Honoring a history-loving war hero

Louis Reuter Jr. was shot in the head during the battle of Okinawa in World War II.

The bullet went through his helmet and stopped in his brain, according to Mullica Hill officials in a recent tribute. There was little hope he would live, but he did, spending the next 53 years in Richwood.

A free exhibit paying tribute to Reuter is on display at Old Town Hall, 62 North Main St., through Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m. It includes his Silver Star medal, a lamp he painted and the story of the building he saved.

Reuter was born in 1913 on his family’s farm – also in Richwood – and was the eldest of six. He graduated from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1935 and stood in front of high-school classrooms in Paulsboro, Glassboro and Woodbury as a history teacher.

Reuter was drafted in 1941 and was part of the Army’s Company G of the 381st Infantry Regiment, 96th Infantry Division, a group that called themselves the Deadeyes. He fought through Leyte in the Philippines in 1944, then headed to Okinawa.

By the spring of 1945, Reuter’s division was at the foot of a 500-foot wall of rock called the Maeda Escarpment. American soldiers had their own name for it: Hacksaw Ridge.

On April 27, Reuter and two enlisted men slipped into an empty cave on the face of that ridge and worked their way deeper – past Japanese voices they could hear but not see – until a side tunnel opened into a hidden observation post fitted with a telescope. Reuter looked through it and saw the entire American advance spread out below him, all the way back to the landing beaches.

Hacksaw was not a ridge, but the roof of an enormous underground fortress, and the enemy inside had been watching the Americans. It was the first hard intelligence the Army had of what it was really up against on Okinawa.

Two weeks later, on May 13, the sniper found him.

The bullet was removed from Reuter’s head on the battlefield where he fell, and he lay unconscious for days. Months later, when surgeons finally operated on his brain at a military hospital in Virginia, the Army nurse assisting at the table was his own sister, Carolyn.

Reuter didn’t die, but he had to regain the use of his arms and his legs and learn to speak, something he still does haltingly. With years of therapy, the history teacher learned to read and write a second time, but never returned to a classroom or worked full time again.

The war took Reuter’s profession, but not his love of history.

In the early 1950s, he joined the effort to save the old Richwood Academy schoolhouse, and was a founding member of the Harrison Township Historical Society in 1971. He filled his home in Mount Pleasant Orchards with antiques and gave tours to anyone who came.

The teacher who lost his classroom spent the rest of his life teaching his town anyway.

Reuter kept one thing from the war on his mantel, the aforementioned oil lamp with a shade he had painted himself. On it, in his own halting hand, he wrote the name of his old unit and a single line: “Once a Deadeye, always a Deadeye. The men of Company G, the ones who came home, and the ones who did not.”

Reuter died in 1998. His medals, uniform, portrait and that hand-painted lamp all went to the society he helped found, and are now in the exhibit at Old Town Hall, the building he helped restore.

The recent Memorial Day – and those that follow – doesn’t belong to the men who came home but the ones who didn’t. Louis Reuter knew that better than most of us ever will. He got 53 years on the far side of that bullet on Okinawa, while many of the men who climbed Hacksaw Ridge with him didn’t.

He carried their memories for the rest of his life.