the mop-up at guadalcanal

“The Mop Up At Guadalcanal” was a strange description for what he actually had to do in “The Pacific,” another phrase that went with his almost never told war stories. It seemed to me that the generation that fought in World War II always referred to where they were sent by continent. Thus his friend Jack Shapiro fought in “Africa” against Rommel (ThatGoddammKrautSonofabitchRommel, as Jack often said, as if it were one word). In The Pacific, my dad was assigned to lead men into the jungle every day looking for snipers that the Japanese had left behind to pick off Marines who were sent out into the jungle every day looking for them. He told us they could only see about two feet in front of them because the jungle was so dense. They went out with machetes and their guns and hacked away at the jungle. That was after they all lined up every morning to take their quinine and salt pills. Malaria was a bigger threat than the Japanese, I think. Every night what they had hacked away would grow back. This was before Agent Orange. By Vietnam we had become far more efficient at totally annihilating every living thing. But back in the 1940s they didn’t have such efficient ways of exposing the enemy.

My dad went over to the Pacific in a troop ship. He described it as a big steel belly with hammocks for thousands of guys stacked one over the other. These guys spent the weeks in transit puking their guts out because the rolling and pitching was so bad and the storms so severe. In case you don’t know the difference, rolling is from side to side and pitching is front to back, or stem to stern if you’re a nautical type, which I like to think I am, except that I get horribly seasick but never throw up. (see previous chapter, Travel) It’s supposed to be better to actually puke if you’re seasick. You get some relief that way. I just get sicker and sicker and want to pass out but can’t. Maybe that’s because I think I’m pregnant, which feels the same way to me.

Before our twins were born, Strong With A Spear and I bought a sailboat. I started sailing when I was ten. My mother believed in exposure to everything because you never knew when it might come in handy, and because the more you got exposed to things the more likely you were to find something you liked or were good at. In the 1960s I would take this whole exposure-to-everything theory to an extreme she never dreamed of, but when I was ten she sent me off to a sailing school in a miniscule Connecticut hamlet called Noroton. Noroton was a suburb of the almost as teensy Rowayton, which was affixed to the waterfront community of greater Norwalk, which at that time was a rather neglected town on the Long Island Sound just before you got to Westport as you were coming northeast on the train from New York City.

We were supposed to sail every weekday morning out of Noroton’s Five Mile River. But first we had to learn rowing. This was a familiar sequence for me.