[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 124 (Wednesday, September 15, 2010)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1617-E1618]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         TRIBUTE TO CHUCK LOVIN

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. TOM LATHAM

                                of iowa

                    in the house of representatives

                     Wednesday, September 15, 2010

  Mr. LATHAM. Madam Speaker, I rise to recognize Chuck Lovin, a World 
War II Navy and Marine veteran from Boone County, Iowa, and to express 
my appreciation for his dedication and commitment to his country.
  The Boone News Republican is currently running a series of articles 
that honors one Boone County veteran every Tuesday from Memorial Day to 
Veterans Day. Chuck Lovin was recognized on Tuesday, July 6. Below is 
the article in its entirety:

                   Boone County Veterans: Chuck Lovin

                        (By Alexander Hutchins)

       When millions of men are mobilized for a war effort, it is 
     easy to neglect the sheer logistical network needed. Amidst 
     the brutality of the Pacific island invasions, there were 
     touches of a more orderly life. At one point in the war, 
     Charles ``Chuck'' Lovin, 90, was in a foxhole on the Marianas 
     Islands as Navy Corpsman, providing dental care in the midst 
     of a marine invasion.
       Lovin grew up on a farm, and said that in a way the life of 
     work was good preparation for his tour in the Navy, and later 
     the Marines.
       ``All we did was work, and every day we got up at 4 a.m.'' 
     Lovin said.
       Despite the work, he was an avid fan of sports and played 
     them consistently through his school career. He participated 
     in track, basketball, tennis and just about everything except 
     football . . . as long as his chores were completed.
       Lovin was a student at Upper Iowa University when World War 
     II began, studying social studies and physical education. His 
     goal was to be a coach and make a career out of his passion 
     for sports.
       Lovin was exempt from the draft at the beginning of the war 
     due to his status as a student, but when he reached the end 
     of his studies, he enlisted in the Navy. After entering the 
     Navy in August of 1942, he was trained as a dental technician 
     before being assigned to the USS Nevada, which had been 
     damaged in the Pearl Harbor attack but was repaired and 
     returned to service. Lovin served for one and a half years on 
     the Nevada, cleaning teeth and providing other dental 
     services.
       ``The ship was good duty. There were so many guys on there 
     it was like living on a city,'' he said.
       When the ship was briefly reassigned to the Atlantic 
     theater, passing through the Panama Canal, the crew took on a 
     number of American sailors who were suffering from mental 
     disorders after traumatic tours on submarines. Some of the 
     sailors were under enough distress that they were restrained 
     or placed on suicide watch.
       ``They were calm during the day, but at night, when the 
     moon would come out, it would get bad,'' Lovin said.
       He still remembers today a doctor explaining that many of 
     the men would return to normal when they returned home, but 
     some soldiers would suffer difficulties for their remaining 
     years.
       Lovin would clean teeth for the sailors late at night on 
     the ship as a matter of duty and didn't charge, but small 
     donations from troops gave Lovin enough money to play poker 
     and buy necessities. Throughout the war, Lovin saved up a 
     portion of his pay to buy the ring he would present to his 
     longtime girlfriend, Lorraine, before they married. The two 
     were split by the war, but wrote to each other almost every 
     day. Necessities of war meant that mail arrived in batches 
     about once a month, and letters were censored. ``I faired a 
     lot better than some guys who got Dear John letters,'' Lovin 
     said. Lorraine still has the ring he presented her.
       Lovin returned to the U.S. after his tour on the ship and 
     entered a ten-week training program with the Marine Corps to 
     prepare him for entering the Fleet Marine Force, or FMF.
       ``They had a lot of fun, the Marines, taking the Navy guys 
     and working them over for ten weeks,'' Lovin said jokingly.
       He was assigned to the 18th anti-aircraft battalion and 
     paired with a doctor named Jim Holdt who would become a long-
     time friend. Lovin and Holdt worked closely throughout the 
     invasion of Tinian in the Marianas Islands, initially 
     providing care to Marines with a foot-cranked dental station 
     that Lovin carried onto the island with his duty pack.
       ``My greatest impression was landing with the Marines. I 
     had this whole pack, plus the medical [equipment] on the 
     side, and I told the doctor `I don't think I can get over 
     that rope ladder and down into the water.' He swore at me and 
     said `you're going to make it, Charlie.' I made it, but the 
     impressionable thing was all the dead bodies of the Japanese 
     and even the Marines. You pushed them aside when you made the 
     landing. When we got in there, by then they had a lot of the 
     Japanese in corrals and all they wanted was the American 
     cigarette,'' Lovin said.
       ``It was your job, and that was it. You just did it, and in 
     that sense it was like growing up on a farm,'' Lovin said. 
     ``I held sick call and treated all the trench mouth and all 
     that.''
       He treated ailments for the Marines protecting Tinian from 
     Japanese air attacks after he came aboard the island in one 
     of the later waves of the invasion.
       ``Doctor Holdt, that I was with for two years and shared 
     the same foxhole, he would take over. . . when he would drill 
     teeth I'd provide the power and clean the teeth at the same 
     time,'' Lovin said.
       Prior to his landing Lovin was on his troop ship when the 
     initial Marine invasion landed, and could hear the conflict 
     as the occupation fought to take enough of the island to 
     allow support troops to move in. He was assigned to patrol 
     around the major smokestack of his ship while the invasion 
     occurred, and said he was always fearful that an enemy bomber 
     would manage to hit the ship while the invasion raged on.
       Lovin and Holdt slept on cots under mosquito netting on the 
     island, and Lovin remembers clearly that Holdt slept with a 
     .45-caliber pistol.

