Cpl. Dixon Porter

Machine Gunner, A Company,
21st Marines, 3rd Division

In 1943 when I was 15, it seemed to me that the war might be winding down, and I was scared to death that it would be over before I could kill someone. I had seen all those movies, Back to Bataan, Guadalcanal Diary, and those guys had so much fun killing people; I knew I just couldn’t pass that up. Also, I’m part Chinese and I was a real racist. I wanted desperately to get in there and kill somebody, especially Japanese. I knew that if I got into the Marines my chances would be increased because Marines all went to the South Pacific.
I ran away from home, came to San Diego, and applied for Social Security under a false name, Dixon Porter. I was afraid my mother might have put out an all points bulletin so I changed my name and lied about my age. That was all the identification I had. I went to the draft board and started complaining about having to get drafted and go into the service. I complained so long and so loud they didn’t even look at my ID. They passed me through the physical.
“Do you have a branch of service?” they asked me.
“Yes, the Marines,” I said.
They didn’t quite tie that together with a guy who didn’t want to get drafted but I was hoping they wouldn’t. I joined the Marines when I was 15 and went through boot camp and the advanced infantry at Camp Pendleton and shipped out to Guadalcanal.
I was assigned to the 21st Marines as a machine gunner. I wasn’t on Guadalcanal more than a week or so when they called us down to the troop ships to invade Guam. I invaded Guam with the rest of my friends, and I made an epiphany. Killing people might be fun but it never occurred to me that they would be trying to kill me at the same time. The first time I heard shots go past my ear I began to wonder about my decision. Guam was not a tremendously intense operation, but it was tough. Our platoon of about 48 guys had two dozen casualties, three or four killed maybe 20 wounded.
We settled there on Guam and trained for whatever was coming next which happened to be Iwo Jima. We were told it was going to be tough, like Tarawa. It won’t be a cakewalk like Guam. To me, Guam was not a cakewalk but I realized later on how right that description was. We were the reserve Division. We landed on Iwo on the third day and we went straight up the beach, no casualties, to about the middle of the island and turned north. We took the center where all the fun was.
The first day we had a dozen or so casualties and we could see it was going to be a nasty bit. The next day our company of roughly about 250 men and officers had about 100 casualties. About half the company was wiped out in a space of maybe three or four hours. Halfway through the next day we got replacements.
The word went around that they’re raising the flag on Suribachi. I was very busy doing something so by the time I got around to looking, it was already up. It was a major event to everybody on that island. It really meant something because we knew how tough it had been getting up there. In the time that I was with the machine gun platoon, I developed really close relationships with some of the guys—Aloysia Joseph Piffkowski; our platoon sergeant, Alexander P. Dupnock; and my platoon leader Lt. Duncan R. Scott, the best man I have ever known. An ammo carrier in back of the second squad of a machine gun platoon doesn’t normally establish a close relationship with the officers but he and I seemed to hit it off. He was from Illinois and I had been born in Illinois. The lieutenant was a bright guy, maybe 22 or 23, who had just graduated from college when he joined the Marines. There wasn’t a man in our platoon who didn’t like him as a fond uncle. He was without question a father figure for me and I loved him to pieces. When he got killed, it was probably the worst night of my life. I will never be able to get it out of my mind. I named my youngest son, Scott, after him. He was killed during one of the comparatively few banzai attacks that we had on Iwo. There were grenades flying in all directions and he had jumped down in the hole in front of me and was trying to direct fire at what he could hear. He couldn’t see anything, as it was pitch black. A grenade landed right behind him.
I hollered, “Grenade” and ducked as it went off.
He didn’t duck and it shredded his back…just shredded it…and he fell back into my hole and into my lap. About that time, the banzai attack petered out, and I sat there for about three hours trying to will him not to die. It was obvious the wound was mortal. I couldn’t believe that Scotty could be killed. It just didn’t compute. I knew by this time that I could be killed, but somehow he was not the kind of person who was supposed to die. When he did, I sat there and cried for about 4 or 5 hours, well beyond sunrise. I had been on Iwo about three weeks when this happened.