The dogs of war

Author Robert Leckie is pictured at work for the Associated Press in Buffalo, N.Y., two years after the end of World War II.

I've spent a lifetime reading books about World War II in the Pacific, trying to understand what my father and my uncle talked about only in guarded terms when I was growing up.

My father was a Navy Seabee during the campaign to wrest the Solomon Islands from the Japanese, and my Uncle Joe was stationed with the Army on Corregidor in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked; he spent the rest of the war as a POW.

I've read fiction and non-fiction alike. There can be much truth in fiction. I couldn't turn the pages fast enough when I first laid hands on Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead," written in 1948. I devoured "Battle Cry" by Leon Uris, written in 1953. Both novelists served in the Pacific and were what Shakespeare called "the dogs of war," meaning they were soldiers.

On the non-fiction front, I spent a summer about 30 years ago reading books by survivors of Japanese POW camps in an attempt to understand what my Uncle Joe had experienced. I remember sitting under the big maple tree in my back yard on hot, sticky days feeling a chill as I read accounts of the brutality they endured.

Perversely, fiction was more engaging -- probably because the novels were by men who went on to have illustrious careers as authors. To be blunt, they were better writers.

The first-hand, non-fiction accounts were more powerful. Their authors might have had only one book in them, but theirs were tales of unvarnished truth.

Now I have found a book that is a personal account of one Marine's experiences in the Pacific that is as engaging as any World War II novel and as powerful as the best non-fiction.

It's "Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific," a 1957 non-fiction account by Robert Leckie. While some might consider the title to be trite, the book is riveting, laced equally with bravery, wit, pathos and humor, and I highly recommend it.

Leckie served in the 1st Marine Division as a machine gunner and intelligence scout during the Battle of Guadalcanal and in later campaigns. "Helmet for My Pillow" and another book, "With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa" by Eugene Sledge, were the cornerstones for the scriptwriters of the recent HBO series "The Pacific."

Leckie, who later wrote many more books on military history, was also a sportswriter. (Despite having spent my life as a journalist, I've only written perhaps a handful of sports stories. But I admire good sportswriters and their colorful and insightful way of stringing sentences together to put the reader in the center of the action.)

Consider this from Leckie's description of his part in the desperate, deadly battle for Peleliu at the end of "Helmet for My Pillow":

"I ran with the heat shimmering in waves from the coral, with the sweat oiling my joints and the fear drying my mouth, with the shells exploding behind me, closer, ever closer -- and the air filled with the angry voices of the shrapnel demanding my life. I ran with an image in my mind of the Japanese gunner atop his ridge, bringing each burst carefully closer to my flying rear, chasing me across that baking table in a monstrous game of cat-and-mouse, gleeful at each greater burst of speed called forth by a closer explosion -- and then, tiring of the sport, lifting the gun and dropping one before me."

The war ended moments later for Leckie. A nearby ammunition dump was hit. The shock wave smashed into him with all its force. "I had been shattered. No good, a dry husk. Modern war had had me. A giant lemon squeezer had crushed me dry."

Fifty-four years and too many wars later, the words resonate still. And Leckie's story is as compelling as the snatches of stories I overheard my father and my uncle hinting at -- when they thought the children weren't listening -- in the years after they came home from World War II.

Say what?

Proofreading menus is easy pickings. Like shooting fish in a barrel. I see so many menu errors that it's hardly worth mentioning them.

But this one caught my eye today. Here's what the menu board said at a cafe where I got a cup of coffee this morning.

Today's Specials

Creamy Tomato Basil Soup

Roasted Beef and Goat

Cheese Salad

Apple Cobbler

After reading it several times, I asked the woman behind the counter about the roasted beef and goat.

She paused a moment, and then she told me that roasted beef and goat cheese salad just wouldn't all fit on one line.

Too bad. I was kind of tantalized by the thought of a roasted beef and goat entree.

Scary times

President John F. Kennedy was photographed in the Oval Office during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

I wasn't even a teenager yet when we learned the principles of "duck and cover" in elementary school.

I was born during World War II, but I have no memories of the war. By the time I started school, in the late 1940s, I might have had some vague understanding of nuclear weapons. But my world was a safe place, I believed, and the duck and cover exercises we practiced in elementary school seemed like a game.

(As a practical matter, hiding under our desks in the event of a nuclear attack would have been about as useless as tits on a boar hog, as my grandfather used to say. But that's beside the point.)

