Reluctant Warriors Page 6

  “I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t help but ask the obvious question. ‘Did it ever happen to you?’

  “‘Yes, twice,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘I should have known better by the second time. I was just a kid.’

  “He paused for a while, obviously reflecting.

  “‘The only way out of it was to, well—picture yourself spinning around quickly but flatly. If it was a dark day, I never saw anyone get out of it. But if it was a bright enough day that you were able to pick out an object on the horizon, and you could gun the engines each time you spun around to that object. Gradually, the spin would become an ellipse, and you could fly out of it.”

  Claire looked up at the audience and smiled as most smiled back at her. “My parents had a good life together. I am sorry for all of us that Daddy was hurt so much by the war, and is not here rubbing and scratching our backs. But he got to see his grandchildren and was loved very much. We were lucky to have had him in our lives for as long as we did. We were luckier than many families whose loved ones never came back.”

  Harry Connors Stories

  Mojarra

  Dorance, Iowa, April 5, 1970

  Harry Connors’ Kiwanis friends had specifically asked him to go to the town meeting, and so he went, even though his wife, Dell, could not accompany him. Today’s topic was the Vietnam War. The meeting was supposed to end with everyone making some kind of resolution about whether the town should support it. He could think of a million other things he’d rather discuss than America’s latest war halfway around the world. In fact, cleaning the chicken coop at the farm would be more appealing. If he was doing that, at least he would get to be outside on this sunny day.

  Instead, here he was, in the library meeting room with its smell of mildew and sound of buzzing fluorescent lights. Others began the discussion, and he sat quietly, having no intention of saying anything.

  “We must support our government,” Cal Werts said. “If the government calls, we must, must answer! It’s our duty as good American citizens, whether we personally agree with the cause or not.”

  Daryl Felton spoke next. “I can’t support this much. I don’t like us putting ourselves in a foreign basket. If these people bought farm products or had any prospects of being business customers any time in the future, maybe I could see it. Otherwise, why should my boy go way over there? There’s nothing in it for us. Those people are nothing to us. They don’t even like us.”

  Bob Anderson, the local pharmacist, stood and spoke. “I suppose there is something to going overseas. My mother-in-law grew up in what is now East Germany during the war. She says communism is very bad. I know these Vietnam characters are in league with the Soviets, so that is not good.”

  Others spoke. Several of the men looked at Harry as if they expected him to speak, but he did not volunteer. He sat still, lost in thought, ignoring the uncomfortable folding chair.

  He was jolted to awareness by the sound of Major Kirkman’s voice. “Folks, we have a real war hero here with us, Harry Connors. Harry commanded a submarine in World War II and won the Navy Cross. Harry, we would like you to say something.”

  Everyone turned Harry’s way. Reluctantly, he stood. He was a slight man in his middle fifties, with graying temples on his black hair. Though he had not been in the service for more than two decades, the military bearing that never left him was apparent to all. As respected as any person in the community, he projected an air of basic decency and honesty.

  He looked around at his friends and neighbors. I wish Dell was here, he thought.

  With a long look on his face, he began, in his deep baritone voice: “Well, to tell you the truth, I wish I had never seen the damn medal. Please excuse my language.”

  People stared at him. He knew many of them had never heard him swear. He paused for a second, and then went on, slowly.

  “I got that medal over the death of several of my closest friends. Since that day, I would have traded it a thousand times for one of their lives. They were good men, much better than I could ever be. Good husbands.” He nodded. “Good fathers. Just . . . good men.”

  He paused again.

  “Some of you are veterans and will probably agree with what I’m about to say. I think the rest of you will have trouble taking the words of an old hand like me. So, take them for what they’re worth, if anything.

  “War is a terrible undertaking not describable with any words I can find. It’s almost useless for me to try to say anything. But if you are determined to go to war, I would say two things to you that are pretty much for certain, two things you might not have considered.

  “The first is that you will kill innocent people. However you define the word innocent, no matter how small, you will kill some of these people by accident just because they’ll be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You will kill women and children who are innocents in any Christian sense you can find.

  “I contributed directly to the deaths of, I am sure, hundreds of people who were in the ships we sank. Some were enemy soldiers or sailors that I was pledged to kill. But probably the majority were innocent civilians. We may have killed some of our own people who were prisoners of war on those ships. That’s a hard thing to live with.

  “Second: your friends will be killed. In war, due to the stakes involved in risking your lives with others, they become friends unlike any that you have known, or will know. They become like brothers, but more.”

  He paused, looking around at everyone. Then he continued, his words measured.

