July 20, 1950
Off Kyushu Island, Japan
Waves raced over the sea in long, broken ranks to batter the port bow of the David C. Shanks. The steel hull shuddered with each blow as the troopship rolled, lifted up, pitched forward and plowed on into the gloom. It held at a steady and stubborn 8 knots.
The four ships of the little westbound convoy, carrying 2,000 men of the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment, struggled to stay in sight of one another in thick sheets of rain and foam, their U.S. Navy colors whipping wildly in force 8 winds. On the bridge of the Shanks, the crewmen tugged at the wheel over and over, nosing the bow back on course toward the wide mouth, still distant, of the Osumi Strait.
If all went well, the three lumbering transports—the Patrick, the Ainsworth and the Shanks—and their escort, a Navy corvette, would make the strait tomorrow, then skirt around the lighthouse point of rocky Cape Sata, at Japan’s southern tip, to emerge among the islands of a stormy East China Sea. The next day, they would turn the corner and bear north toward Korea’s southern coast, toward an unexpected war in an unknown land.
* * *
Maybe a couple of weeks in Korea, Buddy Wenzel thought. Maybe a couple of months. That’s what they say. Private Leonard B. Wenzel, like the rest of the green troops buttoned up inside the Shanks, wanted to believe that his regiment, the famed “Garryowens,” could handle anything thrown at them—once they got through this typhoon.
The U.S. Navy had seen the giant storm coming for days, as it spun toward the sea lanes where the legendary “kamikaze” typhoon, the “divine wind,” sank a Chinese-Korean fleet another July day seven centuries earlier, saving Japan from invasion. But heavy weather would not deter the American planners of 1950, at General Headquarters in Tokyo. The need was urgent for the human cargo that had crowded in the hundreds aboard the troopships last Monday at the Yokohama piers. “The situation in Korea is critical,” the supreme commander, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, had told Washington. Now the Shanks’s crewmen could do little but watch 30-foot seas crash over their bow, hoping to hear the wind’s howl drop an octave, glancing nervously at the barometer. It had to bottom out soon.
The difficult passage—a three-day crossing turned into five days—was especially hard on one group of passengers. When they boarded days before, forty-five Japanese stevedores had been herded down the main deck to the stern and ordered to settle down on the open fantail. Now these quiet men in rough clothes were fending for themselves, finding shelter where they could on the jam-packed ship. Like other Japanese since the war, the stevedores had grown used to American bosses, and they were uncomplaining. At least they had a few days’ work, loading and unloading hardware and food for the soldiers, and knew they’d be returning home when the Americans would not.
Below deck, in stifling quarters beneath the waterline, the young Americans, their fresh fatigue uniforms now crumpled and soiled, sat pale-faced amid the reek, stumbled into the head holding stricken stomachs, or curled up weary on fold-down cots, stacked five high, trying to reread letters, mutter conversation or sleep while bracing themselves against bulkheads or gripping bunk frames, praying for shore or at least an even sea.
For the proud 7th Cavalry, George Armstrong Custer’s regiment, it was an inauspicious journey into war.
* * *
Nineteen-year-old Buddy Wenzel had been counting the days until his discharge, until he could go home to New Jersey and to Dot, his girl. He had been counting the days, that is, until the Army had thrown him a curve ball—the “Truman year,” they were calling it. All enlistments were being extended for twelve months because of the Korea “emergency.” Now, as he lay in his narrow sleeping space, Private Wenzel suddenly faced two years left to serve, instead of 388 days.
Up and down the rows of racks, the story was the same for the others, almost all of them 4745s—riflemen in Army personnel parlance—and most still in their teens. Their return home would now be delayed for many months. They would miss a lot: the family’s new television, the latest car models, the high school girls growing up and getting married.
Since VJ Day in 1945, the country had been racing ahead in every way. It came out of the war an economic giant. Older brothers, home from Europe and the Pacific, had stepped out of uniform and into new jobs, started families, bought houses. America was building new suburbias and roads; producing automobiles, washing machines and babies by the millions; sending veterans to college; introducing gadgets and new ideas daily.
But just when things were so good, the headlines were turning bad. Almost overnight, it seemed, a confident America had found a challenge in the Communist governments of the Soviet Union and China, and now North Korea had invaded South Korea. The Korean peninsula had been split into southern and northern halves by American and Soviet occupation forces after World War II, and the two Korean governments—with armies built up by Washington and Moscow—had been skirmishing across their dividing line, each bent on reuniting the Korean nation under its rule. The two great powers, one a northern neighbor of Korea, the other far across the Pacific, had failed to develop a plan for peacefully restoring an independent, whole Korea. Now that the north was trying to end the division by force, the price of that failure would be paid in blood.
As inevitable as it became, it was an unforeseen war for the crew-cut, fresh-faced infantrymen aboard the Shanks. Now these younger brothers, peacetime pickets on occupation duty in Japan, were suddenly in the front line.
For some of them, those without much to go home to, President Harry Truman’s “year” may have been a godsend. Many came from broken families and had dropped out of school long ago. Some were brawlers and misfits. Some wound up in the regiment because judges back home gave them a choice between the Army or jail. Some couldn’t even write.
One who could was Buddy Wenzel. He loved to write. The curly-haired, pug-nosed Wenzel’s strong right hand, below the bulging biceps and red-and-blue DOT tattoo, produced two or three letters a day in Tokyo, not just his daily note to Dot, but others to two-dozen pen pals, all female, all in different states. He’d picked up the addresses from friends. One favorite was Dorothy Hodges, blond sister of his George Company buddy James Lamarr Hodges, an easy-going, harmonica-playing farm boy from Florida.
Wenzel was a letter writer even as a kid in South River, New Jersey, when he wrote them for his father, a Polish immigrant and cannery worker. During World War II, Albert Sr. would sit with the boy and tell him what to write to big brother Albert, an Army medic on the Belgian front. The boy’s scrawled pages were fraught with a father’s anxiety. But the hardest letter Buddy had to write was the one his father sent to his mother. “Why did you leave us?” the heart-broken husband asked through the confused son. “I tried to give you what I could. If you come home, I’ll even buy new furniture.”
Lydia had walked out of their tall, narrow country house at three o’clock one morning when Buddy was thirteen and moved in with another man. She was fed up with raising five children, Buddy came to believe. It fell to the boy to care for two small sisters. He washed clothes and dishes, ironed, cleaned the house, and he dropped out of school. Then in June 1947, four years after his wife left him, Albert Wenzel Sr.’s broken heart quit beating. Buddy’s mother moved back into the house with her boyfriend, and Buddy rebelled. Learning his friends were enlisting in the Army, he joined them. It was an “out.” Since he was only seventeen, the minimum age, he needed a parent’s signature, and his mother gladly supplied it.
