By eight o’clock about fifty recruits had assembled at gate 8, all of them around my age. Some of them seemed to know one another, though there was no one I recognized from my neighborhood. A few minutes after eight the ensign ordered all of us to line up in front of the gate, in the order that the chief petty officer called off our names. The chief then went down the line to check our papers, and at the end he turned to the ensign and said we were all present and accounted for. One of the SPs took his place at the front of the line and the other at the rear, and when the ensign said “Forward march!” we followed him and the chief as we entered the gate and walked down the stairs to track 8.
The train waiting for us on track 8 was marked LEHIGH VALLEY RAILWAY, a name that I had never seen before in my explorations of the freight yards of Brooklyn. The passenger cars were completely empty, and we were herded aboard the first of them by the SPs. After we took our seats the chief checked off our names again, and then he told us to stay in our seats except when we went to the head, which I already knew was the Navy term for the toilet. Then he took his seat at the front of the car with the ensign, while the two SPs sat at the back. A few minutes later the train whistle blew and we were enveloped in a cloud of steam as the engine began puffing away faster and faster. One of the black porters waved goodbye as our car passed, but otherwise there was no one on the platform to notice our departure, as we entered the tunnel under the Hudson River.
When we emerged from the tunnel I could see the gently glowing skyline of Manhattan across the Hudson, and I knew that all of those lights were on because the offices in the skyscrapers of New York City were being cleaned by women like Peg, who at least had the night off because she and John had come with me to say goodbye at Penn Station.
We stopped in Newark and another group of recruits boarded the train, and I noticed that they were filing into the car behind ours. Then we started up again, and as the train chugged along I could see the familiar names of towns in the New Jersey suburbs of New York City as we passed them in the night. I had a seat to myself, so as soon as the lights in our car were turned off I stretched out and tried to sleep, but it was difficult to do so because every half hour or so we came to a screeching halt as our troop train was shunted aside to make way for high-speed expresses between New York and Philadelphia.
Other groups of recruits boarded our train in Trenton and Philadelphia, where I could see from a clock on the platform that it was past midnight when we finally left. I fell asleep soon afterward, but I was jolted awake when we were shunted off the main line in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, the birthplace of the great Native American athlete Jim Thorpe.
It was dawn by then, so I stayed awake to enjoy the scenery, as our route took us along the Lehigh River as far as Wilkes-Barre, where we went along the Susquehanna. After crossing into New York State we headed north along the west side of Lake Seneca, which I knew from my study of geography was the longest of the Finger Lakes. At the northern end of the lake we stopped at Geneva, where a crowd of U.S. Navy personnel boarded the train, including a number of WAVES, the women’s branch of the Navy. I heard one of the SPs saying that the new arrivals were returning from “liberty,” the Navy term for shore leave. The other SP said that Geneva was a “one-horse hick town” and that he preferred Syracuse and Rochester, where there was a better chance of “getting laid.”
We were shunted onto a branch line that took us around the northern end of the lake and down the eastern shore to the Sampson Naval Training Base, one of the Navy’s two largest boot camps, or recruit training centers, the other being Great Lakes, near Chicago. It occupied four and a half miles of lakefront, and it was operated by about 5,000 Navy personnel who at any given time were training some 25,000 recruits.
As soon as we were herded off the train we boarded trucks that took us into the base to a huge building identified by its sign as the reception center, where the chief checked us off on his list once again as we entered. Once inside the reception room we filed past a desk where each of us was given a canvas bag, into which we were to put all of our clothing and belongings, which would be mailed back to our homes. We stripped down, put our things into the bag, filled out the address on the label, and handed it in as we filed out of the reception room into an enormous drill hall.
We were among the first to arrive, but within a half hour the hall filled up with what I estimated to be a thousand recruits, all of us stark naked, and I was sure that they all felt as defenseless and apprehensive as I did, though everyone tried to act nonchalant. The clock on the front wall read eight o’clock when a voice on the public address system told us to line up at desks alphabetically. This seemed to puzzle some of the Spanish-speaking recruits, but eventually we were all checked in. They gave each of us our dog tag, the metal medallion inscribed with our name, serial number, and blood type, which we were to wear around our neck day and night. We were also handed a baloney sandwich and an apple, which we ate while milling around waiting for further instructions, still naked, except for our dog tags.
When we finished eating we filed through into a shower room where we washed ourselves with a strong-smelling soap that we were told would kill any lice and crabs; then we were given haircuts that were virtually a clean shave.
We filed through a storeroom where we were issued uniforms and other clothing, which we put in our seabag and a smaller sack called a ditty bag. We were also issued a mattress and mattress cover—known in Navy slang as a “fart sack”—as well as a hammock, although we were told that we wouldn’t use that until we went to sea. The last thing we received was a thick book called The Bluejacket’s Manual, which we were expected to read from cover to cover while we were in boot camp, for it contained everything we needed to know while we were in the Navy.
We then put on our GI underwear, socks, dungarees, white canvas hat, and boots, wound our hammock around our mattress and seabag, and carried that and our ditty bag as we were marched out of the reception center to our barracks. It was pouring rain and the paths were churned up into slippery mud, and as we trudged along we were jeered by the recruits in the barracks that we passed; they referred to us contemptuously as “boots,” even though they themselves had been in the Navy only a few weeks at most.
Sampson was divided into five units, each with 1,000 ship’s company, or permanent personnel, and 5,000 recruits, who were housed in barracks that accommodated 228 men each. Each of the units was named for a famous admiral; ours was Dewey, and our barracks was D-20. The bunks were stacked five high, and I was lucky to be assigned a top bunk—the lower ones were claustrophobic and airless. After I put my mattress in its fart sack I laid back to rest for a few minutes before I stowed my belongings in my locker, putting everything in the order described in The Bluejacket’s Manual.
We were then called out to muster outside the barracks, lined up in ranks six deep by our company commander, a fat brute who must have been about forty, although he was only a seaman first class and didn’t have any hash marks, the diagonal arm stripes that each indicate four years of service. He reminded me of Charles Laughton playing Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty, particularly when he gave us a tongue-lashing for our disorderly appearance and told us that he was going to whip us into shape before we went off to sea. I mentioned the resemblance in a whisper to the person on my right, and the word spread through the ranks; from then, on our company commander was known to us as Captain Bligh.
Captain Bligh lined us up four abreast, and for the next two hours he marched us around and around the circular drill track that we came to know as the “Grinder” because it was designed to grind us down. At around six o’clock he marched us to the mess hall, where we lined up for our food with five thousand other recruits, and when we were finished we made our own way back to our barracks. At eight o’clock we were mustered by Captain Bligh, who told us that lights out would be at nine o’clock, and that reveille would be at five thirty in the morning.
Since I had a top bunk I could read by the overhead lights, and so until nine o’clock I paged through The Bluejacket’s Manual, beginning with the section on the Navy terminology I’d been hearing all day. “Floor” was “deck,” “ceiling” was “overhead,” “wall” was “bulkhead,” “toilet” was “head,” “underwear” was “skivvies,” “downstairs” was “below,” “upstairs” was “above,” “left side” was “port,” “right side” was “starboard,” “medical center” was “sick bay,” “cafeteria” was “mess hall,” and “food” was “chow.” The word for “drinking fountain” was “scuttlebutt,” which was also slang for gossip and rumor. I had already learned some Navy slang, for in the mess hall I heard someone referring to our evening meal of stew on cold burned toast as SOS, “shit on a shingle.”
I could see the clock on the front wall of the barracks, and as nine o’clock approached I climbed down from my bunk to kneel and say my prayers, as I had done every evening of my life since I was a boy. I had been hesitant to do this, because I didn’t want to call attention to myself, but I could see that others were doing the same without anything being said about it. I got back to my bunk just before the lights went out, thinking that in the future I would stay put while I said my prayers; those in the bunks below me didn’t seem too happy about being disturbed by me on my way down and up.
