Watching the shipping out

I’ve watched the Pilot coverage of local men and women packing up

and shipping out to join military units in the current war atmosphere

with a powerful sense of familiarity that I’m sure is shared by every

reader who has gone through this experience.

The picture is always the same: family members -- wife or husband,

children, parents -- in the background, usually in front of the

family home, and in the foreground, the recruit, often just removed

from civilian life.

It’s impossible to see this scene without remembering what it was

like. And those recollections play out in two distinct phases: first,

the departure from home to the shock of military life; and later, the

departure from all things dear and familiar to a war zone.

In my case, the second phase is the one I remember so vividly

because it played out like a dead serious comedy of errors.

When I received orders to go overseas early in 1945, I was given a

week to travel from Atlanta, Geo., where I completed my flight

training in a new aircraft, to San Francisco. So I bundled my wife

and infant son into an ancient Studebaker and took off. We had been

preceded there by a pilot friend who had found a rental apartment for

his family in a city where they were hard to come by. He had already

shipped out, but we were invited to share the apartment with his wife

while we looked for a place of our own.

That search was going badly when I had to check in with the Navy

for transportation overseas. There, I met up with a close friend from

my own squadron. We schmoozed with the WAVE who handled our papers

and asked if she would ship us out together. She said she would try.

We had to leave a phone number where we were told to stand by every

day from 11 o’clock until noon. If we weren’t called, we were free

for another 24 hours.

So that became our life. Stress and uncertainty until noon, and

then, when there was no call, my wife and I would improvise a bed in

the car for our son and go looking for a place for her to live while

I was gone. We grabbed our time together in 24-hour cycles, and as

the days drifted by, my friend called to tell me he had his orders

and to ask if I had mine. Then he was gone, and it slowly became

clear that the rest of the squadron was probably gone, too.

In this peculiar vacuum, we finally found a house to rent and

moved into it. I continued to return to the old apartment to monitor

the phone each morning, but no call came. After three weeks of this

drill, two things became clear. Somewhere, somehow the system had

screwed up. And because I apparently no longer existed in their

records, I wasn’t being paid. Money was getting very tight.

That’s when I went in and asked what was happening.

I’ve often wondered since how long this might have played out

before they sent the Marines after me. At any rate, when I appeared,

they discovered that our WAVE had stapled my friend’s transportation

card on top of mine and filed it. So I was officially gone.

This agitated the Navy officer in charge sufficiently that he put

me on the quickest possible transportation -- which meant that night

on the Pan American Clipper.

There were some emotional advantages in this abruptness. When I

got home, we didn’t have time to deal with the finality of what was

happening, only to pack hurriedly before my wife put the baby in the

car and drove me to the Pan American office in downtown San

Francisco. We said goodbye in the car. I stood at the curb and

watched my wife and son drive away.

The Pan American Clipper was the Queen Mary of air travel. The

Navy used it for sending dignitaries a high-ranking military to

combat areas. It was some measure of their sense of urgency to get me

on my way that they put a Navy lieutenant in this company. It was

also clear that when a U.S. senator was a late addition to the

flight, I was the logical passenger to be bumped. And I was. They

booked me on the next Clipper flight the next morning and offered me

a hotel room.

I walked the streets for a half-hour trying to decide whether I

wanted to go through the agony -- and put my wife through it -- of

parting again. Then I made the phone call; I didn’t have the strength

not to do it.

I’ve never regretted that act, although we were emotionally

exhausted when she dropped me off once again the next morning.

This time I got off -- with a load of admirals, generals and

congressmen. I had no interest in socializing with this crowd, but I

didn’t have my wits about me when an admiral stuck his head through

the curtains of my bunk and asked if I played poker. I said I did,

and he virtually ordered me to fill out a game heavy with brass.

My only interest was to lose what I had and get out, so I took

outrageous chances and won. And won. I had several hundred dollars by

the time we got to Oahu and was certain the admiral would have me

sent out to the worst duty post in the Pacific.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen. I came home nine months later

with the war won, eager to return to civilian life with my family, an

ending which I devoutly hope will happen to all of the men and women

saying goodbyes in this current national crisis. When it is over,

they will have their own stories, as I do.

The stories will change with each family’s experience, but the

feelings that surround those stories will be formed from the same

common cloth.

A deep-down fear of loss that has to be buried beneath a surge of

certainty that it is only temporary. The shock of going so suddenly

from the sure and secure to a doubtful and dangerous unknown. The

sudden recognition of all the things that should have been done and

said and haven’t. And all this mixed inexplicably with an

exhilaration of going about a distasteful job that holds out the

promise of adventure before reality sets in.

And when it is all done, the memories -- some, perhaps,

bittersweet -- can be harvested and embraced, especially the memories

of partings that can be brought up instantly as we empathize with

fellow humans now going through this same agonizing experience.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.