Some of the other recruits sweating it out in the Shanks’s lower decks had found their “out” even before turning seventeen.
Pfc. James Hodges had arrived in Japan on the same ship as Wenzel and ended up as a George Company bunkmate in Tokyo. The quiet, sandy-haired Hodges was another rebel, a runaway from a sharecropping family’s hard life among Florida’s baking hot citrus groves and strawberry fields. His father, Cauley Hodges, taciturn and strict, worked James, Dorothy and his nine other children at all hours in the fields, keeping them from school whenever he could, keeping them picking berries or cotton, planting peas, harvesting beans. They moved from town to town, school to school, had little time to do homework, and dropped out one by one.
Eldest son James, a boy who would sing country songs alone on the porch in the evening, finally packed some things and left. He borrowed a few dollars from Juanita, his married older sister, and found someone to pose as a parent and sign him up with the Army, attesting the runaway was older than his sixteen years. He would never return home.
Fox Company’s Ralph Bernotas had already turned seventeen when he set his sights on the service, having been baptized at the Lithuanian Catholic church in Girardville, Pennsylvania, in 1931. But his Pop was a reluctant cosigner. The youngest son among twelve children in a coal-mining family, Ralph was a good boy, an altar boy—“That’s when I learned to drink wine.” He was a poor boy, too. “I was the only one who didn’t have a suitcoat for the class picture.” But he had a happy childhood in a town where it was natural for a fifteen-year-old to descend 300 feet into a hole on a weekend to load coal into wagons and earn a couple of bucks.
By the time Ralph turned seventeen, however, his father’s black lung disease was fast worsening and the boy felt a need for more than a couple of bucks. He decided the Army was one place to make and save some money. He and eight high school pals rode the 15 miles to Pottsville together to meet the recruiter. But only Ralph, back home, finally got his father’s signature and a uniform. “Pop took me to the train in Pottsville. All he said was, ‘Don’t worry about us. We’ll be all right. Just take care of yourself.’”
Now, aboard the Shanks, the affable, chatty Bernotas was suddenly worried about taking care of himself. His sergeant, Lonnie Burrow, had been reassigned out of the regiment at the last minute, and Ralph and the rest of F Company’s 3rd Platoon were without the one leader they trusted.
Ralph was a model soldier, a reader of field manuals who had quickly made corporal and dreamed of an officer’s commission someday. Down in a Shanks latrine, meanwhile, another kind of soldier was swabbing up the mess of seasick shipmates.
For Art Hunter, who had drawn the unpleasant cleanup duty after crossing his sergeant, the Army was a fresh chance in a frustrating young life. Back home in Lynchburg, Virginia, at age fifteen and still in fifth grade, he was finally expelled from school as disruptive and impossible to teach. He painted Coca-Cola signs for a while, until laid off, and then simply quit a second job, working for his second cousin, a plumber. “You ain’t going to lay around here on me,” his father, a fire marshal, told him. “You’re going into the Army.”
On his seventeenth birthday in 1948, Art headed off to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for basic training. It was his first time away from Lynchburg, and the homesick teenager, a big but insecure boy, cried through the night in a strange bunk far from home. Now Art Hunter, having failed at Army supply clerks’ school, was steaming into war, this time very far from home, as an assistant machine gunner for G Company.
Somewhere in the H Company racks, nineteen-year-old Norm Tinkler had crammed his 200-plus pounds into a tight bunk space as the Shanks heaved and slid in what seemed to him “100-foot waves.” Norm grew up among an ocean of wheat in Cloud County, Kansas, and became an intimidating young man, a local boxer and “rassler” who tangled with his own father before finally deciding to try the Army. He had only an eighth-grade education. “I had nowhere to go.”
But even the brawling Norm Tinkler, now toting half of a 100-pound machine gun for How Company, a heavy weapons unit, had not expected to find a war in his future. The one that had ended just a few short years before in the atomic incineration of two Japanese cities had seemed finally to be the war to end all wars. The biggest battles these teenagers had contemplated were the drunken free-for-alls that erupted late at night in the dance halls of the Ginza, after guard duty or parade drills or patrolling in Tokyo.
It can’t last long, they told each other aboard the Shanks. They had us take along only two sets of fatigues, underwear and socks, poncho, steel helmet, weapon. Whatever it is, wherever we’re going in this Korea place, “we’ll just clean it up and get back,” they said—back to Tokyo, to their koibitos, their Japanese girlfriends, to the cheap beer, to the $10 and $20 black-market deals that made them rich Americans. Buddy Wenzel, the quiet one, would get back to writing his twenty-five “girls.”
* * *
Their officers, trying to organize briefings, run their troops in shifts to the mess for meals, and then get them to clean up after seasick bunkmates, were not so cocky. The higher the rank, in fact, the greater was the unease.
Lt. Col. Gilmon Augustus Huff knew firsthand that these parade-ground soldiers were being rushed unready into war. In Japan, Huff had been the chief infantry instructor for the 1st Cavalry Division, the regiment’s parent unit, before being named regimental executive officer, the 7th Cavalry’s second-in-command, just six days before they shipped out.
A Bible reader from South Carolina’s “Possum Kingdom” country, he had learned to hate war, but he’d also become extremely good at it. The curly-red-haired Gil Huff was only twenty-eight, one of the Army’s youngest lieutenant colonels, when he fought through Normandy in 1944 in command of an infantry battalion. He won a Silver Star for his “coolness under fire” in overwhelming a German fortress in France.
In Japan, Huff had plans for whipping the 1st Cavalry Division’s three infantry units—the 5th, 7th and 8th Cavalry Regiments—into shape for their primary mission, combat. But he ran out of time. Now his regiment was headed for an amphibious assault on a Korean beach, a landing that would begin with troops clambering dangerously down cargo nets spread across the side of the ship, nets that Huff’s men had barely seen before. Some boys had not even received full basic training.
Not only was the division’s training incomplete, but the division itself was also incomplete, missing components every infantry officer considered essential. After World War II, Washington planners felt the new atom bombs would make giant land armies obsolete. Budget slashing shrank the mighty, victorious, 100-division Army of 1945 to ten combat divisions. In Japan, those three-regiment divisions in turn were hollowed out by the deactivation of one of each regiment’s three battalions. Each regiment was also short one of three artillery batteries, and the company of medium tanks allotted to it could be found only on paper.