Then I lay awake for a while thinking of my family. This was the first time in my life that I had gone to bed without them around me. I thought particularly of Peg, because when she came home at three in the morning I wouldn’t be there for our usual nocturnal dialogue. So I had the dialogue in my mind, telling her all that had happened during my first day in the Navy.
We were awakened at five thirty by a recorded bugle call on the PA, followed by an announcement that we should fall in for muster outside the barracks at six.
There was barely time to go to the head and wash up; there were long lines at the showers, washbasins, urinals, and commodes—although there was no one lined up to use the toilet seat that was painted red, with a sign above saying it was reserved for VENEREAL PATIENTS.
After we were mustered in, Captain Bligh announced that we would have a “short arm inspection,” and we all looked at one another, wondering what he meant. He then said we should drop our pants and take out our “little friend” and “skin it back” so that the “pecker checker” (pharmacist’s mate) could check to see if we had caught the clap or “the old Joe,” by which I assume he meant syphilis.
When the short-arm inspection was over he said we would spend the day at the sick bay, where we would be given the first of our inoculations as well as dental and psychological exams. He said that if the dentist found that our teeth were rotten they would all be yanked out and we would then be classified as “gummer’s mates.” And if the psychologist thought that we were “nuts” or “queers” we would be assigned to barracks L-16, where they would either straighten us out or get rid of us; in the U.S. Navy it was either “shape up or ship out.” With that he spat a big oyster, picked his nose, scratched his behind, and dismissed us for the moment, saying that we would muster again at seven to march to the mess hall.
After we broke ranks the person to my right introduced himself to me as Dave Zuloff, a Russian Jew from New York City. We laughed about Captain Bligh, and then Zuloff said he couldn’t take “this kind of shit,” and that he would try to escape from the camp. I tried to talk him out of it, but at the next morning muster he was missing and Captain Bligh blew his stack, hauling me in for questioning and telling me that if I didn’t reveal where Zuloff was I’d be put in the brig. But I said I had no idea where Zuloff had gone, and he let me go.
Dave was absent from evening muster, too, but when I was sitting outside before lights-out I saw him beckoning to me from behind one of the concrete pillars that held up the barracks. I crawled in and talked to him, and he said that he was reconnoitering the boundary fences to see if there was an unguarded stretch where he could escape, but in the meantime he would appreciate it if I could bring him some food from the mess hall. I said that I would, and in the days that followed I brought him whatever food I could smuggle out of the mess hall as well as candy and drinks that I bought in the ship’s service canteen with money we had been advanced from our salary, leaving it under the barracks behind the pillar where we had talked.
After the first two weeks of training our barracks was scheduled for inspection by the commander of Dewey Unit, a full lieutenant, the equivalent of an Army captain. I could see that Captain Bligh was nervous about the upcoming inspection, because the disappearance of Dave Zuloff had focused attention on our boot company, and teams of SPs had searched our barracks and the surrounding woods looking for him. I was nervous myself, for I had neglected to write my name on the clothing that had been issued to me, as prescribed in The Bluejacket’s Manual, and some of it had gone missing. As a result, the neatly folded pile of belongings in my locker was noticeably lower than those on either side, which the lieutenant was bound to notice. He skipped my line of lockers during the inspection, but I knew that I would surely get nailed the next time.
Most of the recruits in my barracks were from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, the largest contingent being from Philadelphia, easily identified because they always said “Yo!” instead of “Hey!” or “Hi!” The first friends I made were Pete Hansen, from Teaneck, New Jersey, and Charles Shelmerdine, from Philadelphia. But Pete soon fell in with another group from New Jersey and I found myself spending most of my time with Charles. His parents were from England, and the other recruits called him “Limey.” Like me, he had joined the Navy to see the world, and much of our conversation was about the places we might go after we left boot camp and went to sea.
Everyone thought we would be sent to the southwest Pacific, where the Navy was involved in the fighting that was going on in the Solomon Islands, the Bismarck Archipelago, and Papua New Guinea. Then on June 6 we heard that the Allies had landed at Normandy to begin the long-awaited second front that I had first read about in the Daily Worker. For the next few days scuttlebutt had it that our training would be cut from eight weeks to six, and that we would be sent as replacements to the Navy amphibious forces in action on the beaches in Normandy. But then on June 14 the Marines landed on the island of Saipan and four days later the Battle of the Philippines began, so the scuttlebutt shifted the focus back to the Pacific.
Most days we spent several hours drilling on the Grinder and the rest of the time in orientation films and lectures, aptitude tests, and training classes in things nautical. One of the orientation films concerned the various branches of the Navy for which we could volunteer, including submarines, Naval aviation, underwater demolition, and commando units such as Scouts and Raiders. I signed up for all of these and took several aptitude tests, including one for aerial gunner, which scuttlebutt said had many openings because of the buildup of Naval aviation in the southwest Pacific.
I scored very high on aptitude tests involving general knowledge and mathematical ability, but extremely low on those involving technical subjects—probably because I had no interest in them, but also because I didn’t want to be assigned to a school for further training, since that would delay my being shipped out.
The training classes I enjoyed most were those in plane spotting and simulated antiaircraft gunnery. We learned to identify silhouettes of various German and Japanese warplanes and to fire at them when their images popped up on the screen. We were told to pay particular attention to the Japanese carrier-based fighter plane, the Zero, and to their land-based fighter-bomber, the Betty, for our instructor said we would be seeing many of these in the Pacific. We were also shown the silhouette of a typical kamikaze dive bomber, but our teacher said that there was little chance of hitting one once it began its dive. Our simulated firing at these planes was great fun, as was listening to the war stories of our instructors, some of whom had seen action in the Battles of Midway and the Coral Sea. The latter name intrigued me since it reminded me of Homer’s “wine-dark sea” and “sable sea,” and I hoped my assignment would take me there.
Other training classes involved signaling with flags, which I had already learned in the Catholic Boys’ Brigade, and knot tying, at which I was hopeless. In knot-tying class I just looked out the window and daydreamed, which annoyed the instructor and led him to put me on report. I was called before the lieutenant who commanded Dewey Unit and given a week’s extra duty, to be served in the evenings after supper. The discipline report was also entered in my service report, and the lieutenant told me that it could influence my assignment after boot camp, because no ship’s captain would want a “goof-off” like me in his crew.
We spent one whole afternoon in the gymnasium taking a strength test, where we were scored on our performance in rope climbing, two-handed and one-handed chinning, push-ups, and sit-ups. I did well above the average in the first four tests, without undue effort, and when it came to the sit-ups I just kept going since I wasn’t in the least tired. The instructor finally stopped me because the gym was closing, and he told me that I had done 748 sit-ups, and that the Navy record was 950. I was very proud of this, but for several days afterward I could hardly straighten up, and Charles Shelmerdine said that I walked around like Groucho Marx.
A week later we spent an entire day being tested in the swimming pool, where everyone was required to swim two laps and then jump into the water from a thirty-foot tower. I could only do a dog paddle and a sidestroke, but I could hold my breath for a long time so I decided I could make better time if I swam underwater. I dove in and didn’t come up until I reached the other end of the pool, where I took a deep breath and then swam back underwater. My instructor said, “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch!” and he shook his head in disbelief as he checked off my name.
Then I climbed the ladder to the top of the tower, where two instructors were struggling with a recruit who was too terrified to jump and was hanging on to the railing. They finally pried him loose and threw him into the pool. His scream was still echoing when I jumped in myself, spreading my arms like the wings of a seagull and then folding them to my sides as I plunged into the pool, coiling myself at the bottom so I could surge up out of the water like a dolphin. My instructor called me a “goddamn show-off” and ordered me to “get the hell out of the pool.” I did get out, but only after swimming the length of the pool underwater once again, which made him threaten to put me on report.
