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Born May 20, 1898 at Folkston, GA., graduated Chapel Hill; University of North Carolina 1918, U.S.M.A. 1922, Captain 1935, Major 1940, Lieutenant Colonel, December 19, 1941. Died in Japanese Camp Fukuoka No. 3, Moji, Japan, February 5, 1945.</p>
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Well, that’s the record. That’s what they will carry in the files, but it gives you very little, or nothing, of Mac, “The Great Scotchman”.</p>
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This won’t be a conventional obituary, but <em>Ronald G. MacDonald</em> wasn’t a conventional guy. I couldn’t do that to Mac. I might meet him later on, and I wouldn’t want to be responsible.</p>
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I’d like to tell the people that knew Mac, and loved him for so long, the last official dope on him, and I’d like for those who didn’t know him, but who perchance might read this, to know what a great soldier he was, and how he got better as things got tougher, and things got very tough indeed for the Scotchman toward the last.</p>
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I didn’t run into Mac for some 18 years after he graduated, but during that time he had a tour at Plattsburg Barracks, Panama, Ft. Benning, and back to West Point for five years as an instructor in History, then to Fort Francis E. Warren, Wyoming, and Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and finally to the Philippines in 1939 where I caught up with him in 1940.</p>
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During this time, he met Alice Coleman—always “Gracie” to Mac—and they were married at Forest Hills, Long Island, on July 16, 1933. What a pair they made—and when you think ot Mac, you always think of Gracie. To know them you had to pass their house just as the sun went over the yard arm and hear that “Hey, fellow where you been so long? Come on in here”. And then there would be a bottle and a spyhon on Mac’s and Gracie’s front porch and a lot of friendship all around.</p>
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Yes, to know him you would have to participate in some of the interminable arguments that lasted well into the night, and hear him expound “The MacDonald System” which was always pretty sound, and backed to the limit with all of his Scotch fire and determination.</p>
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You would have to hear him “un-yes” a General or two, or back up one of his juniors with the same bulldog spirit. You would have had to see him grinning at Gracie as he held forth on the uselessness of Army Women. These and so many things more make an obituary of that great guy so difficult.</p>
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You would have had to see him on Bataan, with his leg in a cast to the knee and surrounded by an aura of profanity. He, having spurned the hospital, lying on a bamboo cot and cursing his leg, the Japanese, the files, and the rat trap we were in, with equal venom. He did a lot of yelling for a regiment and got it as soon as he could walk, but after the Japs had broken through, and he arrived to find his command scattered and disintegrating. He assembled 200 of these and stayed up there doing the best he could. But those 200 saw a fellow who wouldn’t quit, and who wouldn’t scare, and they heard a lot of very choice American expressions regarding the whole situation.</p>
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He caught it all. The Death March, O’Donnel, Cabanatuan, Davao, back to Cabanatuan and Bilibid. Then on December 13, 1944, with our troops only a few hundred miles away on Leyte, he caught the “Oryoku Maru”, that Jap Prison ship where his group was jammed into the after hold and left for two days without water, food or air, and where many situations arose for which no satisfactory solutions have ever been taught in our schools. He was still there, and alive, when our planes burned her in Subic Bay on December 15th, and he got ashore somehow. Then he caught the 46 days that followed and he watched the original 1620 of his fellow that started the trip dwindle to 400, and then to 300. Most of the time, he did it on four spoonsful of water a day, and for seven days no food at all, and then a few spoonsful of rice. Yes, there was the tennis court at Olangapo where he squatted for five days naked in the sun, and the Jail at San Fernando, and the 18 hours in the small steel box car on no water and only straffing bullet holes for air for the 162 that were in there with him. And there was Christmas Day on the beach at San Fernando, La Union, where he watched crazed companions drink sea water and go into babbling delirium before they died of thirst.</p>
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Then into the horse hold of the freighter, bound for Japan, and our planes got that one too after twelve rough days, and finally the third ship, where they pitched them overboard at the rate of 50 a day at the last.</p>
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But he got to Japan, to be herded on a windswept deck in zero weather, stark naked and weighing a hundred pounds, to be issued his first clothes in 48 days. He crawled into a Prison Camp to die finally six days later of starvation, dehydration, pneumonia, and most of the other ailments incident to a prisoner of the Japanese.</p>
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I wish the old Alma Mater could have seen him during that period December 8, 1941, to February 5, 1945. She would have been proud of him, because he didn’t let her down. He took the principles laid down by her, and he lived by them, and he died by them. He didn’t waver.</p>
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Throughout those never ending three and a half years, many a fellow prisoner consumed by self-pity, felt the bite of Mac’s salty tongue, and took another hitch in his self-respect. And many a fellow prisoner saw a starving Scotchman give away a portion of his meagre rice to others who seemed to need it more.</p>
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I don’t know where the Scotchman is, but I know he’s got the situation well in hand, and if he doesn’t like the way they’re running the place, he’ll tell them so. And he’ll have some pretty good ideas of his own, but they won’t kick him out, because he’s the kind of a guy you like to have around whether he agrees with you or not.</p>
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And if I hear a blast, it’ll be Mac, if he reads this and doesn’t like it. Which he probably won’t.</p>
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<em>—A Brother Officer</em></p>
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