Proving Himself on the Firing Range

It was a great relief when we were moved into North Unit for the more advanced part of our training.  Now we were eligible for liberty on weekends.  We also did not have to wear the canvas leggings every day and were attending classes at Gravely Hall.

Our North Unit curriculum was quite comprehensive.  It included types of ships, types of aircraft, small arms (including rifle and pistol qualification on the firing range), whaleboat rowing, semaphore, Morse code with blinker lights, marlinspike seamanship (knots and line splicing), and ships organization.

It was on the firing range at rifle practice that I scored a minor triumph.  We were taught the various position from which to fire and our first firing was from the prone position.  To an old squirrel hunter that was duck soup as it was a lot surer than firing offhand as I was used to doing.

We were given a clip of five rounds of ammunition to fire at a target seventy-five yards away.  The paper target was about four feet across and the black bullseye in the center was as large as a dinner plate.  I did not see how anyone could miss it if the sights on the rifle were any good.

I adjusted the rear peep sight on the old Springfield and, at the command to fire, zeroed in on the center of the bullseye.  My shot hit the black so counted as a bullseye but was low and to the left of center when the little marker came up out of the pit to show the hit. I adjusted for that and my next three shots were comfortably close to the center.  After my last shot however, the red flag (known as “Maggie’s Drawers”) waved back and forth indicating that I had missed the entire target.

I was appalled.  There was no way I could have missed the four-foot square at that distance.  At the cease fire I hailed the CPO in charge of the firing line.  “Sir,” I said flatly, “there was no way I could miss that big target at this distance.  Could we please have a closer look at it?”

He agreed and phoned the gun butt.  A seaman came trotting up the range with my target.  We spread it on the ground.  There was the first shot, in the black, but a little low and to the left.  Three other holes near the center of the bullseye could have been covered with a silver dollar.  There was no trace of the fifth shot until we looked closely at the three in the center.  One hole was slightly elongated.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” the CPO exclaimed.  “You hit another hole and they overlooked it!  Can you do that again?”

Another target was put up and I fired another clip, this time calling out the location of the hit before the marker came up.  All five shots were comfortably in the black.  The chief petty officer was so delighted that he called the firing range officer, a lieutenant jg, to come and see what I was doing.

“Only one other man this year could shoot like that,” the CPO said.  “Guy came through here this spring.

I chuckled.  “Five will get you ten that was my brother Dick.  Came through here last April.  We grew up shooting squirrels.  He’s a better shot than I am.”

While I was off the firing line watching, I was amazed at how many times Maggie’s Drawers were waved.  I simply could not understand how anyone could miss that huge target.  Not until I went on the pistol range, that is.  Never having been permitted to practice with a hand gun, I could not hit the broad side of a barn with that heavy military 45-caliber automatic.

Lessons from Boot Camp

On the second day we were issued World War vintage 30-36 Springfield rifles, webbed belts, and bayonets that would be part of our attire in South Unit while we learned close order drill.  For the next three weeks, without liberty to leave the compound, our days would blend one into another.

Each morning we assembled at sunup for muster and calisthenics before breakfast.  After morning chow we hit the grinder and marched and drilled until noon.  Noon chow was a very brief respite, then it was back to the grinder for more drill and practice of the manual of arms with the rifle.  After we secured at sixteen hundred hours, we showered and did our laundry, then there was evening chow and class sessions that followed to occupy us until nearly taps at twenty-two hundred (10:00 PM).

Richard had by no means described everything at book camp.  Our South Unit curriculum included personal hygiene and first aid, naval customs and courtesies, organization of the Navy, and the seemingly unending close order drill and manual of arms.  It was not long before our response to orders were automatic and immediate.

My deep interest in airplanes caused me a problem with Chief Nelson on afternoon.  Flights of Navy training planes (the military version of the Ryan ST low-wing, open cockpit, monoplane) regularly took off from North Island and flew over the training station on their way to their practice areas.  This day, a flight of three of the Ryans passed low overhead.  As we marched I looked up at the airplanes, missed a step, and almost tripped the man close behind me.

Chief Nelson called a halt and pivoted us to company front.  Then he barked, “Frieze, front and center!”

