(2006) Can you name a hero from Korea, Vietnam, or the wars in the Middle East? A real hero, not just anyone who served. Perhaps you've heard of Sergeant York (drafted as a pacifist and played by Gary Cooper) from the First World War or Audie Murphy (played himself in To Hell and Back) for World War II. Chances are you're not familiar with Guy Gabaldon, though Jeffrey Hunter (a handsome, 6'1", white actor) portrayed him in the successful 1960 motion picture Hell to Eternity.

This documentary, opening with scenes of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean, contrasting today (a popular shrine for Japanese tourists) with 60 years ago during WWII - written, directed, and produced by Steven Jay Rubin, narrated by Freddie Prinze Jr - reveals Guy, through his own words and those of others who knew him, as a short, feisty, fearless Hispanic kid in East LA, a courageous US Marine on Saipan, a father, and a charitable citizen.

The descendant of a 16th-century Spanish conquistador in the New World, Guy (born in 1926) moved with his family of four siblings during the Depression from New Mexico to Los Angeles where in the 7th grade he became fast friends with twin brothers Lyle and Lane Nakano (becoming like another member of their family, though unlike the Hollywood movie not a foster child) among other Japanese-Americans in his junior high school from whom he learned Asian customs and to speak a broken, slang Japanese.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, while two older brothers enlisted in the Navy in 1942, Guy, who left for Alaska to work in a fish-canning plant, was turned down for having a perforated eardrum; he then tried the Marine Corps. Though he stood a quarter of an inch short of the 5'4" minimum-height requirement, his language skills qualified him to become a scout and observer (not as an interpreter, for which he lacked fluency).

Entering the Marines with a reputation as a daredevil, trained at camp Pendleton before being sent to Hawaii with the 2nd Regiment, intelligence, Guy hit the beach on Saipan in an "alligator" landing craft following aerial and naval bombardment in June 1944. The Mariana Islands were needed as a platform for the new B-29 bombers to strike Japan; on the neighboring island of Tinian, the Enola Gay would later rise into the air with its atomic bomb headed for Hiroshima. Seeing dead Japanese and then American corpses lying all around him with bullets punching the sand pierced the young Marine to his core, leaving him unsure of himself for several days.

The Japanese - 30,000 battle-hardened troops, twice the estimated strength - threw themselves at the Americans in bansai assaults, littering the island with bodies and leaving the remnants hiding out, sick and starving, in caves. By the time the Japanese resistance collapsed, some 4,000 Americans had been killed. Based on earlier conflicts, the Americans had come to expect that the Japanese would not surrender; but freelancing as a renegade, Guy began killing the enemy and capturing some prisoners. His company commander, Capt (later retired as a colonel) Schwabe, appreciating Guy's getting good results, tagged his private as the Pied Piper.

Gabaldon, upset when his Japanese family was sent to an internment camp, says he was motivated in part to prove that the Japanese could be induced to give themselves up and explains how he managed to convince many of them to surrender to him by assuring them that they would be treated well, fed and given medicines, and eventually returned to Japan after the war. Talking to them about their families and sharing his own kinship with Japanese, he required the soldiers to strip down for his own protection.

Indoctrination had convinced the civilians, who outnumbered soldiers on Saipan, that if captured the Americans would rape the women, barbeque their babies, torture, mutilate, and devour the men; Guy witnessed mass suicides from the cliffs, including women hurling their children over before then jumping to their death. At the northern end of the island, single-handedly in one day, Guy made a haul of 800 soldiers and civilians from Banzai Cliffs. (For commercial purposes, Hollywood invented the conclusion of the motion picture with General Matsui, played by Sessue Hayakawa, surrendering his ragtag army to Gabby.) In all the Pied Piper of Saipan was responsible for bringing in more than 1500 prisoners before he was wounded by machine-gun fire during mop-up operations and evacuated to a hospital in Hawaii, ending his brief but bloody military career.

Though Capt Schwabe recommended Gabaldon for the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Marine Pfc wasn't even promoted for his heroism. Some attributed the slight to his being Mexican-American and to his outspokenness. On 19 June 1957, Ralph Edwards, host of This Is Your Life, introduced Guy Gabaldon to the TV audience for his "killing and compassion." Soon afterward Gil Doud, who also wrote the script for Audie Murphy's 1950 film, composed the story that would become Hell to Eternity. Belatedly the Navy awarded the hero its second-highest medal, the Navy cross. He was proud of having saved both American and Japanese lives; after the war he established a youth camp on Saipan for counseling troubled teens against drugs and violence.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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