Already understrength, the 1st Cavalry Division got a call from Eighth Army headquarters at 2:30 A.M. on June 27, two days after North Korea’s invasion, to round up more than seven hundred sergeants and other enlisted men and send them off to help fill the ranks of the 24th Infantry Division, the first unit to head for Korea.
The 7th Cavalry Regiment lost 168 key noncommissioned officers, among them Ralph Bernotas’s platoon sergeant, a decorated combat veteran. Melbourne C. Chandler, a 7th Cavalry company commander, later described the stripping away of the platoon sergeants as “a blow to the heart and soul of the regiment.”
As for the troops that remained, the U.S. command had noted confidentially that replacements arriving in Tokyo in 1949 had a high percentage of low intelligence ratings and more men of “questionable character” than it would have liked. The current emergency only worsened that situation: The Eighth Army had opened the gates of its stockade and sent one hundred prisoners to the 1st Cavalry Division for deployment to Korea. If they could not repair the soul of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, they would at least replace some bodies.
As the Shanks pitched and rolled through the wild seas, Lieutenant Colonel Huff looked around and knew that the seasick privates and corporals were not the only unready ranks.
At one point, Huff had called on his boss, regimental commander Col. Cecil W. Nist, the man leading the 7th Cavalry toward the unknown in Korea, and found him hurriedly poring through a primer in his cabin—Army Field Manual 7-40: Infantry Regiment. Its words were not reassuring. “The means which a regimental commander has to capture his objectives are his three battalions and his tank company,” read the chapter on attack, envisioning a regiment much different from the thinned-out one Nist commanded.
Nist had spent twelve months in Korea in 1945–1946 as an intelligence staff officer, but the bespectacled, pipe-smoking colonel, in twenty-seven years as a soldier, had never led troops in combat. He spent most of World War II at Fort Jackson and the past three and a half years at the Pentagon, largely in the comptroller’s office. He had arrived in Japan a mere six weeks earlier, in early June, to take command of the storied 7th Cav.
Many senior officers in the Eighth Army, the garrison force in Japan, had been given prestigious infantry commands because of connections, not because of demonstrated abilities. Some were nearing retirement, like Nist, who would soon turn fifty.
In the officers’ cabins of the crowded Shanks, the lack of familiarity with war’s front lines reached right down the chain of command. Lt. Col. Herbert B. Heyer, leading Nist’s 2nd Battalion, had spent the last war as an Army post commander among the peaceful Eskimos of Greenland. Before World War II, back home in Iowa, the lanky Heyer had been a postmaster, doing two weeks’ Army Reserves training each summer. In Japan, the battalion commander had been afflicted by ulcers. Now he faced a hard sea journey, and greater challenges beyond.
A few of the 7th Cavalry’s junior officers had seen action in World War II. The troops spotted them in the full-dress parades in Tokyo, when they could size up the medals spread across the chests of men like G Company’s Capt. Herman L. West. But other company commanders, each in charge of 150 young Americans packed into the heaving holds of the Shanks, bound for uncertain war, had never heard the whine of incoming enemy artillery.
Mel Chandler was one of them. A son of small-town Kansas, Chandler had dropped out of Oklahoma University’s premed program in 1940 to join the Army. A skinny nineteen-year-old, he stuffed himself with bananas to make sure he made the minimum weight at the physical exam. Through the war years and after, the young officer oversaw civilian staff at the Kansas City medical depot and at other Army medical facilities. Then, in 1949, Captain Chandler attended infantry school and was assigned to Japan, to take command of H Company in the 7th Cavalry, the Army’s most famous regiment.
The square-jawed captain, now filled out and solid, soon won the respect of his men. Fellow officers considered him “Army”—thoroughly professional. A less tolerant type or two frowned on his determined partying and drinking, but others joined him in what had become a natural part of occupation duty in Tokyo, where officers could buy a fifth of Canadian Club for little more than a dollar, and GIs could pick up a Japanese party girl for even less.
Melbourne Caldwell Chandler was still rated as a Medical Service Corps officer, though in charge of an infantry company now pounding through the waves toward war. Fellow officers, all infantry, wrote it off to the political machinations of Army life—that is, connections.
On the bottom rung, almost to a man, the lieutenants who led platoons lacked combat experience. One of Chandler’s enthusiastic platoon leaders, Second Lt. Bill Kaluf, had set his heart on the 7th Cavalry ever since seeing, as a boy, his first Budweiser beer poster of Custer’s Last Stand. He wanted to hit the beach in top shape for his first war, and so he was walking the tilting decks of the Shanks in search of a doctor. He needed to have his chronically waxed-up ears cleaned out.
Over in F Company, the men worried that Second Lt. Edwin M. Byles Jr. was losing his bearings. At the Tokyo barracks, Byles had been all over his platoon, an unpopular stickler on inspections. But on the Shanks, Byles could be seen sitting off alone, withdrawn, oddly fixated on a tommy gun, a Thompson submachine gun he was anxiously stroking.
* * *
The gale and heaviest seas began to ease on the fourth day as the tiny American flotilla carrying the fourteen companies of the 7th Cavalry moved into the stream of the warm Tsushima current, which brushes up the Korean coast. Between bouts of rain, the teenaged infantrymen could roam again behind the chest-high gunwales of the open main deck, in the fresh salt air. Officers pulled out maps, briefed the troops on where they were going in Korea, gave them tips on map reading, instructed them in radio operation, distributed antimalaria tablets. The men were told they were unlikely to go up against a regular enemy army in Korea. Guerrillas in civilian clothes were more likely, and they would certainly not see any enemy tanks.
Regaining their sea legs, young soldiers tried to get their minds off the unknown with poker games and craps played against the Shanks’s damp gray bulkheads. Some masked apprehension with bravado. A corporal and a couple of privates had assembled their machine gun on a hatch cover. “Hey, Wenzel! We’re getting up a suicide squad. Wanna join?” It was like some kind of war movie, Wenzel thought, and walked by.
The bravado showed in other ways, too. A few “warriors” had shaved their heads. When Heyer spotted a Mohawk haircut on F Company’s Bill Collins, the mild-mannered battalion commander chewed the young soldier out: “We’re not animals.”