I came out of ranks, smartly executing my ninety degree corners, and came to a halt in a rigid position of attention in front of the little CPO.  He looked me up and down from my sunburned face to thetips of my shoes and snarled, “You like to watch airplanes, Frieze?”

“Yessir!”

All right, Frieze, we will give you an opportunity to watch airplanes.  You are not on plane watch.  On the deck, flat on your back, and at attention.  Whenever you see an airplane, you sing out lud and clear with its identity and direction!”

I hit the deck and came to attention, my rifle at my side.  Nelson marched the company away leaving me in the center of the paved grinder.  For a very few minutes it was a relief from the marching then it got very uncomfortable.  The blacktop was hot as a griddle and the afternoon sun burned down on my unprotected face.  I was soon soaked with sweat.

From a distance I heard Nelson yell, “I hear an airplane, Frieze!  Where away?!”

I sang out, “PBY, sir!  Low over the water south!”

Nelson left me there and continued the routing for the better part of an hour.  It was a relief to get back in ranks.  After dismissal I had to endure the jibes from my shipmates and it took me an extra-long time to scrub the grime from the back of my whites so that I was nearly late for chow formation.

By the time supper was over, I was in agony from sunburn.  My face was red and blisters the size of silver dollars appeared on my neck where the sun had found the vee of my jumper.  It was so painful that I finally got permission from the duty petty officer to visit the sick bay to get some tannic acid put on it.  When I came out, Chief Logan was waiting for me.

“Got yourself a little fried, eh, Frieze?”

I grinned ruefully.  “Guess I did, sir.  Reckon it was my own fault, though.  I should have been paying attention and not goofing off watching the airplanes.”

“Well,” Logan said in a kindly voice, “it will heal.  Don’t hold it against Nelson—he is just trying to instill some discipline in all of you.  Not paying attention can be dangerous to your shipmates some time.  I did think he left you out there longer than necessary.  I have spoken to him about that.  Sorry.”

“Been sunburned before, sir,--I’ll survive and I will watch it next time, and I don’t mean airplanes!

Dick came over from North Island to see me the following Sunday.  Although I was still in detention, I was allowed to visit with him in the unit library.  He grinned as he looked at my sunburned face and my neck where the big blisters had not yet fully healed.

“Been enjoying the old grinder, I see.  How the heck did you get blistered like that?!”

I related what had happened and he just laughed, “Serves you right for goofing off and getting caught!”

I told him that I would have my first liberty in two more weeks and could get together with him in town.  He shook his head.  “I would like to but it won’t happen.  We graduate form mech school next week and they are shipping me out to Hawaii.  I kept my grades at the top of the class—which is not hard with some of the dummies that get in—and got my choice.  Our orders came out yesterday.  I’m being sent to a PBY squadron, VP-23, on Ford Island at a place called Pearl Harbor near Honolulu.”

Once more I had an old familiar feeling—that of trailing behind Dick and running to catch up.  Damn, I thought, if it had not been for that missing tooth, I would be the one already shipping out!

“Great,” I said.  “if I make mech school and get a choice, I’ll see you out there.”

“Oh, you’ll make it all right,” Dick said with confidence.  “The test is a cinch and the training is fun.  If you should goof off and flunk it, I’ll disown you as my brother!”

“What happens to the ones that flunk?”

“Hah, they send them to sea on a fast tin can!  You sure as heck don’t want that.  About the best you could do then would be to strike for boatswain’s mate or something like that.

We passed the time of day until his hour was up, then shook hands and said “so long” quite casually.  I was pleased that each time I saw him, Dick was treating me more and more as an equal and not like a little brother.

Boot Camp, Company 40-52

Southern California was a new and delightful experience for all we recruits from the Pacific Northwest.  We saw our first palm trees somewhere in the vicinity of San Francisco as we rolled south.  The rolling hills in that area were brown from the summer heat, not the lush green of our Douglas fir forests.

When we stepped off the train at the station in San Diego into bright sunshine, we inhaled the warm clear air.  The sky, studded with a few puffy cumulus clouds, was an impossible blue. A grey-painted Navy bus was waiting to transport us to the Naval Training Station through downtown San Diego and out beyond Lindbergh Field where The Spirit of St. Louis had been built for Charles Lindbergh’s historic solo flight across the Atlantic.

