Reluctant Warriors (4 page)

The sharp rattle of guns was opening up on him from all sides now. He pushed the
throttles all the way forward and turned for home. As he got clear of the harbor,
he came up in altitude and kicked the airspeed up to about 350. At this speed, the
enemy would have to be on him immediately to have any chance of catching him.

Nothing followed. Twenty minutes and more than a hundred miles out, he stepped the
engines back to 250. He began regular calculations of his position, and rubbernecked
every few minutes to see if anyone was coming after him. It was hard to believe that
he had gotten away with it!

The weather continued clear. Forty minutes later, with two hundred gallons of fuel
left, Jimmy began looking for
Skate
. He was to meet the sub at 150 degrees west longitude
and 4 degrees above the equator. After several minutes of staring at ceaseless ocean,
he thought he saw the faint shape of a submarine, far ahead and a little to the west.

“Yes, there it is!” he yelled out, with a smile on his face.
Sure is an ugly-looking
thing
, he thought.

He began his descent, pulling back on the throttles. The water looked calm, almost
glassy. He figured it would be easy to set the plane down. He came closer and began
a wide circle.

Looking out the corner of his eye, Jimmy was amazed to see the sub submerging.
What's
going on here?
He wondered. Then he saw it: a big red Rising Sun insignia on the
sub's conning tower!

“Shit!” he blurted. It was a Japanese sub! He leveled
Mara II
and flew off to the
south, then tried to raise
Skate
on the radio. Nothing!

Perhaps she was somewhere near. She might be submerged and eying the enemy sub through
the periscope. Or maybe the Japanese had gotten her, sunk his intended rescuers.

I can't stay around here waiting
, he thought.
I gotta get out of here!
He turned
back toward his base. He sure couldn't fly around in circles—he was in the middle
of the dead zone!

He'd gone from feeling almost safe to being completely lost.
It's 250 miles to the
nearest landfall
, he thought.
I'd better cut my speed back to 160, and feather one
engine.

Jimmy's left hand went to the side of the cockpit. He didn't have to look to grasp
the red plastic ball of the right motor and pull it back. Soon, the engine, starved
for fuel, coughed. The propeller quickly slowed, and then began windmilling. As the
plane slowed, he worried over turning the motor off.
Some guys don't think feathering
one motor saves fuel
, he thought.
I have no idea. I should have asked Breslow. But
I never thought this would happen! I just don't know what to do. Why did I trust
the Navy?

He looked at the vital fuel gauges.
I had 410 gallons when I jettisoned the wing
tanks and attacked the radar station
, he lamented.
I roared out of there at top speed!
I might as well have dumped the fuel out the window!
He tapped on the fuel gauge.
All I have left is a hundred! A hundred gallons! Where's the nearest landfall?
he
wondered.

He spread his map over his knees and stared at it. There were some islands to the
north, he noticed, Sae Island, and a little to the north, the Kaniet Islands. He
wondered if they were controlled by the Japanese. Almost panicking, he scoured the
map again, shaking his head. Then he saw it. Manus!

His mind raced. He thought:
I passed it in the darkness, how many hours ago? It's
the nearest landfall that's definitely not in enemy hands. MacArthur just invaded
the place, though—how much of it is in Allied hands?

Then he remembered what the Colonel had said: “Seaadler Harbor on the eastern end
of Manus is under our control.” But the center of the fifty-mile-long island would
be closer—maybe by only five miles or so, but closer. Five miles farther to go could
mean the difference between being alive or dead.

Jimmy studied the map. There was a Catholic mission on the coast near the middle
of the island. It was his best chance, maybe his only chance.
If I reach the mission
,
he thought,
I can turn east toward Seeadler Harbor.

After a quick calculation, he came over to a heading of 192 degrees and readjusted
the direction gauge. He checked the fuel level. Only ninety gallons were left.

“That's not enough!” he cried.

Much of what followed, he later blocked out of his mind. He looked at the gauge every
few seconds, what seemed like thousands of times. He stared ahead for land he knew
could not yet be there, sweat pouring down his face, his heart pounding in his chest.
Each gallon of fuel gone made cold panic rise inside him.
It never stops dropping!
he thought.

Finally, Jimmy thought he saw land, a headland just a little to the west.

“Yes, yes,” he brayed. “Land, maybe fifty miles off ! Twenty gallons! Not enough!”

His heart rate went higher still, a rate that would have brought on a stroke in an
older man. As the miles tediously closed he became even more frantic. The gas gauge
was on empty! He pounded on the little dial on the left of the panel.

For a time he completely lost control of himself, terror gripping him. He pounded
on the instrument panel, screaming in a high-pitched, unearthly voice, lurching up
and down in his seat.

