American Patriot

by Robert Coram

  Nevertheless, a Hollywood Marine received the same training as one at Parris Island. For many of the recruits, basic training, or boot camp, was their first taste of harsh discipline. Bud and his fellow members of Platoon 12-08, a designation that meant they were the eighth platoon to go through basic training in December, were met by a drill instructor (DI) whose greeting began with “I am your father. I am your mother. I am Jesus Christ. You people are shitheads.”

  Marine Corps training of recruits always has been the most rugged of any branch of the military. And Day went through in the “Old Corps,” long before there were any considerations of recruits except hammering them into Marines. For many of the boys, boot camp was entirely outside any experience they had ever known. But for Bud Day, the training was an upgraded version of his childhood. Drill instructors were tough but not that much tougher than Ed Day. Life in the Marine Corps was about discipline, and discipline was about following orders and not breaking the rules. Back in Siouxland, there was only one way to do things and that was the Ed Day way. Now there was only the Marine Corps way.

  Recruits found it impossible to please a DI. For eight miserable weeks they were told every hour of every day that they were shitheads who were not good enough to be Marines. They suffered through endless inspections. When they were in the field, they drank water from a creek. (Pills dropped into the water were supposed to kill the fecal coliform that came from runoff in the nearby pastures where herds of cattle grazed, but these lads were training to become U.S. Marines, so what was a little cow shit in the water?) The DIs filled the pockets of the recruits’ uniforms with sand and marched the burdened youngsters around the base. They put buckets on the recruits’ heads and banged away. Recruits learned the Manual of Arms, how to fire an M1 while prone, standing, or zigzagging across a field. They learned map reading and navigation and how to exist off the land.

  From the day the recruits walked onto the hallowed ground of the MCRD, they were taught that Marines were superior to all other forms of life, that they were the greatest warriors ever to tread the earth, and that soldiers were mere “dogfaces” while sailors were “swabbies” or “squid.” You never yield, Day was told. You never give up. You are a leader. You will take charge. You represent America. It is mandatory that you succeed. Failure is not an option. And the Marines are the greatest fighting force the world has ever known, always ready, willing, and able to accept whatever job they are assigned. Their war plan is simple: kill everyone they meet. If they are not shooting, they are reloading.

  More than a decade later, General William Thornson of the U.S. Army said, “There are two kinds of people that understand Marines: Marines and the enemy. Everyone else has a secondhand opinion.” He wrote that Marines treat their military service as if it were a kind of cult, that they are cocky and foulmouthed but that their sense of brotherhood sets them apart, and, further, that they are “the most professional soldiers and the finest men and women I have ever had the pleasure to meet.”

  MCRD meant growing up in all sorts of ways. The Marine Corps insisted that recruits shave every morning. So Bud Day began shaving for the first time. Early in boot camp, Bud ate the first salad of his life. He also had his first steak. Being a Marine Corps steak served in a Marine Corps chow hall, it was not a good steak, not even a mediocre steak. In fact, it was little more than a hunk of gristle, far tougher than any pheasant or duck or pigeon that he had ever eaten. He was not impressed.

  About halfway through his basic training, Bud came down with “cat fever,” a pneumonia-like malady that sent him to the hospital for three weeks. Any disorder severe enough to send a seventeen-year-old to a military hospital for three weeks is serious. But Day’s stay was particularly painful because, during war, any recruit in sick bay was considered a malingerer.

  As soon as Bud was ambulatory, he was put to work operating an elevator in the hospital. There he saw an endless parade of military dependents: pregnant women, old men, crippled veterans. Many older veterans — men in their sixties or seventies, many wounded or disabled in World War I — lived in the hospital. As part of training, the recruits all had studied the “Red Book,” which included, among other things, the benefits of a military career. One of the strongest points made was that if a man gave the U.S. military twenty years, the military would, for the remainder of his life, give him free medical benefits. Bud knew that the old veterans believed this to be one of the most important benefits of a military career. But he was a seventeen-year-old shithead, and his level of interest in free medical benefits was too low to be measured.