It was obvious at a glance that San Diego was a Navy town.  Broadway was thronged with white-uniformed sailors and a scattering of Marines.  The broad expanse of San Diego Bay held a multitude of grey Navy warships—many destroyers, cruisers, supply ships, and I could see one aircraft carrier.  Silver airplanes were taking off and landing on North Island against the far horizon of the blue Pacific.

The Naval Training Station in San Diego was, indeed, a brand new world for me and the other recruits.  When the Navy bus pulled through the main gate into the main quadrangle and I looked at the stars and stripes flying over the grassy compound, I somehow felt that I had come “home”.  This was where I was meant to be.

The station was not the big college-type campus that you find in San Diego today.  It, enclosed by a stuccoed wall, was only two quadrangles bordered by double-deck Spanish-style barracks buildings with red tiled roofs.  They were connected by covered walkways, also in Spanish motif.

The first quadrangle, called as we learned “North Unit” was the main part of the training station.  The second, enclosed by a high chain-link fence, was the isolation unit where all new recruits spent the first three weeks so that any communicable diseases would have time to develop.  It was known as “South Unit” and it was the part of the station that contained that contained “the grinder”.

The grinder was simply a black-topped area of about two acres that was the parade ground where we would spend our detention time learning to march and do military drill with a rifle.  We would become all too familiar with “the grinder” but it would instill us with discipline.

Like North Unit, the South Unit quadrangle was bordered with those beige red tiles roofed buildings behind which were concreted areas where tall poles supported a spider web of clothes lines.  The area in front of the barracks buildings was a green lawn bordered with palm trees and crisscrossed with concrete sidewalks centering on a tall flagpole from which the colors flew against that blue sky.  The scene was orderly, clean, and quite beautiful.

When we recruits stepped down from the bus, we were met by two chief petty officers who would be our company commanders.  Both were dressed in uniforms of peaked caps with white covers, light blue shirts with black neckties, dark trousers confined in shiny black puttees, and glossily shined black shoes.  One of the two, who was a very small dark-haired waspish individual named Nelson.  The other, the assistant company commander, was a large sand-haired “good old boy” type who seemed friendly.  His name was Chief Logan.

(We were to learn at the end that both CPOs were friendly individuals; however, for the training program they took turns being the “bad guy” and the “good guy”.  For Company 40-52, it was Nelsn’s turn to be the bad guy.)

Chief Logan lined us up in two rows, showing us how to dress off into straight and properly spaced lines.  The dark-haired little chief then walked up and down the lines, his hands clasped behind him and curling his lip as he looked at the motley crew.

I do not recall his exact acid comments, but the gist of his greeting was that we were, without a doubt, the sorriest-looking bunch he had ever seen.  He had grave doubts that he could make sailors out of us but it was his job, and that of Chief Logan, to try.  Some of us would not make it.  His intent was to make us feel like the lowest things on the face of the Earth.  He pretty much succeeded; however, I saw through his tactic three weeks later.  They had me waxing the red-tiled floor of the nearby chiefs’ mess and wardroom and I overheard another training chief make exactly the same welcoming speech to another arriving batch for Company 40-53.

It was late afternoon so we were lined up for Navy haircuts (I came out feeling like a shorn lamb), given supper (thereafter to be known as “evening chow”), and quartered for the night in a receiving barracks.  The next day, after morning chow, our lives started moving on the double.

We endured another physical examination then were issued more clothing and gear than most of us had ever possessed.  There were four suits of “undress” whites, a dress white jumper with a blue collar, a black silk neckerchief, a pair of work shoes, a woolen knitted watch cap, flat hat, four white hats, a dark jersey, black socks and grey socks, four underwear (known as “skivvies”) of boxer shorts and white tee shirts, gloves, handkerchiefs, shoe polishing gear, rubber overshoes, and a pair of khaki leggings.  It was all topped off with a thin horsehair mattress, two mattress covers and pillow cases, a small pillow, canvas hammock, canvas seabag, a ditty bag for small articles, and a Bluejacket’s Manual.  Our dress uniform would come later when we were out of South Unit and eligible for liberty.

