Six and a half decades after he first set foot on Saipan, John Fusano came back.
He lived in Sylmar, California, though his family had spent years canning olives and pressing oil at Cristo Fusano and Sons in the San Fernando Valley. The island stayed in his mind, and after his wife died in 2011, the desire to see it again took hold. He traveled back with his son, David.
They met his nephew, Cliff Smith, in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency. Smith had worked on Saipan as an engineer for three years and knew the roads well enough to take his uncle back through his past.
Fusano came from a family of four brothers, three of whom went into the service. He trained, shipped out to Saipan, and moved on to Okinawa. He remembered the island fighting clearly. A piece of shrapnel hit him on Okinawa, but he kept going. In a field hospital back on Saipan, the medical staff patched him up—care he remembered six decades later.
He talked about his parents, Cristo and Rose, who raised their children on hard work and devotion to the country. War itself was terrible, and he offered no grand statements about it, only the memory of what it cost. He grew tearful speaking of those who died and of the conflicts that continued long after his own war ended.
When asked what he might pass along to younger people, he spoke of duty—the plain idea that a person owes something to the place they come from.
"You owe it to your country to serve," he said.
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