This is a story about my great granduncle-let’s call him Jon. He sadly passed away in ’86 before I could ever meet him, but from stories my grandpa told me, the man had seen, done, and shot his way through a few layers of hell back in his day. He was born in 1917, the middle son of what had been a middling middle class family, and started learning how to shoot on a local copy of a Gewehr 98. Not having a ton to do out in the countryside back then, he helped on the family farm, did some hunting, and actually managed to learn to read and write a bit, a rarity back in those days in that part of the country.

Fast forward to 1936. Shit harvest year, family is struggling to feed everyone, national army recruiters come around the villages and offer payments in cash, food, and tax relief to any family who could send someone to join. Lo and behold, Jon, being of an adventurous mindset and (literally) hungry for more in his life, takes the offer. Six months later, given he’s able to read, write, count, and actually has some experience both shooting and maintaining firearms, he is made Corporal off the bat and put in as the Asst. Squad Leader and Gunner on a LMG squad. So now, instead of shooting a ’98, Jon is lugging around a ZB 26, about a dozen 20-round mags, six stick grenades and everything else that they could get their hands on.

Jon would be stationed with the 2nd of the 524th Regiment, 88th Infantry Division. He fought in the Battle of Shanghai, took two rounds to the left leg from Japanese machine guns, and was fortunate to be evac’ed first to Nanjing and then eventually to Chengdu over the course of the war. By the time the end of 1939 rolled around, he’d earned battlefield promotions to a platoon leader and had been transferred into the New 22nd Division, where he (once again) took two rounds to his OTHER leg during the Battle of Kunlun Pass. Combined with earlier grazing wounds to both arms and his head in earlier battles around Changsha, Jon had developed a serious reputation by that point of being nearly zombie-like. This is where he got his nickname that would stick with him until he died, “Old Ghost.” I’ll shorten it to OG for later in the story as needed.

Now we come to the start of 1942. The New 22nd Division is being sent to Burma to fight as part of the Chinese Expeditionary Force, and Jon is now a Captain with an infantry company under his command. The campaign goes to hell in a proverbial handbasket, and he eventually follows the division with what’s left of his company all the way to India, where his company would be reinforced and retrained over two long years as part of X Force.

This is the story that he remembered most vividly, according to my grandpa. In June of 1944, as part of the attack towards Myitkyina, his company was tasked with skirting around the Japanese lines and hitting rear-echelon troops to try and sow confusion, destruction and general chaos. They’d not gotten more than a few kilometers behind the Japanese when they heard a massive crash close by, and seconds later what was left of a B-25 skidded it’s way down the small valley they’d been travelling in, both wings torn off and the plane thoroughly chewed up. The crew, miraculously, was somehow still all alive, broken bones and such excepted, and the company’s mission quickly turned from “infiltrate and attack” to “get the hell out of here with the aircrew.” Despite having to fight off Japanese patrols along the way, they’d managed to get the entirety of the crew back to friendly lines.

Two days later, a truck showed up, massive tubs of ice cream and crates of other sundry items in the back, a gesture of thanks from the Mitchell squadron whose crew OG had helped save. My grandpa told me that OG said that was the best thing he’d ever eaten in his life, a cool tub of vanilla ice cream in the sweltering heat of the Burmese jungle, with the sound of 105 and 75mm howitzers echoing in the distance.

The biggest surprise though came when the truck driver beckoned OG over to the truck with what could only be described as a shit-eating grin on his face. Hidden under the cases of goodies were several dozen boxes of .50 cal ammo. OG remembered looking at the driver in confusion, and getting a wink back and a single phrase in heavily accented Chinese: “fei ji shang de ji qiang hai neng yong!”

“The MGs on the airplane still work!”

And that is the story of how a light infantry company ended up with nearly a dozen M2s, salvaged and repaired from the husk of a crashed B-25. OG later credited this with helping to keep him alive until the end of the war, as his company was quickly pulled from infantry duty and used as a light AA and direct fire company instead by mounting the M2s in improvised tripods.

He never fought in the Civil War, instead settling back home in ’49 and just living his life. To this day, at his old house in Shandong, we still have old framed photos of him from enlistment all the way to standing on top of a burned-out Japanese tankette in Yunnan at the tail end of ’45. The prize, of course, is an old table, with the surface being a hammered-flat piece of aluminum alloy from the wing of a Japanese fighter they’d brought down, and the legs being the same improvised tripods they’d put together in the summer of ’44.

Gone but not forgotten, Old Ghost lives on forever in my family's memory.