USMC Cpl. Darol "Lefty" Lee: Hiding the Invisible Wounds of PTSD

      June is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Awareness month, and I have studied how PTSD affected many of the World War II servicemen in my research. During the war, these cases were often listed as combat fatigue, psychoneurosis, non-effectives, shellshock or “cracked-up” cases. During the battle of Iwo Jima, where 80,000 Marines, Corpsmen and Soldiers (yes Marines, there was an Army regiment deployed at the campaign’s end) cycled on and off the island fighting the 22,000 Japanese-man-garrison, at least 2,700 and upwards to 8,000 Americans on the island suffered combat-fatigue or PTSD. Unlike the Imperial Japanese and the Nazis, we Americans treated our guys who succumbed under the mental and emotional stress with compassion and medical treatment. Compared to our humane treatment, the Imperial Japanese soldier or a Wehrmacht army grunt were often killed for suffering psychological breakdowns—this was especially the case in the Imperial Japanese Army. Weakness was not tolerated. By contrast, the U.S. military in general, and the American Navy and Marine Corps in particular, removed men suffering from shellshock and combat fatigue from the front lines and gave them treatment.

           The following is a dramatic and sad case study of what happened to a man during the war who suffered with PTSD, and how he dealt with it thereafter.

           Here is the story USMC Cpl. Darol Eugene “Lefty” Lee gave to journalists, historians, his congressman, the World War II Museum, and the National Museum of the Pacific War—just to name a few. He joined the Marines in February 1943. Later, as a member of the 3rd Marine Division, he fought at Bougainville in November 1943, but did not do anything spectacular—he fought bravely like thousands of other Marines. Then he participated in the invasion of Guam on 21 July 1945 and got injured that very day taking shrapnel to his left side and into his lung. According to Lefty, after being on ship for a few hours, he returned to the battle and fought several more days. On 25 July, he was in the lines during the horrific Banzai charge and witnessed his best friend, USMC PFC Howard Zoellner, get his head blown off. With Zoellner’s sprayed brain particles splattered all over his face, Lee fought courageously with his dead friend at his feet. He killed, what he estimated to be 20 charging Japanese, using his rifle and Zoellner’s weapon to handle the onrush of the enemy. He continued fighting during this battle and survived the entire campaign, going on multiple missions. After Guam was secure, he trained for Iwo Jima and was a BAR-Man (Browning Automatic Rifleman). On 21 February, he hit the beach with his unit, Company C, 1st Battalion, 21st Marines, 3rd MarDiv. For days, he fought in the front lines, and on the 23rd of February, he was one of the men picked to protect Woody Williams the day he took out numerous pillboxes and killed several Japanese in order to receive his Medal of Honor. In fact, Lefty shared elaborate details of once again killing 20 Japanese and watching Woody do incredible acts. Woody also claimed Lefty was there and gave an affidavit for him to get more recognition (a second Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, possibly even a Silver Star) from the United States Marine Corps. A package was put together for Lefty and sent to his congressman and to the Awards and Decorations Board of the Marine Corps in 2015, since the Corps had apparently failed to recognize him for these deeds in 1945.

After the 23rd of February 1945, Lefty continued to fight on the front lines on Iwo and eventually led a platoon that attacked, and then seized, the second airfield on 1 March 1945. Eventually, on 9 March 1945, Lefty was blown “thirty feet in the air” by a spigot mortar (a 700-pound projectile) and was so injured Corpsmen had to carry him off the field of battle. On the way back to the beach, Lefty remembered that they dropped him once as they took enemy fire and left him out in the open. Eventually, he was evacuated to a hospital ship and it took at least nine months for him to heal up enough to return home.

I was with Lefty and his four children on Guam and Iwo Jima back in 2015 for the celebration of the 70th commemoration of the battle for Iwo Jima. My then 12-year-old son Justin and I listen to him in private and in public relate the details of his experiences. My son hero-worshiped Lefty while we were on the island, and listened to everything he said with incredible attention, even recording several interviews with him. He wanted to be a Marine like Lefty, not like his father who did not see any combat!

           Sadly, the truth is a little different. Lefty did indeed fight on Bougainville and seemed to come through the fight without any injuries. Then on Guam, he did get injured on the 21st July, but it seems he was pulled out of the lines for a sucking wound to his lung and did not return to operations and go out on patrols until about three or four weeks later. Also, his friend Zoellner did not die on the 25th of July during the Banzai attack as Lefty had claimed, but on the 23rd of July. Since Lefty was not on the island for either of those dates, but rather on a hospital ship offshore, he wouldn’t have known about any of the events during those days.

