No Ordinary Joes (40 page)

Of all the Dear John stories he’d heard, the worst involved his crewmate George Stauber, the guy who’d been on watch the morning they went down. Stauber thought about his fiancée constantly when they were in the camp. When Stauber got back stateside, she came to visit him in the hospital—with her new husband. Stauber ended up having to be restrained in a straitjacket—at least that’s the way Chuck heard it.

Chuck watched Buck climb the stairs to Irene’s apartment. He knew that Irene had married and had a child while he was gone, but still, he wanted to see her. She was his first brush with love. He remembered how pretty she was. Did she know he’d been a POW?

Heart pounding, Chuck peered around a corner of the building and watched Buck knock on her door. What if her husband answered? The door opened. “I have somebody I want you to meet,” he heard Buck say.

Irene stepped outside and Chuck moved to the bottom of the stairs in full view. Irene stared in disbelief, her hand covering her mouth. “Chuck! Chuck!” she exclaimed, running down the stairs. “I thought you were dead. You’re alive … you’re alive!”

She threw her arms around him, tears streaming down her face. Chuck hugged her, and they embraced for what seemed like forever to Chuck, as her tears turned to joyful sobs.

Finally, Irene took him by the hand and led him back up the stairs and into the apartment. Toys covered the living room floor. She quickly explained that her two-year-old son was asleep in a back room, and that her husband was at work. As Chuck sat down on the couch, he let his eyes wash over her. She was just as pretty as he remembered—and she was pregnant.

Buck excused himself, saying he’d be back in a couple of hours to pick up Chuck.

The two hours sped by. Irene told him that she’d stopped writing because she’d met her husband and just couldn’t make herself write a Dear John letter, figuring that Chuck would eventually figure it out. Her husband had been in the Army Reserve but didn’t see combat and was now selling insurance. She talked about what a nice, considerate man he was, and how hard he worked to support her and their son. When the boy woke up from his nap, Chuck held him on his knee while Irene fixed lunch.

Buck returned to pick up Chuck. Hearing Buck come up the stairs, Irene grabbed Chuck’s hand and clutched it tight. “I really did love you, Chuck,” she said, tears filling her eyes.

Two weeks later, Chuck sat across from his mother, holding a letter from Irene. “What should I do?” he asked.

“You’re a grown man, Chuck,” she replied. “I can’t tell you what to do. But I hoped I raised you well enough so that you know what’s right.”

Chuck glanced down at Irene’s letter. It had caught him completely
off guard. In it she confessed that she had never stopped loving him, and had gotten married because her husband was just so nice and promised he would take good care of her, but it was Chuck who truly owned her heart. But what took him totally by surprise was that she said that she would leave her husband and marry Chuck if he would still have her and her children. She said that she wanted to have more children with him.

“I thought you wanted to marry the Australian girl,” said his mom.

“I thought I did,” replied Chuck.

B
ob stood on the deck of the transport ship, staring out at the ocean. He couldn’t remember if they’d been sailing for ten or eleven days—a lot of things were still fuzzy to him—but he did know they’d be arriving in San Francisco in a couple of days. He hoped his beloved wife Barbara would be there to greet him.

Before leaving Guam, he’d sent a telegram to the apartment on Pine Street where she’d lived when they got married on December 16, 1941. He didn’t know if she still lived there, but he was counting on the telegram being forwarded if she didn’t. He’d also sent a telegram to his dad and stepmother in Medford, telling them to make sure Barbara knew he was coming home.

When he’d walked out of the Death Hut, he weighed barely 80 pounds; now a month later, he’d already gained back about 30 pounds, although he still had little muscle tone. His various physical ailments, including the beriberi, were greatly improved, but he was still struggling psychologically. On a couple of the days aboard the ship, he’d been so depressed that it was all he could do to get out of his bunk to go for chow. He kept reminding himself not to let his mind go to the dark places, to keep it positive, to think about holding Barbara in his arms once again, but it was a struggle.

Barbara tried to digest the news. “What should I do?” she asked.

“You know what I want,” replied Robert Kunhardt.

They were sitting in a motel room in Escanaba, Michigan, on the shores of Lake Michigan in the state’s Upper Peninsula, the latest stop on the USS
Muro
’s goodwill tour of the Great Lakes. Barbara had just received the telegram from Bob; Edna, her former roommate back in San Francisco, had forwarded it to her. His ship would be arriving in San Francisco in seven days.

