A FICTIONAL NON-FICTION TRIP TO JAPAN
By Jim Kittelberger
IN THREE PARTS. PART TWO.
The blue bus reached the end of it’s run when we arrived at Komaki AFB in the southern part of Honshu,
the main island of Japan. But the journey for some of us wasn’t over just yet. Several of us, including Ray I was glad
to discover were transferred to a six-by, a colloquialism for a large truck designed to carry troops and of course supplies,
the six-by denoting the size. Our travel in relative comfort, at least by military standards, was over. We loaded our duffel
bags into the truck before seating ourselves on the wooden benches that ran from front to back on either side. The trick now
would be to hang on and not be thrown out, not unlike a rodeo rider trying to stay on a bucking horse. Off we went, down what
we would certainly call unimproved roads bouncing and inhaling the smell of spent diesel fuel. A smell, that strangely enough,
after fifty years I still associate to my days in Japan and the unloved six-bys.
After a relatively short ride we arrived at what was to be our home for the foreseeable future, Gifu AFB.
Gifu was described to me by a career airman, who had been many places in his time, as the best place he’d
been, or as the place he remembers most fondly. He had come to Gifu, with a group of guys directly from Korea when that cleared
up over there, so perhaps by comparison it would seem a place of calm and peace. He was only a budding career airman at that
time but he was older than the incoming group that I was a member of. Thus we always thought of him as the more serious one
and someone we could ask questions of, and we did. Introducing A.A. Tilley from the great state of Oklahoma. AA was a tall
slender bespectacled, even-tempered man who spoke with a cowboy twang and if we weren’t all hanging out in the same
uniform would have looked at home wearing blue jeans with a piece of straw, or a Marlboro cigarette hanging loosely from his
mouth.
As in college or any other fraternal organization we were all assigned rooms. Ray and I were assigned to a room
already occupied by AA, along with the new fourth member of America’s protectors, Billy Tumbler from Selma, Alabama.
Billy had hair the color and texture of tassels of corn silk springing from field corn in mid August. He was blond, skinny
and tall, cocky and friendly at the same time. He stood with one hip sticking out, smart-ass without words. He was also a
world-class poker player, in his own mind.
In any army, in any country, at any time of the day, there is a card game going on. Camp Gifu was no exception.
It is a time-killer for sure, but it’s also a game that breaks through all social and ethnic barriers quickly and gets
to what is important to everyone, and that’s winning. Army camps, or any other kind of camp, i.e. marine, air force,
navy, and coast guard, even lumber, you get the idea are alike. Men with time on their hands and over confident in their belief
that they are the best card shuffler of the bunch and everyone else will have to learn to beware of the fate that is soon
to befall them. Footlockers, a standard in all barracks, covered with the handy blanket are ready in an army minute for the
action to come. Billy, his mouth salivating in expectation of the fleecing of these sheep before him, stood in his cocky pose
and said he was sure the others would take his money soon, but he was willing to go ahead and try to do as well as he could,
the standard misdirection statement that is only good one time.
Oh poor Billy. Before he had the chance to beguile the sheep with his stories of his heroic days in good ole
Selma in the early fifties he was fleeced. How could this be? A lesson learned early by poor Billy that appearances are sometimes
deceiving and there is always someone better or slicker than you.
Camp Gifu’s mission was, as we were to find out, a mobile communications outfit. Teletype and radio operators,
and the needed maintenance units to keep everything working manned the outfit. We were in business to go where needed in case
another Air Force base in the immediate Pacific went off the air because of weather or whatever. In my time there we went
to Taiwan to help out and also to Okinawa after a Typhoon played havoc with them. Which brings me to one of only a couple
war stories I retain much memory of.
On a mission to Taiwan, which in those days was known as Formosa (a statement of absolutely no importance to
anyone except map makers) we were flying over the China Sea when my war story began:
As we lumbered through the sky most of the passengers were asleep from boredom. I was dozing fitfully as I was
and am not now a great fan of aeronautics and it’s ability to keep an aluminum and steel cylinder with wings in the
air. When a flight sergeant appeared in the aisle demanding our attention.
"We’re having engine problems. He stated. "We’ve feathered one engine and another is running erratically."
We were flying in a four-engine plane, so one engine feathering is not extremely serious, but two is trouble
big-time.
"We may have to ditch", the sergeant said.