[[Page E1618]]

       ``I kept saying that one of these days you're going to wake 
     up from a dream and shoot me,'' Lovin said jokingly.
       He worked in trenches and foxholes after initially landing, 
     and in only a few weeks the engineering corp had built a 
     facility that Lovin moved into for treating soldiers. He 
     spoke of helping to unload injured Marines from hospital 
     ships that had steamed in from Okinawa and other islands once 
     engineers could build a hospital. Lovin said he always 
     remembered though some of the soldiers were bandaged, injured 
     or burned severely they all asked him for cigarettes.
       ``I always said they ought to pull that ship up to New York 
     and make the American people go aboard that ship,'' Lovin 
     said.
       Lovin's duties were the same on the battleship and with the 
     invasion, but the experiences surrounding his work were 
     vastly different.
       ``With the Marines there was more of an `esprit de corps,' 
     because you all depended on the other guy,'' Lovin said. 
     ``Long toward the end of the war I got sent back to go to 
     officer training school at the University of Pennsylvania, 
     but the war ended while I was home on leave.''
       There was no fanfare for Lovin when the war ended. He was 
     given his severance pay, boarded a train, and came home. 
     Because he had earned his degree from Upper Iowa University 
     before joining the Navy, he was hired as a sports coach in 
     Rockford, Iowa almost immediately after the war. Lovin said 
     the days after the war were excellent times for finding work, 
     as there were so many jobs opening up after soldiers returned 
     from Europe and the Pacific. He moved to Boone to coach 
     tennis, basketball and other sports and joined a number of 
     civic organizations such as the Lion's Club and the American 
     Legion. ``I'd never been involved in things like that, living 
     on a farm,'' Lovin said. He and his wife took picnics, 
     wintered in Arizona for many years and took in the community.
       The Lovins eventually met Holdt, the doctor Lovin had 
     worked with in the war, and the two couples visited each 
     other in their respective communities.
       Lovin encouraged citizens today to do what they can to 
     understand the importance of the protection the military 
     provides. Donating care packages or sending correspondence to 
     troops can make a big difference, he said.
       Much of Lovin's time is now taken by visiting numerous 
     class reunions for all of the years he worked in the Boone 
     schools. His legacy is displayed in the pictures of his 
     children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren on a wall in 
     his home and in the years of school classes he receives 
     invitations for reunions from.

  I commend Chuck Lovin for his many years of loyalty and service to 
our great nation. It is an immense honor to represent him in the United 
States Congress, and I wish him all the best in his future endeavors.

                          ____________________