I was never really scared by world events as a young child. I had too little understanding of them. Overhearing parents and relatives talking about the horrors of the Great Depression and World War II made me anxious, to be sure, but I rationalized my fears by believing, as children do, that those things happened a l-o-n-g time ago and would never happen again.

Naïveté can be so comforting.

But when I was 20, the Cuban Missile Crisis scared the bejesus out of me.

And I knew by then that ducking and covering wouldn't do much good.

On Oct. 14, 1962, a U.S. reconnaissance flight over Cuba discovered the presence of what turned out to be an SS-4 construction site. The SS-4 was a Soviet Union ballistic missile deployed during the Cold War. It was capable of attacking targets at medium ranges with a megaton-class nuclear warhead. If there were Soviet SS-4s in Cuba, most of the eastern United States would be within range.

Richmond didn't seem like much of a target to me. But Washington was. And so was Norfolk, with its massive military bases. That was profoundly scary.

For the next few weeks, the U.S. was on the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

Like most Americans my age, I'd never been so frightened before. And I don't think I've been so scared since.

Unlike the Great Depression and World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis was something of my own time, and naïveté was no longer a comfort.

It didn't help matters any that I had read "Alas, Babylon," the 1959 novel by Pat Frank that was one of the first apocalyptic stories of the nuclear era. (The novel centers on the aftermath of a nuclear attack in a small town in Florida.) Having seen the movie "On the Beach," based on Nevil Shute's 1957 novel, which I had also read, was no comfort either. (The story, set in Australia, envisions the aftermath of a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere and a slow and inexorable cloud of fallout that dooms the planet.)

The Cold War spawned its own style of "entertainment," and none of it offered much solace.

If you're a few decades younger than I am, you probably learned all about the Cuban Missile Crisis in history class.

We're all alive today, and we know that the clash between the Soviet Union and the United States was resolved within a few weeks of those U.S. reconnaissance flights in 1962. There have been no nuclear attacks on the U.S. The Soviet Union is no more. Nuclear arms stockpiles are being reduced. The Cold War ended in 1990.

The world is a safer place.

Right.

If you believe that, you're as naïve as I was in the 1950s.

* * *

By the way, I highly recommend "Alas, Babylon" and "On the Beach." They are today, as they were then, compelling and thought provoking.

Different times

This postcard from the 1950s depicts Broad Street looking West from about 8th Street. The State Theater, showing the movie "No Down Payment," is at the near right, and Thalhimers department store is the 6-story building on the left. Downtown was then still a safe place for a kid to explore on his own.

There's been a discussion of the word "playdate" this week on an email list of copyeditors.

It's a fairly new word. I certainly never heard it when I was a kid in the 1940s and 50s. Our parents didn't arrange playdates. We just went outside, found our friends, and played. Often, our parents told us to go outside and play just to get us out from underfoot.

It wasn't unusual for us not to tell our parents where we were going or what we'd be doing -- as long as we promised to be home in time for supper. My friends in those days all lived within a couple of blocks. The neighbors looked out for us. If we misbehaved, some adult would tell us to "stop that this instant!"

We dreaded having a neighbor call our parents to say we'd done something wrong. Unlike today, the adults were believed automatically, without question, and the kids were not. If Mrs. Johnson who lived across the street and down the block, or whoever, said I had done something, there was no question that I had done it. (The same trust applied to teachers. If I messed up at school, I'd be punished once by the teacher and again when I got home.)

The world was a safer place in those days, and the freedom from supervised play that we enjoyed then can only be appreciated in retrospect.

By the time I was 10, my world opened up even more. If I could persuade my mom to give me 30 cents, I could take the bus downtown, by myself, and go to a movie (I became adept at winning free movie tickets on radio quizzes), or explore the State Capitol building's underground tunnels (which were sorta, kinda scary), or wander through Miller & Rhoads or Thalhimers and look at all the things I'd like to buy if only I had the money.

(Persuading my mom to give me 30 cents for the bus wasn't always easy. Back then, 30 cents would buy a carton of Cokes or two loaves of bread.)

We were never totally free of adult supervision. If we got rowdy on the bus, somebody who knew who we were would call our parents, who would be waiting to give us holy hell once we got back home.

Downtown Richmond, just like my East End neighborhood, was safe for a kid. (This is not to say that the blue-haired ladies at the White House of the Confederacy didn't look at me oddly as I explored the exhibits. They did, and I'm certain that they wondered what the heck a 10-year-old was doing wandering around looking at Rebel uniforms with 80-year-old bloodstains on them.)

