Soldier’s Story--Pomp and a Purple Heart : Forty-Four Years Later, Donald W. Roberts, 62, Receives Recognition That Always Eluded Him

TWENTYNINE PALMS — The Marine Corps drum and bugle corps struck up the “Star-Spangled Banner,” the color guard ran Old Glory up a 90-foot flagpole, two brigadier generals stood smartly at attention, a contingent of 200 Marines fell into formation and an audience of 50 friends and relatives watched proudly.

The reason for the fanfare was Donald W. Roberts, 62, an ex-Army private about to receive his Purple Heart and five other service medals--44 years after he was first wounded at Pearl Harbor.

Clutching his cane with his left hand and saluting with his right, Roberts swayed nervously as Brig. Gen. William R. Etnyre awarded the medals.

“I’m glad to be aboard, sir,” Roberts said.

“Sometimes things are done slowly,” the general replied, “but in the end justice is served.”

“Glad to be aboard, sir,” Roberts repeated, the words catching in the back of his throat.

He didn’t know what else to say; his life had been filled with so little pomp and so much circumstance.

That the event took place at all last Feb. 22 seems like a small miracle to Roberts, who has a history of being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Even his childhood memories are not happy. He was a ward of the court, bouncing from one foster home to the next, he recalled.

Judged “mentally incompetent” in 1938, Roberts was committed to Sonoma State Home for the Feeble Minded, he said. Twice he tried to flee from the institution and twice he was captured. Following his second escape attempt he was sterilized. Two years later he escaped.

“In those days juveniles didn’t have any representation,” Roberts explained. “I tried to talk to the court, but I was told to shut up.”

He joined the Army in August, 1941, opting for duty at Pearl Harbor based on the flip of a coin.

On Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, sinking 18 ships, destroying 170 planes and causing 3,700 casualties. But Roberts can’t recall any of the day’s events. What information he has pieced together about what happened to him came from friends and history books.

During a chance 1974 meeting at the Yucca Valley chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn., Brig. Gen. Willis T. Lyman informed Roberts that he had been the private’s commanding officer at Camp Malakole in Hawaii. He also recalled pulling the body of a dead soldier off a shell-shocked Roberts on Dec. 7, 1941.

“Roberts was sitting there like he was in a dream,” Lyman recalled. “He was in a trance, sleepwalking. I just got him over to the infirmary.”

Lyman and the rest of the 251st Coast Artillery were soon shipped to the Fiji Islands, leaving Roberts to recover from the bullet he caught in his left leg. The injury was unknown to both Roberts and Lyman at the time, and remained undocumented until late 1982. The administration building at Camp Malakole was destroyed in the attack, erasing any record that Roberts had served at Pearl Harbor.

Upon discharge in November, 1942, Roberts applied for service-connected disability, citing a nervous disorder. His application, as he related his history, was denied on the grounds that he had developed his condition before entering the service. Army personnel said they had no record of the injury Roberts suffered at Pearl Harbor. Nor was it explained why Roberts, if mentally incompetent, had been accepted in the first place.

From the time of his discharge until 1948, Roberts held more than 70 jobs. After a four-week courtship, he took a wife, Elizabeth, in 1944.

In 1948, desperate for work, Roberts landed work driving a dump truck for North American Aviation in Downey. By the time he went on permanent sick leave in 1968, he had worked up to electronic production assembly analyst, senior grade.

But Roberts’ nervous disorder worsened in 1969, and he again applied for a service-connected disability. Once again, it was denied.

In 1971, Roberts underwent an extensive psychiatric evaluation during a 5 1/2-month stay at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Long Beach. A psychologist, who studied Roberts’ case for his doctoral dissertation, said he found no evidence of feeble-mindedness. In his opinion, Roberts had been wrongly diagnosed.

Third Application

And so, yet a third application for a service-connected pension was rejected, this time because no new evidence was presented regarding Roberts’ condition. For some reason, the psychologist’s report had not been added to Roberts’ claim file.

That’s when Elizabeth enlisted the aid of then-U.S. Rep. Shirley Pettis, a Loma Linda Republican.

Roberts finally won full benefits starting in 1972.

What caused the delay?

“He’s been through a lot,” said Robert Dear, a veterans’ benefit counselor with the VA. “Many of his records were missing and others were incomplete. Things were pretty hectic at the start of the war.”

Roberts got his benefits but he still believed his Purple Heart was attainable.

Ten years later, he wrapped an American flag around his neck and threw his 1898 Springfield rifle into his Ford Courier pickup truck. He left Elizabeth a note saying the Japanese had attacked, they were killing Marines and that he was on his way to help.

Driving erratically and shouting incoherently, he drove in the back entrance to the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms. There, Marines detained Roberts, writing in their report dated Nov. 2, 1982, that he was “referring to the bombing of Pearl Harbor as if it had just occurred and that he and his troops were still under attack by the enemy.”

Roberts spent the next four days at the Jerry L. Pettis Veterans Hospital in Loma Linda where shrapnel was discovered in Roberts’ left leg. It was just the evidence he had been looking for.

From their home in Joshua Tree, the Robertses drove to the regional VA office in Westwood where they requested Roberts’ claims file. Officials told them such sensitive information would have to be sent through the mail. Elizabeth agreed on one condition--each page had to be numbered before she would leave the office.

Almost 800 pages were eventually sent but, significantly, Page 734 was missing. That turned out to be a letter dated Dec. 7, 1941, stating Roberts had been wounded in action and would be hospitalized for at least a month.

Missing Letter Arrives

The missing letter arrived in June, 1984, sent by the Department of the Army in St. Louis. Finally, Roberts had all the information he needed to collect his Purple Heart.

On Jan. 10, 1985, Roberts found the Purple Heart in his mailbox. It was delivered in what he calls a “tattered display case.”

“I sat here for five minutes and cried,” Roberts said. “Then I got mad.”

That day he called the White House and talked to Army staff and liaison officers who told him he would receive a new medal in exchange for the other. So he returned the case, but not the medal.

“After a 43-year wait, there was no way I was going to send the medal back,” Roberts said.

Last January, an executive order signed by President Reagan requested that Roberts’ claims to five additional service medals be resolved “as quickly as possible.”