The Rest of the "Japanese" Stories

I was just talking with Dad's old Marine buddy, Don Provin, the other day.  He was asking what stories I had from my Dad's time in the USMC and when he was deployed.

I figured I'd steer him in the direction of this blog, but there are still four stories I can remember about that time that I haven't shared here.  I hope these help Don and I hope they are all the ones there were.  If anyone can remember more please let me know so I can post them.

The first two are what Dad called his:

"Japanese Toilet Stories."  

As they are toilet related I don't think they are appropriate for this blog, and they really wouldn't help Don as he was looking for combat stores which these are definitely not.

"Japanese toilet" in Dar Es Salaam

Let me just say this about them.  The first one involves fecal matter and what Dad always called a "Japanese toilet."  I've included a photo of a toilet of that kind.  They are sometimes called Asian toilets. I call them "floor toilets."

The second story involves stitches.  I will not relate the story but if you watch the movie, "Something About Mary" and you know the story you might recognize the situation there.



The other two stories are disconnected in my memory.  I really don't remember where or when they were supposed to have taken place, but I assume they were sometime while he was deployed overseas (primarily to Japan).  I could call them the:

"Japanese Knife Stories."

The first isn't really a story, but rather a quip or anecdote.  Dad said there were these UN soldiers who each had a knife.  Their tradition was that if the knife was unsheathed it must "taste" blood before being re-sheathed.

I know of two sets of people who have knives with this as a rumored tradition.  The first is the Gurkhas, but I think it is just a myth with them and their kukri knives.  I know Dad did admire the Gurkhas and may have met some, but the tradition seems to not be true.

Kirpan

The second group that I know has a knife tradition (real group, not the fictional Fremen of Dune) is the Sikhs.  One of the five K things they need to have or do is carry a kirpan knife.  It is true that the kirpan must taste blood before being put away.

Compare them yourselves

The story is that the Marines wanted to compare knives.  They showed their Ka-Bars and asked to see the kirpans.  The other soldiers obliged and when they were done the Sikh soldiers pricked their thumbs and put their knives away.

This was very curious and amusing to the young Marines.  They returned to their own group, sitting not too far from the other soldiers.  When another Marine joined their group who had not seen the kirpans before the first group would tell them to go over and ask to see their knives.

The Sikhs were good-natured about this for the first one or two times, but they quickly caught on that the Marines were really just trying to see how many times they would cut themselves.  The next time they sent a Marine over to ask about the knives they took one out as asked, but before putting it away this time they stuck the Marine before putting it away.

The last story really upset me when I heard it and so I never asked for a retelling or further explanation.

If you are squeamish then you should stop reading right now.

Dad said he was cutting tall grass with some Australian soldiers.  They would take a handful of grass and twist it around to hold it up.  Then they would come along with their knives (machetes or Ka-Bars or whatever, I didn't get the details) and cut the bundle of straw at the base.

Dad said he was working near this Australian who, when he made the bundle with his left hand, left his thumb sticking out.  He brought the knife across too close to his hand and cut his thumb.

The way I remember it, and I was prone to imagine the absolute worst when I was younger, what that he cut his whole thumb off.  Later I rationalized that he probably one cut the tip off.  Now thinking about it I'll bet my Dad had said something like, "He cut the whole thumbnail off."

Regardless of how much he cut, it was substantial enough that the Australian could pick up the severed piece.  The story goes that the Australian was so tough that he just picked up his thumb and kept right on cutting grass. 

Happy Veterans' Day

After Dad enlisted in the USMC he was deployed to Japan in '63 - '64.  From his base in Japan he was sent off to a few different places including a training mission to Taiwan.

I've been through Dad's letters home and that training mission is in there, but there were a couple more stories that he told that I can't find more details or evidence of.  I'm not disputing that he did these things, but I don't know how much he confused because he was just a teenage Private and how much he lost to the years.

He told the story of being deployed to a small island off China.  I do know that there was a long running "Warm" fight over the Straights of Formosa.  The hotter fight predated '63, but they were still under dispute when Dad would have been there.  Artillery was lobbed from the mainland to the islands and vice versa.

According to the story, they sent Dad's Battalion to the island, but not all of them could land because a big storm blew in.  The portion of the Battalion that did land had to secure what they had and just wait.

They didn't have all their supplies and the only things they had to eat and drink were ice tea and rice.  Dad never wanted to consume these things ever again after that.

On the first day they were there, their platoon held attack drills.  On a command everyone had to make their way to the bunkers and hunker down until they got the all clear.

They all moved very slowly and slugishly, so when they were all in the bunker their Platoon Sergeant reamed them out.

"When I say move, you move.  You never know when the Chinese could start shelling, by God I wish they would shell right now just to teach you maggots a lesson!"

Lo and behold shelling  did start.

Dad said that he thought, "Oh my God, the Gunny can even call in fire from the Chinese!"

That certainly lit a fire under their butts, and they were never sluggish again.

While they were on the island they had equipment to either build or repair an airfield.  They didn't have all the pieces and didn't have all the people to put the pieces in place, but they had huge crates.

