LITMIR.BIZ

       FOREWORD

      Diane Cameron has enlarged my understanding of what it means to be a warrior. The stories she recounts of United States Marines stationed in China during the Japanese invasion and occupation at the beginning of World War II certainly illustrate one of the fundamental roles played by the profession of arms in our society—to protect life, property, commerce, and our national identity. Also the stories in this book suggest ways in which war can inflict deep and lasting psychological wounds in warriors. Yet the greatest lesson in Never Leave Your Dead is how the way of the warrior emerges not from the lives of the author’s beloved China Marines but from her own pilgrimage to imagine and understand the tragic life of one particular China Marine—the one who married her mother years later—and to bring home his memory, finally, with love and honor.

      Whether engaged in warfare, peacekeeping, or humanitarian assistance, the greatest challenges warriors face are moral rather than physical. For deployed warriors, physical dangers come and go, but moral dangers are everywhere, all the time. In the high-stakes world of the warrior, there is usually one, or perhaps just a few, right things to do in each situation. And both the cost and consequences of those right actions can be enormous. For a Marine on guard duty, the right thing is to find every threat to those being guarded and to let none pass. For a Navy corpsman tending the wounds of Marines on a battlefield, the right thing is to save every life and limb. For a China Marine in Shanghai in 1937, the right thing was to do nothing—to merely watch as thousands were raped and killed. That’s not a tough job; it’s an impossible job. We now know that one of the consequences of failing to live up to one’s own moral expectation can be moral injury, a deep and lasting wound to one’s personal identity.

      At a deeper level, perhaps the warrior’s challenge is more than just choosing right actions over wrong. Perhaps the most fundamental role warriors play in our society is to venture into the unclaimed territory between good and evil, to construct goodness right there on evil’s doorstep, and then to defend it with their lives. To serve selflessly while others exploit, to show compassion while others are cruel, to forgive the unforgiveable—these are all ways to create goodness in the face of evil. So also is making sense of a brutal double murder that happened decades ago in order to find and celebrate the humanity of a veteran China Marine.

      This book is a creation of goodness on the doorstep of evil. And its author is as much a warrior as the Marines she writes about, even though she has never worn a uniform.

      —William P. Nash, MD

      Director of Psychological Health

      United States Marine Corps

       PREFACE

      This is the story of Donald Watkins, the man my mother married when she was seventy years old. He was a Marine, a murderer, and a former mental patient. At first I wondered, How could she marry this man? Today I understand why, because long after his death, I love Donald too.

      But it wasn’t love at first sight. Two years after Donald’s death I was given a box of his papers, and my search for the truth of this tragic man began. I journeyed long and far. I met amazing people in unusual places. I had to learn their stories so I could finally understand Donald.

      Donald was not the only one with problems. Our family had many challenges, and over the generations we took trauma and compounded it. But to my great surprise, as I undertook this pilgrimage to understand him, I was changed.

      We were not a military family, so I had to confront the misconceptions and stereotypes I had about those who make a commitment to military life. I had to search archives and libraries and I had to find experts to translate the facts of Donald’s life, encountering revelations every step along the way.

      I found documents, reports, records, and ephemera: menus, baseball programs, bits of old film, and parts of American history I never learned in school. Also, I found teachers. My most important teachers were a group of courageous men who were old, sometimes deaf or blind, but who had an abundance of fortitude, resilience, humor, and honor. These were United States China Marines.

      I learned two important lessons from my teachers—both the experts on trauma and the men who lived it: First, trauma is not the terrible thing that happens to you, but what is left inside you because it happened. And second, if something terrible happens to you, that

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