Sayonara (3 page)

I said, “You come see me in ten years and you'll see a happy citizen!”

Joe took a final slug and cried, “I believe you, Ace. Boy, Ace, you're one in a million. Ace, you're one officer in a million I could talk to.” He shook my hand clumsily and banged his way out into the dusty company street. Then he looked back and cried, “Boy, Ace! We got it made! We're gonna get married!” and he staggered off to the mess hall.

O
n Monday Pvt. Kelly and I flew over to Japan on the same plane and as I watched him strap himself into his bucket seat with real joy at the idea of getting home to his girl I thought how different our two journeys were. He was heading for dumpy, round Katsumi and a future that no one could guess, while I was heading for the big surprise that General Webster had arranged for me: a safe desk job, marriage to his beautiful daughter Eileen, and before too many years a promotion surely to colonel and maybe to general.

I didn't talk with Kelly on the trip over because there were some colonels aboard and it seemed wiser for me to sit up front with them and exchange ideas about the Russian pilots we were meeting over Korea. But when we reached Japan the medics came aboard to disinfect the plane, and while I was standing in the aisle Kelly whispered, “Ace, you're the only friend I know here, and you bein' with the squadron…” I thought he was going to touch me for some cash and I prepared to hand him a fin, but he said, “I was wonderin' if you'd be my best man. Saturday?”

The colonels started moving out and I couldn't stand there arguing. My whole inclination—everything I had ever been taught, all I had experienced—led me to say no, but I blurted out, “O.K.”

“Thanks,” he said, and as he trudged across the field, bow-legged
and with a gangster slouch, I thought that this square-headed, sandy-haired kid was not the kind you read about in books when they describe the great lovers. Somehow you didn't think of Pvt. Joe Kelly fighting through walls of flame to win the princess. You thought of him as the tough kid at the filling station who whistles through his teeth at bobby soxers going past in jalopies. But he was off to marry an Asiatic girl in a strange land and I had to admit that he had guts.

I was watching him when General Webster called my name and when I looked his way there stood Mrs. Webster, too. I shouted, “Surprise! When did you get here?”

Mrs. Webster was a handsome woman—the kind who appear in ads wearing tailored suits and white hair and telling the young bride why one cleaner is better than the other—and it was widely understood in Army circles that Mark Webster owed most of his success to this brilliant and energetic woman. I once heard my father say, when some of his classmates from '22 were visiting, “Mark Webster at the Point was an inevitable colonel. Absolutely impossible for him to go further. But a first-class wife came along and made him a general.” There was no scorn in his voice when he said this—and no envy.

When Mrs. Webster saw me she hurried forward to kiss me on the cheek. I had to make believe I didn't know where Eileen was so I asked, “What's the news from Eileen?”

The conspirators looked at each other archly. “She's still at work in the oil company,” Mrs. Webster said. “But she finds Tulsa dull without you around.”

“Boy, did I find Korea dull without her!”

General Webster said, “I hope you didn't mind my dragging you away from the Russians.”

“Frankly, sir, I approved. I was getting a bit jittery.”

“Well, we'll drive you in to Kobe and let you see what the setup is. You're on the Interservice Aviation Board, you know, but you don't start work for a week.”

“I'll get some sleep,” I said, and the Websters snickered to themselves.

He led me to a black Cadillac with one bright red star on the license plate. He had always been something of a dandy, ten pounds underweight, extra-sharp uniforms and a smart headquarters company to make him look good. He was what enlisted men call chicken because he demanded all the military courtesies, straight caps, shined shoes. He himself moved with an exaggerated stride and cultivated
a straight-from-the-heart look. Having known my own father well and having discovered in him a real general who cut right through the nonsense to the hard core of every problem, leaving glossy shoes and snappy salutes to others, I often suspected that Mark Webster was merely playing at being a general. Once I remarked on this to my father, who grew very angry. He said, “Look, Know-it-all! The Army needs many different kinds of generals. Mark Webster can do a dozen things I can't do.” Then he scowled and said, “Not that I would want to do them. But don't underestimate the men who keep the organization running.” About three days later we were dining in a restaurant that featured a lot of swank and Father said, “I always admire headwaiters who appear unflustered yet keep the organization running.” I put my hand over my mouth and mumbled, “That's what you said the other day about General Webster.” He looked up sharply, considered for a moment and said, “I guess that's what I meant—if I said it.”