Most of the balance of that day was devoted to stenciling our names on each article of clothing and equipment.  It was a court martial offense to be in possession of another’s clothes.  We also shifted into Navy uniforms of undress whites.  All our civilian clothes were boxed up and shipped home.

For the balance of our time in South Unit, our daily garb would be undresss whites (meaning without black neckerchiefs which were only worn for dress parades or going ashore), that is, clean undress whites and the canvas leggings for marching.  Each afternoon when we secured from the days marching and drills we were required to shower and in large wood troughs behind the barracks, scrub every article of clothing we had worn that day.  They were hung on the communal clothes lines radiating form a central pole.  Cleanliness was a fetish with the Navy.

We from the Pacific Northwest were the second platoon of Company 40-52 and were assigned to the second deck of our barracks.  The first floor was occupied by the first platoon made up of Texans who had arrived two days ahead of us.  That ethnic division was to result in some keep competition (and more than one fight) between platoons that would result in Company 40-52 earning a Navy E flag for excellence in military drill as each tried to outdo the other.

My Father's Philosophy of War

Part II

The War Years

Forward

This part of my story chronicles my memories of the dark years of World War II and, by epilogue, a summary of the principal events in my life after I went on inactive duty with the Naval Reserve late in 1946.  Once again I have relied on my memory and a few personal records and photographs.  I have attempted to avoid embellishment of any sort.

My contribution to combat was minimal and I was not awarded medals other than for campaigns, areas served in, and a Good Conduct medal.  I was very proud, however of my honorable service in the Navy.  I am also inordinately proud of the fact that when the surprise Japanese attack came on December 7^th 1941, my brother and I did not run away to hide but found a weapon and started shooting back while our base and our airplanes were bombed and shot to pieces around us.

We did not stop to consider that it was an historic event.  We were simply thoroughly enraged and wanted to strike back at the enemy that had suddenly appeared out of a peaceful Sunday morning Hawaiian sky.  We do not consider ourselves heroes—we were simply doing what the Navy had been training us to do.  We do not consider ourselves particularly brave (we knew the acrid metallic taste of fear in our dry mouths) but we did what we could.  I believe I can be excused for being proud of that.

How did it leave me feeling about war?  That is not an easy question to answer because there are different kinds of war and different justifications for restoring to force.  I am happy that I was in the last truly justified war—World War II.  It was brought on by evil aggressive leaders (specifically Adolf Hitler in Germany and Tojo in Japan) ambitious to conquer the world and beat all other races into submission or extinction.  If the Axis powers had won, personal freedom would have vanished from the face of the earth.

I did not feel that the Korean War in the early 1950s was justified.  I am a believer in the natural law of survival of the fittest.  I felt that North and South Korea should have battled it out without intervention for either side and the nation should have been unified with the strongest side in power.  I am a patriotic American, however, and I would have gone and fought my best if my government had ordered me to go.

The war in Vietnam was something else.  As Phyllis can attest, I was opposed to it from the beginning.  Even so, I would have gone and fought had I been younger and my commander-in-chief said “go”.  I have no patience with draft dodgers and cowards that slink away to Candad or Mexico rather than serve in the armed forces. There is no reason for that except plain old cowardice.  As for Vietnam, I felt that it was worthless to the rest of the world and should be left to wallow in its own communist mess without outside intervention.

There is nothing glorious about war even when it is justified.  It is not flags waving and bugles blowing—it is blood, dirt, smoke, fire, deadly steel and lead, the concussion of blasts, and the torn and bloody bodies of friends and shipmates.

War can be justified only by a real threat to world peace.  For that reason I backed and applauded our participation in the Gulf War to stop Saddam Hussien who would have liked to become a latter-day Adolf Hitler.  We claim to have won because we ran the Iraqis out of Kuwait, but actually, Kuwait was not worth it.  We lost because we did not drive on in to Baghdad and hang Saddam Hussien for the aggressive war criminal that he is.  Kuwait is not important (the world seems to be getting along fine without Kuwaiti oil) but world peace must always be our goal.

We must not become complacent because, with the collapse of communism in Russia, we seem to be facing an era of world peace.  As long as there is more than one nation on this shrinking little planet Earth, there can be reasons that world peace is threatened.

