An Eighty-one Year Journey

The Cherubini Brother’s Reunited

If this don’t warm the heart and sting the eyes, then you may be made of stone or servin’ as a bureaucrat. After eighty-one revolvin’ orbits of the sun, a soldier long thought lost to the green jungles of Burma has found his way home, carried not by the footsore march of war but by a Southwest Airlines flight touchin’ down in Reno.

U.S. Army Private Roman Cherubini, one-half of a pair of twins born in the fair town of Bridgeton, New Jersey, in the Year of Our Lord 1923, went to war and never returned–at least not in the usual way. Twenty-two, when he perished in the thick and sweltering wilds of Southeast Asia, he was part of a fierce and wiry crew known as Merrill’s Marauders.

These weren’t your average parade-ground soldiers. These men hiked, sweated, and bled their way through the dense green wrath of Burma, outnumbered, outgunned, and altogether unafraid.

The Marauders were the kind of fellows who’d spit on the Devil’s boots and keep marching. Pvt. Cherubini was among ‘em, making his stand on June 16, 1944, when the War Department says he fell in the service of a cause greater than any one man.

His mortal remains were buried once in a temporary grave, then again in a military cemetery in India, and later still transferred to the green slopes of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu–until science and diligence exhumed his story from the soil. It took the quiet work of men and women in white coats with sharp eyes and steady hands to set the record straight. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, bless‘em, got the job done, and now Roman’s back to the land of his birth, borne on the wings of an airliner.

When his casket came off that plane in Reno, it wasn’t just a box wrapped in a flag. It was eighty years of prayers, grief, and hope.

Passengers on the flight remained seated in a respectful hush, airport firefighters and police lined up in solemn salute as the Cherubini family, quiet and resolute, bore witness to it all.

Come Saturday at noon, down at Big Pine Cemetery south of Bishop, Calif., Pvt. Roman Cherubini will get laid to rest beside his twin brother Raymond–who wore the badge of a military policeman in the same world war and went to his rest in 2005. Two boys, born the same day, joined again in the long sleep, side by side beneath the California sun.

They say Pvt. Cherubini will receive the Purple Heart, Bronze Star, and likely a handful of other medals. But I reckon the real honor is that after eighty-plus years of silence and searching, one soldier came home, and the other was there to meet him.

God rest the Cherubini twins–and bless all who never stopped waiting.