On the evening of July 21, as they bore in on the battle zone, the Navy crew blacked out the Shanks. The darkness that enveloped the sea spread through the ship as well. Those who knew Gil Huff imagined the young colonel pulling out a bottle of vodka from somewhere in the dimness, to sip himself into a mood, perhaps recalling the grief of the Norman hedgerows in ’44, the men lost before the Rhine. Down below, hundreds of men and boys—farmers’ sons, miners’ sons, delinquents on probation—were left with their own thoughts about tomorrow and what they might face, about the unknowables of an amphibious landing: How deep will the water be? Will I get down the net OK? Will we be fired on? As the ship plowed on through the East China Sea, they could listen to the waves thud against the hull, recheck their gear in their minds, let their thoughts drift back to Tokyo, to the bars, to the cheap hooches where they could disappear with their girlfriends, to the parades, to the scenes played out to snatches of “Garryowen,” the tune embedded in every 7th Cavalryman’s unconscious.
* * *
When they were eighteen abreast, parading by battalion, these seasick soldiers could be an inspiring sight, among thousands of men from various divisions striding in synchronized shining boots over the bleached gravel of the Imperial Palace Plaza. On that same vast plaza, just a few momentous years ago, Japan’s Emperor Hirohito, on a white horse, in glittering regalia, had reviewed the loyal troops of his Imperial Army. Now it was General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, in battered cap and open khaki shirt, taking the salute of the U.S. occupation forces marching through the heart of Tokyo. Hirohito sat unseen nearby in his secluded palace, figurehead of a defeated nation.
Parades were a fixture of the late 1940s in Tokyo, when congressional delegations, cabinet secretaries and military chiefs flew in regularly from Washington on inspection tours. The troops, in even ranks of gleaming helmets and blousoned pant legs, with M-1 rifles angled smartly over their shoulders, thundered past the reviewing stand behind company guidons and regimental flags. The highlight, always, came when the band struck the first insistent, prancing chords of “Garryowen” and the 7th Cavalry, MacArthur’s favorite regiment, stepped into view.
That quick march, an old Irish drinking song whose Gaelic title means “Owen’s Garden,” was adopted by the 7th Cavalry’s celebrated early commander, Lt. Col. George A. Custer. He first had it played in 1868 to launch the regiment’s attack on a Cheyenne Indian encampment on the Washita River in Oklahoma. President Theodore Roosevelt later called it “the finest military march in the world.” But to the natives of the American Plains it was “devil’s music.”
Buddy Wenzel, Ralph Bernotas and other fresh recruits heard the uplifting tune soon after docking at Yokohama at the end of their two-week journeys from the States. They were sent to the movies as part of their orientation, to watch Errol Flynn play the doomed Custer in They Died with Their Boots On, the story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Sioux Indians massacred Custer and two hundred men of the 7th Cavalry. Like much of what Hollywood produced in the early 1940s, the film and its heroic music, keyed to “Garryowen,” set a tone of uncomplicated patriotism at a time when Americans faced the challenges of a global war. The blue-coated horsemen of Warner Bros.’ 7th Cavalry had helped make America what it was by sweeping the Plains clean of “hostiles.”
“We’d get them to love the regiment,” a young sergeant from the Japan days, Robert C. “Snuffy” Gray, said of the initiation. What were said to be Custer’s saber, boots and uniform were on display, under glass, at the Tokyo barracks.
The green recruits learned still more by reading a brief history handed out in the barracks, a pamphlet that said the 7th Cavalry troopers “firmly established their reputation as Indian fighters in the Battle of the Washita,” and recounted regimental exploits elsewhere. But behind the cover sheet emblazoned with a horseshoe-and-saber shield, the booklet had gaps. It did not explain that the 7th Cavalry, in the snowstorm at the Washita, had slaughtered more than one hundred Native Americans—mostly unarmed old men, women and children—who had been ordered into the area by the U.S. Army itself, and that the soldiers carried off other women, killed 875 ponies and destroyed whatever Indian property they did not loot.
The history also did not include some later 7th Cavalry operations, including one of the nineteenth century’s most infamous massacres, the killing of up to 370 Sioux, many of them women and children, at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota in December 1890. Troopers later said a Sioux had fired on them first, and they could not distinguish the Indian women from men.
Nor did the newest recruits read that many young men who rode to their deaths with Custer had been poorly trained, some of them immigrants who had never ridden a horse until they put on the blues and set out toward the Little Bighorn.
When the West was won, the 7th Cavalry found new frontiers. The seven-page history noted the regiment was sent to the Philippines in 1905 to help with the “organization of the islands” a few years after the United States seized the East Asian archipelago in the Spanish-American War. In reality, the U.S. Army had been engaged in an anti-guerrilla struggle against a Filipino independence movement, resisters whom President Theodore Roosevelt vilified as “Apaches.” The Army, led in many cases by old Indian fighters, mounted a frontier-style campaign, burning villages to the ground and killing thousands of Filipino peasants. In a letter home a soldier told of the slaughter of one thousand men, women and children in one town and wrote, “I am probably growing hard-hearted for I am in my glory when I can sight my gun on some darkskin and pull the trigger.”
From somewhere, American soldiers picked up a harsh little epithet for these unfamiliar Asians: “gooks.”
Unease over the atrocities in the Philippines led to congressional hearings. A U.S. military governor from Manila, old Indian Wars cavalryman Arthur MacArthur, assured the congressmen that America was carrying out the civilizing mission of its “Aryan ancestors” in its Philippine campaign.
* * *
It was Gen. Arthur MacArthur’s son, four decades later, who rode triumphantly into a defeated Tokyo on September 8, 1945, with a handpicked escort—the 2nd Battalion of the Garryowens. That day, war-weary veterans of the 7th Cavalry raised the Stars and Stripes once more at the old U.S. Embassy to fly over a Japanese capital blanketed with ash, choked with debris, a city that had lost one-third of its buildings to American firebombing and lost half its prewar population of seven million to the bombings, to the warfront as soldiers, or to the poor but bomb-free countryside as refugees.
The 7th Cavalry Regiment, now a modern infantry unit, fought under Douglas MacArthur through his campaigns from 1943 to 1945, hopscotching with the rest of the 1st Cavalry Division up the island chains of the southwest Pacific. Its men had fallen by the hundreds in a war without mercy.
The war’s ferocity was marked early on by the “Rape of Nanking” and other bloodbaths perpetrated by the Japanese army in China, and by the Bataan Death March, on which thousands of American and Filipino soldiers perished after being captured by the Japanese. Eventually, American GIs and Marines began routinely killing Japanese soldiers who tried to surrender. A major psychological study found almost half of American soldiers said they would “really like to kill a Japanese soldier,” but only 6 percent said the same about the German enemy. Then the war ended in the deathly flash of U.S. atomic weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where well over 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed.