“Please, please, please just one more mile,” he screeched. “One more is all I ask!
Save me this one time! Please, help me! I don't want to die. Oh God, don't kill me
like this! I've come so close.
Please, please, please!
”

Then the terrain of the island was there beneath him, rushing past. As he came over
the beach, he could see the mission a mile or so to the west. Hurriedly wiping sweat
and tears from his eyes, he circled to the left.

Then the motor stopped, the sound that had become a part of his very existence for
almost six and a half hours sputtering out. He continued his circle, knowing the
mammoth plane could not go far.

It coasted just far enough to get him about four hundred yards off shore, where he
pulled back on the stick and landed softly in the ocean. He popped the canopy open,
but the plane sank so quickly that he swam right out, into the cool water.

Jimmy laughed, elated. The sea was like glass. He could see the trees and the mission
so clearly.

I can swim in easy!
he thought. He inflated his Mae West life preserver and struck
out for the beach.

But he pulled for naught. The neap tide, far stronger than he'd ever expected, kept
pulling him back into the offshore depths. Within minutes, he was exhausted. The
stress of the long flight had sapped what strength he had.

Damn
, he thought, watching the shore recede. Then he was motionless in the sea, unconscious.

He awoke to shouting and hands hauling him out of the water. A hard thump, and he
realized he was lying in the bottom of a canoe.

A man, brown-skinned, definitely not Japanese, leaned over him. Jimmy could hardly
understand him over the excited chatter of the others in the boat and the slopping
waves.

“We're from the mission,” the man shouted. “We saw you come down in the water, and
we figured you needed help.”

Jimmy smiled, dazed, watching the clouds rotate above him as the canoe turned and
started heading back to shore.

I've made it
, he thought.
I'm safe. I'm going home to Mara and my baby.

Colonel Hazelton had been more correct than he knew: for Jimmy DeValery it had indeed
been a very, very tough job. This one day plagued him and brought ringing back into
his mind every bad memory the war held for him, and thus took years from his life.
In the hundreds of months that followed, the memories never faded away. He teared
over them too many times to count, and wept when he knew no one was around.

Part of it was losing his second plane. When his friends had been killed or rotated
back home,
Mara II
seemed to be all he had left. He gave her credit for pulling them
out of scrapes, getting off the ground with more weight than anyone could ask of
her, and bringing him all the way back to Manus against all logic and science. Until
the day he died, it never occurred to him that the headwind he encountered on the
way to the target was the tailwind that made the difference in getting him to Manus.
It was not that he had wanted
Mara II
to go to some replacement pilot. But he had
lost her, forsaken her in the sea.

A larger part was the guilt he felt in surviving the war. He had watched others from
his squadron—Tony Andreas, Dorsey, Billy Mayford, Forski, and Black—die so easily,
sometimes in quirky ways that made their entire lives seem so trivial, as though
it had not mattered that they had lived. And he had survived when he should not have,
when the odds had been too steep. The largest part, though, was the sheer terror
he had experienced during the run in to Manus.

A terrible, haunting shame pervaded his life. Even to his wife, whom he loved more
than life, he could say nothing. With her woman's intuition, she understood better
than he would have wished, and perhaps better than he did himself. And she knew that
she must never ask him about it. Yes, he was grateful to be alive and have a family
with a loving wife and two beautiful children, but he was alive and the others were
dead. The war had brought him to the edge of a great void where he hung, and where
the difference between what he regarded as the terrible unfairness of life and the
darkness of death was scant. Thousands of times he awoke in a sweat, or lay in bed,
seeing the same images of his friends being killed over and over again, just as clearly
as the day they happened.

Gradually, with the passage of decades, he could manage to say some things to his
grown children. He told them of being trapped by the Zeroes at Dobodura and of the
“mistakes” he thought he had made at Wewak to lose
Mara I
. But of the fear that had
gripped him at Manus, he could not speak. He never sought the sympathetic ears of
his war buddies or his wife. He just bore it in his heart until the end.

The Gift

Mara and Jimmy's Life

Do not beseech me to turn from and leave you.
Where you will go, I will go,
And where you stay I will stay.
Your people will be my people,
And your God will be my God.
Where you die, I will die,
And there I will be buried.
May the Lord punish me, be it ever so severely,
If anything but death separates you and me.

—Ruth 1:16–1:17
New International Version

Wilson, North Carolina, August 4, 1980

C
laire DeValery Baines pulled the letter from the mailbox she was expecting from
her eighty-two year old grandmother, Hannah Thurmond, very ill in the hospital in
Raleigh sixty miles away. With the death of her father, Jimmy, Claire had called
her several days before and the two had had a brief conversation.

