Defining Moments: A True Story of War, Family Conflict & Reconciliation

By ROBERT DUSTMAN

Defining Moments is the compelling true life story of one American soldiers adventures in the South Pacific during World War II. It is a captivating tale of war behind the front lines as revealed through the prism of the more than 300 letters this young G.I. from rural Ohio wrote to his family between the years 1940-45. This memoir, written by the soldiers eldest son, captures in vivid detail Bill Dustmans transformation from a boy into a man. The book presents, in candid detail, the defining moments which shaped this young mans life after he was freed from the bucolic, but cloistered environment of his rural hometown to experience an unfamiliar and uncaring world over which he had little control.

Defining Moments graphically and honestly paints a word picture of Bills romantic liaisons, his conflicted relationships with fellow G.I.s, the bizarre, humorous, and even tragic moments that he encountered during his exciting odyssey through the mosquito-infested jungles of Fiji and Solomon Islands to the more inviting tropical beauty of the Philippines.

Defining Moments traces not only Bill Dustmans physical journey through war, but also his psychological and emotional sojourn as he battled to cope with fear, anger, frustration, self-doubt and sadness because of his long separation from family. This book will resonate with every reader on some very personal level.

The portrait that emerges is of a man in search of himself and the meaning of his own existence in a world that no longer made sense to him. But this is also the tale of a family in crisis, whose love and respect for another, so strong during the war years, was severely tested in the post-war years and beyond. We have a front row seat to the drama of a family from Americas heartland as it struggles to retain the closeness that once bound them together, but which began to crumble due to unfortunate and unforeseen, but preventable, circumstances.

This is an inspiring story of survival, sacrifice, faith, hope and in the end, reconciliation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781463416904

ROBERT DUSTMAN

Robert Dustman is a former broadcast journalist who enjoyed a successful twenty-five year career as a reporter, anchor, news director, sports director and political editor at radio and television stations throughout the State of Michigan. During his tenure at WWJ, the all-news CBS radio owned and operated radio station in Detroit, Mr. Dustman’s news reports were aired frequently on other CBS stations around the country, as well as the CBS Radio Network. He covered the 1988 Republican and Democratic National Conventions, and the inauguration of President George H.W. Bush in 1989. After he left broadcasting in 1992, Mr. Dustman was appointed Director of Media & Communications in the administration of Oakland County (Michigan) Executive L. Brooks Patterson, who is one of Michigan’s longest serving, best known and most respected political leaders. Mr. Dustman and his wife, Mary Alice, who have been married for fifteen years, make their home in Auburn Hills, Michigan, a small, relatively affluent community, about thirty miles north of downtown Detroit. Although now retired, Mr. Dustman serves as a public relations consultant for Park West Galleries, headquartered in Southfield, Michigan, which is one of the world’s foremost fine arts dealers with 1.3 million customers in sixty countries worldwide. He is also a free-lance voice-over talent.

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© 2011 ROBERT DUSTMAN. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 7/6/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4634-1690-4 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4634-1691-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4634-1692-8 (sc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011910028

Printed in the United States of America

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

The Ties That Bind

Goodbye Bucyrus

Bound for the West Coast

Bon Voyage

The Army Life

Strike Up the Band

The Old King of the Tribe and Other Oddities

The Home Front

Lady Killer

The Poet-Philosopher

Bill’s War

Fed Up!!

Looking to the Future

Coming Home

Aftermath

Family Crisis and Reconciliation

Epilogue

Afterthoughts

About the Author

.

Acknowledgments

Most of the material contained in this book came from the more than three hundred letters my father wrote to his family in the years from 1940, when he left home for basic training, through 1945, when he returned from the war in the South Pacific.

However, I consulted several other resources to provide context and perspective to the story. My aunt, Dorothy Dustman-Hayes, my father’s sister, recorded on tape her recollections growing up as the youngest member of the Dustman household and her memories of her brother going off to war. This lengthy interview was followed up by a series of additional e-mail questions in which I requested more specific and detailed information about certain aspects of her recorded account as well as other issues that came up during the writing of the book. At eighty-one years young, Aunt Dort is the oldest surviving member of the Dustman family, and her input was invaluable in crafting the material for this book.

