“We took a Dutch freighter from Australia to Tongatabu. The captain was Dutch; Javanese crew. Twenty-six P-40s in crates. Fifty-five-gallon drums of high-octane fuel. We would’ve been one big fireball. All they had to eat was mutton. Hanging up on deck, collecting maggots. Scrape the maggots off, cut off a piece for dinner. I couldn’t eat it. I lived on bread for two weeks. When we got to Tongatabu, the old man had a pallet of Bulimba Red Top waiting for us. He had it under guard, though, until we assembled the planes. The moment we were finished… warm, but boy did it taste good. Then somebody figured out if you dripped the high-octane fuel on the bottles, it would evaporate so fast it cooled off the beer.”
On Tongatabu, the mechanics figured since they put the planes together, and kept them together, they were entitled to a little fun.
“The P-40s were heavy, and you had to get up a lot of speed to get the tail up before takeoff. We didn’t get them off the ground, but we had a little contest to see who could get the tail up. Well, one of the guys did, but then tipped it over and tore the nose off. The old man wasn’t too happy about that.”
Tongatabu to New Caledonia, then sometime in late October, 1942, onto a C-47 for Guadalcanal. Twenty-one years old, sent ahead to set up for the 68th Fighter Squadron.
“We stayed about ten feet above the water so the Japanese planes couldn’t see us. We landed, they threw our gear out, and the guys from the 67th climbed on board and took off.”
Twenty-one and setting up for what would be some of the worst fighting in the Pacific, some of the most gruesome moments in American history.
“They gave us Marine uniforms. Pants with no back pockets. We cut ‘em off and made shorts. Shorts and a pair of boots. And a 45, two extra clips. Mostly the Marines took care of any Japs that came into camp, but you had to be armed. And it was so hot. The first few nights, we rolled up the sides of the tents to let some air in. Some Jap snuck in, tossed a grenade into one of the tents. That happened a couple of times. We rolled the sides back down, and took turns standing guard. Didn’t happen after that. We had trenches right outside. The shelling would start and you’d have to be out of your bunk and into the trench before you had a chance to wake up.”
In a military family, war is never an abstract. You live around the armament, climb in and out of it on field trips. Everything your dad does every day is in preparation for it. Almost everyone has seen combat. But my dad never made it sinister. It was always a possibility, even a likelihood, but it was just something we were ready for, not something that kept us up at night or contaminated our lives.
He knew how awful it was, how it would never be beyond the periphery of our lives, so he made it an entertainment.
“One of the cooks used to make wine out of grape jelly. Or you could cut a hole in a coconut, pour in some sugar and plug it up for a week to make some hooch.”
“They used to shoot at us from the jungle. One day, we were taking sniper fire, so we got down behind the wheel of a P-39. This Marine comes strolling down the beach. He’s got a Browning Automatic, and ammo strapped all over him. All I could think was, Man, if they hit him, we’re all going up. ‘Jump out and draw some fire,’ he says, ‘so I can see where it’s coming from.’ We drew a few shots from the jungle and he let go with that Browning.”
It was all candid information about life in a war zone, but he talked about it the same way he talked about being able to ice skate on Dunkard Creek all the way from Davistown out to Poland Mines, where the creek empties into the Monongahela; or how he talked his way into every funeral in town so he’d have a chance to ride in a car. There was an affection for his experience, for learning to improvise and survive.
I wanted to give my own kid that sense that there’re catastrophic forces at work, things that can annihilate you in an instant, but you don’t have to live in fear of them. You have to be aware, be willing to learn and improvise, understand what’s going on and what your options are. You can’t prevail if you’re stupid about it, but you sure increase your odds if you pay attention.
I grew up in a military family, which turned out to be a rich experience for a blue-collar kid. We lived all over America, and spent three years in France.
My parents were both proponents of education and the arts, and so helped finance not only my undergraduate studies in English and my graduate studies in Creative Writing, but also my forays into music, visual art, ballet, and finally my post-graduate study of computer graphics. That last thing got me my first real job after years of waiting tables and tending bar.
I ended up in Silicon Valley, where, it turns out, a liberal-arts education isn't an automatic disqualification from reasonable employment.
crossposted at Goodreads