  When Bud was released from the hospital, he was put on light duty for several weeks. The hospital stay, followed by light duty, meant he had to drop back several recruit classes. Considering what happened later, cat fever may have saved his life.

  DORIS had not seen Bud for several weeks at the skating pond. She asked about him and was told, “He’s gone. He joined the Marines.” She wondered why he had not said good-bye.

  But he had not forgotten her. While Bud was in the hospital, he called a friend in Sioux City and said, “Tell that Sorensen girl with the big smile to write me.”

  When the friend called Doris, she said, “I never write first to a boy. You tell Bud to write me.” As she and Bud’s friend were negotiating the protocols of who should first write, her mother walked into the room and told Doris to hang up the phone, that her father was expected to call. Doris quickly said to Bud’s friend, “Okay, give me his address.”

  So Doris wrote first, and soon the letters were flying back and forth. Doris read the first letters to her mother. Then, over the next several years, as the tenor of the letters changed and Bud became more expressive about his feelings, she began to omit parts of the letters when reading.

  BUD graduated from boot camp in early March, a few days after he turned eighteen. No longer a recruit, no longer a shithead, he now belonged to Mother Green. He had been taught — and since the teaching came from a DI, it had ecclesiastical weight — that when dogfaces go to war, the soldiers sew a combat patch on the shoulder of their uniform and call for the Marines. When swabbies go to war, they sip their coffee and call for the Marines. When Army Air Forces weenies go to war, they have a drink and call for the Marines. All men are born equal. But then some become Marines.

  In years to come, great honors would be showered upon Bud Day. But up there at the top of the list of the things of which he was most proud was that he was a Marine. Not that he once had been a Marine but that he was a Marine.

  UPON graduation from boot camp, Bud attended the combat rifleman school, the final course before being assigned to a unit. He expected to be ordered to Hawaii, where the 2nd Marine Division had been formed and was finishing training. Scuttlebutt was that they were about to ship out to a combat zone. Bud Day expected to be with them — and that is what would have happened had it not been for the long arm of John Brodie.

  Brodie, the Sioux City lawyer and father of his good friend, had been a Democrat back when almost everyone else in the Sioux City power structure was a Republican. With the Depression conversion of many of them to Democrats, Brodie was elevated to a position of some influence. He now used his political connections to request that the Marine Corps grant Bud a week’s leave. The purpose: to take a battery of tests, receive his high school diploma, and graduate as a member of the Central High School class of 1943. The Marine Corps granted the request.

  Ed Day could not have been more pleased. When Bud received his diploma, his father nodded in approval and said, “That was one of the few smart things you ever did.”

  Bud left Sioux City with twenty-five cents in his pocket. On the long bus trip back to California, he had nothing to eat, only a few small cartons of milk. This was not a hardship for a Riverside boy. It was simply how things were. And, of course, worse was to come.

  FEW armies anywhere have ever done what the Marine Corps did in the Pacific in the early 1940s. Marines were island-hopping: taking real estate away
from the Japanese and paying for it with blood. Their casualties were horrendous. But the glory was everlasting. By the spring of 1943, Marines were manning dozens of islands in the Pacific. Christmas Island, Wake Island, Midway, Johnston, and Palmyra — all were garrisons in the island chain.

  In early April, Bud shouldered his seabag, boarded the Henderson, and shipped out for Pearl Harbor. The Marines were preparing to land on Bougainville. Bud Day soon would be in the thick of the fighting. But Bud Day’s great exploits as a warrior were not to take place in the Pacific in World War II; it is almost as if the gods of war were saving him for another conflict, for another form of battle.