My younger brother, David Dustman, was too young to recall many, if any, of the events from those early years; however he was instrumental in filling in the blanks where he could.

One of the first people I contacted after I decided to write this book was Mary Ellen Lust, curator of the Bucyrus Historical Society. She took the time to write me a detailed letter about her memories as they related to the Dustman family in the 1950s. Mary Ellen also graciously offered to make the newspaper archives at the historical museum available to me at anytime. Mary Ellen also put me in touch with several people who knew my parents and grandparents and who still live in Bucyrus.

Other contributors to this book included George and Dorothy Fischer, Kenny Fegley, and Carol Corey, all of whom still live in Bucyrus.

Snippets of the historical background related to the founding of Bucyrus and its early days as a frontier town were taken from a book entitled About Bucyrus, which was written by Daniel G. Arnold, MD (copyright 1971 by McM Corporation, Indianapolis, Indiana), and The Bucyrus That Was by Bill Elder (copyright 2010).

Background information on my great-grandfather, Freeman Lincoln Dustman, as well as the history of the Dustman family was gleaned from Our Family History and Genealogical Records, produced by Jeanne Alban Evans, a Dustman family relative.

Other resources I tapped for background information include Wikipedia for facts and statistics on the places where my father served in the South Pacific and details on the 1943 nationwide coal miners’ strike. I also obtained background information from Fiji.gov.fj; the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco; the FDR Library website; and A Dictionary of American History written by Thomas L. Purvis (brief on-line references only from google.com and www.blackwellreference.com). Other sources used were www.worldwar2history.info/Bougainville; a letter written by Robert S. Beightler, Major General, USA, Commanding Headquarters 37th Infantry Division, April 12, 1944; the National Archives & Records Administration and the Oakland County, Michigan, Department of Veterans Affairs (my father’s service records); the National Weather Service, Cleveland; Ohio, and the people history.com and pop-culture.us.

I would like to extend my sincere thanks and appreciation to all of these individuals and organizations for providing the valuable information that made writing this account of my father’s wartime experiences a much smoother and more seamless process than it might otherwise have been.

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For my father, who provided the inspiration for this book, and for my wife, Mary Alice, who has loved and supported me through good times and bad.

Preface

Writing a book has been at the top of my own personal bucket list ever since I made the decision to retire in October 2009. The question I kept asking myself was, What kind of book do I want to write? I started out with one idea, discarded it, and went in another direction. When that did not pan out either, I came up with a list of more possibilities.

Finally, one day while cleaning the storage closet in our basement, I literally stumbled across what I wanted to write about. There in my dad’s beat-up old army footlocker was the answer to my quandary. Looking inside, I found literally hundreds of letters my dad had written to his parents and sister while serving in the South Pacific during World War II. I found the letters carefully cataloged by year and neatly tucked into makeshift cardboard holders.

Once I decided on the subject of the book, the next problem I confronted was the title. Many were considered: With Love, Bill; My Father’s War; The Other Face of War; South Seas Diary; War Has Many Faces; and on and on the list went. None of these titles fit the story I wanted to tell, so the search continued.

Defining Moments ended up as my title choice, because I felt that it accurately captured the essence of the events that shaped my father’s early life and led to his transformation from the naïve country boy who left Bucyrus in 1940 into the more mature individual who returned home in 1945. After leaving the loving, warm embrace of his small, rural hometown of Bucyrus, Ohio, Bill Dustman found himself thrown into a strange and unfamiliar world, where each day was filled with defining moments that began to shape the man he would become.

Bill became defined by numerous factors—the close personal ties he forged with other GIs, his seemingly endless string of romantic liaisons, the character and fortitude he displayed in the face of Japanese attacks, and the humorous, silly, weird, terrifying, and unexplainable events that occurred during his rich odyssey through five years of military service. He had ventured far from home, spatially as well as emotionally, into a new world, now devoid of the protective cloak of family.

When Dad went off to war, his life was a blank sheet of paper that begged for a rich narrative. By the time he returned from the war, five years later, many stories of high adventure and unusual experiences had filled the once-blank pages of his life.