For over two years, Barbara had not known whether her husband was dead or alive. She had repeatedly tried to get information from the Navy Department, without success. When other names of
Grenadier
crew members showed up on the Red Cross’s list of POWs, but not his, her hopes sunk even lower. When Barbara initially started dating Kunhardt, eight months after the
Grenadier
went down, she wondered whether she’d waited long enough and if she’d been persuaded to start dating again because of the package of Bob’s belongings that she’d received from the woman in Australia.

Barbara was, of course, greatly relieved to find out Bob was still alive. But now she was almost two years into a relationship with Kunhardt and in love with him.

The next day, with the wife of another
Muro
officer as her passenger, she took off for San Francisco in Kunhardt’s ’41 Ford. She was going to do the right thing and be there to meet Bob when he got off that ship. Beyond that, she wasn’t sure.

Barbara heard the knock on the door and groggily rolled off the couch. It was 11:00 a.m. on September 29, 1945, and she was in her former apartment on Pine Street in San Francisco, where her friend Edna now resided. She’d arrived at 3:00 a.m. after driving straight through from Salt Lake City and dropping off the other wife at a friend’s house. Bob’s ship was due in in four hours.

She opened the door, surprised to find her father standing there. He’d taken a Greyhound bus from Medford and then a cab to the apartment. Before leaving Michigan, she had sent her parents a telegram telling them she was going to meet Bob.

She recognized the look on her father’s face: it was the same one he’d worn when he and her mother told her back in high school that they didn’t want her dating Bob.

“Your mother and I don’t think you should meet that ship. Don’t get me wrong. We’re happy to know that Bob is still alive. But we just think you’d be making a big mistake if you show up to greet him. It’ll send the wrong message. The truth is, your lot in life will be infinitely better with Robert Kunhardt. We don’t even know what Bob will be like. I’ve seen some of these returning GIs, and most of them have battle shock. They’re not the same as they were before the war. That’s probably going to be the case with Bob.”

Barbara looked overwhelmed.

“I think you and I should drive home to Medford,” said her father.

When Bob stepped off his ship, finally back in America after all those months, nobody was there to greet him.

Bob handed the bus driver a $100 bill. “I can’t change this,” the driver said. “Don’t you have a dime?”

Bob shook his head. At Oak Knoll, he’d received over $3,000 in back pay, paid in $100 bills. He was trying to catch a bus from Oak Knoll to San Francisco. He needed to get to the Navy outfitter; all he had was the Army uniform he’d been given in Guam.

He had been back in America for over a week. He was glad to be back home, but his state of mind wasn’t good. Every day in prison camp he had fantasized about what it would be like when Barbara greeted him when he stepped off the ship, even down to the clothes she’d be wearing; when she wasn’t there when he walked down the gangway, he was crushed. He stood on the pier for minutes, shoulders sagging, hoping she would appear. He wondered if maybe she hadn’t gotten his telegram, so he took a cab to the Pine Street apartment, where he talked with Edna, the woman now living there. After several awkward moments, she explained that Barbara had met another man, an Annapolis grad from a prominent family back east, and was now up in Medford with her parents. He thanked Edna for
the information and left. The next day, he reached Barbara by phone, telling her that when he was released from Oak Knoll in a couple of days, he would be transferred to Camp White near Medford and hoped to see her. She said nothing about Kunhardt; he said nothing about being a POW. She did, however, agree to meet.

The bus driver handed Bob back the $100 bill. “Did you serve overseas?” he asked.

Bob nodded.

“Then you’re a hero in my book. And heroes ride for free.”

Barbara’s father opened the door and let Bob inside, shaking his hand. “We were so happy to get the news that you were alive,” he said. “How are you doing?”

“Fine, thank you, sir,” replied Bob, turning to also greet Barbara’s mother. Then he caught his first glimpse of Barbara.

She was even cuter, shapelier than he remembered. Tears welled in his eyes; his knees felt as if they would surely buckle. He tried to speak, but the words stalled, his long-rehearsed speech vanishing back down his throat. He just stood and stared.

