Above the Thunder (30 page)

We decided we'd better not be on the plane when it sank, so we slid off into the water and floated nearby and waited a very short time before my faithful #79608 slowly dropped below the surface, then shoved up a wing to show the white star and bars, and slowly went down forever. We bobbed up and down in the empty waves and watched the horizon for a boat.

At first, the bow of the LCVP was just a square dot on the horizon, but to one who is floating in the water the horizon is very near, so it wasn't long before the boat was swinging around near us while a sergeant kept a .50-caliber machine gun covering the shore. The crew tossed ropes to us and pulled us aboard. They pulled me up first, and this has bothered me ever since. It made me feel like a captain being first to desert his sinking ship. But it was a great relief not to be anticipating the slashing jaws of a hungry shark. We took off our wet clothing and, wrapped in
blankets, sat on the deck and smoked and answered the crew's questions about what had happened.

During the hour-long ride back to Maffin Beach, we met a “water buffalo,” an amphibious truck. It was wallowing through the waves between us and the shore, loaded to the gunwales with men, rifles sticking out in all directions. It was Phil Ryan and a dozen men from HQ Btry, including Young's brother, Carl. When Ryan had heard that we were down and drifting toward the beach at Sawar, he had the water buffalo cranked up and asked for volunteers to land at Sawar Drome, if necessary, and bring us out! Everyone in the battery volunteered.

See what I mean when I say there's nothing finer than a good soldier?

When we landed back at Maffin, Uncle Bud and Doc Miller were waiting for us, Uncle Bud smiling happily. Doc questioned us about how we felt, gave us a very cursory examination, and administered a shot of medicinal bourbon and a sedative. We both were still shivering a little, although it was hot weather, so he told us to sack out, wrap up in our blankets, and take a nap. He was about to dismiss us, but Colonel Carlson wasn't satisfied.

“Don't either of you have any cuts or anything?” he asked.

“No, sir. Well, I did kind of cut my leg a little.”

I pulled up my trouser leg and showed him a small cut from which blood had trickled down and dried.

“And I guess I've got a few bruises—a knot on my head—but nothing serious.”

Young had the same sort of very minor injuries, but Uncle Bud wasn't going to miss his first chance to award a decoration.

“You boys are wounded! Fix 'em up, Doc. I'm going to award them the Purple Heart.”

I sacked out for a couple of hours, awoke feeling fine, and joined in the officers' late afternoon volleyball game. But Doc Miller wouldn't let me fly for about three days. He was afraid there might be some adverse psychological effect, I guess, and he questioned me at great length about it.

While I'm talking about Doc—whose home was Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania—I'd like to relate a couple of little stories about him.

Although he was a fine fellow in every way and was quite well liked by everyone, as far as I know, it seemed to me that the long months in the dreary atmosphere of the primitive equatorial island sort of got to him. One thing that bothered him was what he considered the inequity of his receiving only the regular pay of a captain while Vin and I, with our flying pay, made more.

“I spent sixteen years getting my basic education, thousands of dollars and eight more years of hard work in medical school and internship, I was on the surgical staff of a large hospital; yet you young lieutenants with no more than a high school education and six months of military training make more money than I do in this war.”

Vineyard and I argued that our extra pay was given not for our level of education but for what we could do for the war effort, and for the unusual risks we were daily required to take. That didn't satisfy Doc at all. Then I posed him a hypothetical situation that, however unfair it might have been, did suffice to stop his arguing with us.

“Doc,” I said, “let's suppose that you and I trade places. I'll be the doctor and you be the pilot. What would you want me to do—something that is a common, routine task for a surgeon?”

After thinking for a few seconds, he replied, “An appendectomy. That's a very common surgical procedure. Every surgeon must be able to do it.”

“OK. Now obviously, I know little or nothing about surgery, and you are equally ignorant about flying a plane, so we would both need advice, right?”

“Right.”

“All right now. You give me a qualified surgeon to stand by and tell me what to do while I perform an appendectomy. I'll give you a competent pilot to ride with you and tell you everything to do while you simply take off, come around the field, and land an airplane—something every pilot needs to do on every flight. Which of us do you think would be more likely to succeed?”

“I must admit, you'd probably win the contest,” he said.

But he was wrong. Even if I had his eight years of training, I don't
think I could perform a surgical operation. I'd be in dreamland after the first incision. I think doctors deserve the extra military pay that later was authorized for them.

One of the busiest and most resourceful men in the 122d FA Bn was a private first class named John Paul Jones. Whatever you wanted, Jones could get it for you—which is how I came by my first pair of combat boots. If you managed to have a camera and a few rolls of film with you and took some pictures, Jones was the man who had the means of developing and printing them for you. He served informally as orderly for a number of officers. And in New Guinea he was detailed as our malaria control specialist. In that capacity, it was his function to make sure everyone had a serviceable mosquito bar, that bug bombs were issued as needed, and that all mosquito breeding places in the area were period ically sprayed with kerosene to kill the larvae. One of those potential breeding places was the three-holer latrine used by the officers.

