The U.S. Open tees off again Thursday, at the Congressional Country Club, in Bethesda, Maryland, and just the other day the Times had a piece revealing that during the Second World War Congressional’s svelte green layout and florid Italianate clubhouse had been the secret training grounds for commandos operating under the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor of the C.I.A. War and golf are strange partners, but not to me. As an Army Air Corps sergeant stationed at Hickam Field, outside Honolulu, in 1944 and 1945, I soon discovered that the private Waialae Country Club, the best course in Hawaii, was reserved for Army enlisted men over the weekends. No officers allowed. I was an editor with the Seventh Air Force G.I. magazine Brief, a lively weekly with a westward beat of about two million square miles. We closed late on Friday night; Saturdays were workdays, but early Sunday often found three or four of us desk guys back at Waialae, where decent rental clubs and open tee times were miraculously available. The course, still the site of the Sony Open on the P.G.A. tour, nestles along the shore near Diamond Head, and it offered windblown palms, stunning surf and skies, and a chance for us to work on our hackers’ games without embarrassment. The left-hand side of one of the outbound holes was weirdly occupied by a spacious fenced-off zoo, and I can still recall setting up for my 7-iron recovery from another drive hooked into the weeds while under scrutiny by an adjacent kudu or giraffe.
Back to the war—or ahead, rather, about nine years, to a Rockland County movie theatre, where, a civilian again and a suburbanite, I am watching an early run of the classic Fred Zinnemann film of the James Jones novel “From Here to Eternity,” which, of course, is all about the regular Army in Oahu before and just after Pearl Harbor. My war, I think to myself. Yow, this time they got it right. Burt Lancaster is just like my old First, minus the gut. Those are the Schofield Barracks balconies. Here are the beaten-down Maggio and Prewitt, a.k.a. Frank Sinatra and Montgomery Clift, down on their knees on another chickenshit fatigue duty; here are Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr making out on the sand in swimsuits; here’s the sadistic Fatso knifed in the belly; here come the Japanese planes. And here’s Prew again, AWOL and on the lam, bravely trying to rejoin his company under the cover of night, now that we’re at war. It’s a day-for-night scene, actually, with palm trees and a shorefront, and Diamond Head out beyond in silhouette. “Halt!” cries a soldier in a tin hat. (Wisely, our guys are guarding the shore against potential saboteurs.) The soldier raises his rifle and fires. Prew dodges.
A burst of machine-gun fire. Prew, hit, clutches himself, spins, and disappears over the rim of a little knoll.
“My God!” I say, rising in the Nyack dark. “That’s the first hole—I was there, I was there! I’ve been in that trap a hundred times!”
Post, June, 2011