Say a prayer for your pal on Guadalcanal

A charming anecdote by one of George H. W. Bush's speechwriters. From George H.W. Bush, 1924 - 2018 by Andrew Ferguson.

As it happened, Bush never liked to talk about the war anyway, especially not in public. An accurate account of his service—you can look up the details—would sound like bragging. Also, mentions of the war and the men who fought it tended to choke him up. The month before I went to work for him the country had marked the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The speechwriters turned out a set of speeches steeped in encomiums to the Greatest Generation—to Bush’s generation. The speech drafts, a friend told me later, came back from the Oval Office with whole sections crossed out. Anything purple, anything wistful or sentimental, was gone. “Not gonna make me cry!” Bush told one of my colleagues, in mock anguish. In the event, when it came time to deliver the speeches, he puddled up anyway.

[snip]

My higher-up had told me the speech had two requirements. The first was political. The campaign strategists insisted it contain a reference to the heroes of the Gulf War—the year before Bush had commanded the war with great subtlety and courage, but voters seemed to have forgotten it and they needed reminding. The second condition came from the president: no sentimental stuff. Not gonna make me cry! I didn’t know whether “say a prayer” would make the cut.

The president arrived in Arlington the next morning. Under a brilliant sun hundreds of Marine veterans were spread across the hillside that slopes gently away from the statue of the flag raising at Iwo Jima. They gave Bush a splendid ovation. For forty years, much longer than my (then) lifetime, the president of the United States had been a veteran of World War 2. No matter what happened in November, Bush would be the last of them, and the thought lent a special poignancy to the event.

“For the Marines Guadalcanal was remembered as an epic struggle,” John Keegan wrote in his history of the war. “Men who had fought there bore an aura of endurance which veterans of almost no other Pacific campaign acquired.”

And here they were, fifty years on, a stalwart sampling of the generation that saved the world—old men now, slathered in sun block against the glare, dressed in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, others in Izod and Dockers, gray or mostly balding, wearing gimme caps and shades and flip flops or sneakers, pot bellies much in evidence. There was lots of facial hair, rarely seen in the 1940s, to compensate for what had gone missing up top. They were seated in lawn chairs or sprawling with their grandkids on blankets.

Bush had revised the remarks that morning and worked on them some more on the drive from the White House. The aide who rode with him in the limousine told me the president liked the speech, including the old bit of doggerel. “It doesn’t get too emotional,” the aide said.

Bush delivered it with a few of his usual improvisations—shout outs to a clergy member, hat tips to other honored guests. He praised the courage of the men who hadn’t made it off the island fifty years earlier and, by implication, the courage of the men who sat before him now, who had survived, only to continue the bloody hopscotch from island to island for three more years

“There was a rhyme passed around during those dark months that I’m sure many of the marines here remember . . . Every Marine who wasn’t fighting on the island knew the lines. ‘Say a prayer for your pal on Guadalcanal.’”

At the words many of the men roared approval; others rose and applauded, obviously pleased. I stood off to the side behind a rope line, feeling an intruder.


They are nearly all of them gone now, of course. And Bush joins them. No one could ask for a greater honor than serving such a man, and by extension serving them too.