  The Henderson was three days out of Pearl Harbor when the captain thought an enemy submarine was nearby and ordered general quarters. Bud moved swiftly toward his appointed position. As he climbed through a hatch on an upper deck, the gunner of a heavy caliber machine gun opened fire to clear the barrel. Bud was so close that the noise ruptured his right eardrum. Within a day the ear was infected. A corpsman administered a sulfa drug, but Bud was allergic to the drug and became sicker. The corpsman gave him more of the drug. When the ship arrived at Pearl Harbor, Bud was hospitalized and underwent a mastoid operation. After the operation, doctors administered a new drug called penicillin. Bud was so allergic to penicillin that he almost died.

  He was in the hospital five months, during which doctors considered giving him a medical discharge. The long illness took a heavy toll, and Bud, never a big man, became downright puny. Doctors put him on light duty and assigned him to the nearby Navy Yard, where he could gain a few pounds and they could keep an eye on him. He was given a job in the mess hall, peeling potatoes. All around him Marines were being ordered to islands in the Pacific where heavy fighting was going on. But Bud’s personnel records were at the hospital rather than at the Replacement Depot, and the doctors thought Bud Day was too weak for combat.

  After a few weeks, he received orders sending him to Johnston Island, a thousand-yard-long atoll 717 miles west-southwest of Hawaii that served as a refueling stop for Navy ships. It was an island caught in the backwaters of the war. The 3rd Marine Defense Battalion, about forty civilian construction workers, and a squadron of small bombers called Scout Bombers–Dive (SBD) were based there. The island was to be a staging area for B-29s when America attacked the Mariana Islands.

  When Bud arrived late in the fall of 1943, the civilian contractor had almost finished extending the runway. Some fifteen hundred troops lived on Johnston Island and nearby Sand Island. Bud’s first job was as the powder man for a five-inch gun. Every day, from an hour before sunrise to an hour after sunset, he stood by the gun. Had the island come under attack, it would have been his job to toss bags of gunpowder down the barrel.

  About a year later, Bud was promoted to corporal and became the noncommissioned officer in charge (NCOIC) of a searchlight battery that was integrated with a 90 mm antiaircraft artillery (AAA) gun. As a corporal, Bud supervised the duties of men under his command and wrote reports on their activities.

  That he had so much responsibility at such a low rank illustrates a crucial point about the Marine Corps. Men of comparable enlisted rank in the Army Air Forces were taught about machines, about equipment, about technology. Enlisted soldiers were taught about weapons and small-unit tactics. But from the first time a Marine wears the green uniform, he is taught leadership. Being a Marine is about taking charge.

  But in any capacity, duty on Johnston Island was boring. After the Battle of Midway, Johnston Island found itself in a deserted part of the vast Pacific. Bud spent his days looking for Japanese ships that never came.

  Because Johnston Island was so remote, the Navy provided plenty of recreational outlets for young Marines. Fishing equipment and an extensive library were both offered. Bud’s reading, or at least the nature of what he read, was relatively unusual among eighteen-year-old Marines. He became a fan of John Steinbeck and Hemingway. He read Erskine Caldwell and thought it was the most salacious material ever printed. He read every work of history he could find. Perhaps because of the reading, perhaps because of what he had observed thus far in the Marine Corps, he was coming to realize that one aspect of the military was the same as civilian life: educated people had privileges.

  Bud certainly did not spend all his free time with a book in hand. Young Marines are as famous for alcohol consumption and hell-raising as they are for their combat skills. The line between boyish exuberance and illegality can be thin. The drinking aspect of Bud’s time on Johnston Island marks the beginning of his wild-rabbit days, the time when his rambunctious side came out and he flirted with activities beyond the pale.

  Johnston Island brought out a side of Bud that, even today, few people know about. Before the story of his drinking can be told, a fish story must be told.

  It was Marine Corps policy to serve fish to all hands on Friday. The salted fish came from a warehouse. Officers began griping that they were in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by fish-filled waters, and were eating salted fish. They wanted fresh fish.

  The Navy cook suddenly was under pressure. He put out the word that he wanted fresh fish for the officers’ mess.