To be sure, there were times I could have used some adult supervision. When I was about 7, my friend Bobby Johnson and I were playing in a field not far from home when we discovered a pint of gin in the weeds. Stupidly, we drank it. I staggered home drunk as a skunk, and my mother was horrified. She called our family doctor. "What should I do?" she asked him. His advice: "Put him to bed and let him sleep it off."

A couple of years later, another friend and I were out riding our bikes. We were about a mile from home when I tried some stupid stunt, went flying over the handlebars, and broke my arm. A stranger came along in an automobile, picked me up, carried me to his car, put my bike in his trunk, and took me home. I shudder to think what my mom must have thought when she opened the front door to find me in the arms of somebody she didn't know. But she was grateful for his help, as was I. (I have no memory of what my young friend did. I suspect he rode his bike back to his house.)

As I said, the world was a safer place then -- not safe from our own stupidity but safe from people who wanted to hurt us.

Much has changed. Now a parent would be foolhardy to allow a child the freedom we enjoyed and took for granted. Today, parents arrange playdates. Back then, they might have asked "Where are you going?"

And we would have said, "Out."

"What are you going to do?"

"Nothing."

And that was okay.

She's b-a-c-k ... maybe

LBJ nest No. 3 is about one third completed. (Don Dale photo, 2011)

My determined little LBJ has returned for the third time to build a nest in my front-porch light fixture.

Three days ago I saw her fly away as I ventured out onto the front porch to pick up the morning paper.

I decided to reward her singular determination by letting her have her way. To help, I set off for the hardware store to buy a 15-watt bulb to replace the 40-watt bulb in the fixture. I thought a lower-watt bulb would produce less heat and -- maybe -- this time her eggs wouldn't be cooked before they hatched.

(Who knew 15-watt bulbs would be twice as expensive as 40-watt bulbs? But no matter. I bought the damned bulbs.)

Since then, there has been no progress on the nest, and I haven't seen the LBJ.

It's been wet and chilly here for the past few days. Maybe she doesn't want to harvest wet grass from my front lawn. Maybe now that it's drier and warmer she'll come back to continue creating a place to lay her eggs. Or maybe not. What do I know? I really don't fathom squat about birds and their nesting habits.

But I hope she does come back. Her perseverance ought to be rewarded.

This all reminds me of the time a few years back when I had another domestic encounter with wildlife. It was the dead of winter, and I was reading a good book when I hard faint scratching noises coming from the woodstove insert in my fireplace.

Boo and Atticus, my two cats at the time, went on full alert. They parked themselves in front of the woodstove and began making quiet curiosity chirps.

Was there an errant bird trapped in my woodstove? And, if so, what to do?

I had heard a first-hand account from one of my co-workers who had faced the same situation. When she opened her woodstove door, a soot-covered bird flew out. Using a broom, she eventually chased the bird out of her front door, but the cleanup bill -- she had to hire a professional service -- was staggering. There was soot on the draperies, the rugs, the furniture, the walls and ceilings. A panicked, soot-covered bird can make a world-class mess.

So I did nothing. I didn't open the woodstove door. I tried to ignore the faint scratching noises. Better a dead bird who lacked the good sense to stay out of chimneys than a giant cleaning bill. Think of it as Darwinian.

Trust me, though: I felt bad about it.

Gradually over the next four days there were fewer and fewer scratching noises. Boo and Atticus lost interest.

On the fifth day, I decided to open the door.

When I did, a startled squirrel was looking out at me.

I slammed the door shut.

And thought about what to do next.

And wondered how he had survived for five days without food or water.

At least a squirrel wouldn't be flying around the room leaving soot in his wake, I thought. He'd stay on the floor. A vacuum cleaner would take care of any problems.

I propped the front door open. I s-l-o-w-l-y opened the woodstove door. The squirrel looked at me, shook himself, and scampered for daylight and up onto a lower branch of the willow oak in the front yard.

He sat there for a moment, staring at me. I stared back at him.

Then he cussed me out, longly and loudly, then scampered further up the tree, screaming squirrel imprecations all the way.

Perhaps, as with the squirrel, I'll be lucky with my LBJ. She'll return, finish her nest, lay her eggs, raise her babies, and live happily ever after.

And once again I'll escape without metaphorical wildlife blood on my hands.

That's what I hope, anyway.