05/25/2026
The man in this photograph was shot in the head by a sniper on Okinawa. The bullet went through his helmet and stopped in his brain. There was little hope he would live. He lived another fifty-three years, and most of them right here in Richwood.
His name was Louis Reuter Jr. He was born in July of 1913 on his family's farm in Richwood, the eldest of six. He loved his hometown, and he wanted to see what was beyond it. In 1935 he graduated from Dickinson College, came home to South Jersey, and stood in front of high school classrooms in Paulsboro, Glassboro, and Woodbury, teaching history.
In 1941 the Army drafted the history teacher. They put him in Company G of the 381st Infantry Regiment, 96th Infantry Division, the outfit that called itself the Deadeyes, and they sent him to the Pacific. He fought through Leyte in the Philippines in 1944. Then came Okinawa.
By the spring of 1945 his division was at the foot of a 500-foot wall of rock called the Maeda Escarpment. American soldiers had their own name for it. They called it Hacksaw Ridge.
On April 27, Captain Reuter and two enlisted men slipped into an empty cave on the face of that ridge. They worked their way deeper, past Japanese voices they could hear but could not see, until a side tunnel opened into a hidden observation post fitted with a telescope. Reuter looked through it and saw the entire American advance spread out below him, all the way back to the landing beaches. Hacksaw was not a ridge. It was the roof of an enormous underground fortress, and the enemy inside had been watching the Americans the whole time. It was the first hard intelligence the Army had of what it was really up against. Reuter was awarded the Silver Star.
Two weeks later, on May 13, a sniper found him.
The bullet was removed from his head on the battlefield where he fell. He lay unconscious for days. Months later, when surgeons finally operated on his brain at a military hospital in Virginia, the Army nurse assisting at the table was his own sister, Carolyn.
He did not die. What he did instead was begin again. He had to regain the use of his arms and his legs. He had to learn to speak, and he would speak haltingly for the rest of his life. Through years of therapy, the history teacher learned to read and write a second time. He never returned to a classroom. He never worked full time again.
The war took his profession. It did not take his love of history.
In the early 1950s, Louis Reuter joined the effort to save the old Richwood Academy schoolhouse. In 1971 he became a founding member of the Harrison Township Historical Society, and he led the effort to restore Old Town Hall. He filled his home at Mt. Pleasant Orchards with antiques and gave tours to anyone who would come. The teacher who lost his classroom spent the rest of his life teaching his town anyway.
He kept one thing from the war on his mantel. An oil lamp, with a shade he had painted himself. On it, in his own halting hand, he wrote the name of his old unit and a single line: Once a Deadeye, always a Deadeye. The men of Company G. The ones who came home, and the ones who did not.
Louis Reuter died on May 7, 1998. His medals, his uniform, his portrait, and that hand-painted lamp all came to the Society he helped found. They are on display now at Old Town Hall, the building he helped restore.
Here is the hard part of Memorial Day. It does not belong to the men who came home. It belongs to the ones who did not. Louis Reuter knew that better than most of us ever will. He got fifty-three years on the far side of that bullet, and many of the men who climbed Hacksaw Ridge beside him did not even get fifty-three more days. He carried them for the rest of his life.
Today we carry all of them.
Thank you, Major Reuter. And to the men of Company G who never came home, to Richwood or anywhere else, this Memorial Day is yours.
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Come honor him in person. The Louis Reuter Jr. featured exhibit is on display at Old Town Hall, 62 N. Main Street, Mullica Hill, through Saturday, June 13. Open Saturdays and Sundays, 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. Admission is free. Come see the medals, the lamp he painted, and the building he saved.
