09 April 2008
Argus
I was talking to Tom out in West Virginia. In the old days, calling from the Hollow as he was, his voice would have been scratchy. Not today; his voice was crisp as fresh paper thanks to digital transmission. He was going to the hospital the next day, and a call to me was one of the action items on his list before he went in.
Tom is a methodical guy. It is what made him an effective counter-intelligence officer. The other thing was that he didn’t like to write.
You may- or may not- recall what a pain in the butt it was to write official things. It is one of the reasons that history is so truncated and abrupt. When I learned how to type, back in the days when dinosaurs ruled the earth, you had to insert a piece of carbon paper in between two sheets of onion paper to make a copy.
Peck-peck-peck-bam on the return lever and off to the next line. We typed slower then, too, since typos were things that you actually had to correct by hand. Technology is swell.
Just for the record, I am going to use the word “Japanese” in the context of these stories. That is not the word that Tom used, or at least not all the time. He uses the shorter, sturdier version. For him, and for many of his generation, the term conveys no inherent disrespect. After all, some of the men who worked for him in Yokosuka had kicked the tar out of an Allied army in China, and killed more U.S. Marines than any other Army in history.
Times change. I was trying to get my arms around what it was like to be the chief inspector of an all-Japanese police force as an American, and a Bo’suns Mate at that.
He got around to it elliptically, since it was difficult to address the matter directly. It had to be an anecdote at a time, a parable of sorts.
“There was a time the Japanese didn’t make cameras,” he said. “Hard to believe now, but that is the way it was. Before I shipped out, a pal gave me one of those Argus 3C cameras, made by the Argus Company, of Ann Arbor Michigan. Those little boxy things that were the best damn 35mm camera in the world for years. They wre named after the Greek god who could see everything. They had a little range-finder you could look through, not through the lens, and I had the flash attachment for it.”
“I didn’t have a plan for it, it just seemed like a good idea to have it in such an exotic place. After a while I carried it everywhere. Due to the shape and weight, we called it “the brick.” My Japanese guys called “the lunchbox.”
“It was made out of Bakelite plastic with metal castings and it had a bunch of buttons and dials and levers. I got to be a regular WeeGee with the thing, and some of the subjects were even the same as his pictures of crime scenes in Manhattan. Some of mine were at least as strange.”
“Remember, I was just a Bos’un Third at that point, civilian clothes, but my division of labor with my Japanese police was that I had the Americans and they had the Japanese.”
“One night I got a call at my quarters just inside the CFAY Main Gate. There had been a rail accident near the Yokosuka-Chuo station that involved some American personnel. I called the base photographer so we could to document the scene in case there was evidence of foul-play. I grabbed my Argus and headed out in my jeep to meet the police at the scene.”
“About a half mile north of the station there was a knot of people around the stopped train, and someone had pulled a police sedan up so the headlights illuminated the scene.”
“It was a mess, I’ll tell you. There were a group of Chief Petty Officers on the train, coming back to base from Tokyo. One of them wanted to go to the benjo and take a leak, and he walked to the back of the car, and opened the door and stepped out.”
“It should have been locked, but it wasn’t. See, there wasn’t a platform between the cars, and there was not a great deal left of the Chief, and what there was wasn’t pretty. I told the Photomate to take pictures from all the angles, but when I looked over he was on his knees, puking on the track bed.”
“I took all the pictures I needed with my Argus. Later, at the inquest, all I had to do was show them and I didn’t have to write much in the report. It saved a lot of time, and I resolved to have my camera with me all the time. It came in handy.”
“Things were wild after the North Koreans invaded the south in June of 1950. I had been there for about eight months, and had got things straight with the Brass. They would not let me bust the Americans that were helping themselves to a nice income. There was a lot of fuel that went missing, and cigarettes and booze, of course. They even were helping the local Japanese strip the teak off the wrecks in the harbor, and make yachts out of it at the private boat works that appeared at the base of the big crane where they used to build imperial navy ships.”
“If I really had the goods on them, I would arrange for the Army guys to arrest them up in Yokohama, where they had jurisdiction.”
“After the war started in Korean things went crazy. There was panic. The Marines at the barracks were getting suited up and shipping out as fast as they could, getting thrown into the fight piecemeal. Some of the soldiers they sent from Eighth Army Rear had never heard a shot fired in anger. They were just occupation jockies thrown in to the meat grinder.”
“The dependent families were getting shipped out to go home. USS Boxer took loads of them when she made the record passage across the Pacific to bring replacement aircraft from the West Coast.”
“One night, I got a call from the base to go investigate four deaths. They were suicides, all of them wives whose husbands had shipped out. They were so spun up that they killed themselves by sticking their heads in the ovens. I didn’t keep the pictures. Really ugly.”
“There was a feeling that the Japanese were going to rise up against us and take back their government. Everyone had the jitters.”
“My office was at Police Headquarters, just to the right out the gate. We were only about two blocks away for the docks, and I could hear something happening down there. I was a little jumpy- everyone was, so I took the Service .45 out of my desk and put it on top and started to write a note to my dear Mother.”
“I could hear voices coming closer to the building and then they stopped and things got ominously quiet. Mauri, my assistant, had been a Master Sergeant in Manchuria in the war. He came in after a few minutes, holding one of those scrolls the Japanese used. It had the names of all the stevedores from the docks on it, and the type of military specialties they had learned when they were fighting us.”
“All my police had signed the thing, too. Instead of wanting to overthrow the Occupation, they all wanted to sign up to go fight for MacArthur in Korea ‘cause they hated those bastard Koreans so intensely.”
“I wish I had my camera that day. The General could have raised a million troops if he wanted to. The Japanese people loved him that much.”
“Stupid the way it worked out, but we seem to do a lot of stupid things, don’t we?”
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com