Once They Were Eagles (32 page)

“I just ran out of gas. I'm not a good delegator—tried to do everything myself. I lost my partner; there was too much entertaining to do, and I got tired of that. So, I got lucky. I sold the place and expect to live happily ever after.

“I figured I'd play a lot of golf, and we've been doing some traveling. But I've always thought I was fortunate and wanted in some
way to ‘repay my debt to society,' So all of a sudden, I found I was a board member of Sonoma Valley Family Center, a counseling organization with a 24-hour crisis line we call Help Line. It may be wife- or child-beating, or a lonely person, or a life-threatening situation. Our volunteers make recommendations. Usually, the people come and talk, and pay what they can afford. I became chairman of fund raising and spent a couple of years at that. I also spent a year on the county grand jury, two or three days a week.

“I guess I'm still trying to do my job.”

Doctor James M. “Happy Jack” Reames drove up to Altadena from his home in Whittier to meet me at Fred Losch's place.

At the time Doc was tapped to become Flight Surgeon for the Black Sheep, he had been attending casualties being evacuated from Guadalcanal on hospital planes. He was a natural for the squadron position. He had graduated from Navy Flight Training and Aviation Medicine courses at Pensacola, so he was both a doctor and a pilot; at 26 he was barely older than most of the pilots so they could understand one another.

Reames possessed a gentle, compassionate, nonabrasive spirit that enabled him to get along with absolutely everyone. Everybody loved him, and not because he had a footlocker full of medicinal brandy. It was his southern charm, his wide-eyed college-boy enthusiasm over the performances of our young combat eagles, the optimistic outlook that enabled him to find something cheerful in everything.

His soft accent sounded as though his throat had been bathed in olive oil; we called him “King of the Yamheads.” But his easy talk disguised a quick mind, as his poker opponents paid dearly to learn. Because of his slow, slightly bumbling style of play, it was a while before we learned enough about his game to call him “Diamond Jim.”

Sitting in Losch's den, Jim didn't appear to have changed very much. Older, yes, with glasses and gray hair—he looked like what he was: a solid, respectable family physician. Even so, it was not hard to visualize him, sleepy eyed, at the poker table, asking, “What y'all gonna do?” Or exuberantly passing out tiny bottles of brandy, shouting, “Eleven Zeros!” Or holding onto an upright at 3:00
A.M.
, saying incredulously: “Strafe Kahili?”

“I'll never forget those Black Sheep days,” he said. “Those wild rides down the hill to the airstrip when we came under bombing attack, and jumped off the truck, and crawled into that muddy culvert for safety, to find out the next day it was a bomb storage dump we'd huddled in.

“Or Kolombangara, collecting Japanese rifles, and I picked up what I thought was a nice brass souvenir and stuck it in my pocket, then knocked around the jungle a couple of hours before I went back onto the boat. I was showing it around when an ordnance man said, ‘Hey, that's a live detonator off a 90-mm shell!'

“And the foxhole full of rats we swore we wouldn't get into.

“The strangest was on Munda when they found a Japanese soldier in our chow lines. He'd scrounged a Marine's fatigues and had been a regular customer.

“And the flight surgeon who circumcised the colonel and saved the shriveled foreskin. He used it as bait a few days later, and landed a 150-pound marlin.”

“That sounds like an old-time ditty,” I chuckled. “Perhaps that bait was specially attractive to marlin. In any case, not too easy to come by—colonels' foreskins, I mean, not fish.”

“Or when we were in Sydney,” Jim went on, “I was afraid Boyington was going to cause an international incident. We were in the bar at the Australian Hotel, and Boyington somehow got into an argument with two Australian enlisted men. I followed them outside, and they were squared away about to tangle. I rushed inside and found the highest-ranking Australian officer; he went out and told those enlisted men to beat it.

“The thing about the Black Sheep was that they were, with few exceptions, all eager to go, gung ho. None of them had any combat fatigue. The British had already discovered that the younger men are more eager than the older men. They're more daring.”

After his two Black Sheep tours, Reames returned to the States and was assigned to the Marine Corps Air Station at Mojave, California, where it sometimes cools down to 100 degrees in the evenings. Scheduled
to go out on the carrier
Franklin,
he was grounded because of his eyes. His replacement was killed when the
Franklin
was bombed and heavily damaged.

Medically retired in July 1946 because of his eyes, Jim opened a general medical practice in East Los Angeles, where he has been extremely successful.

One of his patients was Pappy Boyington. During the course of a physical examination, X-rays disclosed a spot on Boyington's lung; lab tests proved it to be cancerous. Reames assisted at the operation, which took place a number of years ago.