  “They become a part of your soul. Nothing that anyone could ever say or do will ever change that, not even your own death. And these are the ones who will be killed right in front of your eyes, and you will watch them die, and not be able to do anything about it.”

  He nodded in respect to those present.

  “Thanks for listening to me. I did not mean to talk so long.”

  Harry didn’t look at anyone as he walked back to his seat. He picked up his jacket and walked out of the room. As the door closed behind him, he realized he could hear the discussion resuming behind it. He paused, wondering if he’d had any effect on things.

  One young man—it sounded like Danny Buckson, the feed store clerk—said: “I think we should support this. Americans believe in democracy. We need to help the rest of the world in becoming democratic and resisting communism. It is really an evil system.”

  Someone else, whose voice Harry couldn’t place, spoke up. “I’m sure war is no fun, but we must support our country.”

  Harry decided he’d heard enough.

  He left the library and walked across the parking lot to his ’68 Chevrolet Impala. As he opened the door and sat inside, it all flooded back.

  There was never a face or recognizable voice that went with it. All he could remember was the outline of a head and a man’s voice. It spoke to him so weakly, so hauntingly, “Harry, I . . . hurt bad! What happened? The . . . whole side . . . caved in.” The voice slipped away, but Harry could not move to help. He had tried so hard to move! Sometimes he awoke in a sweat, thinking he was there in the submarine again, trying to move. But he could not. He was stunned, and it felt as though a great weight were on top of him,
pressing down, paralyzing him.

  It was one of the memories of the war that troubled him the most. He racked his brain there in the parking lot, as he had thousands of times before. But his mind was blank. He heard the words and saw the vague shape of the head. The great weight had held him down, making it impossible for him to move. Yes, I had an excuse, he thought, staring forward. I sit here in my car, twenty-seven years later, safe in Dorance, Iowa, knowing that I was hurt. But it’s never enough, is it? It’s not a good enough excuse. It’s bad enough that I didn’t help the man, but I don’t even know who he was. Was he an officer? Is that why he called me by my first name? Or was he an enlisted man who called me “Harry” just because he was so badly hurt? If he was an officer, who was it? Was it Don Forbes, or Larry Montain, or Simpson, or Cordell? It might even have been Walter Wood. They all perished in the sinking . . .

  October 14, 1943, Central Pacific

  The submarine Mojarra, on which Lieutenant Harry Connors was serving, had been making an “end run” at a top speed of twenty-one knots on a convoy off the western edge of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Several hours earlier, at about 0600, they had seen a large convoy come out of the mists and head due north, directly away. The only thing to do was to try to race around the flank of the convoy and get in front of it for a torpedo attack. A submarine on the surface during the day with the periscope raised and on four-power could see the smoke from ships for many miles, while its little silhouette allowed it to remain almost unseen.

  Captain Fostel was on the bridge, barking out orders that were obvious to everyone, as usual. There goes “Hostile Fostel” again, Harry thought, exasperated. The truth was that Fostel was too old to command a submarine. He wasn’t aggressive enough to take the calculated risks necessary for successful command, but was quick to blame that lack of success on others. Harry had witnessed many occasions when Fostel had ridiculed an officer in front of the crew for some triviality. Mr. Wood, he would say, you would have done much better if you had done it this way instead . . .

  “What does he know about respect?” Harry mumbled to himself. No explanation or excuse of any type by the victim held any weight with “the Boss,” as he liked being called. In fact, excuses only made it worse. The captain would stubbornly cross his arms and frown at the man without responding. Reprimands took the form of unsavory duties like being on garbage detail, where, just to get it done, the officer would help “Cookie” dump sacks of garbage overboard. The men, officers and enlisted alike, soon learned to just accept Fostel’s criticism and scorn, say nothing, and go about their duties. Named after an insignificant little silver fish, Mojarra was an insignificant and unhappy boat.

  And an unlucky one. It went all the way back to Lake Michigan. Mojarra had been built at Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and the crew first assembled there for the commissioning. Fostel first got on everyone’s nerves during the lake trials. That was long before Harry joined the boat for its third war patrol.

  Harry’s friend, Don Forbes, told him about one day on the lake in February of 1942, with the temperatures well down into the twenties. As Mojarra labored against the choppy waves, spray splashed onto the bridge and froze almost on contact. It was caked two or three inches thick on everything, from the two periscopes to the safety railings that held in the lookouts. Fostel ordered the boat submerged, but the twenty-four inch wide air intake vent, which had to be closed to make the boat watertight, had frozen solid in the open position. The bridge personnel, busy trying to keep from freezing, had not noticed the open hatch.

