My cousin JuJu,
When we were kids during the Depression Years, my cousin John Kriete, lived in a tough section of Hoboken, N. J. Sunday visits to see our aunts, uncles and cousins, all of whom lived within easy driving distance, became an inexpensive form of family week-end recreation. John had an older brother, Warren, who was about my age and whose name became my middle name. But on one such weekend visit by another of my aunts and uncles, my older cousin Bill took Warren for a walk, and while crossing a busy street, Warren was killed by a passing car.
A pall descended over the families which lasted for years. I remember the funeral, even though I was in my pre-teen years. Warren was laid out on the living room sofa, and we kids didn’t really understand the full meaning of his death. I had never seen a dead person before. His mother must have taken it unusually hard, because her younger son John came to live with us for the next few years. He was a big, good natured kid who never took offense. His mother called him Junior, since he had been named after his father, but we kids always called him JuJu. Big, good natured, blue eyed, blonde, roly poly JuJu!
When I was married in October 1943, JuJu was best man at my wedding. We were both in uniform, he was a 6' 4" Marine Corps PFC stationed at the Picattinny Arsenal in N.J. as a Marine guard, an Adonis in uniform! Four months later, I remember reading his letter in my foxhole on the Anzio Beachhead in Italy. He was fed up with being a guard! He wanted action! I told him, he was nuts! He had it made! Stay where he was! I heard nothing for several months and then a letter from my parents told me that JuJu had been wounded in action on Iwo Jima and was in a military hospital in the States. When I came home two years later, he was still in the hospital.
After the War, I don’t remember seeing JuJu for several years, until we both attended a family reunion. He had gone to college on the GI Bill, became a teacher, and was married. We all brought our kids, but JuJu didn’t have any kids of his own. He brought the two youngsters he had adopted. I asked about his wound and he said it was a gunshot wound in the hip. No further discussion. He was then divorced and remarried. Still no children and in his late forties he died of colon cancer.
What do we really know about the terrible price of War?
Russ Cloer