The Death of Col. Robert Walter
 

Col. Walter shortly after graduating from Officer Candidate School December of 1941.

7 Purple Hearts. 1 Silver Star. 1 Bronze Star.

Turned down the Navy Cross because he thought his men deserved it more.


Sunday, February 24, 2007 at 7pm Colonel Robert Walter passed away at the age of 85. Raised by his grandparents on a farm in California, he learned discipline at a young age. At 17 he joined the Marine Corps and went to China. As he would say, “China was a wild and savage place then. You had to watch your back no matter where you were.”

About a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor he served as Admiral Kimmel’s personal runner on the ship Arizona in Hawaii. It was the admiral who recommended he go to OCS, and shortly before December 7, 1941 the new Second Lieutenant Robert Walter graduated from Officer Candidate School. Having served as an enlisted man and now an officer in the Marine Corps, Walter was now known as a “Mustang;” a Marines Marine. He knew how the enlisted man worked and how to get them motivated.

He fought at many of the beach landings in the Pacific including Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Pelileu, and Iwo Jima.  On occasion he went behind enemy lines, fought in several vicious hand-to-hand engagements, and he lost many men at the hands of the enemy.  Not only was it painful for him to deal with the loss of his men but he also suffered physically.  During World War Two he received 7 Purple Hearts, the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and he turned down the Navy Cross. He was always very humble about his medals and never really wanted to talk about them. When I was finally able to find out about the Navy Cross, it turned out that two other men also deserved the medal and because no one would write the commendation papers for the other two men he told the Marine Corps to “keep the medal.”

While at a hospital in Northern California recovering from some of his wounds he met his future wife, ironically a Navy Nurse. Once the war ended the Marine Corps was cutting back on men and one of their first acts was to cut the officers who didn’t have a college education. So Walter went into the Marine Corps reserves and attended the University of Southern California. When he talked about his attendance at USC he said “those kids who came straight out of high school would hate us old war veterans because we actually cared about school and wanted to succeed.”

By the time he graduated he already had kids and wasn’t planning on going back on active duty until the Korean War broke out.  Uncle Sam called Walter back to war where he would survive several more gruesome battles including the Inchon landings and the Choson Reservoir.   He came back from Korea and was reunited with his family.

Because he needed to provide for his family he got a job working for the Los Angeles Police Department where he would eventually become Police Captain Walter. During these years he would get involved with a program called Devil Pups, a non-profit organization designed to help boys and much later girls learn to be better citizens and leaders in their communities. This program was put on at Marine Corps Base, Camp Pendleton in California and received the name Devil Pups from the name, “Devil Dogs,” which the Germans gave to the Marines during World War One. Eventually Colonel Walter would become the encampment commander in charge of overseeing the success of the program.

Oddly enough Colonel Walter was my father’s encampment commander when he went through at age sixteen many years ago. But my family’s relationship with the Colonel and his family definitely did not start there. It actually started about 34 years later in 1998 when my brother decided he wanted to attend the United States Military Academy at West Point. My father, remembering that Devil Pups was the program that helped him realize the military wasn’t his calling in life, felt he could slap some sense into his son by sending him to the same program, if it still existed.

After getting in contact with several people, he was given the phone number for one Colonel Robert Walter. It wasn’t long after that my brother and father met with the Colonel for lunch and began a friendship that would last the rest of his life. My brother ended up going to Devil Pups and liking it enough to go to West Point where he would graduate in 2005 with the class of 9/11. He is now Army First Lieutenant Chaffee and is just back from a year in Korea as a signal corps officer. As for me, I followed in the footsteps of my family, and like my father and brother at age 16, I went to Devil Pups. Even with that experience I thought I was going to attend a military academy, but eventually I realized that my life was meant to serve in a different capacity.

Although my brother and I had finished our Devil Pups tour we continued to visit the good colonel whenever we had the opportunity. He would give us advice and provide insight to any question we had. He would never talk about his war experiences unless he felt it would be relevant to our conversations.

One day my father asked him if he would let us interview him to get his life story on tape, his response “I didn’t do anything special, I just did my job and by the grace of God survived,” which basically meant no. Fortunately, my Eagle project was with the Library of Congress, and it required me to video tape veteran’s life stories.  After a lot of convincing, Colonel Walter agreed to let me tape his story. Funny thing, once I gave him the DVD of the interview he hid it from his family so they wouldn’t know. He felt that he shouldn’t be getting publicity for surviving a war where thousands of other soldiers and sailors had died.  Simply put, he felt they deserved the real publicity.

Our friendship with Colonel Walter was very strong and my father considered him to be a father figure, and my brother and I considered him to be a grandfather. It was about two weeks ago when I returned home from Japan that I was informed that the doctors didn’t expect him to live much longer. It was extremely hard for me to take, especially once my parents told me that he wanted me to be a pallbearer with his other grandsons. I was shocked and honored by this. It was a week later, when I returned home from Report to the Nation in Washington D.C., that I was informed that he had passed away the day before I met with the President in the oval office.

So on Thursday I attended his rosary and today I was a pallbearer in his funeral. It was a beautiful ceremony and the priest gave an amazing sermon. Although Colonel Walter is no longer physically living, he will always remain alive through the lives that he touched. He was a man truly dedicated to serving others; a man that I could only hope to be like. So here’s to you Colonel Walter; thanks for everything you have given my family and me.

 

Soldier. Policeman. Artist.

Peace Be With Thee

Colonel Robert Walter

This entry was posted Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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