The Saga of Ben from Milwaukee

The Life and Death of an Aristocrat of the Soul

“When God hath ordained a creature to die in a particular place, he causeth that creature’s wants to direct him to that place.” – Liet Kynes, Dune

Ben was from Milwaukee.  Milwaukee is not a small town or a big city, but something in between, a few hundred thousand people there to live and work in a place that is known for neither high culture or great wealth.  He grew up in a middle class home, it seems, though there is little information available about his family, which perhaps indicates that they were unremarkable people.  He went to public school there, doing well enough to go to college locally at Marquette.  Ben was Jewish and Marquette was a Jesuit school, a combination that suggests an indifference to doctrine on his part, though little direct evidence exists concerning the matter.   If Ben was consciously introspective, if he wrote or otherwise recorded anything about his thoughts and feelings, such works are not extant.  Such awareness as we have of Ben’s inner life plays out as evidenced in a series of decisions and reactions, choices he made when opportunities presented themselves, all of which led inexorably to his final moments.

As a young man there were signs Ben was not like others, only the faintest hints at first, which in light of later events came to make clearer sense.  He was an Eagle Scout, under older and more rigorous standards, dedicating himself to a years-long path of excellence as a young man.  He was fitter than most, and brighter, with an evident sense of longing for the elsewhere, which led him to California and USC.  There he attended and graduated dental school.  This would be a pattern with Ben for the few remaining years of his life, stabs at adventure colliding with the mundane forces of the system until the ultimate reconciliation of the totality of the choices he had made.

Ben set up a dental practice in Beverly Hills, catering to up-and-coming actors.  He seemed poised for a life as a living trope, Jewish medical professional in Hollywood.  Had life continued as it had for him he probably would have married, complained about WASPs keeping him out of their country clubs, perhaps siring spoiled daughters and neurotic sons, not a bad life really, better than most.  But this was not to be his fate.  It was always as if some inner voice was telling him, “not here, not now, not you.”

Events around him shaped the course of his life, as they do for all of us.  There were wars and rumors of war, and Ben, though having no particular military background, wanted to play a part.  He attempted to join the US Army, which told him they didn’t need dentists at the moment, as did the Canadian Army, presumably for similar reasons.  As the world situation deteriorated, however, and the US became directly involved in hostilities, Ben was eventually taken in, but as a regular infantryman.

Here things began to come into focus for Ben.  Perhaps it was his training as an Eagle Scout, perhaps it was whatever inner force compelled him to become one in the first place, something more primal and visceral, but Ben was, quite simply, a natural as a combat soldier.  He rated as an expert (the highest level) with both rifle and pistol, and was rapidly promoted to sergeant, where he also became a master at machine gunnery and was placed in charge of a heavy weapons squad.  The army put him through all of its tests, physical and mental; he aced them and pushed harder.  It was decided on the basis of this that there was only one thing to do with Ben, commission him as an officer.  And having taken careful account of his evident martial prowess, there was only one job the brass decided he was born for- army dentist.

Ben protested this, wishing to stay a machine gunner.  The army informed Ben that the system had spoken and he was to be made a lieutenant and designated as a dentist for the 102^nd Infantry.  Ben took this in stride, and seems to have decided just to keep doing both jobs.  He worked as a dentist for part of the day, even performing cleanings in the barracks, while at the same time keeping up with a rigorous schedule of PT and weapons training on his own time.  His status as an officer gave him a certain freedom, and he used it to become an ad hoc weapons and tactics instructor, teaching the younger men the vital skills they would need in combat, skills which seemed to come to him almost by instinct, as he had yet to be deployed.  His superiors noted this and he was named best soldier in the regiment by the CO, despite officially having an office job and support role; it was as if the team doctor was named MVP.  Ben was shortly promoted to captain, and made regimental dentist for the 105^th Infantry Regiment, part of the 27^th Infantry Division.  This would be his final posting.

Ben was at last sent overseas as part of a major military campaign.  He was only in theater for a month before he was called into action.  By called I do not mean ordered.  The call came from within.  Hearing that the regimental surgeon had been wounded, Ben volunteered to take his place near the front lines.  Despite not having been formally trained as a surgeon he must have been able to demonstrate to his superiors at that moment that he was the man for the job, as they gave their permission for him to go to the field station some fifty yards back from the fighting.  And it was here, in the midst of saving lives with nothing more than dental training and ingenuity, that his fate finally found him.

