The Final Storm - Jeff Shaara [242]
In 1963 the admiral falls and shatters his kneecap, a debilitating injury that keeps him from his beloved walks. The injury aggravates, revealing that Nimitz also suffers from an arthritic condition in his spine. The condition worsens, causing him increasing pain, and in November 1965 he undergoes a risky form of surgery to relieve his suffering. The operation is a success, but in recovery he contracts pneumonia. On Sunday, February 20, 1966, he dies from the deteriorating complications, just shy of his eighty-first birthday. At the moment of his death, he is alone with his beloved wife.
His funeral is attended by thousands of onlookers and admirers, who line the streets all along the route of the procession to the Golden Gate National Cemetery, at San Bruno, California. The admiral’s body is transported through the cemetery by a horse-drawn caisson, escorted by a dozen navy enlisted men. Once the caisson reaches the grave site, there is a nineteen-gun salute and a flyover by seventy naval jet aircraft.
Soon after his death, Catherine, his wife of fifty-two years, writes to a friend, “I’m not feeling sad. To me, he has just gone to sea, and as I have done so many times in the past, some day I will follow him …”
She does so in 1979.
In Nimitz’s birthplace of Fredericksburg, Texas, the National Museum of the Pacific War is an unequaled site for memorializing and understanding naval history.
His good friend Harry Truman writes, “I came to regard Admiral Nimitz from the outset as a man apart and above all his contemporaries—as a strategist, a leader and as a person. I ranked him with General George Marshall as military geniuses as well as statesmen.”
PRIVATE CLAYTON ADAMS
With the expiration of his thirty-day leave, Private Adams leaves New Mexico for San Diego, and is transported once again to Guam. On October 11, 1945, his unit is transferred to Tsingtao, China, where they begin the tedious duty of repatriating Japanese soldiers from the Chinese campaigns back to their home country. In February 1946 the downsizing of the Sixth Marine Division begins, and by April 1946 the Sixth is redesignated the Third Marine Brigade. On April 3, Clay leaves China, and eventually boards a transport ship that will return him to the United States for good.
From San Diego he once again embarks on the journey by train to Albuquerque, and is met this time by a one-woman welcoming committee. He and Loraine Lancaster marry four months later.
Like his brother before him, Clay has no interest in following his father’s dismal career in the copper mines of western New Mexico, and where Jesse goes to California, Clay obeys his young wife’s ambitions to travel eastward. The couple settles in Lexington, Kentucky, where they raise three daughters.
Clay graduates from the University of Kentucky and surprises Loraine by choosing the study of military science and history. After graduation in 1950, his combat experience lands him a position with the university as an instructor of ROTC cadets. Though he rarely speaks of his service experience on Okinawa, Clay is an outspoken advocate for education in the ranks of the military. By the mid-1960s the Vietnam War has made that philosophy increasingly unpopular. He speaks out frequently in support of the nation’s efforts in Vietnam, and never fully grasps the nation’s change of mood toward the military and its leadership. In 1970, a fire, presumed to be arson, destroys the facility that houses the school’s air force ROTC. Disgusted, Clay leaves Kentucky for a position as an instructor of history at the Virginia Military Institute. His love of history deepens, and Clay begins extensive work on a biography of several of VMI’s most illustrious alumni, and has a particular affection for Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, but the effects of heart disease begin to drain him of strength, and the work is