It is my hope that, if in the time of your life, the time comes to go to war you will go and serve honorably under our red, white, and blue star-spangled flag.  Go where you have to go and do what you have to do when you get there.  I want to be very, very proud of all of you.
Sincerely,
Papa Con

[My father wrote his memoir in ’89-90 when world peace seemed a possibility.  He was frail and dying by September 11^th.  It was like Pearl Harbor all over again, only on American soil this time.  That fall our family had a little reunion in Ilwaco, my Aunt Sandra and Uncle Jerry having brought my father and step-mother Phyllis down for what was his last trip to his beloved sea.  Even as a pacifist I have to say I was pleased when my uncle came into the house and said that we’d struck Al Qaida in Afghanistan.  Unfortunately, I don’t agree with my father about Iraq.  He did not live to see that debacle drag on to what it has become.  I predicted that we would miss Saddam Hussein because he was all that was keeping the lid on things.  We cannot impose democracy on another country that has no concept of it.  Other than that, I think my father and I agreed on the nature of war.  I know that he loved and was proud that my fiancé was in the Navy during Vietnam.]

Heading into the Unknown

Recruits heading to boot camp

A program called “Bundles for Britain” was set up in the U.S.  President Roosevelt armed the merchant ships that were participating in the convoys of foodstuff and war materials to England.  The president was still dealing with a very divided nation even after two American destroyers were sunk in the Atlantic.

Pacifists like Charles Lindbergh talked isolationism.  The German-American bunds were flourishing in the larger cities of the U.W.  Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact with Russia.  The “Axis”—Germany, Italy, and Japan—came into being.  In the newsreels Hitler ranted, Mussolini pranced and postured, and Premier Tojo of Japan grinned from behind his steel-rimmed spectacles.

Personally, I could only feel that it was only a matter of time before the U.S. would have to get into the war, just as it had happened in 1917 to stop the German Kaiser.  The thought of it starting for us in the Pacific never occurred to me in spite of the continued aggression of Japan in China.  I had paid very little attention to events in that part of the world.

It was the first day of July in 1940 when I went to the Federal Building in Portland.  The Navy recruiting office dug out my record, gave me a thorough new physical, and said they would take me.  The following week, a Chief Petty Officer came to our house and interviewed  my mother and father.  They signed the necessary consent form and on July 16^th I received my orders to report on July 22^nd.

I quite at the CC Store and left a recommendation with Mr. Garrison for my brother Rex.  (Rex subsequently worked there for a year when he got out of high school before the joined the Seabees.)  I said goodbye to my friends at Gearhart’s and to Patty Cross.  She cried a little bit and wished me good luck.

Breakfast was a bit strained on the morning of the 22^nd.  Rex told me goodbye then he took the bicycle—his by the right of succession along with the large bedroom and my model airplane collection—to go off to mow someone’s lawn.  Little Sandra Dean, now a husky four-year-old, hugged me and could not understand why her brother Richard had to leave and now I was going also.  I promised to bring her a present when I came home and that mollified her.

I had packed a clean shirt and my toilet articles in the same little zippered bag Richard had carried when he left (it had been sent home by the Navy along with his civilian clothes).  I remember standing awkwardly in the kitchen to say goodbye to my mother.  My father had not gone to work that morning and would walk to the bus depot with me.

As I have said, we Ozark folks are not normally very demonstrative or given to displays of emotion.  My mother hugged me and smiled, although there was moisture in her blue eyes, and simply said, “You be a good boy, Conrad, and do what they tell you.  I know that both you and Richard are going to make us proud of you.  Go on new—Dad is waiting out front.”

I looked back as we walked off up the street.  Sandra was on the front porch waving to me.  I did not see my mother but I saw the curtain move in the front downstairs bedroom and knew that she was watching me go.  Mercifully, I could not see the warm tears that poured down her cheeks as she knelt there by the window.

Dad and I walked pretty much in silence, as I recall, all the way down to the depot, each with our own thoughts.  It reminded me of my drive from Bona to Fairplay with my grandfather in Missouri just three short years before.  Dad was never one to talk much, excepomwhen he had a few beers, and he had never given us advice after we got into high school unless we asked for it.  He turned to me when we got to the depot and were waiting for the Portland bus.  He held out a folded five-dollar bill.

