The Pink Flamingo :: Honoring My Favorite Vet

I guess you could say Humphrey Bogart was responsible for my father joining the Merchant Marines. He was Action on the North Atlantic one day, and enlisted in the Merchant Marines the next. While at Sheep’s Head Bay in New York, he volunteered for the South Pacific, where the causality rate was 90%. Because only 1 in 10 Merchant Marines were surviving the war with Japan, volunteers were feted while they were training. Only a few would survive. My father took advantage of every minute of it. His escapades in Manhattan then in New Orleans are the stuff of family legend. After taking advantage of every pre-heroism accolade offered, and completing OTS, by the time my father reached the South Pacific, the WACS, WAVES, and nurses were already there!

Because he was quite often the only single officer aboard the transport ships that were pulling barges of munitions and spare parts, etc. across the mined areas of the South Pacific, he was the one who would swim through the mine fields, and untie the barges from the main ship, then literally pull them through. It was extremely dangerous. He had two ships shout out from under him as he calls it. He then ended up in Manila the day we liberated the island. One of his ships was blown up in Manila Bay that day. He was on the island at the prison when we liberated our ‘guys’ who were POWs. While there he did some sort of work along the Bataan route, but still will not tell us what he did. All we know, and I did not discover it until about 15 year or so ago, was he was one of the officers involved in the clean up of Bataan. He then spent about 6 months or so on one of those lush tropical islands, where he says he spent most of his days in a hammock under a coconut palm. We all know there was more to it, but that’s all he will tell us.

My father developed his love of ‘trading’ while in the South Pacific. Because he neither drank nor smoked, he would save his rations to trade. He would also sell his uniform, and anything not tacked down in his cabin on the black market when it was time for them to get new rations and uniforms. We have one incredible story where he and two buddies sold everything but their skivvies, then went shopping in some village, where they met up with the governor who invited them for dinner. They told him they were wearing some new top secret issue uniform, then were embarrassed when introduced to three gorgeous daughters!

He was a navigator. How he did this neither my mother nor I can understand because he CANNOT read a map! I’ve now learned when he’s reading a map to have 2 of them so I can keep us from getting lost! He started out as a 2nd officer, and by the time he ended up in England, he was given his own ship – of pregnant war brides heading for the US.

Somewhere my mother has packed up his dress uniform. I have all his papers, and a whole box of letters and pin-up photos of all the women who would write to him. My plans are to put them into a book. He says he spent much of the war wearing the same pair of shorts which he bought off someone who’d just pulled them off a Jap he’d just killed.

He’s one day older than George H. W. Bush and shares much of his family tree. We literally still only know the funny things that happened. We know he saw a tremendous amount of action. Like the majority of people who really do experience the horrors of war, he’s never talked about them. He probably never will. He avoids the water like a plague. Once he must have been an incredible swimmer. I only saw him go swimming once. We were visiting his family in Minneapolis. My sister and I were little. My mother had some hot new bathing suit, and was spending the day at the pool with us – a pool surrounded by Army Reserve officers heading on maneuvers, many of them giving my mother the eye. It was the only time I ever saw him even go near a pool!