On the night of August
8 a Japanese naval squadron sank several more U. S. ships, including the cruise
U.S.S. Quincy. Meigs Comus, a boyhood
friend from Winchester, Tennessee, was among the many whose bodies never were
found. Worse yet, General Douglass MacArthur had ordered all of the First
Division’s supply ships and the aircraft carriers to depart for Australia. The
Marines had offloaded less than half of their supplies. Precious food and
ammunition was on its way to safety.
Without air cover or
adequate supplies, the Marines felt expendable and abandoned. As the days wore
on and became numerically forgotten in the stench of the island, he, and
others, harbored a bitter hatred toward MacArthur, a hatred which lasted long
after the war. We could not speak his name in our home. “’I shall return,’” Dad
often growled, “over the bodies of dead Marines.”
From the day the ships
sailed out, he held an undying grudge against the Army and Douglas MacArthur.
Until his dying day, he believed that the First Division and the Corps had won
the war in the Pacific by themselves. The Marines left behind their own version
of “Bless Them All.”
We asked for the Army
to come to Tulagi/But Douglas MacArthur said, “No.”/We asked for a reason/He
said it’s not the season/Besides, there is no USO.
With food and
ammunition in short supply, the Marines dug in for a long five months. They
plundered the well stocked Japanese warehouses for food. They found cans of raw
fish and rice, both of which pretty much supplemented their diets in the early
stages of the campaign. Dad never mentions the raw fish but he talked about the
rice. Pasty and wormy, it was loaded with harmful bacteria and parasites
(probably because of the human and animal waste used to grow it). Dad came away
from the island with an infected digestive track.
In 1954, he hemorrhaged
so badly one particularly violent attack, he nearly died. Mom kept us boys out
of the bathroom. I still remember her shouting through the door over Dad’s
retching that the floor was covered with blood. Very shortly after that, he
went into the hospital where the surgeons removed part of his pancreas and,
according to Mom, 90% of his stomach. A
voracious eater, under normal circumstances, after he came home, he gorged
himself and never seemed full.
He loved sea food, a
taste which I never acquired. He told us how the men supplemented their foul
rice diet with sea turtle. Some of his more exotic tastes included chocolate
covered grasshoppers and ants, the latter of which would crawl into the men’s
tin cups in which they had melted “pogey bait” (Hershey Bars).
He also introduced us
to “Anything Stew.” It consisted of cabbage, corn, and any leftover vegetables
resembling food boiled together and finished off with a lot of vinegar to “kill
the taste.” He served it steaming hot with a thick layer of black pepper
floating on the surface.
The recipe had come
from the Canal. While we carefully ladled it up with our throats numb, tongues
burning, and eyes watering, he would add with a grin, he said he would have
added flied to it, had he had any, to give it some meat. We knew how he hated
flies.
He literally went
berserk when any got into the house. They had been terrible on the island. He
described how they kamakazied into the men’s boiling stews or coffee. He showed
us how they vainly tried to flick them off their spoons as they ate. They left
big welts wherever they bit. “They sort of crunched,” he added as we tried to
swallow his stew.
The Canal, brutal and
stinking of rot, hardened my father. It destroyed his capacity to fully love
another person. Isolated, exhausted by the innervating humidity and living a
mole like existence drained the compassion from him. He replaced it with
bitterness and anger.
Besides the flies,
MacArthur, and the Army he became hyper vigilant. The Canal abounded in exotic
birds and rodents. They filled the nights with their calls and roaming. The
jungle rats with their long snouts, stringy coarse fur and beady eyes ran
through the foxholes and over the men in their nocturnal raids for food.
The birds, with their
sharps, screeching calls kept the men awake at night. There was one particular
parrot that only defecated when flying and was known for its big loads. They
fluttered through the trees making noises which the Marines suspected the
Japanese imitated. Another bothersome nocturnal bird, which apparently lacked
night vision, continually flew into the tree overhead with a loud “thunk,” at
which point it fell loudly to the ground with an ear splitting scream.
We had to remain quiet
in the house – no whistling, no screaming, no shouting allowed. It would set
him off. He hated canaries and parakeets. All of ours died mysteriously while
we were at school and Dad was off work. We would come home and find the birds
dead in the bottom of the cage, with the door open, high above the household
cats. Sometimes, he told us, the “fell” off their perches while swinging on
them.
Our pet hamsters met a
similar fate. I can still see Dad tightly holding the ball of fur in his left hand.
With his eyes glistening, he sarcastically teased, “If you hold ‘em by the
tail, their eyes ‘ll pop out.” Not knowing whether he was joking or not, my
brother and I laughed. Hamsters do not have any kind of tail to brag about.
When we returned that afternoon, we found them dead in their cage on the back
porch. Mom said they had broken their necks while running on the tread wheel.
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