After a while they noticed that each day the crates were a little bit closer to the jungle around them.  The Marines eventually figured out that the natives on the island were trying to steal them by coming in the night and moving the crates a few inches at a time.  They put an end to that.

The funniest part of this story is that eventually they were releived when the other ships finally made it to the island.  They passed out loaves of bread and set up showers.  The Marines on the island had spend several weeks without showering.

There was a camera there (I think it was Dad's) and someone captured the revelry as the Marines delightfully ate their bread and stripped naked to take their open air showers.

The film of that shower day was actually on the back half of a film my Dad had started of him and his friends in and around the base in Japan.

Somehow he didn't know the back half of the film was there and he sent it home for his family to see how their Billy G was doing away in the Marines.  They gathered the whole family together to watch the movie.  Little did they know that it had a shocking surprise ending.

Happy Veterans' Day and Thank you!

Night of the Purple Fog

This morning was the annual appearance of the Orionid Meteor Shower.  October 21, 1962 was a night of a very young moon and it was the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The Battle of Antietam had occurred in September 1862 and many soldiers probably survived their wounds for at least a month only to die at home.

Because of that I believe that today is the 50th anniversary of The Night of the Purple Fog.  To commemorate that I have decided to finally post what is probably my father's most famous campfire story.

My Father enlisted in the USMC in August of 1960 with the hopes of following in the family "business" of Firefighting. Initially he was assigned to a Crash Crew and trained to fight aircraft fires and save trapped fighter pilots. Due to a choice of twelve weeks of guard duty over six weeks on Kitchen Patrol (KP), by October, 1962 he was working as an MP at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, SC.


The Cuban Missile Crisis had the whole country on edge, but no one was more anxious than the military on the south east coast. After the tensions had risen to a particularly fevered pitch, intelligence came down that all bases, and especially their Military Police patrols should be on the lookout for a known saboteur suspected of being somewhere on the east coast with a mission to damage any military facilities possible. Especially high value targets were those bases on which nuclear weapons were housed, like MCAS Beaufort.

I've searched on Google Earth to find the exact spot of this incident and I believe the Ammo Point is located on the north part of the base. The base is surrounded by low lands, swamps, tidal pools, and rivers.

My Father always said that the patrols to the back gate of the Ammo Point were the most difficult because you had to drive all the way around the airfield and at the furthest point you were beyond the range of the radios. It was a single lane road with swamp on one side and water on the other. The MPs at that time patrolled alone in pickup trucks. At night it was a long, dark, lonely ride to a poorly lit gate.

That night Dad drove around to the gate on the edge of his seat, knowing how close they might be to actual Nuclear War. When he reached the end of the road he tried his radio, nothing. He put the handset down on the bench beside where he sat and exited the vehicle to inspect the gate.

When he stepped out he realized that the ground was covered in a low laying fog. Because of the chemicals in the surrounding swamp gases the fog had taken on a violet tinge as it swirled around at boot top level.

Despite the fact that the truck was parked so that the headlights were pointed at the gate, Dad had his flashlight out to keep a watch on the surrounding area. He easily found that the gate was secure, and he turned to return to his truck.

As he turned he could have sworn that he saw a red light blinking in the distance, somewhere off to the right of the truck. He leaned forward and squinted; he held his flashlight out, and he saw it again. Blink, blink.

He thought it could be a reflector of some kind, but he wasn't waving his light around. None of the lights around him were moving, and yet the light blinked. He knew some Morse code and he walked toward the light, trying to tell what letters were being blinked. With his free hand he unsnapped the loop on the holster of his service .45.

He stepped cautiously through the fog, feeling the hard road change to swamp. As he approached the light he realized that it was indeed a reflector and it was the Spanish moss hanging from a nearby tree swaying between them that made it blink. But what had made the moss sway? Only then did a slight breeze begin to stir.

The reflector was a red, reflective ribbon on a brand new wreath of flowers, still fresh, that had been laid on a headstone. My Father had stumbled into a graveyard. The headstone was leaning and overgrown, covered in tree sap and bird droppings. As the gentle puff of wind cleared the fog, he saw the writing on the grave marker.

He had gone on shift at midnight and this couldn't have been two hours into the patrol, and the day, yet the date on the headstone was one hundred years earlier, to the day. My Father had stumbled into an all but forgotten Civil War cemetery.

He looked around for other evidence of the recent visitor. He found it in the shape of a right boot print. He leaned down to get a better look and realized that it was a full inch all around bigger than his own sizable 13.

He looked for the next print and found it; a left boot print at least six feet away from the first one and leading up out of the nearby creek. This creek had no name but it crisscrossed with countless others until it emptied into the Atlantic. He did a quick calculation and estimated that at six feet tall he could take a three foot stride when he was running. A man who took a six foot stride would have to be closer to twelve feet tall.

Just then his flashlight failed. It died slowly, dimming at first and turning yellow until it was barely a trickle of light. He felt the hair on the back of his head and made his way back to the truck at a range walk.

The headlights of the truck seemed to flutter or dim for a moment as he approached. He couldn't see in the bed of the truck so he threw his now useless flashlight back there with a clatter. As he did so he drew his pistol and chambered a round.