  As diving officer, when the light on the Green Board showed “red” for the intake, Forbes had cancelled the dive and blown the ballast tanks. This quick action had saved the boat. Had she submerged, it would have been only a matter of minutes before the ice on top of the open valve melted, water poured in by the ton, and the boat went down, carrying the entire crew to their deaths.

  Fostel had yelled, “This is the end! My God, we can’t even submerge this goddamn boat!”

  That was a bad thing to say on a submarine. The men in the conning tower had looked askance at the captain, not wanting their submarine to be the object of scorn.

  Fostel went on. “What will happen next? Mr. Forbes,” he said, his voice rising, his head nodding as he walked toward the young officer. “You are the diving officer. I have made SOO-perhuman efforts to give all of you people a chance to learn the difficult, difficult job of commanding a warship. I would think that you could respond by arranging it so we could SUBMERGE! After all, what are we?”

  No one dared speak or even look directly at the captain. Fostel went on anyway, speaking even louder, spittle flying from his mouth.

  “We are a submarine! S-U-B-M-A-R-I-N-E!”

  He did not seem to notice or care when it took three men with hatchets twenty minutes to chip the solid block of ice from the air intake so Mojarra could indeed dive. Forbes hadn’t dared say anything to Fostel, then or now, but Harry knew he was still pretty upset about the whole mess.

  Forbes was hardly the only one Fostel bullied. The result was an inefficient boat on which men squabbled with each other over nothing, and no one wished to take responsibility. In its five war patrols, all under Fostel, the submarine only sank three ships. Fostel always blamed the poor record on “bad luck.”

  Younger, more aggressive men were gradually replacing the older commanders. But that took time, months even. When Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood, better known as “Uncle Charlie,” took over the submarine command in May of 1942, everyone on Mojarra hoped he’d remove Fostel. No such luck. Hostile Fostel was still in command. In the meantime, competent officers that came to Mojarra had unsavory experiences and so transferred out as quickly as they could, in a continual revolving door of personnel.

  Harry had come to the boat as executive officer. Due to a curious incident, he was the only officer of the nine aboard who became exempt to Fostel’s continuous barrage. Harry had actually upstaged the captain in firing two torpedoes at a freighter at the last second. With Fostel on the scope in the conning tower, all of the preparations for firing had been completed. The enemy ship was just seconds away from an optimum firing setup when the captain began to berate one of the crew! Harry never knew who it was. He had been watching the Combat Data Computer, a very complicated calculating machine, as the diatribe began. It became obvious to Harry that they had to fire immediately or the torpedoes would miss.

  The captain was still turned away, oblivious to Harry’s signaling. Harry had then violated the oldest protocol in Navy regulations by taking over from a captain without permission. He just couldn’t help himself. Everyone on board wanted so much to sink enemy ships, to get revenge for Pearl Harbor, to be in the war! Determinedly, he’d shouted, “Fire one, fire two.”

  If those things had missed, his career would have ended right there and then. Probably Fostel would have had him put in irons. Fostel spun around, as amazed as outraged, about to start shouting at Connors, when both torpedoes hit!

  The crew had erupted in joy. They’d continued cheering as they heard the Japanese freighter begin breaking up and sinking. Fostel had stared at Connors, no joy on his face at all. It must have occurred to him that he could not very well reprimand Harry. Mojarra had sunk a ship, something command had been breathing down their necks to accomplish!

  Fostel stalked of
f, without a word, and retired to his cabin. He never said an unkind word about Harry after that, though he was not complimentary either.

  That had been Harry’s first run on Mojarra. This was his fifth, and things just didn’t seem to be getting any better.

  He headed down to the Control Room to check on operations. This room, directly under the conning tower, which in turn was below the bridge, earned its name by “controlling” the ship. There were dozens of gauges visible on the four walls, punctuated by the three large steering wheel–like controls: two on the port side of the room, one for each of the diving planes, and the other one on the wall facing the bow, which controlled the rudder.

  Harry walked aft, intending to talk with the radar operator. He was in the narrow passage between the Radar Room and the crews’ mess when there was an ear-shattering bang, and the port side of the crew’s mess exploded.

  Harry instinctively flung his arms up in front of his face to protect himself. The explosion’s force threw him against the lockers opposite the Radar Room. He looked up, dazed, blood dripping into his eyes, and saw the greenish-blue water of the Central Pacific rushing in through a jagged hole in Mojarra’s side, rising around him and starting to fill the compartment. In the flashes of the dying lights, he could see the steep angle the sub had immediately taken. We’re going down! We’re going down! he thought.