"I dare you!"
"I double dare you!"

Clambering up the ladder of a boxcar stopped on a high stone bridge and then diving off from its roof into the swiftly moving currents of the St. Joe River took a certain amount of nerve. Maybe my father chose to be a paratrooper because when he was a boy he grew to like the wind in his face as he jumped from the boxcars into the dark waters of the current furrowed river.

Duane Larson was born on May 17, 1917, in Niles, a small southwestern Michigan town called the City of Four Flags because the flags of Spain, France, England and the United States had flown over Fort St. Joseph. Niles was, even during the Depression, an idyllic place to grow up. Perhaps my father and his siblings did not know that the St. Joseph River was one of only two rivers in the world to flow north; what they did know was that it provided free food and fun year round. What boy could be bored when he could be swimming, fishing, boating, ice skating, or just messing around in the woods like Huck Finn?

My father worked for a time at the Niles News Agency, but like so many small town boys he was restless and rode his Harley Davidson to California to see what was on other side of the mountains. By October of 1941 he had joined the 19th Coast Artillery. His early swimming feats stood him in good stead and he was able to save a man's life by pulling him from the riptide off the California coast. Then came Pearl Harbor and the Army. Jump school for paratroopers was a four week course at Fort Benning, GA. On February 11, 1943, he married Dolores Van Skiver in Fayetteville, NC. By the time Battery A of the 462nd Parachute Field Artillery Battalion was activated on June 16, 1943, my father had been married for five months. He had trained at Camp MacKall, NC, made jumps with howitzers, fired on the range at Fort Bragg, NC, and finally received his moving orders. On February 28, 1944, the battalion left Camp McCall, NC, for the overseas staging area at Camp Stoneman, California. The paratroopers boarded the "Sea Cat" headed for Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

On March 29, 1944, the 462nd debarked at Brett's wharf, Brisbane, and joined the 503 PIR at Camp Cable. Sometime after that, word reached my father that he had a baby girl, born one day after he had arrived in Australia and named Dolane, a combination of Dolores and Duane. He sent his new daughter a lovely white lace dress and matching bonnet. Pictures arrived back showing a placid infant wearing "the outfit Daddy sent from Australia."

Training continued with marches and jumps and although the men did not consider it overly strenuous they did feel they were gaining valuable experience. By September of 1944, the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment, the 462nd parachute Artillery Battalion and the 161st Parachute Engineer Company had formed the Regimental Combat Team. From Australia the team went on to Noemfoor and from there to Leyte and Mindoro. The Team's biggest challenge awaited them in Corregidor.

Tokyo had warned the Japanese commander, Itagaki, to be prepared for an airborne landing, but Itagaki had studied the terrain and judged an airborne landing "not doable." On February 16, 1945, he was looking out to sea at the 34th Infantry's 3rd Battalion landing barges and never noticed the white blossoming C-47's until some 25 to 30 paratroopers, blown off course, landed practically on top of him. The troopers formed up and fired, killing Itagaki and eight others around him.

"The men who floated down over Corregidor on that sparkling morning of February 16, 1945, represented not only a new way of warfare, but also a new breed of American soldier, the paratrooper." [Belote, 225] The "tough and aggressive" paratroopers knew that the Corregidor jump was not going to be a picnic. They were to jump onto a three and a half mile long by one mile and a half mile wide tadpole of an island, "the worst jump field ever used for an airborne operation," from the dangerously low altitude of 400 feet .The calculations made beforehand did not lie - "it was impossible to place all of the paratroopers in the area and yet it had to be attempted. ..." [Flanagan, 165] The Brass had decided that a vertical attack was the only way to retake Corregidor and that a 10% to 50% casualty rate was acceptable.The C-47's would fly over one after the other and deliver a stick of 8 men at each pass onto either a small golf course (nine holes) or a postage stamp sized parade ground, each torn up after heavy bombing and covered with big chunks of concrete and splintered tree trunks. Although the casualty rate was "only 13%," troopers were fired upon as they descended and some were severely injured or killed. My father landed safely, but he had only ten more days to live.

James Wilcox described for me what the landing was like for his gun section in Battery A:

"Your father, whom I called Larson, and Brayton, his best friend, were the finest paratroopers and the backbone of our section. A section is one 75 MM Pack Howitzer and a crew of about ten men.

"...We were most fortunate in our jump. Our equipment landed in the exact center of our drop zone... . The net result was that our section had its gun assembled and at our rendezvous point HOURS before the next section arrived. The other two sections had been jumped off the top of the island, some even into the sea, and didn't get there at all. I'm telling you this so that you will know what kind of soldier your dad was.

"Larson was about six feet, fair complexion, light hair and medium weight,... a nice looking man. He was courteous, well-mannered and mature. Brayton was also like that, which was perhaps why they were buddies. He ... was always a pleasure to be around because of his decency, maturity, and reliability."

By February 26, the men had reached the tail of the tadpole at Monkey Point and were "mopping up." Already General MacArthur was making plans for his return to Corregidor. Just northeast was a little ridge and under it was an underground network of tunnels which had housed the Navy's Radio Intercept Station. Unknown to the men on Monkey Point, the Japanese had packed the caves under the ridge with explosives. Battery A of the 462nd had moved along the shore road just past the tunnel entrances; two tanks were helping the soldiers close these entrances off. At ll:05 one of the tanks fired into the sloping entrance of the Monkey Point tunnel. Simultaneously, a violent explosion lifted the top off the ridge over the Radio Intercept Station. Both 35 ton tanks flew into the air and tumbled end over end down the ridge. Bodies were lifted high and rained down again in pieces. A chunk of debris landed on a destroyer over a mile away. The little ridge was now only a hole in the ground. Sergeant Eugene Bert found himself down in the valley and couldn't remember how he got there. When he scrambled back up to the top of Monkey Point, the first sight that met his eyes was my father, crushed under a huge boulder.

My father, his best friend Lawrence Brayton and the rest of the dead were wrapped in ponchos; the line of bodies along the road extended over 100 feet.

My father's body remained in the Philippines until after the war. On February 21, 1949, when a military escort accompanied him back to Niles, his life had come full circle. In St. Mary's he had been baptized and from St. Mary's he was taken to Calvary Cemetery to be buried . My grandfather walked to his grave every day for the rest of his life.

Although "the presence of his absence" has been with me all my life, it is thanks to AWON that I was able to get in touch with those who knew him. Even though our fathers never saw us nor were even on the same continent as we were, "for one brief shining moment" in time, our fathers and mothers and we children were a family . Now it is up to us, the AWON children, to see that the legacy of the greatest generation is not forgotten.