Baa Baa Black Sheep (33 page)

But perhaps this tiny medallion I always wear from my neck on a slim gold chain is a sort of connection with all three. Or even, perhaps this is what all religions, the same as all talismans, are expected to be—a connection.

Unlike so many flyers I know, even those in my own outfit, I have not always worn a good-luck charm. Today, as we know, a good many such so-called charms are on the bottom of the ocean. So I do not consider this medallion one as such. At least not in the ordinary sense, for it represents to me something even bigger than that, and I never will part with it.

Nor did I have it even at the time I was knocked down. It was given to me afterward, long afterward, and after a series of circumstances that, if described the easiest way, would have to be described as “peculiar.”

In regard to the word so loosely described as “religion,” I used to go to the Protestant services sometimes with some of the Protestant pilots in the squadron, and at other times I’d go to Mass with the Catholic pilots. Indeed, I once heard a padre in Guadalcanal give one of the meatiest Easter sermons I ever heard. Instead of going on at great length on
something that didn’t interest the boys, he spent about an hour telling the boys why they should write home more often to their folks.

“Explain to your folks,” he said, “that Guadalcanal is not a hellhole any more,” which it wasn’t at that time. “Your people back home think that you’re living an awful life out here. Let them know that you’re getting along fine, that you have plenty of food and are not
always
being bothered by Japanese bombers. It isn’t fair to let your people think that you’re suffering when you’re not.”

It was about one of the most sensible Easter talks one could expect to hear. And even now, today, so many of us who were out there are expected to answer such questions as which made the best chaplains, the Catholics or the Protestants. My answer would be that it depended on the circumstances as well as the man.

Because on my records I was listed as a Protestant, and still am, it was up to a Protestant chaplain to preach my funeral services after I had been “killed.” Nor was it until years later, after I was released from the Japanese prison camp, that I had the opportunity to thank him for the nice things he had said about me. He was quite a boy. At our airstrip, while we were flying, he had lived in a tent with the Catholic padre and a rabbi, and I had asked him, “Gee whiz, how do you three get along?”

He had just laughed and said: “Well, I’ll tell you. We’ve gotten along wonderfully here for months. I get along fine with them as long as they don’t try to convert me!” I liked him for that.

The Japanese military have a little prayer of their own, too, which I was to learn later. Any chaplain, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, would have to agree that even this Japanese prayer had something in it too; I say this even after I had listened to it in Japanese for some eighteen months. It would be given each morning and afternoon while all of us were in formation.

At first I could not figure out the prayer, so I asked someone what it meant. He told me that it meant that they would be kind to those less fortunate than they were, and guide the weak, and so forth. The way he described it to me it meant just anything that would be similar to one we would give in any of our own religions. So any one of them who
would live up to that prayer, the same as any of us who could live up to the Lord’s Prayer, could not be too far off his base.

Mentioning our own assortment of padres, I cannot help think that the Catholic chaplains had a knack usually of stealing the show. They seemed extraordinarily congenial in their special efforts to get along with the boys. They seemed to try hard to talk the boys’ language and to try to understand them. In fact, some of their language couldn’t be used after the boys got home here.

There was one Catholic chaplain, in Espiritu Santo, whom I used to like to go over and talk with on rainy nights, and we never talked about religion. From him I learned something about their organization and how they had helped the Allies in the Pacific. He told me that the Church had known all about this Pacific war long before it ever started, and that the Church knew what islands were going to be taken, and how the Church quietly had removed all the German priests from these islands ahead of time, even from the islands we were on then, and had replaced them with American and French priests. The reason the Church had been able to do this, the padre explained, without any of the German priests being suspicious, was that instead of transferring them they gave them all promotions and moved them back to the Vatican. This was to prevent their helping the Japanese, of course, and yet they had no idea at the time of what was going on. Whether they would have or not, the Church removed all temptation very cleverly.

On one of the down-pouring nights, as I was trudging along through the coconut trees near the fighter strip, I was very nearly drowned in my attempt to get to my cribbage-playing pal’s tent. In order to get the proper coral for constructing a runway or taxi way the bulldozers had taken the coral from the ground, leaving behind long pits. Some of them were ten or twelve feet deep, and they were left open. The pits had been completely filled with rain water, and in the darkness they resembled many of the roadways, which were also covered with water. By accident I happened to walk into a water-filled pit on my way to the padre’s, wearing hip boots and a heavy raincoat. The suddenness, combined with the extra weight, made it almost impossible for me to crawl up the vertical sides submerged in the water. I must have struggled nearly twenty minutes before I got out. While I sat
beside the ditch, waiting to catch my breath, I realized that I had had a near miss.

It was pleasant while talking or playing cribbage with my friend. We occupied ourselves until the wee hours of the morning by smoking long black cigars and quietly sipping brandy. I never seemed to get drunk when I was with this man, though. Apparently I must have been seeking something, although I wasn’t quite certain what it might be. This man seemed to possess what I needed.

Even at that time, I am positive, I realized that fame or fortune could not be the answer. I was seeking happiness and peace of mind, but the way to get these eluded me. Fortunately, for me, I know now that spiritual things are the only answer.

Yet out of it all, and in regard to this tiny medallion of mine, I hardly know just how to classify my attachment to it, whether faith, or trust, or part of something I believe I am just beginning to understand.

When, after being shot down, I finally got aboard my little raft, and no clothes on, I found that I had something clutched in my hand. It was a small card that had been sent to me by a Catholic nun from Jersey City. The card was soaked with sea water then, of course, as I held it and looked at it and wondered why I had it. And it was then I remembered how, a couple of years previously, passing through Jersey City, I had given a talk to a Catholic orphanage, and a couple of little girl orphans took a fancy to me. So, when I was out in the South Pacific long afterward I had sent this nun some money to buy dresses for these two little orphans, and the nun had mailed it to me.