He moved around to the driver side and opened the door.

The cab was empty except for the radio handset sitting on his clipboard. He jumped in and put his pistol down next to the mic.

He put the clutch in, put the truck in gear and let out the clutch. Nothing happened. The back tires slid but didn't seem to catch.

It was a dry night and he had stopped solidly on the road. There was no reason for his wheels to spin. He tried again, trying to give it more gas, with the same result. It was like something or someone was holding the back bumper.

He looked in the rearview mirror and saw only black.

Heart racing he kicked in the clutch, jammed it into reverse and popped the clutch. The truck jumped back a few feet. He reversed the procedure and popped it into first.

The wheels squealed but moved him forward. As he peeled around in the sharp turn he needed to get going back down the road, he felt a heavy thump as if someone had jumped into the bed of his truck.

At the same time in that sharp, hard turn, his clipboard, with the radio hand set and his Colt M1911 .45 caliber pistol slide across the bench seat and dumped into the space between the seat and the passenger side door.

He slammed on the gas and raced through the gears. He figured that if a twelve foot tall man were in the back of his truck he would have a hell of a time getting around to open his door and if he wanted to jump out of the bed of the truck at 60 mph, then more power to him.

As he raced around back onto the main part of the base he was too frightened to look in the rearview mirror, even when the lights of the base would have made the bed visible.

He sped through the front gate, right past the guard without slowing down at all. The horrified look on the guard's face confirmed that he had a tiger by the tail in the back of his truck.

He needed a plan to get stopped and out of the truck without running into his passenger. He decide to make directly for the guard shack, where there would be other men and many more weapons. He would put drive right up to a space and let the concrete bumper stop the truck. The sudden stop would kill the truck so suddenly that someone without a proper hand hold in the back would be tossed about. My Father would have steadying hands on the wheel. As his passenger tried to regain his balance my Father would be out his door and make a mad dash for the shack door.

That was exactly what he did. As soon as the truck slammed into the barrier he threw the door open and bolted inside shouting, "Sergeant of the Guard! Sergeant of the Guard!"

He ran right past the desk and grabbed a shotgun out of the rack. He pumped it and put it up to his shoulder aimed at the still swinging double doors.

"What's going on?"

"Giant saboteur, walked out of the water, held my truck, twelve feet tall, flowers, out there!"

Eventually others joined him and they walked out to find his empty truck. It was exactly as he had left it, and there was no one in it.

"But the guard saw it, ask him," my Father protested. "He had a look of pure terror."

The guard had indeed had a terrified look on his face, but he hadn't seen anything except a runaway truck and the look on my Father's face. They were what had scared him so.

In the end my Father had to admit that there was no evidence that anything untoward had happened at all. There was no evidence that anyone had done anything except careless laid a wreath. Nothing except that when my Dad went to get his dead flashlight out of the truck bed he found that it was all wet and there was an old metal milk bottle back there.
The bed had been clean and empty when he had checked it out earlier that night.

NCO to Officer

My oldest is now in college and she has two medium term goals, to get her degree and to graduate as a United States Marine Corps Officer.

This prompted me to tell her how Papa became a US Army Officer.  This is definitely a story that may need additional support from others for authenticity.

After Papa was in the USMC and married for a while, they determined that the two do not mix (at least for Papa and Boushette).  Papa got out of the Marines and joined the Marine Corps Reserve.

A few years and three sons later Papa was an E7 (Gunnery Sergeant) and competed for NCO of the Year.  He won in fact and was awarded NCO of the Year for the entire USMC Reserve.  At about the same time he was applying to attend OCS (Officer Candidate School) with the Marines.

This is where the story gets fuzzy for me.  Either they forwarded the wrong paperwork and some numbskull who was also named William La Fleur was rejected (I can't believe any William La Fleur would be anything less than stellar, but that's just me) and/or his paperwork was delayed because it was the same paperwork that got forwarded for the NCO of the Year Award.

Either way, in the end he was 34 years old before the package went to the board.  At that time (I don't know about now) the USMC had a cutoff of 33 to attend OCS.  He was too old.

He was already a Sergeant in the Chicago Police Department and some of his friends there suggested that he try the Illinois Army National Guard because the Army cutoff age was 35.

He transferred to the Army and ultimately retired as a BG (Brigadier General).  The moral of the story is, keep your goal in sight and keep your legs pumping, never give up there is always a way.

Gap Tooth

I'm not sure what made me think of this today, but here is a quick story.

Dad had always had a gap between his front teeth.  I know we don't remember him that way because he got it fixed so long ago.

When he joined the USMC he had to get a physical and a dental checkup.  The Marine dentist took a look at his mouth and asked him, "You want that gap?"

Dad said that he could do without it.  The dentist reached behind himself and grabbed a pliers.  He stuck them in Dad's mouth, grabbed one of the back teeth and yanked it out.

In a few days Dad's teeth slowly moved and closed the gap.  That back tooth was just one too many teeth and it was crowding the rest until there was just no more room and the front slide sideways just to fit in.