Beyond Social Security retirement age now, Jim works a slower pace; he gets in regular fishing and bird-hunting trips, with an occasional junket to Las Vegas to keep his hand in at poker and dice. And he attends our Black Sheep reunions.

Don “Mo” Fisher picked us up at Savannah's airport and drove my wife and me to Beaufort, South Carolina, a lovely old city of 14,000. The Fishers live just outside of town in Port Royal, a community of 2,000. Their plush Spanish-style home, a two iron shot from Parris Island, is built over the remains of an old fort, overlooking Spanish Point and the scenic waterway leading into Beaufort's waterfront area. There's a steady stream of boats drifting past his patio window.

Fisher's hair is grayer and his forehead higher, but he is still big, vigorous, affable, friendly, and outgoing, and he still loves to arrange everything for a get-together.

He insisted on putting together a party: he picked up a couple of bushels of oysters; Lou Markey, the Chance Vought technical rep
who'd been with us at Vella Lavella, brought a huge package of venison from a deer he'd bagged; a retired Marine general brought a rum cake he'd baked; my wife, Carol, helped Mo's wife, Bette, prepare a batch of eggplant from the Fisher garden. It was a feast, with Fisher his typical hospitable self.

I asked him why he left college to join the Marines, what he remembered.

“I don't mean to sound patriotic. It was something the majority were doing. I had a civilian pilot's license and had gone through the CPT program in 1940, so I joined up.

“After training I went to Glenview and checked out on the carrier
Wolverine,
then to San Diego and overseas. On Espiritu Santo, we got checked out in Corsairs: somebody showed you how to start it, you sat in the cockpit, and they pointed out a few things.

“When we first started going to Rabaul, there was tremendous air opposition—I saw my only Japanese carrier in Rabaul Harbor—but toward the end of our tour, there was no air opposition.

“After the Black Sheep were broken up, I went to Green Island, back to Cherry Point, then to Congaree. I put in my letter to become a regular. I flew off a carrier with a stunt team to represent the Marines—sort of like the Navy's Blue Angels except that we flew in a group of 16; they fly in fours.

“I went out to China in 1948, assigned to the ground forces in Tsing Tao; I was the Air Officer for what they called the Fleet Marine Force of the Western Pacific.

“A year in China, then back to the States, then out to Korea on a jeep carrier flying close support. Back in the States, I commanded an attack squadron for a year; went on a Mediterranean cruise; saw Japan for a year; went to Quantico for four years on the Senior School staff.

“In 1964, I came to Beaufort as CO of MAG 31. My wife had an operation and needed to stay near the hospital, so when it came time to leave, I retired. That was 1966.

“I read in the paper that the Beaufort city manager had resigned. Playing golf with the mayor, I asked, ‘What is this city manager job?'

“He said, ‘Do you want it?'

“Later, while I was in Tampa, the mayor called and asked me to come up for an interview. I took the job and stayed for five years. I resigned to try construction work, and that evolved into real estate, and that into appraising. Now I have so much work I'm thinking about expanding, renting a building, and hiring a couple of assistants.”

Don has also served as a member of the city council, as mayor for
two years, and as president of the Rotary Club. As we walked along the streets, it was obvious that everybody knew and liked him, pausing to exchange a few friendly words.

Some things don't change.

Denmark “Quill Skull” Groover drove 400 miles round trip from Macon to Savannah, Georgia, to meet me for dinner. A busy trial lawyer, he had to be in court the next morning to defend a woman who had stabbed her husband. Groover's hair is no longer coal black; he has less of it and it no longer sticks out. Today he looks distinguished.

He became a flyer, he said, because “I got seasick if I rode in a boat, and I didn't want to wander through the mud.”

Commissioned in December 1942, he was shipped overseas in mid-1943. I asked how he felt on his first mission.

“I was wondering whether the hell I was going to get back or not. There's no substitute for experience—I realized the only reason I got shot up was that I had extraneous matter in my mind.

“When I got shot up my right arm and leg were paralyzed, my right aileron cable was severed, and I had no rudder control. My instruments were all out, but I made the best landing I ever made—rolled to the end of the strip where I just kept going around in a circle until they got me out. At the emergency room, Doc wanted to give me a shot, but for some reason I was afraid of it. He gave me one of those bottles of brandy, and I got as high as three tall pines. They took me to Guadalcanal, and after a week I started to come back, but they caught me and operated on my right arm and ankle. I was there for a month before I came back for the second combat tour.