But on this ride in from the airport General Webster was way off stride. He wasn't his urbane self at all. In fact, he was downright uncomfortable, but it wasn't until we neared the center of Kobe that I found out what was eating him. Mrs. Webster was riding herd again.

We were passing a corner at which half a dozen enlisted men—we had orders not to call them G.I.'s any more—were loafing. They were in Kobe for Rest and Recuperation from the front in Korea. Like most soldiers, they were recuperating with streetwalkers. Five chunky Japanese girls were standing with them and as we drove by, one of the soldiers slapped a girl on the bottom. She squealed.

“That's what I mean,” Mrs. Webster said.

“Kobe's a recreation center,” the general said grimly. “I can't change it.”

“It's disgraceful.”

“I know it is,” the general snorted.

“Furthermore, it degrades the military uniform.”

“There seem to be no rules against it,” General Webster mumbled, leaning back in a disgruntled slouch.

Mrs. Webster, seeing she could get no further with the general, asked me, “What do you think about it, Lloyd?”

“Don't try to make me argue against a general,” I pleaded.

General Webster sat up. “Seriously, Gruver, what do you younger officers think?”

I had just started to say, “I've never understood how any self-
respecting officer can go with a Japanese girl” when I stopped sharp. For straight ahead of our Cadillac was a tall Marine lieutenant coming out of a nylon-underwear shop accompanied by the first beautiful Japanese girl I had ever seen. She was slim and black haired and her eyes didn't slant. And she laughed. Somehow I had never thought of Japanese girls as laughing. But this extraordinarily beautiful girl laughed and tucked her parcel of nylon underwear beneath her left arm. Then, like any American wife at a busy corner, she grasped her Marine's hand warmly and smiled up at him.

“It's a disgrace,” the general snorted.

Mrs. Webster leaned forward to watch the Marine and his girl. “Why, he's a handsome young man,” she gasped. “Probably from a very good family. What's he doing with a Japanese girl?”

I had a smart-aleck reply to that question but stifled it and then caught the general's eye and saw clearly that he had thought of the same reply and had killed his, too, for the same reason that I had killed mine. Mrs. Webster looked at us and asked, “Is it true, Mark, that some of our young men have actually married such girls?”

“About 10,000 of them,” he replied gruffly.

“I simply can't believe it! Yellow girls as mothers of an American home! Even the poor fellows who married French girls last time…Remember those awful Farringdons at Camp Polk?”

General Webster asked, “Any of your outfit married to Japanese girls?”

I said, “I spent all afternoon last Friday arguing with a kid nineteen who's determined to marry one of them.”

“How deplorable!” Mrs. Webster sighed. She spoke with real compassion, and it was apparent that she honestly felt sorry for any nineteen-year-old boy who, far from home, had got himself mixed up with a Japanese girl.

At that moment a fat Army major, obviously a civilian, came ambling down the street, window-shopping as he might have done in San Francisco, and on his arm, window-shopping too, was a Japanese girl. Some fellow officers wandered by and the fat major stopped them to introduce his girl just as if she had been a girl he was dating at home. The girl chatted with the other officers for a moment and then led her major on down the street.

“You must do something about such behavior,” Mrs. Webster said grimly. “At least on the officer level.”

Our Cadillac stopped at Camp Kobe and General Webster
bounded out of the car and said, “I have one disagreeable job to do. Nancy, you go on back to the club. Lloyd and I'll meet you there soon.”

Mrs. Webster smiled at me archly and said, “They're having a special luncheon for us today. I might almost say an extraordinary one.”

The general showed me to a davenport in his outer office—paneled in Japanese pine and very handsome—and told his aide, “All right, I'll see him now.” A colonel with highly polished boots disappeared into an inner room and said crisply, “General Webster will see you now.”

Through the door came sawed-off Airman Kelly. Playing the Air Force game, he never acknowledged he knew me but stared straight ahead, following the spruced-up colonel, but as he disappeared through the door leading to General Webster's inner office, he shrugged his shoulders.