The story gets sadder. Instead of fighting on Iwo Jima for days and helping Woody Williams get his Medal of Honor, he “cracked-up” right after he hit the beach on 21 February 1945. He suffered shellshock or psychoneurosis and just shut down. He had to be escorted back to a landing craft on the beach without his weapon, while he was frozen in terror. He was sedated and put on a ship headed to a psych ward on Saipan. For the next nine months, he was treated for his mental breakdown. His parents were informed he had suffered shellshock/combat fatigue on 8 April 1945 but was receiving good care. Perhaps he lied to his parents about what happened to him (“being blown up and suffering combat wounds”) because he was ashamed of his PTSD. It’s also possible that his parents encouraged him to lie, due to their own embarrassment over what had happened to him. Maybe he was fearful his girlfriend back home, Marian Hengel, would dump him if she knew the truth about his ordeal on Iwo Jima. She later became his wife and never knew about his fabrications, dying before the truth of his real experiences were documented as just described.

           When all this information came out during my search in the National Archives in 2017 for material to support his application to receive his second Purple Heart and a valorous medal such as a Silver Star, his package was about to be officially reviewed by the Marine Corps and his local U.S. Rep. Tim Walz, in order to quickly get him his medals before he died. He was, after all, 94 years old. Once the uncomfortable truth came to light, the package was pulled since it was full of fabricated facts—even though those facts had been supported for years by Medal of Honor recipient Woody Williams.

Lefty and Woody were at that time working with the World War II Museum in New Orleans to do a documentary of a the Pacific War, where the two men would return to the places they fought together and be interviewed for two weeks about their heroics while traveling around to the islands where they had been deployed. Lefty had been flown down with red carpet treatment at least twice to the World War II Museum to conduct interviews in preparation for the trips, and during one of the return trips back to Minnesota, I had even arranged a public announcement on his flight from DFW to Minneapolis to praise him for his heroics on Iwo Jima. I later heard from his daughter that all the passengers in the plane erupted in applause and loud calls of “Semper Fi” as the captain of the plane finished his elaborate explanation of what type of hero they had on the plane. Lefty liked such events and waved to the passengers. Many shook his hand during the trip home, honored to shake the hand of a real, hard-core warrior from Iwo Jima. Just a few years before, at a Medal of Honor event in Ohio in 2013, Woody Williams said he would not talk until a person in the audience who had protected him the day he got the medal got up and tied his Medal of Honor around his neck. Lefty rose from the audience, walked up to the stage, tied the medal around Woody’s neck, and then the audience exploded with applause and a standing ovation. Lefty had done this exact thing at countless events.

In the course of my study, I also found that Lefty fabricated a document from the National Archives putting his name in a dispatch that he gave me and others to prove his acts—the original file in the archives showed that he had fabricated the document. When I found out the information that Lefty was a fraud, I immediately told Tommy Lofton at the World War II Museum and the trip was cancelled. I also told the lead civil servant in Minnesota, former Marine and U.S. Army Sgt. Major Gerry Krage, about these revelations and he stopped the political endorsements immediately. For weeks, Lefty fought me on the facts and his family grew combative about the documents I had found. They went from being my biggest, best friends and strongest supporters, to angry and perturbed people. Lefty fought me for weeks saying the documents were lying. Eventually, I had a long conversation with Lefty. I basically said, “Hey Lefty, let me tell you how absurd your claims are now. I could tell people at a party tonight that I was the backup quarterback for Terry Bradshaw when the Steelers played the Rams in the Super Bowl in 1980. Even though I am 45, I could look like a very youthful 57-year-old. I have watched the actual game and played college football, so I could talk about the event intelligently and who the Hell knows who the backup quarterback for Terry Bradshaw was that season anyway? I might be able to fool a few people at the party for a while,” I told Lefty. “But it would take one internet search that night, or one phone call to the Pittsburgh Steelers headquarters the next day, to find out who was the backup quarterback. And guess what Lefty? The backup quarterback sure as hell would not be Bryan Rigg.”

After I finished this explanation, Lefty got very quiet and then asked, “What will happen if I tell the truth?”

“Well, I said, maybe you can start living with honor and tell the truth about what really happened. Also, you will stop making other people liars, like you were doing with all those journalists and historians who were citing you in their sources and supporting your fabricated tales. You dishonor your brother Marines by lying about what you did as a Marine when what you are claiming you did was indeed done by others, but not by you.”