As I poured over each letter, it was like reading pages from an engaging novel that is difficult to put down. Dad wrote tantalizingly descriptive and detailed accounts of his experiences during the years 1940–45, both in the United States during basic training in Wisconsin, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and California and about his overseas assignments in Fiji, the Philippines, New Zealand, Bougainville, New Georgia, and the Solomon Islands.

This book purposely avoids any great detail about battles or battlefield heroics, since that facet of war has been well documented in numerous other books. However, a later chapter does cover my father’s personal, up-close contact with the horrors of war. This is the story of a young GI who left his rural hometown in central Ohio to serve his country in faraway places and the extraordinary things that happened to him along his fascinating journey. My hope is that the book gives you, the reader, a clear picture and understanding of the other side of war, a glimpse into the heart and mind of a soldier as he grew into manhood and struggled within himself to battle anger, frustration, self-doubt, sadness, fear, and at times, sheer hopelessness.

As I delved deeper into the book, it soon became clear that the story was as much about family as it was about my father’s transcendental journey of discovery through the jungles of the South Pacific. The two components were inextricably intertwined and served as a stark contrast between the once close-knit and loving family of the war years with the fractures that developed in the family structure that occurred in the postwar period and beyond.

It was a startling transformation that revealed the precipitous erosion over time in the way in which members of the immediate Dustman family—mother, father, sister, and brother—interacted with one another. The events that caused distress in my family were unforeseen but were certainly preventable. However, no one took the initiative to bridge the family divide until it was almost too late.

A rainbow of hope and reconciliation did eventually present itself that, while not salving all the wounds that had been inflicted, did manage to bring our family closer together.

The Ties That Bind

The center of my father’s universe, as a boy growing up in Bucyrus, Ohio, was his family. His parents instilled in him early in life an abiding respect and appreciation for family. The Dustmans did everything together. They ate together. They worshipped together. They spent their evenings together listening to the radio or playing games. They visited relatives together on the weekends.

This tradition of family cohesiveness was passed along by my father to my brother and me when we were children. In my father’s view, family was the brick-and-mortar foundation on which lives were built. Everything revolved around family. It was the seed from which grew our belief system, moral code, character, and personality. The family, I was taught to believe, forms the nucleus of our existence and makes us who we are as human beings.

As a boy growing up in small town America in the 1940s and 50s, I began to learn the importance of family. I recall that dinnertime conversations in the Dustman house revolved around events of the day. How was school? Are you getting good grades? What did you do after school today? Are we going to Mendon this weekend to visit Grandma and Granddad Custer?

During the week we would often visit both sets of grandparents, who lived nearby, or they would come to see us. Weekends often meant visiting my grandparents or driving to tiny Bloomville, Ohio, for Sunday dinner at my aunt and uncle’s, where sumptuous feasts were prepared by the women in the family while the men chatted in the parlor.

The patriarch of the Dustman clan in my formative years was my grandfather, George Tappan Dustman, who was born in Toledo, Ohio, on July 2, 1894, and served in the US Army as a clerk during World War I. He received his honorable discharge on March 21, 1919. My grandmother, Amanda Elizabeth Custer (a distant relative of George Armstrong Custer), was born on May 21, 1899, in Union Township, Ohio.

The couple met in a social circle of friends in Mendon, a tiny rural community nestled snugly in the southwest corner of Ohio, where my grandmother was born and raised. George T. knew instantly that Amanda was the gal for him. They got married right on the spot after picking up the marriage license.

After their marriage on April 24, 1919, in Celina, Ohio, my grandparents left Ohio and moved to Livingston, Montana, where grandfather realized a lifelong dream as a ranger at Yellowstone National Park. My father, George William (Bill) Dustman was born there on February 13, 1921.

Concerned that Montana might not be able to provide a good education or stable environment for their son, my grandmother and grandfather returned to Ohio and stayed at her parent’s home in Mendon for a time before moving to Bucyrus, where their second child, Dorothy Ann Dustman, was born on December 18, 1929.

What my grandfather did to earn a living after returning to Ohio is not known, since my Aunt Dort, his daughter and the oldest living member of the Dustman family, has no recollection of those years, either because she was not yet born or because she was too young to recall events. My aunt does remember that her dad started the Dustman Coal and Supply Company in 1938–39 and served one term as mayor of Bucyrus from 1938–40.