Most evenings Charles and I went to the ship’s service canteen to have a Coke and listen to the jukebox. “Sleepy Lagoon” was still number one on the Hit Parade, but a new song by Bing Crosby, “Don’t Fence Me In,” was now moving up the list, and it became our favorite because its lyrics expressed our frustration at being confined to boot camp when we wanted to be off at sea.
Give me land, lots of land,
Under starry skies above,
Don’t fence me in!
A letter from Peg arrived on June 26, 1944, my eighteenth birthday. She listed the names of everyone in our extended family who sent their love, and she said they all missed me and were looking forward to seeing me when I came home on leave. She said that my uncle Mike had been taken into the Army and was now in training camp too, and that my uncle Tom had put up both of our names on the honor rolls of all the saloons in our neighborhood, although she was embarrassed by this, since it might lead people to think that I drank in those places like my father and his brothers.
Peg also said that she had sent me a fruitcake for my birthday. Since I hadn’t received it in mail call that day, I asked the recruit assigned to mail duty in our barracks if he had seen it. He said that he had, but that Captain Bligh had taken it for himself and was probably having it now for his dessert. I headed toward the door of his quarters to confront him about this, but Charles persuaded me not to, saying that Captain Bligh would only make life difficult for me and might put me on report and delay my being shipped out to sea. So I let it pass, and when I wrote back to Peg I thanked her for the fruitcake and said that we, my friends and I, had really enjoyed eating it, though as I wrote those words a bitter feeling of suppressed rage rose up within me.
Our boot company was assigned to mess-hall duty for the first two weeks in July. We had to get up at four thirty in the morning and didn’t get back to our barracks until well after supper. Charles and I served together in the mess line, where our pranks got us into trouble with our supervisor, a black chief petty officer. One of the things we did to have fun and pass the time was to invent a new way to dispense pats of butter, spearing them on the bent tine of a fork and flipping them in the air onto the trays of the recruits in the mess line. This amused everyone except our chief, who was so provoked that he assigned us to the scullery, which was very filthy work. When we continued fooling around in the scullery, he put us on the garbage detail, which was even more disgusting, but even there we managed to have some fun, figuring there was nothing worse the chief could do to us. But there was: in addition to the garbage detail, he assigned us to the crew that swept up and swabbed the mess hall after everyone else had left, so we were the last to leave and barely made it back to our barracks for evening muster. In any event I always brought back food for Dave Zuloff, for though I hadn’t seen him for several weeks the food was always gone when I returned the following morning.
After our mess duty was over we began what was called Hell Week, which involved twelve-hour days on an obstacle course simulating combat conditions, followed by all-night marches. Charles and I enjoyed this immensely, but a number of people in our boot company broke down under the strain and were assigned to the L16 barracks, known as “the Loony Bin,” whose inmates were usually released from the service with a medical discharge, which labeled you for life as a mental case.
The Sunday after Hell Week we were scheduled to have a day off, which I greatly appreciated, for I was dead tired. I went to the Catholic chapel for mass after breakfast and then decided I would spend the rest of the morning dozing in a shady spot I had found in the woods beside our barracks. I thought I might spot Dave Zuloff there, for I had a feeling that he was hiding in the woods, but he was nowhere to be seen.
When I returned to the barracks I was told that after lunch we were all going to be marched to the main athletic field to watch a baseball game. The Boston Braves of the National League were playing the Sampson team, which I thought was a joke until I saw that our team included some of the most famous stars in the big leagues, all of whom had enlisted in the Navy to avoid being drafted, on the promise that they could continue to play ball, which was better than being blown away on the battlefields of Europe or the South Pacific. The game was indeed a joke: Sampson beat the Braves 24–0. The stands were almost empty by the time the game was over, but I stuck it out till the end. I hadn’t had a chance to see big-league baseball all through high school because of my odd jobs and our penury.
After Hell Week we were told that we would finish boot camp at the end of July, and that lists would be posted on the barracks’ notice board informing us where we would report after our week’s leave. On the first day of that week Pete Hansen found his name on a list of those assigned to a destroyer in San Francisco, while other lists appeared for submarine service, Naval aviation, the amphibious forces, and various battleships, aircraft carriers, heavy and light cruisers, destroyers, destroyer escorts, gunboats, and patrol boats, most of them on the West Coast. On the second day, Charles and many others I knew were on a long list assigned to the USS Dickerson, an attack transport docked in San Pedro, California. I was very disappointed that my name was not on this list, and could only think that it was the discipline report I had received for not paying attention in the knot-tying class that prevented me from being assigned to the same ship as my friends.
The next day I was dismayed to find my name on a list of those assigned to the electrician’s mate school at Sampson, which meant I would be stuck ashore for a couple of months while all of my friends went off to sea. I was afraid that the war would end before I was shipped out; the Allied forces were now beginning to break out of the beachheads in Normandy, while the Navy had defeated the Japanese in the Battle of the Philippines and the Marines had taken Saipan as well as Tinian and Guam.
At the end of July we packed our seabags and mustered for the last time outside our barracks, wearing our dress white uniforms. Captain Bligh inspected our company and then bid us farewell, telling us to “keep our peckers up.” He then told us to stand at ease, while we waited to be taken off in trucks to board the troop trains that would be taking us home on leave. Charles and I said goodbye to each other then; we had been assigned to different trains, his going to Philadelphia and mine to New York City. He said that he would write to me once he had a Fleet Post Office, or FPO, address, so we could keep in touch, and maybe we’d meet up in the Pacific.
After Charles left I waited for the next truck, and just as I was about to board it I saw a white handkerchief being waved at me from under the barracks. It was Dave Zuloff, wrapped in a khaki blanket, his unkempt hair and beard giving him the appearance of a medieval hermit. He smiled as soon as he saw that I recognized him; then, with a last wave, he disappeared under the barracks, and that’s the last I ever saw of him.
Our troop train pulled into Penn Station at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, and I arrived home at 225 Cornelia Street just before noon. Peg was waiting for me with Dorothy and Nancy and Jimmy, and shortly afterward John came back from eleven o’clock mass.
Peg had cooked a leg of lamb for my homecoming dinner and the six of us ate together for the first time in a long while. Her night job put her on a different schedule than the rest of the family, even on Sunday, when she was usually so exhausted that she slept through the day. But not this Sunday, which she said she had looked forward to since I had gone away, and so had I.
While we ate we talked about all that had happened since we had last been together. Or, rather, Peg and I talked, as I told her about life in the Navy, while she brought me up to date on news of our family and our “Gaelic ghetto.” I told them all about my experiences in boot camp, leaving out “short-arm inspection” and some of my misadventures. Peg was pleased to hear that I would be going to electrician’s mate school rather than being shipped out right away, and she said that my uncle Mike had already been sent overseas with the U.S. Army infantry and was probably fighting in France. I felt ashamed at this, for my uncle Mike was more than twice my age and had a wife and children, and now he was off in the war while I would be stuck in school for months.
Peg told me that Dorothy had just finished her sophomore year at Bushwick High, where she was on the honor roll for the second year in a row. I could see that Peg took great pride in this, particularly since I hadn’t made the grade at Brooklyn Tech, although she didn’t say this, to spare my feelings.
Dorothy and I had been very close when we lived in Ireland, and in photographs taken during those years I am always holding her by the hand, as if I were protecting her. But in the years since then, when our family life had been so difficult, we’d had little to do with each other and had drifted apart, even though we were living under the same roof. She had always been quiet and self-contained, perhaps as a reaction to the turbulent way of life in our Gaelic ghetto. I realized she had developed into a dignified and quite beautiful young woman, and as I looked at her across the dinner table it was almost as if I were in the company of a stranger.
