulfillment of a promise I made to my late father, a World War II combat infantryman. I truly thank you for your support and look forward to connecting with you again soon on the Ordinary Heroes Podcast.
