We were talking about Guam and slowly lowering the levels of the liquids in the glasses in front of us. Mac had a golden Bell’s Lager, from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and I was working on a pale white wine from  South Africa that Kevin the Sommelier had picked out as the Happy hour loss-leader.

We may have been on Guam at the moment, but were headed somewhere else, I was pretty sure. Jasper the Best Bowler on that island was behind the bar with Liz-S.

“Where were we?” I asked owlishly. Mac was getting to the three-quarters mark on his first beer. “Your quarters there on Nimitz Hill?

“It was a two-story Quonset Hut.  It was a dun-colored building. Our room was at the end corner, closest to the HQ. We had in in-room head, Hal Leathers was my roommate, as I have told you before.

“Sounds civilized,” I remarked.

Mac smiled. “A bottle of Three Feathers whiskey was a couple bucks at the Wine Mess. Cigarettes were ten cents a pack.”

“What kind?”

“I smoked Camels  back then . When filters came in, I switched to Winstons.”

“Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should,” I said, quoting the old wheeze.

“It was sort of racy at the time. The ungrammatical clunker in the middle was supposed to broaden the appeal of the brand,” said Mac. It worked on me, anyway.” He wrinkled his brown.

“That would have been in the early ‘50s. 1954 maybe? Anyway, Winston vaulted to number two behind Pell Mells, and finally was the top brand in America by the 1960s.”

“I will never forget when the Marlboro Man died. I remember the folks smoked Pell Mells at one time, but Dad wound up as a Kent guy, but Mom liked Chesterfields. She used to send me up the block to Olsen’s Market to buy them for her.

“You quit in the early ‘70s, right?” Mac nodded. “And you still have COPD today.”

“Cautionary tale, Vic. Do what you want, but you ought to think about quitting yourself.”

“Yessir. Everyone tells me that. So, let’s see:  Nick Russell was your best pal on Guam?”

“Yes, he was a Supply Corps Officer, like Dick Nixon. Interesting story about that- I was teaching at the Intelligence School at Anacostia, and Nixon had stayed in the reserves. It was a requirement that Reserve officers take correspondence courses. I got to grade Mr. Nixon’s when he was Vice President.”

“How were they?”

“Professional. I don’t remember much about them.”

“I don’t suppose failing him would have altered anything.”

“No,” I don’t suppose so.”

“So, when you came back from Guam, everyone was trying to get out as fast as possible. Your Boss Eddie Layton was back testifying. You worked for CAPT Frankel, right?” I flipped through a few pages of notes. “Wendy Furness was getting rid of everything at JICPOA, and then he came up to relieve me. That was about six months after the war ended. Did you still have the Frankenstein car with the borrowed engine?”

“No, I got rid of that heap when I went to Guam. CAPT Frankel just lived up Makalapa Drive, and he let me use the Staff Plymouth.”
“What was that like?”

“Great. The Navy could get tires and gas, so it was a deal. The Army also used the Plymouth, but they painted their cars olive drab. Navy mostly used them for the Flag motor pool, or Assistant Chief of Staff cars. The Navy  P11 Plymouth was mostly stock, with some chrome. Ours had an L-head 6 cylinder engine with a three speed transmission. It took a good foot on the clutch to prevent the car from “bucking” on the up-shift. “

“So what did you do at the office in those days? There obviously was no threat to worry about.”

“No, the war might have been over, but we had a ton of stuff to pack up, shred or get rid of.  That pretty much summed up the task.  Well, that and the odd party at the Junior Officer BOQ in Makalapa. I remember one we had with some Navy Nurses and we drank Grasshoppers. We all got pretty tight, and lost the car. My pal Nick had to drive everyone home. I honestly don’t know where the staff car wound up, but we found it the next day.”

“In 1978, some pilots from my first squadron borrowed a staff car on a port visit to Busan, Korea, and the NCIS was hunting the culprits across Asia. The ones who took the car got thrown in HACQ* by the Skipper and they missed one of the great port visits in history at Pattaya Beach, Thailand.” I beamed at the recollection.” I wound up in Bangkok with the advance detail of the Shore Patrol, which I got away from as soon as possible. Patpong Road was indeed a place to make a hard man humble.”

Mac did not recognize the reference to the song, but he got the drift.  “The staff car had suicide doors, by the way,” he said. “The rear door hinges were set behind the seat on the rear doors.

The door locks were forward.  We called them “suicide doors” since if they were opened while the car was moving they would swing open, sometimes pulling the passenger out of the seat and hurling them into the street. Not good if you are hauling the Admiral around.”

“I remember suicide doors on the old Lincoln Continentals,” I said. “You and Nick didn’t lose any nurses that night, did you?”

“Not that I am aware of,” said Mac, taking a sip of Bell’s.

“Did anyone get lucky?” I asked.

“Only you would ask, Vic.”

“Well, you weren’t married yet, and I need a chapter on Sex and the Single Officer in the War War II Years.”

“Not from me you don’t,” he said with a laugh. “There are some things a gentleman does not discuss even after all these years.”
“All right. So, after six months in peacetime Hawaii, were you restless?”

“You bet. I wanted to stay in the Navy; we had just won the biggest war in history; I had just made Lieutenant Commander. The Pacific Fleet could afford to be generous. If the right job was out there, so they cut me permissive TDY orders to go back to Washington and poke around and see what was possible. If I found something, the understanding was that I did not have to go back to Hawaii to formally detach.”

“But that gets us to a place we have been before, back at Main Navy in Washington and a chance encounter with Admiral Forrest Sherman that changed the course of your life.”

“Indeed it did.” Liz-S topped me off with some more South African white, and brought another Bell’s for the Admiral. He likes two, just two, and that suits him just fine. I just soak the stuff up, and I am pleased that the Bluesmobile does not have suicide doors, not that I can drive that well from the back seat.

* House arrest, confined to quarters.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com