I studied the maps in the general's waiting room and browsed through his copy of the
Infantry Journal,
but my reading was disrupted by the general shouting, “Why in hell do you want to marry her, anyway?”

Then I heard the colonel argue more persuasively, “But, Private Kelly, if you do marry her you can't take her back to the States.”

Kelly's response was muffled but judging from what happened next the kid must have said, “I don't want to go back to the States,” because the general shouted, “By God, I'll send you back whether you want to go or not. Colonel, send this young whippersnapper home. Tonight!”

That was when I first heard Kelly's voice. He said, “I won't go.”

The general exploded. “You won't go!”

Kelly said, “That's right, because Congressman Shimmark has arranged it for me to get married.”

I have found that no matter where you are in the military—Army, Air Force, Navy, it doesn't matter—things quiet down when somebody mentions Congress. I remember hearing about the time my father was stuck in the Philippines without supplies. It was during the battle when he got his fourth star and MacArthur could drop dead and Nimitz was a bum and he would bust Roosevelt in the nose. But a five-foot-four-inch Congressman appeared and Father became as smooth as butter. Because he knew that Congressmen run the military. They approve the budget.

So General Webster retreated before the name of Congressman
Shimmark. “All right,” he blustered, “go ahead and ruin your life. I've done my duty. I've tried to stop you.” Then he apparently turned to the colonel, for he snapped, “Arrange the young fool's wedding. Next we'll be running a nursery.”

The colonel was grim-lipped as he led Kelly back into the waiting room. “Who do you think you are,” he muttered savagely, “speaking to a general that way?”

Kelly said with great finality, “I ain't takin' no more pushin' around. I'm gettin' married.”

The colonel showed him to the door and said, “You'll regret it as long as you live.”

Kelly looked at the colonel and laughed. Then he saw me and shrugged his shoulders again. “Saturday,” he said through the corner of his mouth.

When he had gone the general appeared. He was red in the face and mumbling. “By God, in the old days we'd have thrown an insolent moron like that into the stockade. Now it's the new Army, and every young pup writes to his Congressman. Damn, I wish all Congressmen would drop dead.” Quickly he looked about the room to see if anyone had heard this remark.

The colonel tried to make a joke and said, “You can't stop men from marrying women!”

The general looked at him as if he had gone off his rocker and growled, “But you can keep officers of the United States Army from making utter fools of themselves in public. And by God I will.”

Then he saw me and, taking me by the arm, said, “Lloyd, I certainly do wish the imbeciles I have under me were sensible like you. But then you've been reared in a tradition of service to the nation. You understand what a uniform means.” He looked for his Cadillac, which hadn't yet returned, and called for a Buick instead. As soon as we got inside he said, “Speaking of Eileen, let's eat.”

“I wasn't speaking of Eileen.” I laughed.

“I was,” he said “Because…I mean…it's inconceivable that these officers you see parading Japanese girls could ever have known clean, decent American girls like Eileen….”

He turned abruptly and his voice sputtered like a volcano gasping for air. Across the street stood the fat major and his window-shopping Japanese girl. They were looking at dresses, holding hands in the spring sunshine. The general leaned forward and asked his driver, “Isn't that Major Bartlett?”

“Yes, sir.”

“A shoe salesman in civilian life,” the general snorted. “What can you expect?”

The driver corrected him. “Major Bartlett's the one who owns the chain of filling stations, sir.”

General Webster relaxed. “God, what an army!” he sighed.

We drove up to the deluxe Japanese hotel which housed the Officers Club and I could sense the general becoming excited at the prospect of surprising me with Eileen. As a matter of fact, I got pretty steamed up myself because I hadn't seen Eileen for more than a year. Nervously I slapped my wallet for good luck and started up the marble steps.

A Japanese bellhop greeted the general. A Japanese bell captain handed him some papers. A Japanese elevator operator took us briskly up to the general's suite and a Japanese chambermaid hurried down the hall ahead of us. A Japanese butler opened the door for us, grinning happily, and a Japanese housemaid bowed almost to the floor, honoring the general.