Complete quiet among the passengers, something whenever I think back upon it rather surprised me. Not that I
was thinking of it at the time. When he made his next pronouncement I must tell you I became completely calm. A very strange
reaction I thought then, but after years of contemplation, maybe not so strange after all.
"If we get the signal we will have to exit the airplane". He started to tell us how to put on the parachutes.
"When you get to within", and I really don’t remember exactly what number he said, two feet, ten feet,
twenty feet, I don’t remember, you will have to pull the release mechanism located here. He then showed us how that
was going to work. "The reason this is important is because if you don’t hit the release, the parachute may drag you
under the water."
"Oh shit", I thought. But still no panic, just the feeling that he and I were the only people in the plane and
he’ll be O.K. but I won’t."
My only thoughts were that if I do by dumb luck bail out successfully, release the mechanism at the proper time,
and drop into the water, I would certainly drown, because a swimmer I am not. In the time we had after preparing ourselves
for the eventuality I thought I should take my glasses off and I did and put them into my breast pocket along with my wedding
ring which I figured would slide off in the water, and buttoned them up.
The sergeant with one attempt at calming us told us that life rafts would be shoved overboard, and would be
waiting for us.
I figured if I didn’t kill myself jumping out, I would forget, or not do the release mechanism properly,
and end up under the China Sea, or I would not be able to swim to a raft. I was a goner and I knew it.
Anticlimax.
The second engine did not stop and we landed in Taiwan safely. The funny thing, if there is such a thing, is
there was very little talk about any of it, like it never happened. I’m sure the shrinks have a medical term for such
a reaction. But I wasn’t interested then and I’m not interested now.
The heatwave that we endured this summer reminded
me of this little story I wrote a few years ago.
A BAD CASE OF WRITER’S BLOCK
By Jim Kittelberger
“It was
a dark and gloomy night and my brain is dead”.
**&^%%$##@#$%^^&&&***^%%$#
Now is the time
for all good men to come to the aid of their country and me
He pushed
himself back from the typewriter, disgusted with the worst case of writers block he had ever had to endure. And to add to his misery, it must be ninety-five degrees in this squalid walkup apartment he called his
office. His undershirt felt like it had absorbed ten pounds of sweat and smelled
like it too.
From the always-on
radio in the corner of the room came the sounds of the announcer proclaiming the benefits of Wild Root Crème Oil Charley. On it’s return swing, the rotary fan by the desk slightly ruffled the paper
in the typewriter, but did not stay long enough to have any effect on his physical or mental misery.
As he got
up from his desk, the spring of his wooden office chair groaned and snapped with the relieved burden of the slightly out of
shape two hundred fifty pound ex-newspaper reporter.
“That’s
all I need now, to have the damn chair break. Oh what makes the difference, I
can’t write sitting, I might as well try it standing,” he said to himself as he realized he was talking out loud
to an empty room. He headed for the small kitchen and a cool one. The refrigerator revealed a pan with the remains of a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup with
the spoon still inside, a half empty pack of Camel cigarettes, a sign of his latest attempt to stop smoking, and two bottles
of Blatz brew. He grabbed the cold brown bottle and held it to his forehead. The cold from the fridge and the bottle of Blatz momentarily relieving his momentum
toward heat stroke, assuring him of a little more time to finish the great American novel.
He had returned
unscathed and in the best shape of his life from Guadalcanal to his old job of reporter for the local rag. But after an unsuccessful adjustment to civilian life with all its rules and regulations along with unreasonable
expectations that you must contribute something to your employers endeavor, he quit.
He walked out after giving a grand speech about fighting for liberty and then coming home to find that his was
being denied. It was really almost a teary eyed performance and was well received
by other nine to fivers listening and taking in the whole show. He actually received
some spattering of applause as he righteously exited into the world of the free.
He leaned
against the wall in his Pullman kitchen taking a last swig of the quickly warming brew, and had to smile remembering that
moment of liberation and promise. But the promise and the back military pay he
received upon discharge were fast dwindling, thus adding to his current miseries of writers block, heat prostration, and a
bad case of body odor. As if on cue, the radio announcer asked a rude question
that would very probably guarantee a loss of friendship of any real live person, “Do you have B.O.? Then bathe daily with Lifebuoy.”
“You
don’t have to tell me twice,” he said to the empty room, “I’m getting nothing accomplished at the
typewriter, so I might as well hit the shower and maybe, just maybe, my mind will clear and I’ll get some words down
on paper,” he said to the void, and nodding his head in agreement with himself headed for the bathroom and a clean start.