Nancy was a different matter altogether. She was nine years younger than I was, and the years of her early childhood had been the most difficult period in our family life, when John was unemployed and we were evicted from one apartment after another before the Morans took us in. I hardly knew her; when she was a toddler I was out on the streets scavenging and delivering newspapers, and for the four years before I went into the Navy I had been working after school, first at the Willis Paint Company and then at the Eagle Druggist Supply Company, and by the time I came home from work she and Jimmy were in bed.
Now she had just finished the third grade at Fourteen Holy Martyrs, where she was barely passing; she seemed to have little interest in schoolwork, and preferred to be out on the streets having fun with her friends, who were predominately boys. Peg was working nights and wasn’t around to look after her in the evenings, so Nancy was pretty much on her own. She was an imp, and everyone liked her so much that she got away with things that would have brought down Peg’s wrath on me. But I was very fond of Nancy, and I felt bad that I wouldn’t be around to look after her, for she was my baby sister.
And Jimmy was my baby brother. He was eleven years younger than I was, almost half a generation, and I felt almost like an uncle to him, although I had just turned eighteen myself. During what little spare time I’d had these past four years I’d looked after him as best I could, rocking his carriage when Peg put him out in the backyard in good weather, and wheeling him around the neighborhood whenever I was running errands. Then, when he was old enough to walk, I took him with me wherever I went, though during the past four years I had been able to do that only on Sundays, because I worked every afternoon and on Saturday.
Jimmy looked very much like John, with the same red hair and very fair complexion. When John sat in the Morris chair after supper, Jimmy would climb up on his shoulders to peel away the sunburned skin from his back. The two of them were very much alike, sweet-natured and soft of speech, though Peg gave John very little time to talk. This seemed fine with him, for after a hard day’s work all he wanted to do was to eat his supper and then sit in the Morris chair and read the Journal-American. Afterward he would go down to the basement to tend the furnace and drink the two or three bottles of beer that I’d smuggled in for him from Mr. Hellman’s grocery. I was pleased to see that Jimmy had taken over that job from me; when Peg wasn’t looking he showed me the nine cents he’d earned from the deposits on the three bottles of beer that John had drunk the evening before.
That night, my uncle Tom threw a party at his apartment on Central Avenue to welcome me back, and all of our extended family members were there. He had brought a barrel of beer in the Collins Brothers hearse, several quarts of whiskey he had stolen from the rectory at Fourteen Holy Martyrs, and a bottle of sherry from the convent, because most of my aunts preferred sweet wine to “the hard stuff.”
Mary Guiheen’s brother Mauris had brought his accordion, and played a number of jigs and stack-of-barleys so Peg and my aunts could dance. Then he accompanied himself while he sang one of Peg’s favorites, “She Moved Thro’ the Fair,” which made her cry.
She stepp’d away from me, and she went thro’ the fair,
And fondly I watched her move here and move there,
And then she went homeward with one star awake—
As the swan in the evening moves over the lake.
The next morning John went off to work without the sandwiches that Peg had made for his lunch, so I brought them to him at the Evergreens Cemetery before his noon break, taking Jimmy along with me. We arrived at exactly noon, just as John’s lunch hour began, and when he came out from the workmen’s quarters I gave him the big bag of sandwiches, which pleased him no end. Then, just as he left, a car drove out through the cemetery gate and stopped beside us. The driver, a distinguished-looking white-haired gentleman, smiled at me and introduced himself as Mr. Dwight, the director of the cemetery. He had seen me giving my father his lunch and asked me if I was John Freely’s son. When I said that I was indeed, he told me of his high regard for John, whom he considered to be a cut above all of the other men who worked at the cemetery, a true gentleman. And with that he bade me good day, leaving me pleased beyond measure.
Later that day I took Jimmy to the local public school at the corner of Cornelia Street and Wilson Avenue, and I registered him so he could begin first-grade classes in the fall semester. Peg was taking a nap before she went off to work at five in the afternoon.
After Peg left I took a walk around the neighborhood, noticing that there were more gold stars in the windows than there had been before I left. From what my relatives had told me the previous evening I learned that boys I knew had been killed both in the Pacific and in Europe, where the Allies were now advancing deep into the continent. No one had any news about Jimmy Anderson and Phil Gould, but my uncle Tom said he had not seen gold stars next to their names on the honor rolls of the saloons he frequented.
I met Tom when I visited Fourteen Holy Martyrs, and he took me to Paul Hesse’s bar. He showed me my name on the honor roll, as well as those of Jimmy, Phil, and my uncle Mike, which was three names below mine. He wanted to buy me a beer, but I had a Coke instead, for I had promised Peg that I wouldn’t drink—at least until I was twenty-one—and I didn’t want her to smell alcohol on my breath when I came home. As I sipped my Coke I looked around the saloon, and there on the wall above the bar was the framed front page from the Daily News of December 20, 1927, with the headline STORK SNARLS TRAFFIC.
During the week I looked up those of my friends who were not in the service, either because they were waiting to be called up or, like Martin Kaiser and Billy Decker, because they had not passed the medical exam and thus been classified 4F. I read in the papers that Frank Sinatra had been classified 4F because he had a punctured eardrum, a condition that seemed to be endemic among famous singers and actors.
I spent one afternoon with Jean Caputo, who told me that she was “going steady” with a Jewish boy named Artie Spielman, whom I didn’t particularly like, but I didn’t tell her that. She said that most of the other girls we knew were going steady too, although some of their boyfriends had enlisted in the Navy or been drafted into the Army. She asked me if I’d like to go on a double date with her and Artie, but I said that I didn’t know any girls who might be willing to go out with me. Jean said she knew several girls who would love to go on a date with me. I told her not to bother because I was tied up with my family, but the real reason was that I was too shy.
Every night that week I got up at two in the morning to meet Peg at the Wilson Avenue subway stop when she returned from work, and we stayed up for hours engaged in our nocturnal dialogues. Her talk was very spirited early in the week, for she was so happy to have me home again. As my departure drew near, though, she became increasingly sad, and on the last night she said that if we had stayed in Ireland then I wouldn’t have had to go off to war. Then she brightened up and said, “All will be well, Jackie, all will be well.”
I was due back in Sampson before noon on Monday, so I had to catch a train at Penn Station on Sunday afternoon. I told John and Peg there was no need to come with me to the station this time, so I kissed everyone goodbye at home, walking to the Wilson Avenue subway stop with my seabag on my shoulder and my ditty bag in my hand, wondering when I’d see my family and my old neighborhood again.
When I returned to Sampson I was assigned to a barracks in Edwards Unit, where all of my shipmates (that was the word we used, even though we weren’t on a ship) were assigned to one or another of the advanced training schools, in my case the one for electrician’s mates. The electrician’s mates and motor machinist’s mates were engineering ratings, since on a ship most of them worked in the engine room, while others such as the signalmen, radiomen, yeomen, pharmacist’s mates, gunner’s mates, and boatswain’s (pronounced bosun’s) mates were deck ratings. Those of us in training for the engineering ratings had the rank of fireman second class, while the deck ratings were seamen second class. I was a fireman second class, electrician’s mate striker, and if I passed the course I would be promoted to fireman first class, and then, I hoped, through the successive ranks of petty officer—third, second, first, and chief—with the almost unattainable rank of warrant officer being the ultimate promotion for enlisted men.