Grandfather was a stout, short man standing about five feet, five and three-quarters inches tall with a bulbous nose like W. C. Fields that turned a bright red whenever he drank, which was often. He had more belly than chest, grey eyes, brown hair that turned prematurely gray early in life, and a ruddy complexion. Grandfather smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, which probably accounted for the lung cancer that took his life in 1958. He usually had a cigarette, or occasionally an R. G. Dunn cigar, pressed between his lips.

Grandmother Dustman was a very stately and attractive woman with brown hair and green eyes that flashed when she got angry. She was about five feet, six inches tall, which made her slightly taller than her husband. She had a charming and warm personality and was one of the more popular women on the Bucyrus social circuit.

Grandmother was very active in the cribbage club, country club, church, and American Legion. She played golf and, during the war, performed volunteer work for the Red Cross and USO. Grandmother was always elegantly dressed and her hair neatly coiffed. In her dotage, Grandma would often tell anyone who would listen: I was really something. And you know what? She really was.

My other set of grandparents, Joe and Gertrude Eaton, also lived in Bucyrus and had one child, Addie May, who was born on November 30, 1920. Granddad, as a young man, was robust, healthy, and full of life, and he liked to drink beer and play cards. In his prime he stood about five feet, ten inches tall and weighed in the neighborhood of two hundred pounds.

Grandmother Eaton told me how, in his youth, Granddad had terrorized bars accompanied by a rather large brutish friend of his. As the story goes, Granddad would start a fight and then let his bouncer-sized buddy mop the floor with the unsuspecting poor soul who had taken the bait. But as he aged, Granddad’s health deteriorated rapidly with the onset of the after-effects of the gas attacks to which he had been subjected in World War I. His hulk-like frame shrank to no more than 145 pounds.

Walking hand-in-hand down the street with Granddad Eaton to his nearby office was a real treat, because I enjoyed spending time with him. He was a gentle, kind soul who died long before his time. The walk was slow because of his ailing heart, which made it necessary to stop every so often for a brief rest. One of the other memories I have is of Granddad sitting in a chair with his legs slung over the arm.

One evening in 1952, long after I had gone to bed and was fast asleep, I have the vague recollection of my mother stealthily entering my room and whispering in my ear to move over, since Grandma Gertrude would be spending the night. It wasn’t until the next morning that I learned the distressing reason for Grandma’s late-night sleepover.

My father took me for a walk, and along the way we stopped. He knelt down to be at eye level with me and then told me the sad news that Granddad Eaton had passed away the previous night. I frankly don’t recall how or if I reacted. The concept of death is difficult enough for adults to grasp, let alone a six-year-old little boy.

The next thing I remember is the day Dad took me to the funeral home to see Granddad. As we entered the parlor, I distinctly remember Dad telling the greeter that Bobby would like to see his granddad. As we walked up to the coffin and gazed upon my granddad’s lifeless body, my father made the comment: Bobby, we all have to go sometime.

The effect on me of seeing a dead person for the first time in my young life, especially someone I loved dearly, was devastating. I became obsessed with death. I would find dead birds and bury them, fashioning crosses for their graves out of the wood that was used to stoke the furnace in our home.

My drawings in school took on a somber tone, as I drew pictures of dead people in coffins, surrounded by flowers. Oddly, I don’t recall if my parents, teacher, or anyone else, for that matter, was alarmed by my eccentric behavior. Fortunately, the mood quickly passed and I returned to being a normal six-year-old little boy.

Grandma Gertrude, now a widow, was a woman of slight build, sparkling eyes, and an easygoing demeanor who let me play with her foot-pedal sewing machine whenever I came for a visit. I remember that she had Aunt Jemima salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen counter. She had a great sense of humor too.

Toward the end of her life, when she was about eighty years old, Grandma lived with my parents. I’d come in the front door and see her sitting in her favorite chair by the front window working, as usual, on a crossword puzzle. I’d say, Grandma, you’re looking good. She’d come back with You mean I’m good lookin’. Gert never missed