“Is your Mama doing Okay, Claire? I talked to her last night.”

“No, not really, but I suppose as well as could be expected.”

Oh, Claire,” she had said, “it breaks my heart to have to miss your father's service.
I would give anything to be there, but the doctor says ‘No,' and I must
accept that.”
She had gone on to say that she would write a few things. The letter had arrived
just before the service and Claire opened it. Inside were hand written pages which
Claire knew were not in her grandmother's hand. Then she saw a note at the top in
a wavering scroll: “Claire, Mrs. Patterson, a very nice person who is sitting with
me, wrote this up. I just had to write something.”

Claire went in the house, smiled as she passed those sitting in the living room with
her mother and sister, and went upstairs to her childhood bedroom where she had spent
the last two nights, and begin to read it.

I have to say in my long life
, it began, that besides the memory of my loving husband,
Hermes, and my wonderful daughter, Margaret Ann, I am most grateful for my son-in-law,
Jimmy DeValery.

He was the handsomest and nicest man I ever knew. You might think it odd, but his
good looks were particularly hard on your mom, my dear and only child, Margaret Ann
Thurmond DeValery. Once, in my hearing, in talking to her two daughters about their
father, she blurted out something in great emotion.

“I thought myself too plain for him!”

It hurt my feelings for many years. I watched as she dabbed at her eyes with a tissue
for a long while she was consoled by the girls.

I suppose most would have agreed that, like me, she was not thought to be any kind
of a great beauty. She was short rather than statuesque, had average skin, and mousy
brown hair which she admitted was “like straw.” I didn't think so, but she always
thought her nose was too big. Certainly, most thought it a mystery as to what her
war hero husband, who might have charmed a fence post, saw in her. It was not made
easier for her that her girls, first Claire and her baby, Helen, called “Bye,” both
competed in the Miss North Carolina beauty pageant. But to Jimmy DeValery, she was
the world and all of its treasures.

It certainly wasn't that he could not function without her. He proved a very good
and innovative executive in the tobacco industry, a good provider,
and a wonderful
father. In front of strangers, even large crowds, he could tell story after story,
entertaining them thoroughly, and leaving them laughing. But he so much preferred
being with his “Mara,” as he alone called her. And he did not have to be the center
of attention. He preferred that she drive. He regularly went shopping with her and
never complained even when he waited for long periods of time.

Generally, he deferred to her in all things from fashion to things for the house.
When he left on a business trip on which she could not accompany, a number of times
I saw him he noticeably ill at ease at the airport in Raleigh. He would look back
at her when he was boarding, a worried look on his face, usually stepping awkwardly.
Twice I saw the former gifted athlete either brush into a wall or actually walk into
one. He and I often had long talks, and he told me that when he saw her his heart
leaped and sometimes he felt faint.

It was a standing joke in our town, that he was just helpless near her. His first
thought always was to be with her and to care for her, and he did so every day of
their lives together until the moment of his death. Even when his health deteriorated
and his heart had become paper thin, he waited on her, despite anything she or I
or the children could say. There was simply no stopping him. On July 29, 1980, he
went to the kitchen to get her a soft drink and didn't come back. She found him on
the floor dead of a heart attack. The look on his face was one of peace. He had been
doing what he wanted to do.

Over the years people began to change their minds around my Margaret Ann. She projected
an aura of goodness and kindness with which she could transform a room when she entered.
She had had a great gift, a fairy tale love, which validated her and made her into
a better person than she might have been. She glowed with a sense of happiness that
was lovely indeed. People said, “She has light in her eyes.”

Theirs was a sweet love story which went on for nearly fifty years. The two became
a couple when they were still in grade school. She had almost no choice in the matter
at all. She told the story all of her life that one day on the playground in third
grade she noticed a boy watching her. A day or so later one of her little friends
noticed the boy and asked about him.

“Oh,” Margaret Ann said, “he's always there at recess. I don't know his name.”

The next day, the friend reported back.

“His name is Jimmy. He's in fourth grade.”

Soon, he began to come to our house after school. I was won over the first time I
ever saw him. He would knock on the door, and when I opened it there he was, an innocent
look upon his face. His question was the same every time.

“Is Mara here?”

My lips just have to tremble over this more than half a century later. He was the
cutest little boy! I could have just picked him up and hugged him. You know, he was
the only person who ever called her Mara, but no one had the heart to tell him not
to. Why he called her that I never learned. In the
Bible
in the book of
Ruth
, Naomi
tells her daughters-in-law to call her “Mara” which means “bitter” because her life
had been so hard. So we didn't want that, but that's the way it was. Happily, I think
they never had a bitter day in their married life. He never lost that innocence,
even in the war. That's why it hurt him so badly. My eyes just have to moisten thinking
about that.

