Of Little League baseball, the bloody Battle of Saipan, US Marines, the American Dream, high school wrestling, and remembrance.

You see, Saipan's Little League team has made it to the World Series in Williamsport...

(If you can stand one sentence paragraphs, this is a story worth reading. If it only had a writer worthy of it...)

Lancaster Sunday News: In good company
By Jon Rutter

LANCASTER COUNTY, PA - From his perch high in a breadfruit tree, 17-year-old Ricardo Tutela Borja saw grim, gray battleships jammed gunwale to gunwale.

The air was filled with the sound of guns and bombs.

It was June 1944. The Americans had arrived to wrest control of Saipan from the Japanese.

Borja, a Chamorro Pacific Islander, who now lives in Bowmansville, had chafed under the brutal hands of the occupiers.

“I was slapped here many times in the classroom,” he recalled, delicately touching his jaw. “You say no” to forced labor, he added, “you won’t be living.”

He prayed for the invaders.

Among the Marines hitting the beach under heavy enemy fire June 15 were Melvin Riker and Lester Youndt of Lancaster County.

It took them and their buddies more than two weeks to secure Saipan, a task that almost killed Youndt.

The terrible ordeal still resounds in Micronesia’s collective memory.

The day the fighting started, a piece of shrapnel tore into Borja’s breadfruit tree, filling his nostrils with the odor of burning steel and driving him to the ground.

He took refuge in a cave. His neighbor and future wife, Tina Camacho, then 14, was hiding in a nearby cavern.

“Every night I hear the boom!” said Mrs. Borja, who suffers from claustrophobia.

Hundreds of Chamorros died from illness, starvation and wounds. Borja, who had been ordered to carry water for the Japanese, escaped to the American lines, and Mrs. Borja was rescued from a cave by the Marines.

“When I came out,” she said, “my eyes were closed” and someone asked if she was blind. “I was really scared.”

She immigrated to the United States in 1959 and married her husband, who earned a business degree from the University of Michigan. Borja, 80, later became a counselor; he retired from Graterford Prison in 1990.

Two years ago, the Borjas discovered by chance that Riker lives in Earl Township and Youndt in New Holland.

All four have participated in Company K reunions. Another reunion, scheduled for Thursday at Cedar Grove Church, Blue Ball, will be followed by a weekend bus trip to the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.

“You never can tell” what turn of fate will bring people together, said Mrs. Borja, now 76. “From a little place you come up and you meet [these] Marines that sacrificed their lives. ... I call them my heroes. I’m so happy that they found us.”

Saipan was the second island invaded by Company K, which Riker said endured 63 days of combat.

The unit liberated Roi-Namur in the Marshall Island chain in January 1944.

Tinian, separated from Saipan by three miles of water, fell to the Americans Aug. 1.

Taken in March 1945 was Iwo Jima, a conquest synonymous with combat savagery.

However, recalled Riker, “For two or three days on Saipan, it was as bad as Iwo Jima.” Flanked by tanks and backed by 16-inch naval guns roaring over their heads, the Marines fought their way across Saipan’s southern beach.

“I spent the first night in a foxhole just big enough to stoop in,” Youndt recalled.

He and his pals would have advanced into the jungle had there still been one. Most of the cover had been shot away.

Meanwhile, deadly Japanese mortar and machine gun fire exploded all around. A single bullet would crack like a whip.

“You heard it snap,” Riker said.

“If you heard it,” Youndt said, “you were all right.”

The Marines used flamethrowers to flush enemy soldiers out of sugar cane fields and caves.

At a sugar mill near Ricardo Borja’s hideout, they knocked down a smokestack concealing a Japanese observer.

The air smelled like death; the sun seared their skin; and the breakfast ration was made more palatable only by placing it on a shovel and cooking it with an explosive compound that burned like acetylene.

Chopped pork and egg yolks, Riker recited. Vegetable hash. “You had to blow the flies from your spoon before you put it in your mouth.”

Riker recalled wearing the same pants without washing them for 30 days.

The islanders were in much the same rugged boat.

When the Japanese evicted them from the village of Garapan in preparation for the battle, Borja recalled, his parents had fled to rural land they owned.

The family raised sugar cane and tapioca, said Borja, displaying his still sturdy farmer’s hands.

Forbidden by the Japanese from buying shoes, they made their own sandals.

Everybody was dirt poor, said Borja, who noted that some of the more desperate residents stole chickens and other food from their own neighbors. “When you’re hungry, you don’t care.”

As the bombardment commenced, many ducked into caves, subsisting on rice, coconuts, breadfruit, bananas and sweet potatoes.

Some collected rainwater dripping from palm fronds, according to a 2004 compilation of the memories of Saipan and Tinian elders called “We Drank Our Tears.”

The invasion tightened belts even further.

Borja said his youngest brother, a toddler, was unable to find milk and died of starvation. Their mother was killed by tracer bullets from an airplane.

In all, more than 933 Chamorros and Carolinians succumbed on Saipan and Tinian. Fighting on Saipan claimed 3,426 Americans lives.

Cut off from supplies, the 43rd Division of the Imperial Japanese Army under Lt. Gen. Yoshitsugu Saito fought to the death, culminating in a mass banzai charge July 7.

Many Japanese civilians on the island committed suicide, some by hurling themselves and their children from the northern Saipan cliffs.

Some of the jumpers did not die, Borja said. “It depends on whether you hit a big rock.”

Success on Saipan and other Mariana Islands outposts cleared the way for the American invasion of the Philippines and for the atomic bombing of Japan.

Riker, now 84, went on to fight on Iwo Jima in 1945.

Saipan was the last battle for Youndt, 83.

"...who is now 83." Don't these clowns in Lancaster even read their own words?

Just before dark July 3, an enemy soldier shot the scout from behind, badly wounding his hip and hand.

“It really didn’t hurt very much because it was so quick,” Youndt recalled. “I knew I was bleeding pretty bad. I thought that was the end.”

When he came to, he saw lights all around him. He feared he had been captured, but then “I heard someone say, ‘Roll over on the tarp,’ and I knew it was our guys.”

He was discharged Aug. 5, 1944, from the naval hospital in Philadelphia. He came home and worked in a butchering business with his brothers in Fivepointville.

Riker, a retired toolmaker, was watching his grandson wrestle at Garden Spot High School a couple of years ago when he talked to the coach, Steve Borja, and discovered that Borja’s parents had been born in Saipan.

(Coached by his dad, the Borjas’ grandson, Steve Borja Jr., won the 171-pound state Triple-A championship in 2002.)

Sixty-two years later, the Borjas remain forever grateful for their World War II deliverance.

“We’re lucky we weren’t killed” before the rescue could unfold, Borja said.