As I like to do every Memorial day, I would like to talk about past soldiers who did great things by not getting people killed.
In 1944, Private Guy Gabaldon, a skinny 5′4″ kid from East LA set out every night during the brutal three-week battle for Saipan, armed with intermediate Japanese-language skills (and a rifle, he wasn’t stupid) to do what the rest of his 2nd Marine Division couldn’t accomplish with larger artillery: convince a hefty portion of the occupying Japanese forces to surrender. Reports vary from 1000 and 1500, but his successes were far from trivial. It also sounds like he was one of the lucky ones who wasn’t just sort of lost after the war; he ran a successful seafood business (which included, appropriately, a branch in Saipan), and married twice.
A compilation of interviews with Gabaldon from the War Times Journal
2006 obit from the New York Times
A Friendship Like No Other (from the Pacific Citizen)