‘I had to come and see this place’

From left, Thomas “Tom” Ortman, Marilyn Ortman, and Saipan Community School pastor Stephen Dame on the beach near Sugar Dock in Chalan Kanoa. (MARK RABAGO)

Thomas “Tom” Ortman and his wife, Marilyn, are visiting Saipan this week to fulfill a lifelong dream of visiting the place where his father, a World War II veteran, crawled from foxhole to foxhole and saw his fellow Marines shredded to pieces by Japanese mortar.

“I’ve been wanting to come here since I was 8 years old. My dad was wounded here and I basically wanted to see where they landed. He had talked about digging a foxhole while being shelled in a cemetery.”

Thomas said his father, PFC James D. Ortman, was part of the Wake Island Avengers, a group of men who enlisted in the U.S. Army shortly after the Japanese took Wake Island in December 1941.

However, it took more than two years before Ortman saw his first combat action when he was part of the invasion force that stormed the island in June 1944. He was part of the 23rd Marine regiment, 4th Division, M Company, that landed on the beach near where the Saipan Community Church now stands.

Tom said his father didn’t really talk much about the Battle of Saipan, but he inferred from what little interaction he had with him that it brought his father to a dark place.

“Just very little and only every once in a while. If we were watching a John Wayne movie and they had a scene where the guy was crawling from foxhole to foxhole…all he said was, ‘I did that.’ That’s all he said and I never asked him anything more about it.”

That experience in the Pacific War probably left such a bad impression that when Tom told him he was about to take a physical to enlist in the Vietnam War, the elder Ortman became livid.

“I tried to enlist in the Marines. My friend told me, ‘You better tell your dad.’ So the night before the physical, I told him. I’ve never seen him mad at me in my whole life except that time; he was dead set against me going into service.  He said, ‘if you go into service, I won’t be here when you come home.’”

Tom said that fateful day in the Chalan Kanoa cemetery where mortars were exploding around him changed his then 22-year-old father forever.

“He got shelled and I don’t know how the corpsman got over to him but the corpsman asked him to open his fingers and he couldn’t do that. … The guy next to him was killed, his chest was ripped open. My dad got blown up in the air about 6 feet and then that explosion sucked him back into the ground. Then he looked over at his buddy and he’s gone.”

After getting medically evacuated, his father spent 10 months in a mental hospital and even after he got out, they wanted him to go to treatment.

“He wouldn’t get treatment. The one that straightened them out was my mother. He got married and she straightened them out,” Tom said.

Unfortunately, his dad’s post-traumatic stress disorder didn’t go entirely away and resurfaced from time to time.

“Even years later, I stopped at their house. This was in the 1980s. He’ll be taking a nap and would wake up screaming with nightmares. If there was ever a thunderstorm at night, he’d be in the living room. Just sitting there alone in the dark. He had a dog and the dog was sitting there with him during the thunderstorm. That’s the way it was. So I had to come back here to see this place,” said Tom.

PFC James D.. Ortman in an undated World War II photo. (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)

James Ortman, who went back to work at a Milwaukee motor engine company after the war, passed away in 1995. Tom later named his own son after him.

The Ortmans said their trip to Saipan wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Saipan Community School pastor Stephen Dame, whom Tom met in a World II group on Facebook.

“I think I was posting some stuff about Saipan and he said, ‘Hey, my dad fought there.’ And we started discussing and, every once in a while we would just touch base and he said I’d really like to come there someday and I said well, ‘I hope you can. I’d love to show you around.’”

Dame told Tom that in a way his father and U.S. troops invading Saipan in 1944 had a profound effect in spreading the gospel in the Pacific.

“Your dad could have come ashore right here. It’s very possible. You can almost say this church, this school that shares Christianity with all of Asia is here because your dad set foot on this point,” said Dame, pointing to the beach near where the Sugar Dock is.

And Marilyn Ortman said it’s all thanks to Facebook and Dame’s interest in World War II.

“Thanks to the pastor, if not for him we wouldn’t be here. I hear that all the time. I want to go to Saipan and I keep saying next year, next year, next year but when he talked to Pastor Steve, I thought it was the right time to go to Saipan.”

Tom said perhaps his father’s only regret is that those in the U.S. mainland don’t really know the amount of blood that was spilled in the Battle of Saipan, adding that even those in the Philippines, where he and his wife now live, can’t even point to where Saipan is on the map.

“My dad said on the ship before they landed that [an officer] told them ‘you guys are gonna be remembered forever. Nobody’s gonna forget you. They’re gonna remember what you’re going to do in the next few days, and they’re gonna remember Saipan.’”

The invasion of Saipan may not be as famous as D-Day, but for Tom coming to the island—less than a week before Father’s Day—where his father fought and was wounded has been very cathartic.

“If I die right now I’d be happy from what I saw. Going up the beach knowing he was there, he dug a foxhole in the cemetery. So that’s the only cemetery I’m aware of that the 4th Division moved. I mean how many people can say that I went to visit the area where my dad dug a foxhole during the war. How many people can say that? It just blows my mind.”