Laying his head
back on the only chair worth sitting in, with his feet on the coffee table, he lit one of his formerly refrigerated Camels. He relished the clean refreshed feeling, but knew it would be short lived. The heat of the dying day was unrelenting and a breeze was non-existent.
Oh, if it would only rain, that might help a little.
It rained
a lot on the Canal, and it never helped a damn bit there. If anything, it just
jacked the humidity up a few more notches. But that was a jungle. Oh no, he thought, I’m not going there. When I left
there, I left there. Like most of the vets he met, there was little or no talk
of the bad times. But they did talk of the good times, and there were some of
those too. He remembered a time at Pearl with a good buddy of his. They had been invited to a private late-night luau that turned into a lulu of a luau. A smile started on his face, then, just as quickly it disappeared as he remembered that was just before
the Canal and his buddy never came back.
He must have dozed
because the radio woke him with the loud sound of the contents of Fibber McGee’s closet hitting the deck and McGee yelling
again how he’ll have to get it cleaned out.
It occurred
to him that in all the years working for the paper before and after the war, that he had never had a time when the words stopped
for him. He loved working with words. Whether
as a reporter, when he just had to get the right facts in the right order down on paper in a timely manner, or when his editor
moved him to commentary and he had to try and make sense out of what was happening in the world, they came in a rush. But this time no words would come.
This was
new to him, and he was more than a little frightened. It was not unlike a logjam
at the mouth of a river when all the logs strive to flow freely at the same time. They’re
all facing in different directions and just the opposite happens, none of them come through.
This in essence, he believed was happening to him, the logjam of ideas were all trying to come out at the same time
or, and this was the most frightening, there were no logs or ideas to begin with, in which case he shouldn’t be a writer
at all.
He leaped
to his feet and started pacing the floor. The inertia was making him depressed,
and God knows he didn’t need to go there. He had read somewhere that some
writers kept an apple in their desk because the smell made them think more clearly.
He had no apples on hand, so that was no good.
He fell
to the floor and began doing push-ups, ten, twenty, thirty. His muscles quivered,
then his arms gave out, and he lay prostrate on the floor. Not only was his brain
deserting him, he was also becoming a physical wreck. He used to be able to do
a hundred of those damn things. Suddenly, the inertia felt good as he cradled
his head in his arms and remained where he fell on the floor.
He thought
back to when it felt good to lie on the floor reading his comic books, which were becoming more and more plentiful and the
kids loved them. The coal furnace filled the house with its strangely comforting
aroma as his mom sat in an overstuffed chair mending holes in old socks. There
was no doubt that he had gotten his love of books and words from his mother. She
was university trained in English and the humanities, and was teaching school until she married and had her son. His mother introduced him to Tom Sawyer, Moby Dick, and Treasure Island, and she taught him to understand
and love poetry. She also taught him the power of words spoken and written correctly. When he went to the university he gravitated most naturally, it seemed to him, to
journalism. He never regretted his decision except when payday arrived and he
was always a day late and a dollar short, as the vernacular of the day went. But
he hoped, in spite of the odds against it, that perhaps he had a book in him that someone would pay to read. If that happened, but money did not follow, maybe a measure of fame would, and give the words he might
produce afterwards a measure of power. He had a smile on his face as he drifted
off.
Every bone in
his body hurt as he rolled over and started to awaken. He hated it when he fell
asleep on the floor. There was just no give to wooden floors and, even though
he had a little padding on his frame, it still felt like all his bones were fused together as he started to move first one
arm, then the other, and finally his legs until all the pieces stopped hurting and he brought himself to a sitting position. The radio was playing the national anthem, so it must be midnight. His stomach also told him he had forgotten to feed it.
As he walked
from the kitchen eating a peanut butter foldover, he stared at the silent typewriter with a look of betrayal on his face. He was being betrayed by a friend of these many years and he felt obliged to hear
a reason for it. The typewriter sat there ignoring him. He took that as a personal
affront, stuck his nose in the air, and turned his back on it.
A window without
a screen opened onto the fire escape and provided a place for solitary thought and maybe even a stray breeze that might happen
by. He picked up the last pear for dessert and climbed out. He sat with his back against the building and felt the residual heat still remaining from the hot day. As he had many times before, he glanced down at the passing world below him. It was after midnight and the traffic was light.
