Marines on Tarawa, November 1944.
In Casper, Wyoming this past week a crowed gathered to observe the passing of World War Two Marine Corps Corporal Ray Barela.
Not much was really known about him, other than that he lived to be 101 years old.
Cpl. Barela had been born in Ft. Collins Colorado in 1918, a then much smaller and very agricultural town. He therefore by default grew up in the Great Depression and was in his early 20s when World War Two broke out and he joined the Marines.
For unknown reasons, he simply dropped out of communication with his family, forever. For some time they thought he may have been killed by the Japanese during the war. At any rate, he returned to the region and after the war worked as a vegetable picker and sheepherder, the latter job being one that classically favored people who love isolation. Those who knew him in later years said that he loved dogs and horses, but people not so much, something that also would have favored his occupation.
His first and last name are Latinate names, common among Italian and Hispanic families. Based upon the location of his birth and the names of his closet relatives, who until the funeral had thought that he had died decades ago, he was from an Hispanic family in Colorado. The post war occupations he chose would have been common pre war ones for Hispanics in the region, although they became increasingly less so as every decade following the war moved on. His omission of his family is odd and its connection with World War Two unmistakable. His family, which he claimed to have outlived, apparently never forgot him, and when news of his funeral spread they came to pay their respects, joined back to his family in the end.
