Rex Guymon, a Marine buddy from World War II, called several weeks ago to tell me that Blair Reeves was dead. Guymon who lives in Helper, Utah, had been Blair's squad leader in F Company, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, during the invasion of Okinawa back in 1945.

Another Marine friend of Blair's, Jack Salter of Del Rio, Texas, had sent Rex a copy of an article from the March 24 issue of the San Antonio Express News reporting Blair's passing and reminding its readers of a few of the remarkable accomplishments of this lion-hearted man. Rex and Jack had already passed the news to several other F Company Marines who had served with Blair Reeves back during those grim days of the war against the Empire of Japan: Art Corella in Redding, California; Jim Strawbridge in Pensacola; and Pat Almond in Baton Rouge.

I promised to call others: Pinky Salleng in Cottage Grove, Oregon; Jack Freeling in Omaha; and Frank Amo, who lives in a suburb of Detroit. They all reacted in much the same way: first, silence; then a brief halting expression of regret; then more silence; then a few words of thanks for letting them know; finally an abrupt goodbye and the click of a phone being put firmly back in its place.

I understood. For those of us Marines who long ago had been comrades in arms of a youthful, active, happy-go-lucky Blair Reeves, who knew of the grievous wound he had suffered on Okinawa on May 20, 1945, and who knew also the story of his heroic victories over a harrowing adversity in the 54 years since, there was at that moment nothing more to be said.

My calls completed, I closed the door of my office and just sat there awhile alone. I was not really surprised to hear that Blair was gone. Back in February, Guymon had called to say that Blair had been in and out of the hospital. I wrote to Blair immediately. He had not replied. That was unusual. Invariably a letter to Blair brought a prompt reply. So in a way, I was forewarned. Even so, the news of his passing was somehow especially sad.

Of course, I had not expected him to live forever. Give or take a year or a decade, the Biblical three score years and ten is still about all that most mortals have a right to expect. Yet if ever there was a man to whom the word survivor applied, that man was San Antonio's Judge Blair Reeves.

The enemy bullet that struck Blair Reeves so exactly in the middle of his lower back that grim day of May 20, 1945, would have killed most men then and there. Only a few yards from him when that fateful bullet hit, I felt an absolute certainty that he would not survive to the end of day.

Twelve years later at a Marine Raider reunion in Chicago, I learned that Blair was very much alive. Although paralyzed from the waist down, he had acquired a law degree and was already taking an active part in San Antonio and Texas politics.

Back home, I wrote to Blair and received an enthusiastic reply. He was in good health, he said, and making a satisfactory living, although he was obliged to get around a little more deliberately than back in the days when, as young American Marines, we were teaching the Army of the Rising Sun a few lessons in acceptable behavior.

He went on to say that he was much interested in the practice of law. Because of the law with all its countless precedents and numerous statutes and imperfections and seeming contradictions, the daily business of a city, a state, a nation got done in at least a fairly orderly fashion. Automobiles going in opposite directions on narrow highways almost always passed each other without incident; mail got delivered; buildings got built; and when the judge mounted to the bench, lawyers were waiting, jurors were on hand, and even the most bitter disputes were almost always settled.

Moreover, articles of exchange such as currency, practically worthless if we only considered the weight and substance of the paper on which it was printed, could be entrusted to total strangers at what citizens call a bank and redeemed later through the magic of a few numbers and words written on another small, seemingly worthless piece of paper. It was the law that made such an incredible system possible.

Of course, Blair wrote, the law must be applied firmly, fairly, and objectively, but never with hostility or malice or inconsistency. For the ultimate goal is not merely resolution but justice, a noble concept which separates the civilized from the savage, the human family from the beasts of the field.

There was more, much more, about procedures that needed to be introduced and certain practices which he believed could be improved. The words disability or paralysis or crutches or wheel chairs were never mentioned.

Over the years afterward, he and I and other Marine friends kept in touch by mail or phone on an infrequent basis. I wish we had called and corresponded with him more often; but all of us, including Blair himself, were busy trying to overtake all those other Americans who had gotten a 4-year head start on us while we were off at war.

Visiting San Antonio three years ago, I spent several hours with Blair. Naturally, we talked a good while about World War II and the Marine Corps. I went away from that meeting marveling once again, as I had many times before, at the life he had made for himself in spite of a disability that would have destroyed the morale of lesser humans.