The classes were even less interesting to me than the technical courses at Brooklyn Tech, which were at least scientific, but those at Sampson were totally devoted to electrical work that we would do aboard a ship—principally electrical motors, generators, electrical machines, and wiring in general—so I soon tuned out the lectures and spent my time daydreaming. This got me in trouble with one of my instructors, who put me on report. After a second warning, he had me brought up on a “captain’s mast,” the lowest form of court-martial.
My trial was held in mid-October, when I was taken before the commanding officer of Sampson Naval Training Base, a commodore who in civilian life had been a florist and looked the part. The chief in charge of our barracks had instructed me in the protocol to be followed, and I had turned my white Navy cap inside out so I was immediately identifiable as “the accused.” When the commodore and his entourage arrived, the chief in charge called everyone to attention, and when the officers took their seats he ordered that “the accused step forward!” I strode forward two steps, whereupon a pair of armed SPs grasped my elbows and brought me before the commodore, who looked at me disdainfully, as if I were some lower form of insect life on one of his flowers. The instructor who had turned me in was called up to read the charge he had made against me, which was that I was “inattentive in class and disrespectful to a superior officer.” The chief asked, “How does the accused plead?” as if he had any doubt—and I managed to speak with a firm voice as I answered, “Guilty, sir.”
I saluted and was led away by the two SPs into the waiting room, where I was dismissed and told that my sentence would be posted on the bulletin board of my barracks by the end of the day. So it was, and I learned that I was sentenced to one hundred hours of hard labor, to be served in the evenings and on weekends. I started my sentence after supper the following evening, serving on a work detail assigned to repair the roads within the base and to clear out brush from the woods that surrounded it on all sides except the lakefront. As I worked I kept an eye out for Dave Zuloff, although I hoped that by now he had made good his escape from Sampson.
On October 20 we learned that the U.S. Army under General Douglas MacArthur had landed at Leyte in the Philippines. Then a week later we heard that an American fleet commanded by Admiral William Halsey had been victorious in a three-day battle in Leyte Gulf that effectively destroyed the Japanese navy. This was a cause for celebration in the canteens of Sampson, but I began to worry anew that the war would end before I got into action, though I was careful to keep this to myself.
It took me more than a month to work off my sentence, and by the end of that time the first blizzard of the coming winter had begun, and our labor gang was ordered to shovel snow off the roads and paths around the base. Working in the snow was great fun, and I took every opportunity to throw snowballs at my friends who were going to and from the canteen, though I stopped after the chief in charge of our work detail threatened to put me on report.
My best friend at electrician’s mate school was Bernard Coopersmith, a Jewish boy from Newark, New Jersey. Bernard was a couple of years older than I was and had finished his freshman year at Newark College of Engineering before he enlisted in the Navy. He was the only one of my class with whom I could have a serious conversation, and I learned a lot from him, including Jewish history, sparking my lifelong interest in that subject. Bernard advised me to go to college after the war, but I told him there was little likelihood that I would, since I didn’t have a high school diploma, and in any event I intended to be a merchant seaman. This led him to shake his head in evident disapproval, saying, “Do think about it.”
Our classes finished at the end of November, and we were given a forty-eight-hour liberty before graduating and being reassigned. The leave wasn’t long enough to go anywhere except Rochester, where we all checked into a cheap hotel that catered to the Navy—which meant that they had few amenities and were battened down when mobs of sailors blew in on leave from Sampson.
The minimum drinking age in Rochester was twenty-one, and most of us were well under that limit, which was enforced by SPs checking ID cards at the entrance of every bar in town. One of our gang had just turned twenty-one, so he bought a fifth of cheap rye whiskey at a liquor store, which four of us drank in a park, oblivious to the bitter cold and the blizzard howling around us. I spent the rest of my short liberty recovering from a colossal hangover, wracked with guilt that I had broken the promise I had made to Peg not to drink until I was at least twenty-one. Bernard was not with us on our bender, but he sat next to me in the train on the way back to Sampson, and when he saw my condition he shook his head in disapproval, saying, “Freely, you’re heading for trouble.”
My captain’s mast meant that I would not be promoted to fireman first class, and, in addition to that, I also received the lowest grade in the class. This gave me some satisfaction, since now there was no way I would be assigned to an advanced school; only the very best students such as Bernard Coopersmith went on to further studies in radio, radar, and sonar. Scuttlebutt had it that the worst graduates were assigned to the amphibious forces, which our chief said were manned by the “scum of the Navy,” and he assured me that I was headed that way. He was absolutely right, and the next day I found my name on a list of those assigned to the amphibious training base at Little Creek, Virginia, where I was ordered to report on December 15, 1944.
My orders gave me time for a week’s leave at home, where Peg was very disappointed because she had hoped I would be there for Christmas. We celebrated Christmas early, though with some sadness, for John had learned that his brother Mike had been badly wounded in France. Before I left we received word that Mike had been shipped back to a hospital in New York City, and that there was hope he would recover.
I left early the next morning, taking a regular passenger train from Penn Station to Norfolk, Virginia. There I boarded a Navy bus that took me out to the amphibious training base at Little Creek, on the coast near the North Carolina border. When I checked in at the base I was given a short-arm inspection, and I saw that several of the sailors who arrived with me were taken aside after the exam. The pharmacist’s mate who had examined me told me that the amphibious forces had a higher incidence of venereal disease than any other branch of the service, and this seemed to corroborate what our chief at Sampson had said about the kind of people who ended up in the “amphibs.”
The men in my barracks were for the most part somewhat older than I was, many of them having already served overseas, as I could tell from the campaign ribbons they wore on their dress blues, some with several battle stars. The oldest of those I got to know was a yeoman first class known as “Seagoing Baker,” who told me that he had been in the amphibious forces since the beginning of the war, and had served in half a dozen campaigns. But now he had had enough, and he said that if he was assigned to sea duty again he was going to head for the hills. He advised me to do the same, saying that the landing craft in the “amphibs” were “sand-scrapers” and would take me to an early grave.
Little Creek was the largest amphibious base in the United States. The largest and most numerous of the ships at the base were of the type known as LSTs, landing ship, tank, which were designed to land infantry and tanks on invasion beachheads, as they had at Omaha Beach in Normandy. The LSM (landing ship, medium) was smaller and could carry fewer men and vehicles than the LST. Some of these had been converted to form a type known as LSM(R), landing ship, medium (rocket), so called because they were armed with rocket launchers as well as a five-inch naval gun and several antiaircraft machine guns. Only a dozen LSM(R)s had been launched by the time I arrived in Little Creek, and when I looked at the bulletin board in our barracks I saw that I would be in the first crew assigned to one of them as soon as they were ready for us. It seems that there had been an unexpected delay, for one of the LSM(R)s had sunk on its shakedown voyage in Chesapeake Bay, having sprung a huge leak when its five-inch gun was fired. Luckily, none of the crew drowned, but from then on the LSM(R) was referred to as a floating coffin, and Seagoing Baker told me I might as well have been given a death sentence by being assigned to one.
After morning chow each day we assembled on an enormous drill field, lining up according to our rank and rating. I represented a unique case, for among the several thousand men assembled on the field I was the only fireman second class, electrician’s mate striker, a distinction I had achieved because of my captain’s mast and my failure at electrician’s mate school. Thus I formed a group all by myself, and when the duty officer of the day checked the various formations he paused in surprise when he came to me, and he tried not to smile when I saluted him and said, “All present and accounted for, sir,” as I had been trained to do in the Catholic Boys’ Brigade.
The Saturday muster was held on a special drill field down by the docks, where all the LSTs, LSMs, and LSM(R)s were tied up, along with smaller vessels such as LCTs (landing craft, tank) and LCVPs (landing craft, vehicle, personnel). We all saluted when the commanding admiral of the base and his staff arrived, accompanied by a chief gunner’s mate carrying a shotgun. I wondered why the chief was carrying a shotgun, but then I saw him fire both barrels to disperse a flock of seagulls hovering overhead, and I realized that he was making sure the admiral and his staff wouldn’t be shat upon by the birds—though some of the other officers and men at the muster weren’t so lucky.