“Here, boy, you might need this for something extra on your trip down,” he said gruffly and just as my grandfather had done three years before.

I shook my head.  “You keep it, Dad.  I got a couple of dollars of my own (I had not yet found the two-dollar bill my mother had tucked into my bag).  The Navy will take care of me when I get there.  They said that all our meals on the train would be furnished.  You keep it.”

“Never mind,” he said as he took my hand and pressed the folded bill into it.  “I give five to Richard when he left and I want you to have it.  You’ll find a use for it.”

I put the folded bill into my pocket.  He then placed a gnarled hand on my shoulder.  “Ain’t never been on to give unasked advice, Conard, and I hope me and your mother has raised you boys right.  We are proud of both of you.

“Ain’t been one to go to church, much, either, but I will tell you what my Uncle Jim told me when I left to go in the Army back in the World War.  You are liable to run into some rough times down the road there.  Just remember, a real man goes where the hand of the Lord leads him and he does what he has to do when he gets there.  Go on now son, the bus is loading.  Goodbye, boy.”

He dropped his head then, turned, and walked away down the street.  I boarded the bus and got a seat by the window.  As we pulled out, Dad had halted on the corner and was lighting his pipe.  I do not know if he saw me waving but I think he maybe did.

At the recruiting office in Portland, I quickly began to understand why they say that the military is a matter of “hurry up and wait”.  I cooled my heels all morning in an anteroom while other recruits gradually straggled in.  There was the Olsen brothers from Portland, a fellow from Astoria, two or three from the Chehalis area, one from Montana, and others I did not get a chance to talk to.  Finally, after they had sent us out with chits for lunch, we were gathered in an office and a Navy lieutenant came and administered the Oath of Allegiance.  We were now officially apprentice seamen in the United States Navy and they gave each of us a little certificate to prove it.

After we had been sworn in, we waited around for another hour or so, then we had another physical mostly to make sure we all met the height and weight requirements.  Later a yeoman came and handed out chits for a night at a hotel.  We were informed that we would not leave for San Diego until the following day after another batch of recruits arrived.  Those of us who were close to home could go home for the night if we wished.

I did not want to go back to Vancouver.  I had said my goodbyes and that was that.  I did not want to have to do it all over again.  I got together with a recruit from Montana—a tall, lanky young fellow whose name I no longer recall—and we had dinner on another Navy chit, then went to see the new movie “One Million B.C.” at the Coliseum Theater before we bedded down at a hotel.  The movie was good and, of course, I promptly fell in love with a new starlet, Raquel Welch.

The next day it was wait, wait, and wait again while more Pacific Northwest recruits straggled in from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.  Finally, around noon, we were told we would be catching the train to San Diego at twenty-two hundred hours.  It took us a minute to figure out that, on the Navy 24-hour clock, that meant ten p.m.

I had no desire for my family to come over and see me off like a kid leaving for summer camp, so I called the only one I thought of offhand that could drive a car which was Shirley Mills.  She came to Portland about eight o’clock after supper and picked me up in front of the Federal Building.

We drove to Portland Heights somewhere around the zoo and parked to talk and neck a little.  My heart was not in it, however, because I was looking eagerly forward to getting on that train.  I had her take me back to the station before nine-thirty.

I did not want Shirley hanging onto me and kissing me goodbye in front of the other recruits, so I insisted on leaving her there in front of the station so she would not have to go and park the car.  She was weeping a little bit.  I impulsively reached into my bag and produced the Oath of Allegiance I had signed.

“Here,” I said, “you can keep this for me until I get back.”

I got out of the car then and marched into the train station without looking back.  I do not know why I gave her the certificate—I should have sent it to my mother.  I most certainly was not in love with Shirley—she was just a fun date.

The Navy had provided a Pullman car for us and the porter had already made it up for the night when the thirty or so of us boarded.  I was assigned an upper bunk with only a small window beside me out of which to peer at the passing lights of the Willamette river waterfront.  It was not until the train had cleared the Portland suburbs and Oregon City and headed into the darkness of central Oregon that I began to feel the pangs of homesickness.