As the mass killings drew toward a close, one of MacArthur’s own top aides took note of the cruel conflict’s special nature. “The war in the Pacific was racial,” Brig. Gen. Bonner F. Fellers, the general’s military secretary and psychological warfare chief, wrote in an internal memo. Even before Hiroshima, this American general concluded that his country’s bombings of Japanese cities were “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of noncombatants in all history.”
Gil Huff, the junior colonel, got his own good look at the nature of that Asian war when he took up his infantry assignment in Japan in 1945, fresh from Europe and a war in which Americans and Germans frequently did take each other prisoner. The daring Huff, in fact, had himself been captured by the Germans that January. When his family back home in Greenville was told he was missing, they filed into the Second Baptist Church every day to pray for a miracle. Then, 92 days later, he returned to American lines leading a group of escapees. On turnips, water and dandelion greens, the onetime 190-pound bulldog lost one-third of his weight.
In Japan, Huff joined a military team that traveled to Nagasaki not long after the atomic bombing. He had seen a lot of war, but never anything like that plain of devastation, the bizarrely twisted steel—“like a corkscrew”—the stench of death, of burned, decaying flesh, that gripped the site of the vanished city center.
Possessing the atomic bomb put a swagger in the step of Americans. They stood unchallenged on the world stage. It was a swagger that could be seen at the top in Japan, where the erect, stern-jawed MacArthur assumed the role of Asian proconsul for a kind of American global empire. “Our frontier lies here where half the world’s population lives,” MacArthur took to telling American visitors in Tokyo. “We haven’t begun to realize its potentialities.”
As Supreme Commander Allied Powers—SCAP in Army shorthand—MacArthur set about transforming occupied Japan, his actions enforced by a “strong right arm,” the 1st Cavalry Division. The division, including the 7th Cavalry, was entrusted with overseeing all of Tokyo and eventually all of central Honshu, the main Japanese island.
Throughout the war, Americans had developed vile images of the Japanese—as “savages,” President Truman’s term, and as the “monkey men” shown in propaganda art spilling decent people’s blood and raping white women. The U.S. troops pouring into Japan in 1945 were apprehensive. Die-hard militarists might mount terror attacks. When the 7th Cavalry first moved into permanent barracks, taking over the yellow brick buildings of the Japanese Merchant Marine Academy, the troopers stashed their M-1 rifles beneath their cots, with ammunition clips, in case of trouble. But the Jeep patrols and off-duty GIs, dispensing chocolate and chewing gum to kids and cautious smiles to adults, soon broke through the chill.
Eventually, MacArthur and his SCAP brain trust would rewrite the defeated nation’s constitution, redistribute agricultural lands in a vast reform and put their stamp on a host of other institutions of postwar Japan. But first the occupation forces had to disarm a heavily militarized country, and Sgt. Snuffy Gray and the rest of the 7th Cavalry took part.
A brawny, canny New Yorker, Gray and his men traveled to Chiba prefecture outside Tokyo in 1946 to collect guns and arms-making equipment and dump them at sea. They even seized antique samurai armor and cut it up. The enterprising sergeant did manage to save about two hundred classic samurai swords and take them to Tokyo for the “regimental museum.” But the museum did not exist, many valuable swords were given away to departing veterans, the rest were eventually stolen, and it all typified the casual plundering the conquering army grew accustomed to. They owned Japan.
In the post–World War II years, most of the cavalrymen’s working hours were spent on guard duty, punctuated by occasional full-dress parades. For both they needed to look sharp. Pfc. Don MacFarland was surprised when he first reported to F Company and was sent to the “tailor shop” to get his fitted uniforms, with military creases sewn into the pants. MacArthur wanted the new recruit from Massachusetts and the rest of his 7th Cavalry to impress the Japanese. Not only did the men spit-shine their tanker boots, but they also car-waxed their helmet liners to wear as dress headgear, and soaked their web belts in salt water to bleach them to a showy white. “We weren’t infantry,” MacFarland said of those days before Korea. They were a praetorian guard fit for a proconsul.
They had little time and Japan had little space for full infantry training. They fired their M-1 rifles and .30-caliber machine guns once or twice a year on ranges, and in the summer of 1949 the regiment spent a few weeks at Camp McNair, a training ground near Mount Fuji. Gray, the reconnaissance platoon sergeant, called the training at McNair “haphazard and sketchy.”
“All we did was ride around,” he said. When John Ramirez, a nineteen-year-old sergeant in G Company, tried to give his platoon some bayonet training outside the Tokyo barracks, a passing regimental staff officer told him to forget it. “We’re never going to be in another war where there’ll be bayonet charges,” he said.
The troops did no large-unit maneuvers, and little or no live-fire training. Lieutenant Colonel Huff eventually could report that only one company in the 8th Cavalry Regiment, among the dozens in the division, had received complete combat training by the time of the Korea emergency in the summer of 1950. One segment completely missed by the 7th Cavalrymen instructed troops in how to handle civilian refugees in a war zone.
An Army historian later concluded that the occupation army in Japan had simply become “flabby and soft.” Too much beer can do that. Once when the men were scheduled for a long march at McNair, they planted caches of beer along the route beforehand.
* * *
The teenaged Americans were not true infantry, but guards, and they manned critical posts across Tokyo—the ordnance depot, a major pier, railroad stations. The showiest was at the moats of the Imperial Palace, where Hirohito and his family remained largely hidden behind the glossy, nine-foot-high stone outer walls, and where meticulously turned-out 7th Cavalry troopers, pairing up with Australian, British Gurkha, or other Allied soldiers, would stand at parade rest at the gatehouse for four hours at a time.
They stood across the broad avenue as well, guarding the austere office building of the Dai-Ichi insurance company, where “acting emperor” MacArthur was chauffeured up to the columned entrance each morning in a black Cadillac to rule Japan from a sixth-floor office. His SCAP bureaucracy of U.S. military officers and civilian specialists eventually filled up a 278-page telephone directory, taking over the office blocks of the Marunouchi financial district and turning it into a “Little America.”
Wherever they could, the SCAP bureaucrats put an American stamp on Tokyo, superimposing a U.S.-style grid of street names, for example, over the unfamiliar Japanese address system. New wooden street signs went up across town. The 7th Cavalry’s home, renamed McKnight Barracks, was instantly relocated from Fukagawa-Etchujima to the intersection of 22nd Street and Avenue W. A giant post exchange opened in the heart of the Ginza, purveying everything from Buicks to lunch-counter beef hash. Before long The Aldrich Family, Jack Benny and Amos ’n’ Andy were crowding the Tokyo broadcast band, thanks to the U.S. Armed Forces Radio Service.
