Jan. 23, 1958

There’s an old saying that I frequently call upon which goes:

“Omnia vincit amor.”

It means “Love conquers all”–and I think it’s pretty applicable to what’s going to happen to the U.S. Marines.

I think so because, shortly after dusk last night, I was invaded by some dozen wives of the corps. And I can truthfully say that I think the shores of Tripoli fared better than I did.

The women were, in mild English, disgruntled. In stronger English, angered. Or in corps English, fighting mad.

–Not, fortunately, at me.

They were mad, generally, at the Marine Corps; more specifically, at a four-star general named Randolph McCall Pate.

Pate, according to their unanimous complaint, is standing between them and their husbands. He, as corps commandant, is responsible for an official order to break up their homes.

He stands accused of:

1–Forcing the wives out of Japan or from going to Japan to be with their Marine husbands because their presence would “interfere with the combat readiness” of their spouses.

2–Permitting undemocratic disciplinary measures to be taken against Marines whose wives refused to bow to the order, including actual expulsion from the corps.

And 3–Suggesting to those Marines whose wives were forcibly separated from
them that they could satisfy their natural desires by making discreet use of the female talent available in Japan.

I’ll leave it to your imagination to figure out the collective state of mind of the dozen
women who established a beachhead in my office last night.

One spoke freely of her fears of divorce.

“During my husband’s six years in the corps, we’ve only been together three of them,” she said. “It’s at a point now where we’ve got to get back together soon or–or we’re through. We’ve got problems which are too big to solve when we’re a long ocean apart.”

Another spoke: “We wives got the order to leave when I was in Japan with my husband. My husband and I owned our house there and owned our car–because we knew
he had more than a year of duty left in Japan.

“I was one of some 20% of the wives who refused to go away. I had my passport and my visa and I had every legal right as a U.S. citizen to stay. So what did the brass do?

“They changed my husband’s orders–shipped him
out. Then, after 15 years with an excellent record as a Marine, he was forced out of the corps.”

Each wife had a story, different in detail but in general the same.

I listened, I think, to every one of them. And I was told that if I wanted to hear more, there were three dozen other women ready to talk.

Including one, they added, who received an anonymous phone call last night warning her to keep her mouth shut.

Before they filed out, they asked me to include a couple of important points in whatever I wrote.

The first was that there are 92,000 military dependents in Japan, that all other branches of U.S. military service permit their personnel to have their families with them and that by Defense Department edict, overseas treatment of military dependents is supposed to be going through standardization process.

“But Pate hasn’t started to do anything about it yet,” one wife complained. “He sees nothing wrong with taking his own wife on a tour of the Far East with him, but when the order would permit us to go, he asks noncompliance.”

The second point was that Marines who marry in Japan–whether to Oriental girls or
American ones–are permitted to keep their families there.

“They discriminate against us because of the geographical location of our
marriage vows,” complained another. “If I divorce my husband and go to
Japan to remarry him, that’s all right.”

The women told me that most of them had already written their congressmen, and that they wanted other interested citizens to do the same.

When they left, I had the definite impression that this was one military campaign which Gen. Pate wasn’t going to win.