I lay there sleepless for a long time, thinking of home and knowing that my life would never again be the same.  I thought about what it would be like at breakfast in the morpnig, just the four of them—Mother, Dad, Rex and Sandra—with my chair and Richard’s empty and pushed out of the way from the table.

I thought, too, about the good friends I had left in Vancouver, particularly my confidant Patty Cross and lively and vivacious Elaine.  I vowed to myself to keep in touch with letters (and I did for a long time).

I was still lying awake when the train halted for a short time at Roseburg, Oregon.  This time it was not simply as if a door was closing behind me—this one seemed to literally clang shut.  There was another wide open in front of me, however.  I thought about that and the adventures to come.  When I finally fell asleep with my head on a slightly damp railroad pillow while the train was laboring up the mountain grades toward Mt. Shasta in the pre-dawn darkness, I was probably smiling because I relished the challenge of my strange new world.

(the best was yet to come.)

Dunkirk was the Deciding Factor

I needed someone with whom to talk it over.  I would have called Elaine because, besides being a chatterbox, she was one smart little cookie; however, since I knew she was probably still peeved at me about bringing Shirley to the prom, I did not call.  Instead, after Dick left with the car, I got on my bicycle and pedaled off to 13^th and Kauffman to see Patty Cross.  It was a warm spring evening and we sat on the concrete steps of the apartment.  I told her all about it and how I felt—omitting my wild idea about maybe going to the Naval Academy.

Patty did not have to, nor did I expect her to, advise me.  She simply listened patiently and let me get it all out.  Finally, she asked, “How long would you have to sign up for?”

“One cruise is six years.  Could have signed up for a short cruise—they call it a ‘diaper cruise’—if I had done it while I was seventeen, but it is too late for that.”

“Well,” she said as she snuggled against my shoulder, “six years is not all that long a time.  I would be out of high school before then and probably have a job.  Who knows what may happen?”

When Dick left to go back to Sa Diego four days later, I was still vacillating.  The day after that, while I was changing the women’s wear display in the window of the CC Store, I saw my old high school advisor, Louis Barter, walking up the street.  I scrambled out of the display window, told one of the clerks that I was taking a break, and caught up with Barter.  I invited him to have a beer with me at the Cave Tavern under the bank across from the store.

Over nickel glasses of beer, I told Barter my problem.  I ended by asking, “What do you think I should do, Mr. Barter?”

Barter brushed the beer suds off his sand little mustache, looked keenly at me, and said, “Look, Conrad, you want to be a naval officer and you want to fly.  The best thing for you to do is to get two years of college under your belt, then apply for the naval aviation cadet program.  Enlisting in the Navy in the hope of making the academy would be a long-shot gamble at best.”

It was not the answer I wanted to hear.  I could not see a possibility of making it to college in the near future.  I did not believe that we had two or three years before the United States would be forced into the war.  I thanked Barter, paid for the beer, and bought a package of Sen-Sen before I went back to the store.

Less than a week later my mind was suddenly made up.  I had gone to a movie at the Castle Theater.  The Lowell Thomas newsreel was devoted entirely to the debacle at a town called Dunkirk where the remnants of the British Army, under murderous fire from German guns and the Luftwaffe, was evacuated from the continent.  The newsreel closed with a scene of Adolf Hitler dancing a little jig of elation outside the railroad car at Versailles when the French capitulated.  The Nazis had full control of the continent of Europe.

Richard Comes Home on Leave

Richard’s boot camp training lasted eight weeks.  It was around the middle of May that he came home on boot leave.  When I got home from work and found him sitting in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, I was immediately envious his snappy uniform.

He was wearing dress blues with the three shite stripes around the large collar in back which also had two white stars.  The single stripe of an apprentice seaman was around the buttoned cuffs.  His black neckerchief was tied in a square knot at his throat, and a jaunty white hat was perched precariously on the very back of his curly black hair.

We shook hands and I made him stand up so I could admire the uniform fully.  It looked good on his slender frame.  His black shoes were shined to a high gloss.  He looked more mature than I remembered.

“Well, bird brain,” Dick said, “how is your love life these days?”

I reddened and said, “Oh, it’s okay, I guess.”