In fact, I was thinking of him during mass this spring on Palm Sunday as my wife and I and all the congregation stood listening to the Long Gospel at the Church of St. Thomas- by- the- Sea in Orange Beach, Alabama. On that March day, I had not yet heard that Blair was gone. The Long Gospel goes on for some time. A dramatic account of Christ's last days as man, it describes a series of events so momentous that they have had a profound influence on the affairs of humanity for going on 2,000 years.

There is Judas and his silver and suicide; there is Peter, his protestations of loyalty and his subsequent "I do not know this man!"; there is the shock and desperation of Christ's other followers.

No great imagination is required to understand their dismay. They were, after all, in the presence of a screaming mob much devoted to the sport of stoning those with whom they were displeased. Roman soldiers were on hand too. Of the legions of Caesar Augustus, they were neither sentimental nor sympathetic. The historian Gibbon has described those soldiers of Rome as thoroughly brutalized, "habituated during twenty years of civil war to every act of blood and violence."

For Christ's followers then, it was not a prudent time for any display of allegiance to a youngish prophet who had been going about the land insisting that he was the Son of God. So the disciples retreated in haste, Pilate washed his hands, the mob had its way, and Christ shouldered the cross.

At that moment the image of Blair Reeves and his onerous burden of many years came abruptly into my mind, and an instant later I had been transported from Orange Beach, Alabama, and the Church of St. Thomas-by-the-Sea, to a torn battlefield on Japanese held island of Okinawa. The day was May 20, 1945, and I was one of the sixteen men, all that remained of the 3rd Platoon of F Company, 4th Marines.

The sixteen of us were spread out near the crest of a ridge which ran between a hill called Sugar Loaf on our right and a second, Half-Moon, to our immediate left. In every direction around us sprawled the bodies of Japanese defenders and Marine attackers who had been battling for possession of these key strongpoints for nine bloody days. Just as was the case with Sugar Loaf and Half-Moon, the ridge between was a boiling nest of Japanese machine gunners, grenadiers, and riflemen. F Company and the 3rd Platoon had been attacking that deadly ridge and the areas to left and right of it since break of day.

Within fifty yards of success, we had been stopped. The Japanese, under cover just beyond the ridge's crest, were hurling grenades over at us and screaming- a frenzy of activity which often preceded one of their wild and deadly banzai attacks.

Expecting them to charge us at any minute, platoon-sergeant Jim Brown grabbed a walkie-talkie and called for help. In short order, we saw help coming, but not as the forty or fifty well-armed Marines we were hoping to see. It came instead as a whittled down squad of seven led by 17-year-old Rex Guymon.

Single file, they labored toward us through mud shoetop deep. Last in the file was Blair Reeves. On his right shoulder, he bore a .30-caliber machine gun, and he was additionally burdened with the considerable weight of belt on belt of.30-caliber ammunition.

As I knelt watching their approach, the air was suddenly filled with the crack and whistle of bullets, some of which splattered the mud and ricocheted off the rocks a few yards ahead. It was one of those nasty little surprises that create such high levels of anxiety among men in battle. Somehow the Japs had fought or sneaked their way to a firing point behind us.

I swung left to shout a warning to Guymon and his squad. With that sudden turn, I escaped almost certain death. A bullet which would have ripped right through me from side to side merely cut a half-inch deep furrow along my right-side ribs instead.

As I felt the burn of that bullet, I heard the ominous thwack of another bullet slamming into a solid object close by and saw Blair Reeves tumble forward face down in the mud.

The Japanese beyond the ridge chose that moment to launch a suicidal charge--twenty or thirty screaming riflemen, bayonets fixed, led by a couple of officers waving samurai swords. They had no chance against our automatic weapons. Nevertheless, a good ten minutes passed before we made certain that none of them would rise again.

When I had time to look back toward the spot where Blair Reeves had fallen, Rex Guymon was kneeling beside him applying a bandage. Surprisingly, Blair was conscious and actually appeared to be protesting Guymon's intent to administer a shot of morphine.

In a remarkably short time, a corpsman arrived, made a quick check of Blair's bandages, and called for stretcher bearers. Five minutes later, Blair was on the first lap of his long and anguished journey home.

Before day's end, we finally overran our ridgeline objective as other platoons and companies of the 4th Marines seized and held both Sugar Loaf and Half-Moon. We had paid dearly all along the line. In addition to Blair and three' others in Guymon's small squad, we had lost eight more veterans of the 3rd Platoon.