Please don’t get the idea that I had turned noble, because I hadn’t, not in the least. I had won a considerable sum of money playing poker with some starry-eyed second lieutenants who had more money than they knew what to do with. But it bothered me, and I would have gladly given the money back if I’d thought they would accept it. Nor was I the type of person who gambled with his own squadron mates, for I didn’t like the idea of people firing guns behind me when they owed me money. I gambled with people I didn’t have to fly with.

So that is how I happened to think of the nun. But I didn’t think of her and the orphans until I had spent all I could on whisky while in Sydney.

I had paid little or no attention to the card when I received it, but absently had stuck it in my jacket pocket, the pocket that happens to be above the heart. But why now on the raft I had it in my hand, water-soaked though it was, I never will know. Yet, for some peculiar reason, I now looked at it more closely than I had before. It was a picture of a lady with a baby in her arms, and there was a boat on a stormy sea. On the back of it I could make out the blurred lettering of a lengthy prayer. I read it over time after time, while drifting there. I probably read it over forty or fifty times, and it seemed to give me a great deal of company, and I was sickly unhappy when later the Japanese, after taking me, also took the card away from me.

While floating about the Pacific I had time to meditate. I wondered how it was possible for me to be saved from death so many times when people I considered so much better than myself had to die. I hated myself, but it was for the first time that I realized a Higher Power than myself does with one as it wishes. I truthfully wondered why a Higher Power might be saving a bum like me.

I look back now and realize that this was the first time I had ever prayed without asking for something, the first time I had ever prayed honestly, or properly, in my entire lifetime. I wasn’t asking for a deal, although I wasn’t conscious that it is impossible to make a so-called deal with one’s Higher Power.

I prayed: “I don’t know why I was saved, and I don’t really care, but you have my permission to do anything with me you want. You take over. You’ve got the controls!” And, oddly enough, this seemed to help me through the next two hectic months.

After being released from the prison camp, at the end of the war, and returning to the United States, I sent a letter to the nun and told her about the card and that it had come to be in my hand at such a time, when there seemed no chance at all of getting out. I wrote all this to her as best I could, and when I was in New York City sometime later the little nun presented me with my medallion to replace the card. And this is why I always will wear this medallion. It is about the size of a dime, or even smaller. On one side is the Virgin Mary, and the edge is bordered with stars.

How much simpler life would be for all of us if we could turn our lives over to some comic-strip cartoonist and say: “Here you are, mister. You take on from here.” He would leave us in all kinds of tough situations, of course, but it also would be up to him to get us out of them. He could not very well let us, his main characters, be drowned or killed, for he himself would then be out of a job. His strip would have reached an end.

I was not thinking of this while floating around on that raft. But I am thinking of it now, and the whole string of incidents does seem to parallel some of those strips we have seen. The cartoons are not always funny, and neither was my own case, but always the last panel of each strip leaves me suspended again with a sort of “to be continued” motif.

And so on, and it would now be up to the cartoonist to get me out of this fix but immediately into something else equally suspenseful. It would be his worry, not mine. But on looking back I must admit he did a rather pat job of it and should be congratulated.

After I had been floating around on the raft for something like eight hours, I happened to see something come to
the surface nearby. I looked at it and realized that it was a submarine—a large submarine.

Only a cartoonist could have thought of that, and also of the idea that it should not be an American submarine but one belonging to the enemy, which it turned out to be. But I didn’t know this until the sub came alongside. I figured that in those waters it could very well be one of ours and started to take hope. But then, as it drew alongside, I could see a tarpaulin stretched by four lines to the conning tower, and right in the center was that angry red meat ball.

“Oh God, Boyington,” I said, and heaved anything I thought might be of military value over the side of the raft. The only things I didn’t heave over the side were my jungle pack, which I knew would float and they would pick up anyhow, and my medicine kit, which I thought might be of use later on.

As the sub pulled closer, out of the conning tower came a lot of funny-looking little men. They all had on the same kind of hat. I later saw that these hats were all one size and had a kind of shoestring affair in the back to adjust them so they would fit anything from a fathead down to a pinhead.

After the sub came alongside, a line was tossed to me, and when I grabbed hold of it they pulled in the little raft. The men helped me aboard, took my rubber raft and jungle pack aboard, then sat me down on the deck. One of them, in English, asked my name.

I was going to give him a phony name and a phony rank because I didn’t have on any clothes. A thought ran through my mind that it wouldn’t be too conducive to longevity to tell my real identity. Just as I was about ready to give this phony information, I happened to glance at my jungle pack, lying there on the deck, and on the back was stenciled: “Major G. Boyington, USMC.” So I decided to give them my correct name instead. I didn’t think they would know me in their navy.

The one person who spoke English was a pharmacist’s mate, and he said to me: “You don’t have to worry about anything as long as you are on this boat.” That made me feel about as comfortable as the old turkey does before Thanksgiving. It left me to wonder what the hell was going to happen when they took me ashore.

Strangely, I was given the best treatment I ever had
while I was a captive. The sub stayed surfaced all the way into Rabaul Harbor, more than a two-hour trip, and anchored just after darkness. But meanwhile they offered me sweet tea and cookies, and gave me cigarettes, which didn’t taste good at the time, and matches.

Later I found out that the cigarettes they gave me were their better brands; Sakara and Cherry were the words in their language. This was the only time the Nips didn’t stand around and gawk at me. The majority of them proceeded about their business and paid no attention to me.