When I finished, he sadly pleaded with me “Don’t tell my kids. Please, don’t tell my kids.”

I simply said, “No Lefty, as a good Marine, you will tell your kids.” (To see all the documents and the sad story of his fabrication, see the article that I and Jonn Lilyea wrote on the web site “This Ain’t Hell”).

           Eventually Lefty did tell his kids and it has been a tough journey for them as a family. As a historian, I had to take out more than 40 pages in my book “Flamethrower” I was writing about Woody Williams because they were based on erroneous testimony. However, the story of Lefty shows us how little we understood about PTSD back in WWII. We did recognize people suffered mentally after being in combat, but the society still frowned on their condition (hence why Lefty lied about it). Nonetheless, Lefty benefited from excellent medical care at that time that few armies in the world provided. The Corps showed Lefty and others like him kindness when they mentally broke down. Just a few days after Lefty was removed from the island, the Marine Corps had already registered 700 cases of combat fatigue and shellshock, having also removed these Marines from the front lines.

Now, here is what is also disturbing about this whole story. Many of the “facts” Lefty admitted to using in his canards he told me he got from reading interviews Woody Williams had given throughout the years. Many of the facts in these articles have since been proven to be embellishments by Woody or even out-and-out fabrications. So, how could Woody not recognize that Lefty was spreading falsehoods when he must have known that Lefty was regurgitating “facts’ that only he was on the record as saying, facts that have since proven to be fabrications. Woody allowed Lefty to speak publicly about his MOH acts from 23 February everywhere they went, making Lefty’s lies, Woody’s truth. Why did Woody say he remembered Lefty being there that day when he was not? Didn’t he know he was helping a man falsify his history? Lefty is the only Marine Woody has ever tried to get some form or recognition for, although he knew many of the other Marines who were really were there, such as Howard Chambers, Alexander Schlager, Donald Beck, Joseph Rybakiewicz and Charles Henning for seven decades (these men have been documented in posts for this web site)—why didn’t Woody do something for them? Woody strongly recommended Lefty be used for this book, but why none of the others? Had Lefty’s misinformation not been discovered, it would have been presented here. Why couldn’t Woody figure out that Lefty was not there by listening to his stories? When Lefty’s falsehoods were brought to light, people expressed surprise asking, “How could that be? Woody believed in him.”

In the end, both men probably suffered PTSD, and one way they dealt with it was to create narratives that supported what they wanted people to know, versus what really happened. We need to realize that combat is a traumatic experience and understand that once veterans return home, they need support to deal with what they have gone through. We, as a society, need to do more for these men and women—this might be one reason why many veterans are committing suicide after they survive the hell of combat. They cannot survive their survival and we need to help them deal with what they did while in the service to our nation. Moreover, if someone suffers from PTSD, we need to do a better job of letting them know this is all right and help is available.

Lefty served bravely on Bougainville, Guam and Iwo Jima. He did not have to make up a stories about his experiences on Guam and Iwo to hide the fact that he struggled as a 19- and 20-year-old kid dealing with killing the Japanese, suffering wounds and witnessing his comrades getting killed. This reality of combat is often overlooked and needs to be better understood. Hopefully this post gets you thinking. If you know someone who fought for our freedoms, then thank him or her and let them know their sacrifice is greatly appreciated. Moreover, if you are a veteran who struggles with PTSD, get help at your local VA hospital, and share your struggles with your loved ones. If you have made up stories to hide painful truths, stop telling those lies today. You need healing; you are not protecting yourself nor are you getting well if you stand on Sea Tales.

So, Lefty, Semper Fi. I thank you for your service and I am sorry you have struggled so long with what really happened to you during World War II. I wish we, as a society, had helped you more back in 1945 to heal your invisible wounds. Retired Navy captain, and medical doctor, Lee Mandel, says, “Every man has a breaking point from which he cannot return. PTSD is a result of this.” Our military needs to study more about how to train men and women not to reach that point, and moreover, if they happen to reach it (which has happened throughout history), provide them with the help and treatment they so desperately need.

For more, see my new book, “Flamethrower”: https://www.amazon.com/Flamethrower-Recipient-Williams-Controversial-Holocaust/dp/1734534109/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=flamethrower+by+bryan+mark+rigg&link_code=qs&qid=1592239708&sourceid=Mozilla-search&sr=8-1&tag=mozilla-20