Fifteen or twenty minutes after Blair went down, we lost Jim Brown, shot in the head by a Jap in a spider trap. Three other old timers, Okunevitch, Nichols, and Brander had been killed during the Japanese banzai. Zobenica had lost half a heel and Pat Almond an eye. Two others had been so stunned by concussion that they had to be led to the rear.

Although the day had been a bad one, we could only look forward to many more just as bad or worse. In fact, within two more weeks of fighting our way into Okinawa's capital city of Naha and on to an invasion of the Oroku Peninsula beyond, only one man of Brown's twenty-one and Guymon's seven escaped unscathed.

The battle for Okinawa dragged on through May and June and into July of 1945, eventually bringing death to 120,000 Japanese defenders, perhaps 150,000 Okinawan civilians, and 29,000 American soldiers, sailors, and Marines. The fighting ended officially on July 2, 1945, but a series of unofficial skirmishes and firefights went on until, in August, after two great new bombs were dropped, Japan's leaders finally decided they had had enough.

By a coincidence of scheduling, what was left of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, was sent to Japan to accept the surrender of Japanese forces at Yokosuka Naval Base and in the area all around Tokyo Bay. Back from 50 days of being reconstructed in a military hospital, I rejoined the battalion just in time to board ship to Japan. Only a small number off Company veterans were still around.

When I asked them about Reeves, and Guymon, they were a bit vague. They were pretty sure that Blair had died of wounds, although they did know that Rex had survived and was hospitalized in San Diego.

As I finally discovered in the fall of 1957, Blair had survived also but would never walk again. It was not the sort of news that is good to hear. Hearing it and remembering what an athletic young Marine Blair had been, I was struck by the thought that the bullet which hit him would have been more mercifully aimed if it had cut through his heart.

I was wrong about that. Although no one except those closest to him could even have guessed at the hell of physical pain and mental anguish he must have experienced over the years, he never surrendered. In battling his way upward from despair to become lawyer and judge and Chief Justice of the 4th Texas Court of Appeals, a man loved and respected by those who knew him, in addition to the legions of others who knew him only by the accounts of the great and lasting good he had done, he displayed a nobility of spirit to which few mortals can aspire.

There came a strange but somehow familiar stirring around me. Abruptly back at the Church of St. Thomas-by-the-Sea, I realized with a start that I alone stood in a church filled with people seated and looking curiously my way. A firm poke from my wife had brought me back from a battle of long ago and the memory of a hero who had carried from it a burden that would be his to bear for as long as he lived.

As, a bit embarrassed, I took my seat, I was recalling that part of the Long Gospel which had propelled me into the past and halfway around the world: that brief, dramatic moment at which Christ shouldered the Roman cross. And what is perhaps an irreverent thought crossed my mind. Even the Son of God had borne His burden for only a little while. My friend, Blair Reeves, had borne his burden for 54 years.

Well, the burden is lifted now. Our old, brave comrade has gone away. But we shall always remember his legacy: that is, that no matter the weight of the cross, those with the courage and will of a Blair Reeves can support the most agonizing burden.

The passing of Blair Reeves reminds us also that the ranks of those young men who fought the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II are thinning more and more rapidly as the Twentieth Century ends. For those who returned to their homes from that great conflict, time has accomplished or is accomplishing what all the enemy rifles and bayonets and machine guns and cannons were unable to accomplish in the years 1941 to 1945.

But during Labor Day week this September when the remnants of the four Marine Raider battalions gather in San Diego at one more of our annual reunions, those of us who knew Blair Reeves will remember him as he was in the spring and early summer of 1945-- so young, so strong, so cheerful, so full of hope. And we will once again remind each other as we have many times before of a bitter lesson we learned in the hard and inflexible school of battle: one small bullet, one fragment from a hand grenade, one sliver from a bursting shell, one short thrust of a bayonet or slash from a samurai sword can end a life or change it in a variety of nearly unbearable ways. War, we have concluded, is a business that is not to be entered into lightly.

Once more too we will speak to each other about that old comrade of whom we have long been so proud. We will speak of his invincible heroism both in the fierce struggles against a ferocious enemy and the crushing infirmity he endured for so many years.

And in the highest words of praise that any Marine can utter, we will agree to this above all: "Blair Reeves! The man with a will of iron! Blair Reeves! He was a good Marine!"