Later I mustered with the crew of the LSM(R) to which I had been assigned, with a ship’s company of five officers and seventy-six enlisted men. Our captain, a lieutenant senior grade, informed us that our ship would make its shakedown cruise in mid-January 1945, and that we would be going aboard a week or so before she sailed in order to get her ready. Scuttlebutt had it that we would be going to the Pacific via the Panama Canal, and that we would be part of an invasion force landing on the Ryuku Islands in the East China Sea, the largest of which was Okinawa.
We spent several days checking out our LSM(R), which looked more like a gunboat than a mere landing ship, for it was bristling with weapons. There was a five-inch naval gun just forward of the bridge, a twin 40mm antiaircraft gun at the bow, three 20mm machine guns on the fantail and the flying bridges, four 4.2-inch mortars in a guntub above the bridge, and 156 rocket launchers arrayed on the tank deck. Our captain told us that all of us, regardless of our rating and regular duties, would be manning the various guns and rocket launchers. He said that our gunnery training would begin on our shakedown cruise, which was good news for me, since I hadn’t wanted to go into combat just looking after electric motors and generators, which in any event I knew little about. I was relieved to learn that I would be serving under an experienced electrician’s mate first class.
Shortly after New Year’s a notice was posted on the bulletin board in our barracks calling for volunteers for a top-secret commando unit. I immediately signed up, because it seemed more exciting than serving as an apprentice electrician aboard an LSM(R). Two days later I found my name on a list of those who had signed up for the unit, with orders to muster the following day outside the base headquarters. I informed the captain of my LSM(R), and spent the following day being examined and interviewed. Two days later I found my name on a list of those who would report the following week for shipment to the amphibious training base at Fort Pierce, Florida.
We were given a twelve-hour liberty in Norfolk before we shipped out, from noon to midnight on Saturday. Norfolk was the home port for the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet, with battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and troopships constantly crossing from there to the European theater. The war seemed much closer in dockside Norfolk than it had in New York, for the piers on Chesapeake Bay were lined with warships and the streets were full of sailors streaming in and out of the bars and nightclubs (which were open in the daytime as well) that I’d heard so much about in Sampson. I had been told that there were signs that said NO DOGS OR SAILORS ALLOWED, but I didn’t see any during the twelve hours or so that I spent in Norfolk. The bars were far rougher than those I knew in Brooklyn, and the only patrons seemed to be drunken sailors and the women whom historians of earlier wars had called “camp followers.” I saw several drunken brawls, one of which was ended only by a flying squad of SPs, who carried off some of the sailors in their paddywagons, leaving their girlfriends to the local police. Around midnight I hitched a ride aboard a Navy truck headed back to Little Creek. I helped the driver and two SPs load dead-drunk sailors aboard the truck if their liberty passes showed they were from the amphibious base. Then I helped them unload the drunks when we reached the base, after which I checked in with the duty officer and was given a short-arm inspection before going off to my barracks. Such was my one and only liberty in Norfolk, which otherwise I saw only from the trains that brought me in and out of the city.
On Sunday afternoon I wrote a short letter to Peg, telling her that I was fine and that I was being transferred to Florida, though I didn’t tell her what I would be doing there. Then I began packing my seabag, wondering about the secret commando unit I had joined and where it would be taking me.
It was bitterly cold when we left Little Creek early Monday afternoon, traveling in trucks that brought us to the train station in Norfolk. The troop train that we boarded in Norfolk was unheated, so I bundled up in my peacoat to keep warm, gratefully accepting a swig of whiskey from the sailor sitting next to me, who handed me the bottle as he drifted off to sleep. After a few more swallows I began to doze off myself, thinking of my father and his brother Willie leaving Ballyhaunis on Easter Sunday 1916, sharing bottles of whiskey with shipwrecked Irish sailors on the train that took them to Dublin. We Freelys had come a long way in one generation.
When I awoke the next morning I could see from the stations we passed that we were in Florida, whose palm trees and orange groves seemed like paradise after the grim winter landscapes we had left behind. By the time our train reached Fort Pierce the weather was as warm as if it were late spring, and the air was heady with the aroma of the flowers and fruit trees that were just beginning to blossom in the garden around the station.
There were several hundred of us aboard the train, and after we got off we were herded aboard trucks to take us out to the base, which was on South Hutchinson Island, one of the string of barrier islands separated from the mainland by the Indian River, part of the inland waterway along the east coast of Florida.
The entrance to the base was at the far end of the causeway across the Indian River, where a sign said U.S. NAVY AMPHIBIOUS FORCES—UNDERWATER DEMOLITION TEAMS—SCOUTS AND RAIDERS. We got out of the trucks and filed into the administration building, where we checked in and were given our assignments. About half of the group was marched off to the barracks of the Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT), which were on the inner side of the island, facing the Indian River. The rest of us were put back on the trucks and taken out to the seaward side of the island, where the entrance to a separate tent city bore a sign reading SCOUTS AND RAIDERS. I was very excited, for this seemed to promise the adventure I had sought when I’d enlisted in the Navy. But when we checked in at that administration center I found from my orders that I was not going into the Scouts and Raiders after all, but into a commando unit called Amphibious Roger Three.
Later that day, when we went to a briefing after evening mess, we learned that we would be the third contingent of the commando unit to train at Fort Pierce, Roger One and Two having completed their program and now gone overseas. We were the last contingent of Roger Three to arrive, we were told. Our training program would begin tomorrow morning and would combine those of the UDTs and the Scouts and Raiders. There were about a thousand of us, but by the time our training was over our number would be winnowed down to one hundred and fifty, the chief said, because “the men would be separated from the boys.”
And with that we were sent off to our various barracks, laid out at the north end of a beach that stretched the whole length of South Hutchinson Island, which was separated from North Hutchinson Island, the barrier islet to its north, by the Fort Pierce Inlet. During the hour that was left before lights-out I walked along the beach to the breakwater on our side of the inlet, where pelicans, cormorants, and myriad other seabirds were skimming the water in their hunt for fish, occasionally plunging in like kamikazes, the Japanese suicide dive-bombers I had seen in training films. This was the tropical setting I had imagined in my daydreams, and the war seemed very far away, until a deafening explosion sent up an enormous plume of smoke across the inlet on North Hutchinson, where I later learned that the UDTs were conducting a night exercise.
The next morning after breakfast we mustered and were organized into platoons, each with ten enlisted men and an ensign. All of the ensigns were “ninety-day wonders,” college boys who had been commissioned after three months of intensive training. This made them less experienced than any of us, but most of them were smart enough to make up for it. Some of them were very good athletes as well and had played football and other varsity sports, as I learned from listening to their conversations. The senior officers for the most part had been in combat, and one of them had commanded a UDT unit in the Normandy invasion. But our commanding officer, a lieutenant commander who had been a lawyer in civilian life, had never been to sea and seemed completely unsuited to be the CO of an outfit like ours, or so I thought when I sized him up during our first muster.
After the muster we were issued U.S. Marine Corps fatigues and combat boots, which were more suitable for the kind of training we would be doing, which in the beginning included strenuous and prolonged calisthenics, weight lifting, boxing, and long-distance marching and swimming, designed to toughen us up for our subsequent training in underwater demolition, scouting, gunnery, and hand-to-hand combat, as well as infantry tactics under simulated combat conditions.
