What Came before Milton's Paradise Regained?

I had an English professor in college who was a large influence on my life and who helped me to get through college. He was a calm and soft-spoken gentleman who loved British poetry. He thrived on talking about Shakespeare and Milton. One day in class, I was seated at his right hand and answered one of his questions. He pardoned himself that he had not heard me. He explained that he had spent too much time hunched next to a machine gun, and it had taken some of the hearing in his right ear. This made me curious, but I was too intimidated to inquire further. I was easily intimidated by professors back then. However, his comment remained stuck in my mind, and I wondered what experience had placed him for long hours close at the left of a hammering machine gun.

It was not until my 30-year class reunion that I got part of an answer to my curiosity. I was a classmate of the professor's daughter, and I met her at the reunion. I decided to ask her what she knew of her dad's military experience. She replied that he was (and is to this day) a U.S. Marine who fought it out during the dark and tentative days of the war on the bloody island of Guadalcanal.

This struck me. Here was this mild-mannered gentleman with a fondness for poetry who had been baptized by fire in a life or death struggle on a remote South Pacific island. I still cannot picture it. But maybe his time next to a pounding machine gun was at the Battle or Bloody Ridge. Or it could have been a number of other places.

My point is this: he was another example of the millions of members of the Greatest Generation. He defended his country. He experienced unimaginable death and savagery. Yet he came home and put it all behind him. He earned an education, including a Ph.D., made a home for his family, and devoted his life to helping young men and women earn their college degrees and learn about the beauty of the English language. He is yet another to whom we owe such a debt. And the only way we can repay the debt is to live our lives and help others in the way that generation had wanted us to forge ahead.