  Bud had provided food for the family table since he was ten years old, and gathering fish for a chow hall did not seem that big of a challenge. He approached the cook and offered a deal. “I can get you fresh fish, not only for the officers’ mess but for all the enlisted troops on Johnston Island.”

  A cook on a remote island has little chance of moving up the ranks. It would have been a real coup to provide fish for the officers. But to do so for the officers and more than a thousand enlisted men — well, the Marine Corps appreciates initiative and results. The cook was looking at a sure promotion.

  He also knew that Corporal Day was not doing this out of the goodness of his heart. There had to be a catch. He stared at Bud and said, “What do you want in return?”

  “All the syrup off every can of peaches. And yeast.”

  The cook raised his eyebrows. Marines ate canned peaches two or three days a week. Bud was talking about gallons of syrup. That much syrup could be used for only one thing. But the cook decided that was none of his business. The two men shook hands.

  Bud then “liberated” — that is the military term for “stole” — a 25-horsepower outboard engine from the civilian contractor. He hid the engine for a few days until the civilians finished the runway extension and were transferred off the island. They left behind a beamy fifteen-foot wooden boat. Bud also “liberated” the boat.

  Next, between the protective sandbagged walls of the searchlight battery, Bud built a whiskey still modeled on the ones he had found in Riverside. Once the still was completed, he gave the cook a heads-up: expect fresh fish for Friday.

  A reef surrounded much of Johnston Island. Three days each week a Navy scow went outside the reef and dumped the garbage of fifteen hundred men. Thousands of fish gathered for the feast: white tuna, sea bass, dozens of species. Several hours before the first garbage run of the week was to take place, Bud took his purloined vessel into the shallows near the island. At his feet was a box of “liberated” hand grenades. Schools of mullet numbering in the thousands took refuge in the three-feet-deep waters. When Bud saw a school of mullet, he pulled the pin on a grenade and threw it into the water. Scores of stunned fish covered the surface. Day scooped up a few dozen and then motored to where the garbage scow was moving offshore. As the Navy enlisted guys began throwing garbage overboard, the big pelagic fish were swarming.

  Bud hooked a mullet on a fishing rig and tossed it overboard, and a few seconds later he was fighting a forty-pound tuna. One after another, fish after fish was pulled in. When his boat was in danger of swamping from the load, he motored back and presented his catch to the cook. He did the same thing the next time the garbage scow went out. On Friday the officers and men feasted on fresh fish, and Bud received his gallons of peach syrup and boxes of yeast.

  Bud took the fixings b
ack to his still and began brewing moonshine. But either he had the wrong kind of yeast or he had not paid enough attention to construction details of the still back home, since he produced only a weak, milky liquor that he called “-Horrible Hooch.” The stuff was too bad to sell even to Marines, so he gave it away to a few friends.

  Every Friday until April 1945, when Bud rotated back to Hawaii, the officers of Johnston Island, unlike Marines elsewhere in the Pacific, feasted on tuna only hours out of the ocean. And Bud Day and a few friends regularly became sick on Horrible Hooch. Had Bud’s moonshining activities been discovered, he would have been court-martialed and sent to the brig.

  ONE day Doris and her mother were talking about Bud’s letters, and her mother said, “He has nice handwriting.” Doris agreed. What she did not know was that her sister was reading all of Bud’s letters and showing them — unedited — to their mother. But it seemed to make no difference.

  Doris and her mother had developed a daily ritual. Each afternoon when Doris came home from school, her mother would have ready a plate of pastries. The two snacked, read passages from the Bible, and prayed for the safety of Bud Day.

  Even though the tone of the letters between Bud and Doris had changed, Doris remained careful in her letters to Bud. She rarely used the word “I” but instead used the word “we,” meaning herself and her mother. “We pray for you every day and are waiting for you to come home,” she wrote.

  Bud was moved. No one ever said they were waiting for him or that they were praying for his safety. He wrote his parents often, but their responses were slow and almost impersonal.