“Hear you been keeping company with a state senator’s daughter, old Shirley Mills.  You want to watch out—she gets her hooks into you, you might wind up with a ball and chain.  No sense in buying a cow when milk is so cheap, you know.”

Mother, who was bustling around getting supper, reproved him, “Richard, you shush that kind of talk!”

I noticed a white-winged propeller emblem on

Dick’s lower left sleeve.  “Hey,” I said to change the subject, “what is that?”

“That, my boy,” Dick said, “is an aviation machinists mate striker badge.  I am going to be an airplane mechanic!  I passed the test in boot camp and am being sent to aviation machinist mate’s school on North Island in San Diego bay.  When I graduate from that, I am going to put in or a patrol squadron, get on a flight crew, and be a machine gunner, too.”

My envy was now a shade of deep green.  I said scornfully, “Shoot!  You don’t know anything about airplanes like I do!  I have been for airplane rides twice and you have never been up!”

“Never you mind, boy,” he said.  “In four month I will know more about airplanes than you ever thought of knowing.”

I was so bemused when we sat down to supper that I toyed with my food and ignored Rex’s excited questioning.  Damn, I thought bitterly, here it was my idea of joining the Navy in the first place and I really want to fly.  Now old Dick’s got it all!

After supper Dick regaled us with tales of everything that had happened in boot camp—washing his own clothes, learning to tie knots, rowing a whaleboat, marching on what he called “the grinder”, learning to semaphore and read Morse code, and on and on.  My envy was a torment.

Later in the evening, I lounged on the bed upstairs while Dick gussied himself up to go out with the car and impress his friends.  He neatly re-reolled his neckerchief, tied it higher than regulations specify, and re-shined his glossy black shoes.  As he combed his thick black hair, I asked, “They really tell you that time that they would take me in the Navy?”

He lowered the comb and turned.  His face was dead serious.  “Sure they did.  I wasn’t just shittin’ you, Con.  You could still sign up.  The way things are going in Europe, you would be a real bird-brain not to do it!

“Heck, after the way you and I used to tinker with that old Model T in Missouri, that examination for mech school is a lead pipe cinch.  I made a four of on it and didn’t have to spend half the time of some of the others that made it.  If you know a box wrench from a pair of pliers, you got it made!

“Like I told you, brothers can be stationed together if they want.  We could be in the same squadron.  Come on—wise up!”

“We-ell,” I hedged, “I dunno.”

I was in a real quandary.  I kept thinking maybe it was not too late to get into the Navy and maybe make it to the academy—at least try.  Even if that did not work out, like Dick kept saying, if a war came I would be a lot better off in the Navy than to be drafted into the Army.  It kept occurring to me, however, that what a good thing I had going here at home—good job at the store, money to spend, and a car to drive.

“Aw,” I said, “I got a pretty good job.  Got a raise to sixteen dollars a week not long ago.  Shoot, that’s sixty-four a month and you are only getting 21 bucks a month in the Navy!”

“It ain’t the money that’s important,” he stated flatly.  “Anyway, just looking at that part of it, in two more months I will be a seaman second class and then I get thirty-six.  Six more months and I will be a seaman first and getting fifty-four. Then, after I’ve been in a year, I will be eligible to take the test for third class mech—which is a petty officer rate and they get seventy-two.

“On top of that, by then I can get into a flight crew if I get into PBYs or something and flight skins add fifty percent of your base pay.  Figure it out—that is over a hundred a month in a year!  Shoot, you’ll still be sweeping out the CC Store for two thirds of that.  What chance you got of getting another raise soon?”

He had a good point.  I did not know what the others made, but I doubted that clerks got more than twenty a week and I doubted if the store manager got more than a hundred a month.  I was sure not putting anything in the bank, what with spending most of it on clothes, gasoline, and girls.

Richard settled the white hat on his dark hair with it tipped jauntily over his right eyebrow.  “Furthermore,” he went on, “that Navy pay is free and clear.  They give you your first outfit of uniforms and gear, all your chow unless you eat ashore, and a decent place to live.  You can’t go on freeloading on the folks forever.  You got to go it on your own.  You think about it.”  He departed, whistling “Anchors Aweigh” and flipping the key to the Chevrolet in his hand.