Hermes, who had no middle name or initial, was not so quickly impressed. Once, in
the beginning, he called Jimmy “that little ragamuffin,” and his family “little better
than beggars.” It went on for a while until one day, after church, I had to say something.
Margaret Ann had cleared the dishes and gone to spend the afternoon with a neighbor
girl. We were at the sink finishing up and I turned to my dear husband.

“I don't want you to talk against Jimmy anymore.”

He was a thin, already graying man then, and I know I caught him off-guard.

He said, “What are you talking about?”

“You know very well what I'm talking about. It's true his folks don't have much,
and that his clothes and things are plain, but he's clean when he comes here. He's
a nice little boy.”

“He's just not of our standing in this community is all I mean,” he said.

I'm sure he was wondering why we were having such a conversation.

“When we have him sit down to supper you know he's had nice manners, saying ‘Yes,
Ma'am' and ‘No, Sir.'”

“Yes, well,” he said, still not clear in his mind what I was saying.

“Then give the boy a chance as father gave you and me a chance. Principal Gilford's
wife, Lorna, says that Bob says that Jimmy's the smartest child in that school, as
smart as that Jackson boy who went to Princeton. It will probably come to nothing
between the two. But let Margaret Ann have someone who pays her attention, like you
did me. He really does help her with her school work.”

“Well, I sure can't help her. It's over my head.”

Thus little Jimmy was allowed to continue to come and was welcomed by all three of
us. One day went into another, and then the years rolled by and he would come, in
all kinds of weather, always with the same innocent look on his face, just wishing
to see Margaret Ann. He brought her a present everyday he came! Oh, I can't think
of that without chocking up a little. They were just simple things, a flower, a dandelion,
or a little figurine. Every day! He would hold it in front of him as I opened the
door. Margaret Ann kept them in a drawer for years and years, until the dandelion
petals had long since turned to dust.

His attraction to Margaret Ann was just the natural love God intended the male and
female relationship to have.

“Mom,” as he lovingly called me. “I liked to see her, her form, her silhouette, how
those old print dresses hung on her long before she had any figure at all, how she
holds her head, how she leans forward ever so slightly when she walks. I like her
hair, and how her face scrunches all up when she's asleep, and how she holds the
girls in her arms.”

They were lovers, and best friends, one of those lucky couples who grow closer as
the years passed, can talk rather continuously about almost nothing, producing a
contentment and joy in both. Their lives together were like an endless summer.

Claire had teared reading the narrative and was surprised as it ended so
abruptly.
Then she noticed a sentence at the bottom that explained it: “Your grandmother is
tired now and needs to rest. I will send this on to you. Good luck with the service
and all. Lou.” She nodded thanking her grandmother and feeling a little pressure
knowing what was ahead of her. In only three hours she stood in the church where
she had grown up, and walked to the podium on this very hot day to deliver her eulogy.

“As with everything else he did,” she began, “whether it was being a pilot or executive
or husband, Daddy was a wonderful parent as well. He was always there for us girls.
When we were sick, he would come and sleep on the floor next to our beds just in
case we might cry or need comfort. When we were older and asked him if he was uncomfortable
when he slept on the floor, he had a standard answer.

“‘It sure beats the cot I had at Nadzab.'

“It took me years to realize that Nadzab was a base he was assigned to in New Guinea
during the war. Many a time he would pick us up unannounced from elementary or middle
school. He would say, ‘I just missed you and wanted to see you!'

“We thought every daddy was like that.

“He scratched our backs almost every chance he got, a sweetness we have passed on
to our own families. He called it ‘tickling' but it was really caressing, running
his right index finger over our faces. He had a real knack for it. He could caress
Mama's face and pretty much rid her of the migraine headaches she occasionally suffered.
And always, he said sweet things to all three of us at every turn.

“He told Mama, ‘I never wanted to let a chance go by to be sweet to my sweethearts,'
and that was the way it was.

“He pursued no other interests for himself until we girls were grown. As his time
permitted, he met our teachers, took us to Miss Farmer's for ballet lessons, even
went to play rehearsals, and anything else that came up.

“And he was very funny too. He always had jokes to tell us. We came to learn that
he tested his material on us, and if we liked them, he would put them in his seemingly
endless talks before groups or conventions. They
were never pointed, or gender sensitive,
just good wholesome jokes which never hurt anyone's feelings. We never had any idea
where he got them, or if he made them up himself. In my career as a writer of two
novels on the World War II generation, I have actually used some of his stories for
my main character, based on my dad. Here are two I heard him deliver which the audiences
particularly liked. The first he told in Raleigh at a convention when he was introducing
a candidate for political office.