Across a canal from the SCAP buildings, well-armed Garryowens settled in for days at a time at the Bank of Japan, an imposing Romanesque stone pile. Behind its heavy front doors, troopers descended by elevator through four underground levels, where guards guarding guards stood outside vaults holding uncounted riches in Japanese government gold and silver and imperial trinkets.
The security was not always airtight. One veteran 7th Cavalry sergeant made off with a kilogram bar of gold from the bowels of the bank, pounded it exceedingly thin, sewed it into the lining of foldover luggage, and successfully spirited it back to the States.
Ralph Bernotas would not have dreamed of attempting such a caper. The eighteen-year-old corporal, pleased with a paycheck approaching $100 a month, regularly did his “four hours on” in the subterranean corridors and simply wondered what lay inside the giant vaults.
Lois Findley could have told him. In the war’s dying days, Japanese officials had dumped tons of gold ingots into Tokyo harbor, hoping to secretly recover them someday. But the Americans happened on the treasure, in waters just off the 7th Cavalry’s motor pool area. Now the efficient Miss Findley, twenty-four, a civilian Army employee, was working every day down in the Bank of Japan vaults, two regiment guards beside her, trying to match recovered ingots with bank registration numbers. During her time in Tokyo, she never completed the task, but the pretty, lively Nebraskan did manage to meet a 7th Cavalryman who took her fancy.
Up at ground level, above this storehouse of wealth, Tokyo was a metropolis of the newly poor. It could, in pockets amid the ruins, still be a charming place of meandering alleys and long rows of tiny houses, their occupants’ shoes arrayed outside, their light flowing warmly through paper windows onto the passing scene. The cherry trees still blossomed a sublime pink each spring. But in the central city, where the healthy Americans with the yellow-and-black “Cav” patches on their uniforms towered over the Japanese throngs, the hard times could be seen everywhere.
Tokyoites jammed dangerously onto rickety old streetcars or into the too few trains. Even some of the most important Japanese offices went unheated in winter. The aftermath of war—unemployment, inflation of 10 percent a month, chronic food shortages—crushed the urban workingman and his family. Hundreds of thousands resorted to a barter economy: taking the train to the countryside, or meeting farmers in the city, to trade clothing, household goods, even heirlooms for a bag of rice.
On guard duty behind an Army mess hall, the 7th Cavalry’s Joe McAnany spotted a Japanese man breaking in and stealing food one night. “I could have shot him, but he was hungry and I let him go.”
In such desperate times, millions of ordinary Japanese stepped over the line into the black market, which, with the help of almost every American soldier, quickly became the real economy of Japan. Rationing of rice and other staples at times permitted only half the daily requirement of calories. The Japanese had little choice but to pay the ever-inflating prices of the black market. Some hoped to make money themselves there.
The Garryowens became enthusiastic black marketers, and their barracks’ location, beside the oily dark waters of Tokyo harbor, made movement of goods easy. Even quiet Buddy Wenzel joined in. The arithmetic, from Army post exchange to black market, was too persuasive. “A carton of cigarettes cost us a dollar. You could take a carton down there and make $10 on it.”
Men reported their bed linen or clothing lost at the laundry and got new supplies that quickly turned up in the open-air markets around town. On guard duty at the quartermaster depot, men would help themselves to Army footwear—choosing smaller sizes for the Japanese. Some even stole .45-caliber pistols to sell to the black market. The troops grew to expect the extra income. MacArthur’s fiscal officers reported that servicemen in Japan each month were sending home $8 million more than their total pay.
Black-market cigarettes became a currency in a land whose citizens could smoke only two “legal” cigarettes a day. In fact, American soldiers would remember for the rest of their lives the days in Tokyo when a single Lucky Strike could buy them sex with a “gook girl.”
The hard times had driven tens of thousands of young Japanese women to prostitution—part-time, full-time or in an onrii wan relationship, with only one GI. Some hungry families encouraged their daughters to become bar girls, taxi dancers, bathhouse attendants.
Prostitution had long been accepted, even licensed, in Japan. Under pressure from the U.S. military, the Tokyo government tried to outlaw it after the war. American commanders even sent troops, including Snuffy Gray’s platoon, on raids through Yoshiwara, a centuries-old red-light district. “Guys would be jumping out windows in their underwear,” Gray recalled. One was big Norm Tinkler, who dodged military police once by diving for a ditch behind a bathhouse, only to find he had landed in an open sewer. Once the commotion died, the “panpan girls” washed him down. The night was still young.
Off-limits signs went up all over Tokyo, but 7th Cavalrymen ignored them. The U.S. command, in a way, encouraged the red-light expeditions by setting up “pro stations” in convenient spots, where partying soldiers stopped to pick up condoms or dose themselves with after-sex medication. For inexperienced country boys, half a world away from parents and American puritanism, it was an idyll of parades, easy money and cheap sex. “I didn’t have a care in the world then,” Norm Tinkler said.
But not everyone went out every night. Buddy Wenzel, for one, wanted time alone. Buddy had not taken to Army life, bucking some of the petty discipline. At one point, because of a childhood musical talent, he was shunted over to the regimental bugle corps, but the tricky notes of “Retreat” defied him and he was passed around some more, spending time as an MP.
When he was off duty, Buddy would sit atop his bunk for hours, pencil in hand, writing to a long list of girls in California, Idaho, Ohio and beyond. “It was interesting to hear what the different states were like.” Every day he wrote to “Green Eyes,” his girlfriend Dot back home in New Jersey, and once a month he sent her $10 or $20 from his $80 pay. He knew they’d be getting married.
Other 7th Cavalrymen were scared off the circuit of bars and guesthouses by venereal disease. They latched onto a single girl, and usually put her up in a little rented house, a hooch. Don McFarland paid secretarial school tuition for his girlfriend, Kiyo. Girl, house, school, laundry—the cost for all was about $30 a month, “a couple of cartons of cigarettes.”
A teenager in bangs named Yoshiko found the blue-eyed ex–altar boy Ralph Bernotas. She was “Cookie” to him. Ralph had her checked by a doctor, paid her rent in a cramped, hibachi-heated house. She made him happy. “If we didn’t have the war,” he said, “I might have brought her home.”