Businesses were closing or had closed. A wife, I assume, was walking beside an inebriated man, her husband, I assume,
and reading him the riot act for spending most of the weeks check in the saloon and for her having to come after him before
he spent it all. Another couple was holding hands, seemingly oblivious to anyone
else in the world as they walked along. They were enjoying love in its first
blush, deep and belonging only to them. The sounds that carried his way were
gentle and muted. Cars waited more patiently for traffic lights to change, then
accelerated more slowly in step with the less hurried, more personal nightlife of the city.
He had worked many all-nighters for the paper and the difference between the day people and the night people was quite
evident to him. Night people were more talkative, less stressed, and more open, as if the velvet blackness of the night shielded
them from the reality that the day people had to deal with. As a newspaperman,
an interview with a night person was more candid as one person talking to another, conversing instead of make statements. Editors loved night people for personality pieces to fill the Sunday supplements. He liked them too.
He leaned
his head back against the building, lit a cigarette and closed his eyes, taking in a deep lungful of smoke. When he opened his eyes, he was looking at a sky so clear, so black, it seemed he could reach out and touch
a star. The moon was nearly full, and he could make out textures and shadings. It seemed so peaceful. His mind again
tried to comprehend that the same moon he was gazing at from his fire escape, the friendly, beautiful, lovers moon, shining
down so benevolently on the city, adding background for everything romantic, is the same exact moon that shined on steaming
jungles full of men trying desperately to kill the other guy before he killed him. The
same moon shines over people dying of disease or hunger, caring not a whit.
“Oh, to
hell with that”, he said as he yanked himself back from analyzing the world condition to his immediate problem. “Maybe my mother was too diligent in her teachings. I seem too often to philosophize and get myself backed into a conundrum and a blasted enigma with no way
to get out.”
He lay his head
back, gazing up and willing that moon to answer his questions. He closed his
eyes for just a moment and a slight breeze ruffled his hair. He remembered another
time a breeze ruffled his hair, a bittersweet time of great happiness and great sadness.
A time when the moon shone brightly for him until, in his stupidity, he shot it out of the sky. Yes, contrary to what
most people thought, there was a time when love had a role in his life. Before
the war he had met and fallen deeply in love with a fellow writer, but was unable to live two lives as most normal people
seem to be able to do. When a story called, he answered. Until a day came when she, ah she was lovely, made him choose. Oh
Lord, why couldn’t I have made some room for her. But he had made his choice
for ill or good, and you have no other option but to live with your decisions, as he was every day of his life.
He glanced down
at his watch; the luminescent green glow read four o’clock. His rear end
was telling him to please relieve it of the burden of his weight for a spell. He
obeyed and made his way back inside.
The radio station
had signed off for the night and the radio was emitting a strange garbled noise as he rushed to turn it off. He strolled to his phonograph and started to select something that might fit his mood. A mood that would reflect his blasted empty head, he thought as he gave a silent growl. He stacked a few on the changer and flipped the switch. As
he sat and laid his head back, he noticed a fly walking on the ceiling. It was
not any special fly but just the normal black housefly. It seemed quite big though. He wondered if it was that large because it had survived many missed flyswatters,
or was that just the average size of his, his, and what the heck word do I want? his breed?
If he had gotten this big, he must he rather intelligent or has splendid eyesight and reflexes. Look at him; I think he’s looking down at me right now. I
think we’re having a staring contest. I wonder how long these do-nothing
insects live, providing they are able to dodge the before mentioned perils? All
of a sudden he flew from his ceiling perch to land on the remains of my dessert pear.
My first instinct was to shoo him away, but on further thought, it seemed we had made some kind of connection, some
kind of understanding. Perhaps we were the first members of the human/bug alliance. So, in accordance with our new understanding I sat and watched him enjoy himself. Ah, peace, understanding, and co-existence on earth, is there anything better? As he watched the fly eat, his eyelids became heavy and he slept.
©
Jim Kittelberger 2002. All Rights Reserved
Oh I'm so, so tired of saying goodbye
As we grow older and the poignant moments of
partings begin to pile up, we learn to accept the
natural order of things.
My lifetime friend and I have endured saying
goodbye to our grandparents, our parents, and sisters.
Now we have said goodbye to the last of our children,
Each one pursuing their dreams at locations
far from their onetime home. It's natural, it's normal,
But damn it gets old.
“Buck up you old fool”, I’m told. “That’s
the way
it is”.
Yeah, I suppose it is.
2005 jim kittelberger
|