Clete and F.X. made a deal. If Clete didn’t come back, F.X. could have Clete’s two bottles of Jack Daniel’s sour-mash bourbon; and if F.X. didn’t come back, Clete could have F.X.’s Half Wellington boots, which, conveniently, fit him perfectly. The second part of the deal was that each had promised the other—presuming, of course, that one of them came through—that he would visit the other’s family and tell them a bullshit story about how the fallen hero had died—“quickly, without pain, he really didn’t know what hit him.”
F.X. went in while supporting the Marine Raiders on Edson’s Ridge. He got his P-40 on the ground in more or less one piece, and he was alive when it caught fire. The Raiders heard him screaming until finally, mercifully, the sonofabitch blew up.
Clete went to F.X.’s tent while F.X.’s Executive Officer was inventorying his personal gear. About the only thing that wasn’t worn out, or covered with green mold, was the boots. F.X. had spent a lot of time caring for his boots. They would, he claimed, get him laid a lot when they were given a rest leave in Australia. F.X. had heard that from a fellow who’d flown with the Eagle Squadron of the Royal Air Force before the United States had gotten into the war; women liked men who wore boots.
Clete was tempted not to claim the boots, but decided in the end that a deal was a deal. F.X. damned sure would have claimed the Jack Daniel’s.
While he waited for the bourbon, he pinned the new insignia to his new shirt and freshly pressed tunic. The new shirt, being new, was not stiff with starch. Before long, he knew, it would look limp and floppy, not shipshape.
Is there a regulation someplace that orders shirts to be washed and starched before wear? I wouldn’t be a damned bit surprised.
There was a knock at the door. When he opened it, a different bellman pushed in a tray on wheels; the tray held a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a battered silver bowl full of ice, a silver pitcher that presumably contained water, and two glass bowls, one filled with mixed nuts and the other with pretzels. There was also a newspaper, which Clete thought was a nice touch.
He took the bill from the bellman and signed it. When he turned back to the bellman, he was holding the newspaper open, so that it was ready to read when Clete took it.
“Welcome home, Lieutenant,” the bellman said, meaning it.
“Thank you,” Clete said. “It’s good to be home.”
“You’re here,” the bellman said, pointing at the photograph on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. It showed a dozen Marines standing by the Greyhound bus in front of the hotel. The headline above them read:
Guadalcanal Heroes Receive
Key to City From Mayor
Clete looked at his photograph.
My God, I look like a cadaver! Do I really look that bad, or is it just the photograph?
“Thank you,” Clete said.
The bullshit begins.
After he joined the other
returning pilots back on Espíritu Santo—in the absence of more deserving heroes, he decided, he was apparently a last-minute addition to the roster—and they were waiting for further air transportation, via Pearl Harbor, T.H., to U.S. Navy Base, San Diego, California, there was a lot of talk, naturally, about why they were being sent home.
No one believed that their pleasure, or comfort, or even physical well-being had anything to do with it. The Marine Corps did not act that way. It was certainly not a reward for a job well done, either.
All they’d been told, probably all that anyone knew, was that the orders came as a radio message from Eighth & I.
It wasn’t until they were actually given their orders at Espíritu (a twenty-copy stack of mimeographed paper), minutes before they boarded the Martin Mariner, that the words “War Bond Tour” came up. And these gave Clete little more information than Dawkins had already told him:
The following officers, the orders read, are detached from indicated organizations and temporarily attached to the USMC Public Affairs Office, Federal Building, Los Angeles, Cal., for the purpose of participating in a War Bond Tour.
That 1/Lt Frade, C. H., USMCR was detached from VMF-229 was sort of a joke, for little—if anything—of Marine Fighter Squadron Number 229 remained to be detached from. After Clete wrecked his Wildcat, VMF-229 was down to two airplanes and four pilots. There were almost no mechanics, or clerks, or cooks either. As more of VMF-229’s Wildcats and their pilots had been shot down, crashed, or simply disappeared than had been replaced, the mechanics and clerks had been transferred to other squadrons.
What, exactly, a baker’s dozen of battered fighter pilots who resembled not at all the handsome Marine aviators of the movies and recruiting posters could possibly have to do with a War Bond Tour was something of a mystery, until one of them realized that they all had one thing in common besides membership in the Cactus Air Force and their surprising presence among the living. They each—he polled the jury to make sure—had shot down at least five Japanese aircraft. They were all aces. Two were double aces, and one was working hard on being a triple.
“They’re putting us on fucking display, is what they’re doing!” one of them announced in disgust.
There were groans. Some of these were genuine, Clete thought—including his own. And some of them were pro forma. There was really nothing wrong with being identified as a hero. For one thing, as one said with a certain fascination in his voice, it would probably get them laid. Clete Frade had absolutely nothing against getting laid, but he was uncomfortable with the notion of considering himself a hero. In his mind, what he’d done was only what he had been ordered to do.
He had not volunteered to fly at Midway, where he shot down his first Japanese shortly before being shot down himself and earning his first Purple Heart. And he had not volunteered to go to Guadalcanal. He was sent there, and he flew off Henderson and Fighter One because he was ordered to. So far as he was concerned, with one exception, he owed his seven victories to luck. He could just as easily have been killed. He was not a hero.
On the chartered Greyhound bus from San Diego to Los Angeles, a public relations major stood in the aisle and delivered a little speech, the straight scoop about what was going on, Clete Frade realized then.
“What this is all about, gentlemen,” the major said, “is civilian morale. The powers that be have decided that civilian morale needs a shot in the arm. You may have noticed that so far in this war, we haven’t done very well: The Japanese took Wake Island away from the Marine Corps, and the Philippines away from the Army. In other words, we have had our ass kicked—with two exceptions.