Art Hunter, no longer homesick, plunked down $200 to buy a hooch for his pretty girlfriend. The shy, blond James Hodges had a koibito, too, a lovely young woman whose photograph puzzled his sisters back at the Florida farm. Whose child was in the photo with her, they wondered, and why did James urgently ask that the savings he’d sent home now be sent back to him in Japan?
In occupied Tokyo, before Korea, no Garryowen was a hermit. The unlimited Class-A passes, the sake rice brew and inexpensive beer, the live music, the lipsticked girls, all drew the young soldiers to the Ginza. Even Buddy Wenzel learned to samba there.
At the Oasis, the biggest, hottest Ginza nightspot, the taxi dancers all wore long evening dresses, copied from old American magazines, and loose-limbed GIs tried out the jitterbug they’d picked up in high school. The big Japanese band, its sound a dead ringer for what they left back in the States, would play “Tokyo Boogie Woogie” and, always, “China Nights,” a wistful Japanese tune that became the late-night anthem for these boys far from home. It was a few cents a dance, and girls were available for more than dancing later.
Beneath the spinning, mirrored chandelier, in a haze of cigarette smoke, the vast sunken dance floor of the Oasis was a sea of libido, liquor and five hundred girls, and was also a notorious cauldron for trouble. Brawls broke out repeatedly, and in late 1948 one erupted that Sgt. John Ramirez, a tough barrio kid from Los Angeles, called the biggest free-for-all he ever saw. Paratroopers passing through Tokyo took exception to the Garryowens they found around the Oasis dance floor, and forty-five minutes of fistfights ensued, among hundreds of GIs. “The 720th MP Battalion would not go down into the club. They were afraid,” said Ramirez, who was in the thick of the action. The MPs finally did venture inside. “They arrested the ones still on the floor.”
While drunken squads of enlisted men roamed the Ginza, the regiment’s commissioned ranks found their Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw music at the officers’ clubs, especially the former University Club of Tokyo, a grand expropriated building where General MacArthur’s officer corps dined on continental cuisine, played the slot machines, took in the floor shows and danced, with wives or girlfriends, to the nightly music of a fourteen-piece band. The amusing Mel Chandler, crew-cut and dark, was one of the regular ladies’ men around the dance floor.
For these “honorable conquerors” in occupied Japan, on the eve of an unexpected war, life was almost aristocratic. At a time when millions of Japanese remained homeless, the U.S. occupation requisitioned more than six hundred houses for Army officers and others, naturally choosing the finest. A twenty-nine-year-old major, Harold D. Steward, and his wife had a 14-room house, fronting a private lake, with five servants. “It was a very pleasant life, with maids, cooks, manservants, gardener,” said Steward. Even sergeants often had two maids.
The conquerors could travel free on the trains to visit the city of Kyoto and other Japanese treasures that had escaped the U.S. bombing. Back in Tokyo, the division’s ex–horse cavalrymen took over a city stadium for regular polo matches, riding quarter horses from the Japanese imperial stables. On weekends, regimental and division football teams clashed before stands full of cheering Americans.
Even junior officers like Captain Chandler, whose wife and small son stayed behind in the States when he shipped out to Asia, drew comfortable Japanese-style homes for quarters. At his place, near the 7th Cavalry’s McKnight Barracks, Chandler had H Company men build him an un-Japanese wet bar, and the twenty-eight-year-old company commander threw frequent parties, popular with young officers, nurses and other civilian American women, and pretty Japanese.
Army officers were more discreet than the privates who “lost” their laundry, but they, too, routinely ventured into the black market—at times too deeply. When the Tokyo provost marshal’s wife, spouse of the Army’s top policeman, began flaunting her fur coats, an underling turned the major in for enriching himself on seized contraband recycled back into the illicit market. The ex–police chief ended up serving stockade time in the States.
* * *
No matter what they did, both teenaged recruits and high-living officers enjoyed immunity in one sense: The Japanese couldn’t touch them. In fact, public criticism of the U.S. military was forbidden under all-encompassing censorship. After posters appeared in 1949 accusing American troops of widespread rapes of local women, six Japanese held responsible for the “rumors” were sentenced to five years in prison by a U.S. military court.
The censorship obscured a violent, criminal side of the American presence. One Japanese calculation found an average of 330 rapes and assaults daily on Japanese women at one point during the occupation. Reckless Army Jeep drivers ran down Japanese civilians and simply drove on. Half-drunk soldiers, unprovoked, would kick or beat Japanese on the street, sometimes shouting, “Remember Pearl Harbor!” At times those responsible would be traced and prosecuted by the U.S. military, sometimes not.
On a petty level, crude abuse was common. Clownish GIs took to pushing tram drivers aside and taking trolleys, with terrified passengers, on headlong joy rides. Soldiers “playfully” nudged Tokyo’s pedicabs with their Jeeps, sending their runner-drivers sprawling. Photos of those rickshaw cabs show the unequal relationship: Teenaged white soldiers, buck privates, sit grandly above grim and sweaty Japanese, often war veterans, hauling them through Tokyo.
Officially, the U.S. Army was a racist institution at the time. Black soldiers were still segregated in their own units; the 7th Cavalry Regiment was all white. President Truman had ordered the armed forces desegregated in 1948, but the Army was slow to comply, especially in MacArthur’s Far East Command. When his father signed Art Hunter into the Army back in Virginia, the young man chose the 1st Cavalry Division because recruiters assured him it had not been integrated.
Anti-Asian racism, inflamed by the recent war, underlay many American attitudes on the far side of the Pacific. MacArthur’s own intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Charles A. Willoughby, had proclaimed at the outset of World War II his belief in the “military supremacy of the white race.” In Japan, a visiting U.S. journalist found ranking Army officers who told him, “Dumbness has almost been bred into these people,” and, “They are sneaky right down to their pagan souls. They are like animals.” MacArthur himself viewed his mission to include “Christianizing” the Japanese. His aides kept him informed on missionaries’ successes.
One observant visitor to MacArthur’s Tokyo, the Navy veteran and writer James Michener, captured this khaki-clad mentality at the time in his short novel Sayonara, in which an American officer, son of a general, is pressured into abandoning the Japanese actress he loves. “We don’t want officers with yellow wives,” declares his father.
That kind of poignant clash of worlds played out in real life uncounted times. Gil Huff, unmarried and in his thirties, reborn survivor of the European front, met a beautiful young woman at a dinner in Tokyo, a member of a prominent Japanese family. The millworker’s son was entranced. He pursued her, called on her. She seemed interested in him, too, he thought. But the gap was too great, the liaison was doomed. It would have hurt the young colonel’s career.