This was Saipan, June 7^th, 1944.  The Battle of Saipan was the most important part of the terrible Marianas Campaign, as much a turning point in the Pacific War as Midway.  The Japanese knew that if the Americans were able to take Saipain, Guam, and Tinian, they would be able to launch their devastating B-29 bombers at Japan itself.  The Japanese meant to destroy the Americans or die trying, and as they had failed to do the former, there was only one recourse as far as their commander, Lt. Gen. Yoshitsugu Saito, was concerned.  He announced to his men that they were to become gyokusai, smashed jewels, beautiful and precious in their courageous final moments before they were destroyed by the hammer blow of combat.

“Whether we attack or whether we stay where we are, there is only death. However, in death there is life. I will advance with you to deliver another blow to the American devils and leave my bones on Saipan as a fortress of the Pacific”

What he had in mind was the largest Banzai charge of the war, nearly 5,000 men, many on crutches and some unarmed, flinging themselves headlong at the American lines, launched on the morning of the 7^th.  The Americans had dealt with this tactic before, but never at this scale, and when the cry of “tennōheika banzai” came out of the blasted tropical landscape, it was quickly evident that the forward positions would be overwhelmed.  Machine guns, mortars, artillery support, rifles, bayonets, and fists- nothing could slow this suicidal tide.  Even after Saito himself was wounded, dragging himself to a cave to commit seppuku, there was seemingly no end to it.

It did not take long for the carnage to reach Ben, first as the wounded rapidly came in, then as the Japanese themselves advanced on his position.  He watched as a Japanese soldier burst into his operating tent and bayonetted a casualty.  It was then, it seems, that that inner voice that had brought him across his country and across the Pacific, which had led him inexorably to this time and this place, finally spoke to him in a clear voice: 

“Here.  Now.  You.”

What happened next is taken from the citation accompanying the Medal of Honor of Captain Ben Saloman, 29.  I mention that because one might easily confuse it with a plagiarized script from a John Wick movie.  Ben shot the man who bayonetted his comrade with a handy carbine, then briefly attempted to continue surgery before shooting two more Japanese attackers coming into his tent.  Four more attempted to crawl under the fabric; he disarmed one with a kick before shooting him, stabbing another with his own bayonet, clubbing the third with the butt of his carbine, and wounding another with an unspecified gun, this last man being finished off by one of the wounded Americans in the tent.  The citation notes at this point that Ben was “realizing the gravity of the situation,” in other words, what he’d done to that point was the warm up.  He then ran outside to order everyone to retreat to more secure positions further back.  He had done all he could do as an erstwhile surgeon; now it was time to progress to final form.  Ben made his way to a nearby machine gun position where the four-man crew lay dead.  He took his place there alone, all the while commanding everyone else to help the wounded escape.  He was last seen blazing away at the oncoming horde, smashing jewels with lead.

When the banzai charge was finally stopped and the position was retaken, Ben was found at his final post, the one to which he had been called by that voice that had spoken to him his whole life.  Ben had been shot at least 76 times and bayonetted more times than could be counted.  At least a third of those shots had occurred while he was still alive, and while he was found next to the machine gun, it was not in its original place; Ben had dragged it back to more secure positions several times before he was finally killed.  Before him lay at least 98 dead Japanese, those being the ones that could definitely be attributed to his efforts.

The army tried one final time to squeeze Ben into a system-acceptable role.  They denied the initial application submitted on his behalf for the MOH on the grounds that, as a medical officer, he shouldn’t have been fighting in the first place, and that it would have been a violation of the Geneva Convention to give such an award to a dentist for shooting people who were murdering defenseless, wounded men.  Fortunately, his fellow dental school alumni from USC launched an effort on his behalf, and after fighting bureaucracy for decades, in 2008 he finally got the recognition he deserved. 

Ben’s family was long gone at that point. He had no siblings, never married, and had no children.  He had hardly made use of his education and professional skills.  Such was not his fate.  He was always meant to be on that island, at that very place, at that very moment.  He was not really a dentist, but then, he was not really only a soldier either.  He was a warrior, a spiritual aristocrat whose role in the universe was to live and die exactly as he did, and God called him to the place where he could fulfill his higher destiny, arrayed against an enemy that would oblige him. 

All of us are being led, inexorably, to the place of our death, just as Ben Saloman was.  In some sense we choose this path, in some sense it is laid out before us, but to the degree we are able every choice we make puts us further along the way.  For those who feel they are meant for more, who toil in obscurity for men and causes not their own, who are bored and lonely and uncertain, realize that everything you do is taking you where you are supposed to be, and if you would be more, choose more.   The world gave Ben Saloman a rear-echelon job cleaning teeth; he was willing to die rather than accept that.  And it is that choice, ultimately, that puts one’s fate in one’s own hands.