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the girls who couldn’t get a date. If a girl’s date fell through, she could always call on Delay. He was the extra man, always a gentleman and very funny. A chum more than a boyfriend. There were dances every weekend at the country club, and Delay was often there with a girl who considered him a safe choice — better than going alone.
    Another classmate — and few want their names mentioned — remembers Delay as “a screwball,” blazingly eccentric even in a town where genteel eccentricity was borne with honor and not discussed in public, like a string of bad paper debts. He would do unusual things, like circulate a petition to demand that all the high school dances be formal balls and to mandate the wearing of tuxedos. This was in the depth of the Depression.
    He finally graduated when he was twenty years old. This is his prediction in the “Class Prophecy” pages of his high school annual: “De La Beckwith has turned reformer and missionary in the South Sea Islands.”
    It is unclear whether this was meant to be ironic. It turned out to be partly right. He ended up in the South Seas, although his mission was not yet religious.
    In the fall of 1940 Beckwith enrolled at Mississippi State College in Starkville. His grades were so bad that he dropped out after midterm and returned to Greenwood. He went to work in a steam laundry and later at the nearby Pepsi-Cola bottling plant, where he did well enough to be made a salesman. It was not an easy thing, but he managed to break this new beverage into the Delta marketplace, where Coca-Cola and RC were nearly sacred traditions. Apparently Beckwith found his calling as a salesman. By all accounts he was not interested in much except learning the trade, enjoying his Scotch and soda, and generally having a good time.
    But before he could decide whether to return to college or make his career in sales, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. There was never a question that Beckwith would sign up, like every able-bodied Mississippi boy was expected to do. In January 1942 Beckwith joined the Marines. He was twenty-one years old, five foot eight, and not quite 140 pounds.
    He trained at San Diego and shipped out with the Second Marine Division for the first Battle of Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands campaign. Beckwith saw some action and then cooled his heels in New Zealand for nine months. He took up reading for the first time and managed to memorize the entire Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam . In November 1943 his division was positioned to join one of the bloodiest campaigns of the Pacific, in the Gilbert Islands.
    The Tarawa atoll had been British territory until the Japanese captured the island group in December 1941. They had heavily fortified an air base at Betio, and that was the object of the Marine assault.
    In Line of Departure , a book later written about the Battle of Tarawa, Corporal Byron De La Beckwith is mentioned as a “happy-go-lucky youngster,” who went into battle with copies of the Bible and The Rubaiyat in his pack. The stroppy little Marine also carried a straight razor in case an enemy soldier jumped him during the assault. He was a forward machine gunner on an amphibious tractor vehicle in the first wave of Marines to land at Betio.
    The night before the landing Beckwith prayed “fervently” to keep from showing fear. The next morning, as Beckwith’s amtrak churned across the shallow reef, the invading force came under withering fire. There were nearly 5,000 Japanese troops dug in on Betio. There were 5,600 Marines and 125 amtracs to take the beach.
    Four hundred yards from shore, Beckwith’s .50-caliber machine gun jammed. Rather than hit the deck with his fellow Marines, who were taking heavy casualties as bullets ripped straight through the armored bow, Beckwith scrambled aft and yanked out the .30-caliber gun. He wrestled it forward and placed it in the forward mount. Beckwith kept firing as the amtrac hit a reef one hundred yards from the beach. Then