Kearney clearly remembers what he was doing on Dec. 7, 1941, when he heard that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. He was milking a cow. His uncle, Bernard Flanagan, came out to the barn and said, "Well, the war is on. The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor."

"Where is Pearl Harbor?" asked Kearney, who was a teenager.

John Kearney was born in Chicago but grew up in a small town in Iowa named Monti. His father had lost his job during the Great Depression, so Kearney’s parents decided to move near his mother’s family in Buchanan County, an area settled entirely by Irish immigrants.

His family was patriotic. They were loyal to, and defenders of, the United States, the Democratic Party and Ireland.

They were also religious. The Kearney family went to Mass every Sunday, every first Friday and on holy days of obligation. When he was learning to be an altar boy, an older lad named Donald O’Connor, who was supposed to be his mentor, told him that he didn’t have to memorize the whole Latin Mass. All you have to do, said O’Connor, was to say some of the key Latin words in a loud voice and then fill in the spaces between with mumbling. When young Kearney told his uncle what O’Connor had said, his uncle declared, "You will put it to memory, and you will understand it," and proceeded to go through the whole Mass with him word by word.

Until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, his family had all been isolationists. They believed the British were sending propaganda to the United States to try to pull them into the war. The DesMoines Register, in fact, had been printing a series of false propaganda that the British had used to bring the U.S. into World War I. Being Irish, the Kearney family had no love for Great Britain to begin with, and they were determined to do what they could to prevent it from happening again. But all of that changed on Dec. 7.

Kearney remembers the principal of his school bringing a radio into his study hall the next day and the whole class listening to FDR’s "date which shall live in infamy" speech. A couple weeks later he went to visit his parents who had moved back to Chicago. Soon after arriving, he went to the recruiting office to volunteer. He was 15.

Because he was unable to get all the necessary forms—including parental permission—filled out, he returned to Iowa and finished the school year. When he came back to Chicago in the summer, however, he had learned the drill. When he applied for a Social Security card, he was able to convince the clerk that he was 18; this time his father was willing to sign the proof of age certificate; and Kearney was sworn into the Marine Corps. It was 1942. He was 16.

After boot camp in San Diego, Kearney shipped out and eventually wound up in a place at that time called Point Gloucester. There his unit encountered what he refers to as "rough action." One night he and his comrades were sleeping in hammocks on the beach when a contingent of Japanese Imperial Marines swam ashore armed only with knives and intending to take the very beach on which the GI’s were sleeping.

Upon hearing the sentry’s alarm, Kearney and the others in his unit grabbed their K-bars—the knives they slept with—and engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Kearney remembers a particularly large Japanese marine coming at him. He parried the soldiers thrust and buried his K-bar in the soldier’s gut. The Imperial Marine fell on top of him as he died.

"It is strange," Kearney said, "but the pressure of combat does not come when one is under fire but afterwards when there is no longer as much danger and you are able to think of what has happened and the tension you have gone through. It hits you later, and it hits you hard."

Kearney maintains that war does something to human beings which causes them to think, feel and behave differently than they would in civilian life. One of the atrocities he witnessed happened on Okinawa. He wrote in his autobiography,

What I have to say here is hard to write. From this point, it is hard to appreciate the feelings of us who had gone through several battles fighting the Japanese. They never took prisoners nor did we. We scarcely considered them them to be human, and the hatred for our enemy grew with every encounter. We walked up on the beach [after landing] at Okinawa. The first Japanese person I saw was a woman who must have been eight months pregnant. We were proceeding with fixed bayonets anticipating Japanese troops at every step. The fellow who was beside me stuck a bayonet into the woman’s midriff and said, "That’s one little Nip who’ll never grow up to kill a Yank." I didn’t try to stop him, nor did I protest. I was part of the same culture that ... countenanced such actions.

Other examples of how hardened soldiers can become in combat came from Kearney’s time at Point Gloucester. He said the Japanese would place snipers in the trees, and GIs would see a puff of smoke coming from the tree where the sniper was hiding after he had taken a shot. That was because they would oil their ammunition. The problem, of course, was that the smoke would be seen after someone had been killed.

"There were merchant mariners who would come ashore from time to time, and they would ask us where they could find souvenirs," Kearney recalled. We would send them down a road that we knew had snipers. We would watch, and when a sniper would take a shot at them, we would shoot at the puff of smoke. We didn’t think anything of it at the time."

In his autobiography, Kearney describes the aftermath of the Imperial Marine assault on Cape Gloucester.

Bodies were piled up on the point, not only on the beach but throughout. Our TD18s had to bulldoze bodies out of the way to put our guns in place, and we would sit on rotting bodies to eat our rations. The stench was unbelievable.

Reflecting on the atrocities and horrors he witnessed during World War II, Kearney said, "I didn’t think anything of it at the time but then afterwards, ‘My God!’ I thought back about many things during that war. This may sound strange but the Second World War made a pacifist out of me. The atrocities I saw committed by our own troops as well as by the enemy. War is no way to settle anything."

In the early 1950s he spent three years as a monk studying for ordination at the Trappist monastery at New Mellery, Iowa. His studies of Thomistic philosophy and theology gave conceptual structure to his feelings about war. Kearney explained that he is what he would call a "virtual pacifist." What he means is that he accepts the Just War Theory, articulated in Catholic moral theology, i.e. that war is sometimes justified if several standards are met. However, the standards, according to Kearney, are so high that few circumstances justify the use of violence.

John and his wife, Mildred, moved to Oak Park in 1989. He was a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois - Chicago and George Williams College until he retired. He and his wife, who died three years ago, had two children and three grandchildren.

As much as Kearney decries the atrocities he witnessed in war, he mentioned two reunions to which he is looking forward. One is with former Trappists at New Mellery in July. The second is with members of his former battalion in September.

He says that his three years in the Marines and his three years as a monk were the most influential in his life.

That’s saying a lot from a man who has studied in Mexico City, worked for the government of Puerto Rico, earned a doctorate in sociology, taught at the college level, worked with Dorothy Day and spent time as a political organizer.

"I think the role of religion is important," he said, "but it must be a counter-force to government. When government sweeps dirt under the rug, religion has to come along, pick it up and say, ‘Hey, look at this.’"