The 15-year-old pieced together the news from the excited chatter at a soda fountain. Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor.

Happy to be anywhere away from an abusive stepfather, Ashley signed on with the Marines when he was 16, lying about his age. By the time the military learned the truth, he had nearly completed boot camp in San Diego. They asked if he wanted to stay in. He said okay, and that was that. Wartime is no time to be choosy.

So it was that Ashley — the father of Bill Ashley Jr. and Bob Ashley, both of Bethany, and a former Bethany farmer — found himself under constant enemy fire on an Okinawa air strip during April, May and June of 1945. He was a member of VMTB 232, the Marine Red Devil air squadron. His job was ordnance — loading the bombs.

"The ground echelon found its work cut out for it on Oki, as did the flight echelon," Kuhns wrote in his Red Devil history. "With bomb strikes [alternating] with para-pack drops, the ordnance department worked plenty of extra hours. Because the packs are of different size and shape from bombs, every chute drop meant a thorough going over of the bomb bays to see that everything checked out okay."

But sometimes things would go wrong, and a bomb would end up stuck in a plane’s bomb bay. Then it would be the job of Ashley and the other ordnance guys to remove the armed device. They also learned to handle this new jellied weapon called napalm, loading it into wing tanks.

"Changing ground conditions complicated the job of aviation ordnance," Kuhns noted. "Frequently the squadron would be notified to prepare for a strike load with 500-pound bombs. Then a changed tactical situation would make it necessary for the load to be switched to 1,000-pounders or something else. In spite of changed loads and the fact that 232 frequently flew three or four strikes daily under short notice, ordnance had every flight ready to go on schedule."

Rainfall and enemy fire fell on the ordnance crew relentlessly. Ashley, the youngest member of the crew, remembers being scared, but not overly so.

"You were so busy all the time, and your adrenaline was so high," he said. "But anybody who says they weren’t scared is lying. They shelled us night and day."

Often the men would drop and sleep right where they worked, huddling in a foxhole. Once, in a daring raid at a nearby US airstrip, Japanese attackers dared to land their plane and tossed hand grenades at the parked US aircraft.

Ashley recalled a stumble that saved his life. As he tripped, shrapnel peppered the man he’d been talking to from head to foot. He took his pal to medics, who told Ashley he was bleeding from a shrapnel gash in his forehead. Ashley took off his T-shirt, wrapped it around his head, and went about his business.

And the business of the Red Devils was varied. They sank ship after ship in addition to providing supporting fire to infantry. "(The squadron) supplied the ground forces via parachute drops," Kuhns said. "It sprayed the island with DDT to wipe out disease-carrying insects. It dropped propaganda leaflets over enemy lines. It delivered hot chocolate and doughnuts to Marines on the front lines by parachute."

Ashley was 18 when he was discharged, and remembers the affection with which he greeted "the lights of the good old USA" as he sailed to California. But he didn’t leave the war entirely behind. It continued to play on his nerves, and he would awaken screaming. Once he even awakened to himself choking his wife, whom he’d dreamed was a Japanese soldier.

Now a vice commander of the American Legion in Normal, Ashley spends his time lobbying for more generous health care benefits for vets, and participating in the honor guard for funeral services for fallen comrades — 53 of them so far this year.