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could be. None of this facilitated a love affair with the girl he wanted to marry. “It was hard to have energy left over to see Lena even though I was thinking of her all the time now. She was thinking of me too and wasn’t at all shy about telling me how she felt.” By the start of May, John knew that his time with Lena, their time together here at Pendleton, was running out. He was trying for once to think ahead. There was much to talk about, to do, if only there wasn’t the pressure of time, the need to rush. “I wanted to know how it was to love somebody the way Pop loved Mama. At least I wanted a few days, or weeks if I could get it, to know what it was like to be married. I wanted to be able to say ‘I love you’ a few times and mean it. Maybe it was something we wouldn’t have done if we weren’t in a rush, but Lena agreed to marry me. We set the date for July 10th, 1944.”

There were three problems: the Marine Corps, money, and the Catholic Church. There was also John’s brother George, now in harm’s way. On June 15, the 2nd and 4th Marine divisions had landed on the big enemy-held island of Saipan, and hard fighting raged with heavy casualties on each side. Was George okay? No one could yet say.

Closer to home, Lena was working out things to be done, and laying plans for something she’d always hoped for: a big, white wedding. The duty chaplain, the Catholic padre of course, declared in ex cathedra tones that he needed two weeks of instruction for the bride. As a Catholic myself, I’m not sure why the priest didn’t also need two weeks with John. When Lena explained to the chaplain (all Marine chaplains are naval officers, not Marines) that as a serving sergeant in time of war, she couldn’t just take off for two weeks to go to wedding school, the good father was tolerant but firm. She would just have to find the time. Rules were rules, and as not only her priest but as her superior officer, he intended to follow them, and she had better as well. Fed up already, an irritated Lena Riggi demanded of the stuffy priest, “What are you going to tell me? You’ve never been married.” And that was that.

John liked this girl better all the time. Like him, she was a bit of the maverick. Together, they went to St. Mary’s Church in downtown Oceanside and found themselves a more pragmatic Catholic father, Reverend Paul Bradley, to whom they explained their dilemma, and in the end he agreed to marry the young couple with or without the fortnight’s instruction, thereby rendering unto Caesar (the Marine Corps and its chaplains) the things that were Caesar’s but rendering to God the things that were God’s, a couple of Catholic kids in love and about to be separated by the damned war.

The ceremony was set for three p.m. on July 10 at St. Mary’s. Lena was a half hour late, the single-vehicle Oceanside taxicab company having forgotten her reservation. Attending, and patiently awaiting the bride, were John’s commanding officer Colonel Justin Duryea, the executive officer, Lena’s sergeant, and the women in her outfit. Some local people dropped by to wish the couple well, and a few reporters from Los Angeles showed up. Standing in for her dad, Sergeant Frank Budemy walked Lena down the aisle and gave the bride away.

Father Bradley recited the vows, the couple looked into each other’s eyes, John kissed the bride, and yet another wartime marriage had been solemnized in a small-town church just outside the main gate of a military post somewhere in America.

The only difference was that here were two Marine sergeants being wed and one of them was one of the more recognizable people in the country. The small reception was held down the street at the Carlsbad Hotel, a convenient and useful favorite of Hollywood studios making war movies and calling on the Marine Corps for cooperation and the use of facilities and open spaces on the nearby base’s tens of thousands of acres. The studios and the Washington big shots knew the value of such films to morale and the war effort, and unless a breach of security were involved, the Marine Corps and the other branches