Thoughts on Memorial Day

“This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.”

-- Captain's message to the crew of the USS?Samuel B. Roberts, DE-413, 0740 hours, 25 October 1944

Every Memorial Day, I remember Gunners Mate 3rd Class Paul Henry Carr.

He was serving aboard the?Roberts, during the Battle of Samar on October 25, 1944, when a small group of US Navy escort destroyers pulled off one of the greatest upsets in military history against a much larger Japanese fleet of battleships and cruisers.

Roberts?was one of the American ships sunk that day. Repeatedly struck by enemy shells up to 14 inches in diameter, she eventually lost power and went dead in the water.

Carr was a gun captain of one of the ship's 5-inch main guns. The loss of power prevented the gun's compressed-air automatic breech-clearing mechanism from working.

This meant that the gun could no longer safely be fired. After every round, compressed air blew out the gun breech before the crew loaded the next round. Otherwise, a still-smoldering bit of the last round's gunpowder bags might come into contact with the new bags being loaded.

Carr and his gun crew knew the risk they were taking. They kept on firing. They did everything by hand: traversing and elevating the gun, loading and ramming the gunpowder and shells, and firing them.

Everything but clear the breech after each round.

They fired six rounds this way.

Their luck ran out with the seventh round, when a powder bag ignited in the breech, killing most of the gun crew and mortally wounding Carr.

But he wasn't finished.

Even though the gun was now out of action and so was almost everyone around him, Carr kept on trying to load the gun with the last 54-pound shell still cradled in his chest.

When he was taken out of the gun turret and laid down next to it, he still attempted one last time to get up and load the gun. His last words were gasping pleas for help to load the gun.

Paul Henry Carr was posthumously awarded the Silver Star for his actions on that day.

I first read about him when I was maybe 10 years old, and I could never forget his story because I could never stop asking myself, then and today, whether I could ever do the same thing he did. That kind of dedication to duty.

I still don't know. I never had to find out. And part of the reason why is guys who could, like Paul Henry Carr and a lot of other guys like him throughout all our wars.

That's why to me, Memorial Day is always a day of gratitude.

"Bravery is being willing to go into a bad situation. Courage is not running away once you realize what you've just gotten yourself into."