One afternoon, minutes after Jones had sprayed kerosene quite liberally into the dark hole beneath the latrine box, Doc Miller strolled casually into the latrine, seated himself on the center hole, and lit a cigarette. Just as casually, his mind probably ten thousand miles away in Bloomsburg, he raised up one haunch and dropped the lighted match into the hole.

Need I say more on that subject? Fortunately, Doc wasn't seriously hurt.

Our mail deliveries probably averaged one a week, but they were quite irregular, for the ships that brought mail from the States were subject to the many uncertain winds of war. Camped there on the rim of the huge, untamed island of New Guinea, we were in what some newsmen called “the backwash” of the war in the Southwest Pacific. We were in
contact with the enemy, but nothing big was happening there anymore. MacArthur's island-hopping war had moved on ahead of us. MacArthur himself was well down on Washington's priority list, and our small task force was probably near the bottom of MacArthur's list. Bigger things were happening elsewhere.

The folks back home knew that their letters normally took one to two months to reach us there on the other side of the world, so they did their Christmas mailing early. And so, sometime in October of 1944, a ship dropped anchor off Hollandia (later Sukarnapura, and still later, Jayapura) that had onboard a large amount of Christmas mail for men in units all up and down the New Guinea coast. Hollandia, where MacArthur then had his headquarters, was a very busy place, and there was no dock space to accommodate the mail ship. Unfortunately, the ship was scheduled to join a convoy to support the invasion of Leyte in the Philippines. When she had waited as long as she could, her captain used his small boats to put the cargo on the Hollandia beach, and away he went.

There on the beach lay the ordinary canvas mail sacks filled with all the love and tender concern that thousands of mothers, wives, sisters, and sweethearts could wrap up in packages of cake and candy and favorite sausages and cheeses, and whatever they could find and mail that they thought would please their loved ones overseas. They lay there for two months, exposed to the hot, humid tropical climate, before someone finally got them picked up and sent on their way.

Our mail clerk was a Sergeant Perkins of Louisville, Kentucky. He was probably the oldest man in the outfit, a good and sensitive man who was almost like a father to many of the men, so when they pestered him about when they were going to get some mail he good-naturedly assured them that there was no need to worry, the mail would be in before Christmas. And it was. Only a day or two before Christmas, Perkins returned from our one crude little dock with his truck piled high with mailbags. Smiling happily, he began tossing them off in front of the mail tent, and then the men—and officers too—gathered from all directions.

It was obvious that no one was in a mood to wait for the usual sorting, so Sergeant Perkins just started opening bags and emptying the
contents out on the ground. Bag after bag he opened and emptied, and it was all the same. When he finished, he stood facing a huge pile of greasy, moldy, stinking garbage. Tears streamed down his kindly face as he stood, unable to speak, and motioned with his hands as if to say, “Go ahead, men. See if you can find your name.” Then he turned and stumbled into the tent.

The men began slowly and carefully sorting through the mess, each looking for a piece of paper with his name on it, anything he could identify as being intended for him. Some were lucky enough to find some soiled scrap bearing a familiar name or address, perhaps a package more or less intact, but inside would be only garbage where loving hands had placed some good food three months ago. A few men were, like Sergeant Perkins, in tears as they searched, but most were merely sad and disappointed. It was touching to see some soldier's pleasure at finding just his name and knowing that someone had sent him something.

There were a few nonperishable items, of course, although many could not be identified as to addressee. The only major item in this category was canned fruit juice—orange, pineapple, apricot, and others. Since so little could be claimed by any individual, we pooled the juice so everyone could have some.

As for me, I had asked my mother to send me one of the two-pound blocks of American processed cheese, which then came packed in a wooden box. I searched hopefully for the cheese—and I found it. The wooden box was intact. Inside I found a shriveled, heavily molded, very stinking chunk of what had once been cheese.

That was my Christmas gift—and like the other men I was very grateful, just knowing that it came from home, from someone who loved me.

The American offensive along the coast of New Guinea broke up the Japanese forces into fairly well isolated groups, and communications among these various pockets of resistance was usually poor, often nonexistent. Thus it was that a Japanese construction unit consisting of about five hundred Okinawans under the command of a civilian engineer hit the
trail from the Aitape-Wewak vicinity with the intention of evading the American forces and joining the stronger friendly elements at Hollandia. It was hard going as they made their way on foot over rough jungle trails with scanty supplies of food and medicine. There were deaths, even early in the trek, but they kept on.