John Neill joined the U.S. Marine Corps with four of his friends, but would face a shared war experience with his son. A 1939 graduate of Monongahela High School, Neill worked at Combustion-Engineering until 1943. That’s when he decided to enlist in the Marine Corps with several friends – Wilbur Caldwell, Lou Frye, Lynn Barber and Eddie Rach. They were sent to Paris Island for boot camp, but after boot camp were given different assignments and didn’t see each other until the end of the war. It would be nearly three years before they would realize that each would survive the war. After a brief assignment at Cherry Point, N.C., Neill was sent to the West Coast to prepare to be shipped to the South Pacific. His first war zone assignment was in the Marshall Islands. But his most harrowing experience was at Ie Shima, an island located off Okinawa. During a five-hour bombardment, two rockets struck the middle of his camp. Neill was on a hillside outside the camp at the time of the attack and escaped injury in the attack, but three-fourths of his unit became casualties. “I guess the good Lord took care of me that day,” Neill said. “I came down the hill and saw where it hit. I realized I would have been killed if I was in camp.” One local man, Jack Burgoyne, of Victory Hill, was seriously wounded in the attack, Neill recalled. “When I saw him, he had a big hole in his shoulder and his side,” Neill recalled. “One field officer at the hospital told me, ‘You’ll never see him again.’ “He was the first guy I saw when I came home.” After the attack, the survivors were split up and assigned to new units. Neill advanced in rank during his service overseas, eventually rising to the rank of staff sergeant. He also was awarded three battle stars during his service. He suffered a bout of malaria while in the South Pacific, but he was never wounded in combat. Neill was in Okinawa when the war ended. He was sent to Japan to serve with the occupation forces. “Finally, we got to meet the Japanese people and they got to be quite friendly,” Neill said. He returned home in June 1946. He was a member of the U.S. Marine Reserves, finally being discharged in 1949. One day before being shipped overseas, Neill went into a pharmacy in Donora for a milk shake. t was there that he met his wife-to-be, Shirley. The couple resides in Monongahela and will celebrate 60 years of marriage in November. Neill will turn 86 on April 25. The couple has one son, John Robert Neill, who served three tours of duty in Vietnam. Like his father, he was serving in the Army – as a security specialist guarding an air base – when the base came under mortar and rocket fire. The younger Neill was wounded in the attack, but survived the war. He lives in San Antonio, Tex., with his wife, Terri, and their daughters, Christine and Tricia Neill.

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