“‘Squaw man,’ the Army would have called me in the old days,” says Michener’s hero, who in his sayonara to Japan regrets that he lives in an age “when the only acceptable attitude toward strange lands and people of another color must be not love but fear.”
* * *
The 7th cavalry regiment in Japan was surrounded by strange lands it could fear. One lay just across the Korea Strait, an ancient place of mountains, paddies, almost medieval poverty, a mystery to all but a few who served in an Army contingent there after World War II. Those U.S. troops withdrew from Korea in 1949, four years after Soviet and U.S. forces first occupied the Japanese colony and divided it north and south.
As he flew home in August 1948, the man in charge of that Korean occupation, Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, looked ahead for reporters. The 7th Cavalrymen, in their bunks at McKnight Barracks, could have read about it in the newspaper: KOREA CIVIL WAR POSSIBLE, HODGE SAYS. But the headline did not concern them. The U.S. Army’s mission was to defend Japan.
Although they didn’t know Korea, the Garryowens did, to some extent, know Koreans—a one-million-strong minority in Japan, many imported and impressed into hard labor during World War II. The Japanese looked down on the Korean “garlic eaters,” and MacArthur allowed Japan’s reconstituted parliament to pass discriminatory laws against them. The Americans considered them a troublemaking minority from the outset of the occupation, when hungry Korean coal miners in Japan agitated for a better deal. In 1948, U.S. troops of the 25th Infantry Division killed five Koreans in rioting over demands for minority rights in the Japanese city of Kobe.
Year by year, the SCAP regime’s political attitudes had been shifting. MacArthur began with attacks on the pillars of Japan’s “fascism” by dismantling its military institutions and by working to break up the wealth of the zaibatsu, family business monopolies. He had authority from Washington to promote labor unions and wider income distribution in Japan. He even legalized Japan’s long-suppressed Communist Party. But by 1947 the SCAP planners were themselves under attack from right-wing critics back home who called their plans a war against capitalism. Anti-leftist fervor was building daily in America because of the news from Europe, where communists had gained control of the governments in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and from China, where the communists were advancing in the civil war.
Japanese conservatives lobbied MacArthur’s aides to view their country as a bulwark against a leftist tide. Willoughby’s counterintelligence corps began reporting any political or labor protest as “communist agitation.” MacArthur pushed through legislation restricting the rights of Japan’s labor unions. The efforts to “deconcentrate” giant conglomerates were largely abandoned. Japan began to look like its prewar self again.
Political surveillance became a major mission for the 1st Cavalry Division. In one monthly report, it said its men had monitored thirty-one meetings of communists in the Tokyo area and—the other troublesome group—“ten meetings of Koreans.”
The troops still carried out other occupation duties as well, among them escorting accused war criminals to their trials. On December 22, 1948, two 7th Cavalry companies were trucked out to Sugamo Prison, where they stood around the dark, glowering fortress, almost shoulder to shoulder, while U.S. Army hangmen inside, just after midnight, dropped the gallows trap door under Hideki Tojo.
The wartime Japanese prime minister was declared dead within minutes. But his voice lived on in a final testament in which he declared the Americans had committed major blunders in the postwar period, one of the most serious being the division of Korea. That had sown the seeds of future disaster, Tojo wrote.
If so, American generals believed, it would not be their disaster. South and North Korea, armed by the United States and the Soviet Union, were trading threats and artillery fire across their dividing line. But the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff decided in 1949 that the peninsula was of little strategic value, and “any commitment to United States’ use of military force in Korea would be ill-advised.”
Other voices were also being heard, however. Presidential advisers told Truman that Korea was a symbolic battleground of ideologies, and in February 1950 a U.S. senator, Joseph M. McCarthy, stoked the fears of ordinary Americans by telling them that leftist traitors had infiltrated their very own government. The proof, McCarthy said, could be seen in America’s “loss” of China to the communists in October 1949. Out of nowhere, it seemed, a “Red” tide was threatening America.
* * *
Now it was July 1950, and Buddy Wenzel and Ralph Bernotas, Captain Chandler, Gil Huff and the nervous Colonel Nist were all on the high seas in a lonely convoy strung out along the back side of a typhoon. They would soon land in Korea, but the Garryowens hoped to return before long to the girls and football, the scams and sukiyaki, to their own little “Bali Ha’i,” the paradise in that new Rodgers and Hammerstein musical about the last war.
One Garryowen, Bill McKown, knew a Bali Ha’i off through the stormy murk past Cape Sata. He and Lois Findley, the “girl from the vaults,” had spent their honeymoon there, at a hotel among the Unzen hot springs of Japan’s south coast.
Lois hadn’t liked Cav men until her blind date with the tall, sensible mess sergeant from West Virginia. Six months later, they got married—after first obtaining his commanding officer’s permission and then waiting through a 60-day cooling-off period, designed to discourage soldiers from impulsive marriages to Japanese, but applicable to everyone.
When the wedding day finally came, it was an unforgettable, all-American blowout. Friends took care of that. An MP Jeep with siren blaring escorted Bill and Lois to the ceremony at the U.S. Consulate. A colonel’s driver later chauffeured the newlyweds to the front door of Tokyo’s Civilian Club, where two hundred guests—sharply uniformed Garryowens, young American women in stylish bright dresses—packed the ballroom for their reception. Lois, the star, wore a headband of white satin and a flared suit of brown gabardine.
A 20-piece Japanese band, an affordable luxury picked up by a generous sergeant friend, played jitterbugs, fox-trots, two-steps. They sang along to “She Ain’t Got No Yo-Yo,” the Americans’ nonsense mimic of the Japanese lyrics of “China Nights.” They all drank and joked, flirted and danced the night away, in a party that, in its way, captured a carefree moment in time for a generation and an army that had grown too used to peace too quickly.
Around midnight, the driver whisked the McKowns to a Japanese-style home, an officer’s quarters vacant at the time, to spend the night. Just as they settled in behind rice-paper doors, the street outside exploded with gunfire. Snuffy Gray and a few of the boys had descended on them to perform a “shivaree,” a traditional raucous serenade, Sergeant Gray squeezing off a magazine of rounds from his .45 pistol, the others banging on pots and pans.
Then, as the smell of gunpowder floated off into the night, the noisy interlopers sat down with Bill and Lois and drank champagne and beer and laughed until dawn, toasting the happiness of the newlyweds and basking in their own good fortune, at being young and American and on top of an American world.