Tears also rushed to Barbara’s eyes. Bob looked so much older. The last time she’d seen him he was a young twenty-one-year-old, bright-eyed and sure of himself even as he was about to go off to war. Now, standing there in his new blue Navy uniform, he looked tired, puffy, uncertain.

She giggled nervously, and then moved to give him a hug. Bob hugged her back, but the moment was stiff, uncomfortable. In his dreams of this moment, he never saw Mr. and Mrs. Koehler standing two feet away. Nor did he imagine seeing another man’s engagement ring on his wife’s finger, a ring that probably cost twenty times more than the one Barbara had bought just before they got married.

They all sat down in the living room, and Barbara sensed his discomfort. “Shall we go for a drive and look around the old town?” she offered.

Soon they were driving south of town on Highway 99, through Ashland and up into the Siskiyou Mountains, Bob just staring at the road.

“What happened to you?” asked Barbara. “What happened to your ship? How come you were never on any Red Cross POW list I saw?”

“Don’t know.”

“How did they treat you? Did they beat you?”

He didn’t answer and just kept driving on the narrow road up Mount Ashland in silence. He lit another cigarette, flicking the ashes out the window.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Fine,” he answered.

But clearly he wasn’t. His silence and his refusal to tell her anything about what had happened scared Barbara. She didn’t think that he was going to hurt her physically, but she was afraid that he had come back so emotionally scarred that he would never be the same.

The last three weeks had moved so fast: the telegram that he was alive, the decision to meet his ship, the cross-country drive, the intervention by her father, the return to Medford, the cables from Kunhardt, and now seeing the shell of a man who was still her husband.

“You just seem, er, um …” she stuttered.

“Seem so what?”

“I guess ‘sad’ is the word I’d use.”

“Can you blame me?” he said. “I survived by thinking about you. And I come home and find you’ve run off with somebody else.”

“Bob, I thought you were dead.”

“Well, I hear this is the age of gold diggers, so I guess that’s what I can expect.”

“That’s not fair.”

“So what do you want to do?” he asked. “Do you want a divorce?”

She hesitated, and then replied softly: “I suppose.”

He turned the car around and drove back to Medford in silence.

Two weeks later, Barbara parked Kunhardt’s Ford in front of the Medford Hotel and went inside, heading directly for the bar. A friend had told her that Bob had been spotted drinking there the past couple of nights.

Barbara had also heard from mutual friends that at one point Bob had been put in a very small hospital room, almost like a cage, and spent most of the next forty-eight hours curled in the fetal position in a corner. A nurse had come into the room and Bob proposed to her. Despite this behavior, Bob had improved enough that he was regularly given twelve-hour leaves, which he used to go to the Medford Hotel bar and get drunk.

One of the reasons Barbara wanted to talk to Bob was to tell him that she was driving back to Michigan the next day to rejoin Kunhardt. She also wanted to tell him that her father had offered to pay the $200 necessary for them to get a divorce in Reno. And she just wanted to see how he was doing. She truly cared about him, even though she was worried that what he’d been through was just too hard for him to cope with, and would be for her as well.

Entering the dimly lit bar, Barbara spotted Bob sitting alone on a stool at the end of the bar. “Mind if I sit down?” she asked.

“I hear it’s a free country,” he slurred.

She quickly told him she was leaving the next day. He awkwardly put his arm around her. “Does this mean I’ll never see you again?” he asked.

“Who knows what the future holds?” she said.

“Well, if we aren’t ever going to see each other again, then how’s about let’s get a room here … and … you know. For old time’s sake?”

The offer completely surprised Barbara. She studied him to see if he was serious. He was—at least he was to the extent he could be after drinking for three hours. She saw those beautiful blue eyes and the hint of that devilish smile she’d loved so much as a teenager.

Taking his hand, she led him out of the bar to the front desk.

There was a knock at the door. “I’ll get it,” said Barbara, getting off the couch. It was mid-December 1945, and she was visiting with Edna in the apartment on Pine Street in San Francisco. After leaving Medford, she’d driven back to Michigan and rejoined Kunhardt. They’d traveled to New Orleans, where the
Muro
was temporarily stationed prior to shipping off to Pearl Harbor for several months. From New Orleans, she had driven
back to San Francisco; Kunhardt would join her there in the early spring, when they planned to marry.