There were also evening orientation films and lectures, as well as classes for those who were qualified in fields such as radio and telegraphy. One of the classes was very hush-hush, but I learned from a friend who was enrolled in it that it was an intensive course in Chinese. I would love to have taken it, but I figured I had been left out because I was a high school dropout and had failed my course in electrician’s mate school. But at least I now knew that our outfit would be going to China, which led me to begin asking questions of the ensign who headed our platoon. That, together with the scuttlebutt I gathered from my shipmates, eventually gave me some idea of what our unit was all about.
I learned first of all that we were involved in a top-secret operation run by the U.S. Naval Group China, which was the core of a clandestine organization known as SACO (pronounced socko), an acronym for the Sino-American Cooperative Organization. The Loyal and Patriotic Army (LPA) of China, an elite force of Chinese commandos, would be trained and led into battle by members of SACO.
SACO had been founded in 1942 through an agreement between President Roosevelt and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, under which the United States and the Kuomintang Nationalist government would create a joint intelligence-gathering organization against the Japanese.
The commander of Naval Group China was Captain (later Rear Admiral) Milton Miles, an Annapolis graduate who had been director of the Office of Strategic Services in the Far East. Miles was also deputy director of SACO, whose director was General Tai Li, Chiang Kai-shek’s right-hand man and spymaster. The activities of Naval Group China included the collection of meteorological data for the U.S. Army Air Forces, gathering Japanese shipping information and other intelligence for both the U.S. Navy and Army, and the training of Tai Li’s guerrilla force, the LPA, which had been very effective fighting against the Japanese in China.
The Roger Amphibious Unit was established in 1943, when Miles decided that the U.S. Navy should train its own commandos to go into action with the LPA. Roger One had been trained and sent to China in 1943, followed by Roger Two in 1944, and then our Roger Three, which was scheduled to be shipped out in the spring of 1945. All of this was very exciting for me, and as soon as I became fully aware of the great adventure involved I did everything I possibly could to survive the winnowing-out process that began on the first day of our training.
Our physical training included boxing, and every day each one of us had to box three two-minute rounds against a different opponent, with no consideration given to differences in height, weight, strength, or pugilistic experience. I had learned how to box in the Catholic Boys’ Brigade, and since I was in excellent physical condition I more than held my own against my opponents, defending myself against the bigger ones and sometimes clobbering those who were my own size or smaller.
The toughest guy in our outfit was a Mexican American man named Pete Echeverry who had boxed professionally. He took it easy on his opponents, since otherwise he might easily have killed them, but once our commander made the mistake of challenging Echeverry and was knocked out cold with one punch. Echeverry and I became good friends, and when I had to go into the ring with him our bout was essentially a boxing lesson for me, which I used to good advantage in my later fights.
The enlisted men in our outfit were mostly country boys from the South and Southwest, including Pete Echeverry and a Navaho named Joe Jackson, who also became a good friend of mine. But one day a couple of SPs came and took Joe away, for what reason we never learned, and that was the last I ever saw of him.
The only other New Yorker in the outfit was Bill Glennon, an Irish American man from the Bronx who had already done a tour of duty in the Caribbean. Bill and I became good friends, for we had a lot in common, particularly because our parents were Irish immigrants. Another good friend was Tunney King, who was from Greenville, Maine, on Moosehead Lake. I asked him about his curious first name, and he said that his godfather was the famous boxer Gene Tunney, former world heavyweight champion, who had trained for his fights at the King family’s farm on Moosehead. Another of my good friends was Ron Fuller, from Waterville, New York, who told me that he had girlfriends who were identical twins, and he was never certain which one he was with at any time, and though he seemed to be keeping both of them happy, he wasn’t quite sure which sister he would end up with after the war.
Underwater demolition training started in the third week, when we learned to handle dynamite, TNT, plastic shaped charges, and other types of explosives including Bangalore torpedoes, which were long tubes packed with TNT that were set off to the create trenches in beaches so that LCVPs could come in close to land troops. Mostly we worked with half-pound blocks of TNT, which we carried in pouches around our waist. We became so used to TNT that we lost all fear of it, though we were told that a half-pound block could cost us a hand or our “dangling participles,” which were particularly exposed when we set off charges in water.
During the fourth week we were taken in trucks every day to the gunnery school at the southern end of South Hutchinson Island, where we learned to fire virtually every weapon in the U.S. arsenal, starting on the rifle range. I was a very poor marksman, and I was afraid that this would get me eliminated from the outfit, but I did much better with the other weapons we fired, including the .45-caliber pistol and the Thompson submachine gun. I also did very well on aerial gunnery, particularly on a 20mm antiaircraft gun, where I was the only one in our outfit to hit a target drone pulled by a Navy seaplane. It was all great fun, particularly learning to fire a bazooka and a trench mortar, although I found hand grenades a little scary, particularly when we had to pick up a live grenade and throw it out of range before it exploded. Another perilous exercise involved crawling through barbed wire under live machine gun fire, which caused several of our outfit to chicken out, but I kept my nerve and made it through without “marking my laundry,” GI slang for shitting your pants from visceral fear.
At the start of our second month of training we went on a five-day exercise, the first day of which took us along the whole length of North Hutchinson. We marched thirty miles from the Fort Pierce Inlet to the Sebastian Inlet, carrying a forty-pound pack with a rifle and hand grenades and wearing a belt with a dozen half-pound blocks of TNT, accompanied by trucks loaded with a ton of dynamite and TNT.
We were supposed to pitch our tents on the beach at Sebastian, but when we reached the inlet just before sunset we were amazed to find the abandoned cars of a circus wagon train among the dunes. Our ensign said that we might just as well unroll our sleeping bags in the circus cars, some of which had barred sides, indicating that they had been used as cages for lions and tigers. Other platoons did the same, and as we sat around our campfires that evening we laughed as we tried to imagine how a circus wagon train might have ended up abandoned on the dunes on an island off the Florida coast. It still tickles me to think that I spent a night in a lion’s cage.
We spent the next three days setting off explosives in various exercises, some of them underwater charges off the beach by the Sebastian Inlet, others in the junglelike interior of the island. At one point I was having a fungus on my right ankle treated by a pharmacist’s mate when a large piece of shrapnel from the end of a Bangalore torpedo smashed the box on which my foot was resting. Another time a charge that I had set failed to go off, and our ensign sent me back to see what was wrong. I found that the fuse had only burned halfway, and when I reset it I had barely enough time to take shelter behind a dune before the charge went off, showering me with sand and fragments of palmetto trees.
At the end of our last day at Sebastian we gathered all of the explosives we hadn’t used—several hundred pounds of dynamite and TNT—and after we piled up the charges we set fuses connected with explosive primer cord so they would all go off at the same time. I volunteered to set off the final fuse, trying to make up for having bungled my earlier assignment, while everyone else took cover behind the dunes farther down the beach. I just made it to the dunes before the charge went off with a tremendous blast, which we later learned blew out many of the windows in the town of Sebastian on the Indian River.
The following week we practiced amphibious landings on South Hutchinson, some of us setting underwater explosives off the beach and others landing in LCVPs as the charges exploded. One of my friends had picked up a stray dog in Fort Pierce and it became our mascot, and in our amphibious landings it was always the first to run ashore, barking loudly while we shouted “Gung ho!,” the rallying cry of the Marines, which we had been taught to do by one of our instructors, a Marine master sergeant. When I later looked up “gung ho” in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, tenth edition, I found that it was an abbreviation for “Zhongguo Gongye Hezuo She,” meaning “Chinese Industrial Cooperative Society,” first used in 1942. This made me think that the term was associated with the name of our outfit, SACO, the Sino-American Cooperative Organization, which was founded the same year.
