CLARKSBURG, Mass. — Erwin Shaftsbury King's ambition was to join the Marines and six weeks after Pearl Harbor, he was on his way to Parris Island.

 

King was a graduate of the town's old Center School and Drury High in North Adams. He'd seemed to have an affinity for adventure and difficulty — not only his desire to rush to arms for his country but his unexpected arrival when the family car broke down on Aug. 11, 1924, in the Vermont town that gave him his middle name.

 

He apparently excelled during basic training, earning medals for bayonet work, shooting and jiu jitsu. He'd hoped for leave in March to visit family but was shipped out immediately to the Pacific, at least that's where his family assumed he was.

 

King wrote intermittently but couldn't tell his parents, Erwin C. and Emelia LaFountain King of West Road, where he was or what he was doing.  

 

In October, they got a letter that so many parents would come to dread — their son, Marine Private 1st Class Edwin S. King, had been killed in action on Sept. 24, 1942. Later they would learn their son had been killed in an ambush during the Battle of Guadalcanal, the first major campaign against the Empire of Japan.

 

A year later they would receive his posthumous Purple Heart. 

 

In the 1942 town report the dedication to him reads, "Today he rests with honor on a sandy sunlit coral reef in a farflung corner of the tropics." That sandy island was supposed to be temporary but King never came home. There were two failed attempts in the 1940s to recover him and nine other comrades who perished.