Another of our exercises took us out for a week into the swampy land around Lake Okeechobee in the Everglades. The expedition was led by Lieutenant Ross Allen, who in civilian life ran what he called a “gator farm” in the Everglades, a game farm with alligators, water snakes, and other creatures of the swamp in their natural environment. We made our way through the swamp in inflatable seven-man rubber boats, complementing our K rations with palmetto hearts that we carved out of the swamp trees and rattlesnakes that we caught, skinned, and grilled, as well as eggs that we bought in a Seminole village. One of our officers, Ensign Bosco, was bitten by a water moccasin, which, we were told, was even more poisonous than a rattlesnake. We thought he was a goner, but he was given first aid and rushed back to Fort Pierce for treatment, after which he was able to resume training.
Meanwhile, I followed the progress of the war on our camp radio and through news bulletins posted in our headquarters building. First came news that the Marines had landed on Iwo Jima on February 16, 1945, beginning a battle that lasted two weeks before the Japanese were defeated. Then, on April 2, U.S. forces landed on Okinawa, while the Battle of the Philippines continued. The bulletins gave no details of these battles, but we knew for sure that the Navy’s amphibious forces were involved in both the Iwo Jima and Okinawa landings, and I wondered if the LSM(R) to which I had initially been assigned had taken part in either landing. I wondered also about Jimmy Anderson, Phil Gould, and Charles Shelmerdine. I hadn’t expected to hear from Jimmy or Phil, but Charles had promised to write as soon as he had an FPO number, and I hadn’t had a word from him.
I also followed the progress of the fighting in Europe, where the Allies had penetrated deep into Germany on both the Eastern and Western fronts, and the Far East, where American and British forces were slowly retaking Burma from the Japanese, who had launched a new offensive in China. I was particularly interested in news from Asia, for, according to scuttlebutt, SACO had bases all over the China-Burma-India theater, and our senior officers had said that some of our units were operating behind enemy lines.
Then, on April 12, the devastating news came that Franklin Roosevelt had passed away and that Harry Truman had succeeded him as president. All activity was suspended at Fort Pierce, and during Roosevelt’s funeral three days later the only sound came from the PA speaker, which played a recording of Bing Crosby singing the president’s favorite song, “Home on the Range.”
Oh give me a home
Where the buffalo roam,
And the deer and the antelope play.
And seldom is heard
A discouraging word,
And the skies are not cloudy all day.
At the moment of his burial a bugler played taps, and many broke into tears, as did I, for Roosevelt had first been inaugurated just after we came back to the United States from Ireland for the second time, and he was the only president I had ever known.
Two weeks later we learned that Hitler was dead, and then on May 8 the news came that Germany had surrendered. The war in Europe was over, but fighting continued unabated in the Pacific and the Far East. Scuttlebutt said that our outfit would take part in the invasion of Japan along with General Tai Li’s LPA, crossing over from China to attack one of the main Japanese islands.
Scuttlebutt also had it that our training would now be terminated so that we could be sent to China as soon as possible, and for once rumor turned out to be true. A few days later we were informed that we would finish our program almost immediately, after which we would have a week of home leave before being shipped out.
I did a quick check of the roster at the next muster and saw that we were now down to 160 enlisted men, 10 over the limit that had been set for Roger Three. Five of the 10 were eliminated in the last of our endurance tests, when we had to swim a mile parallel to the beach, beginning from the end of the breakwater at the Fort Pierce Inlet. Time was not a factor, but endurance was, and I had no difficulty—though I was one of the last to finish, as I had to drag along a friend, a Puerto Rican boy named Juan who otherwise would have been eliminated.
Scuttlebutt said that the last cut would be made at the beginning of our final week, and once again rumor turned out to be true. When the final roster was posted, I was relieved to find that my name was on the list, along with my friends Bill Glennon, Tunney King, Pete Echeverry, and Ronald Fuller, though Juan didn’t make it. We received our individual leave papers and orders the following day, and I learned that after my home leave I would report at Penn Station to be sent by train to the naval base at San Pedro, California, the main port for troopships leaving for the Pacific and the Far East.
I was sorry to leave Fort Pierce, which I had enjoyed more than any other part of my Navy training. But I had been in the Navy for a year and was anxious to go overseas; the war was reaching a climax, and I wanted to get into action as soon as possible.
Our training had ended so abruptly that I hadn’t had time to write home and tell my family I was coming. So my homecoming was a complete surprise for them, and because I arrived on a Sunday afternoon they were all gathered around the table having dinner.
That evening all of my relatives came by to welcome me home. Mary Guiheen (we still called her that even though her married name was Kennelly) came with her brother Mauris. Mauris brought along his accordion and played for us, reminding me once again of Ireland.
Only when the party was over did Peg tell me the bad news about my uncle Mike. He had been recuperating from the wounds he had suffered fighting in France, where he had been machine-gunned in the stomach. But he had managed to get friends to smuggle bottles of whiskey into the hospital, and because of his heavy drinking he had just suffered a hemorrhage and was in critical condition. All of the extended family would be going to visit him the next day, and I said that I would go along too.
John took off from work, and on Monday morning we all went to Bellevue, where we gave blood and then went to see Mike, who was in intensive care. He was sitting up in bed and cheerfully greeted each of us as we arrived, though he was deathly pale from loss of blood, and he said that all he needed was a good stiff drink. The Catholic chaplain came in and administered Extreme Unction, and we all laughed when Mike asked the priest for some communion wine, saying that he had need of a last drink to speed his way to the next world, which he didn’t think would be heaven.
We were then asked to leave so they could give Mike a blood transfusion, and we all kissed him and wished him well, though I remember thinking I would never see him again. It was raining heavily when we emerged from the hospital, and we waited under the awning at the entrance, hoping that it would clear so we could walk to the subway. We were there for about half an hour before the rain diminished enough for us to make a run for it. Just at that moment I heard a clatter above us, and I looked up to see Mike climbing down the fire escape in his pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers. My aunt Mary screamed when she saw him, but Mike said that he was just going out for a drink, since they wouldn’t let him have any in the hospital. John and my uncle Tom went up the fire escape and managed to get Mike back into his bed, promising they would buy him a bottle of whiskey, but Peg and my aunts would have none of that.
I spent most of the rest of the week at home, walking to the Evergreens Cemetery at noon with my brother, Jimmy, to bring John the sandwiches Peg had made for his lunch, and after supper I sat and talked with John, Dorothy, Nancy, and Jimmy until they went to bed. Then I read until two in the morning, when I left to meet Peg at the Wilson Avenue station to walk her home, after which we ate together and then talked for hours before we went to sleep, a peaceful routine that I found blissful after the constant hyperactivity at Fort Pierce, though I knew it was just the calm before the storm.
On the final day of my leave I went out after supper and made one last round of the neighborhood, stopping at Otto’s ice cream parlor to say goodbye to any of my friends who might be gathered there. Many of the boys I knew were now off in the service, but some of those who were not were hanging around outside Otto’s with a group of girls, a few of whom I knew. We talked for a while, until one of my friends said they were all going up to Highland Park, but I declined, saying I had to go home since I was catching a train at Penn Station at eight in the morning. One of the girls, someone I hadn’t seen before, asked me if I would come along for a little while, which caught me in the heart because the jukebox was playing “Linger Awhile,” and the vocalist was singing “Whisper I love you, oh linger awhile.” I told her that I was very sorry, but that I simply had to go, and then I said goodbye and started home, listening to the fading sound of their laughter as they headed toward the park, my heart aching.
When I got home I slept for a few hours and then got up to meet Peg at the Wilson Avenue station. We ate together, and then we had a nocturnal dialogue that lasted until the first light of false dawn. It was time to go, and Peg woke up the rest of the family so they could all kiss me goodbye. Then I slung my seabag and ditty bag over my shoulder and left, walking along Wilson Avenue to the subway station just as the sun was rising over the hills in the Evergreens Cemetery.