Once They Were Eagles Read online

  Printer and Humanitarian

  Al Marker

  Sonoma, where Al Marker has his lovely home, is steeped in tradition. The town of some 6,000 is the site of the flag raising in June 1846 that proclaimed California a republic. The Stars and Stripes replaced it in July of that year.

  Sonoma is in the heart of wine country; there’s one high-quality winery just up the road, and nearby is the Sonoma State Historic Park containing the well-preserved home of General Vallejo, the city’s founder. Close by are the home of macho author Jack London, and the Jack London State Historic Park.

  Although one of the youngest Black Sheep, Al’s gray hair and shaggy gray beard make him appear the oldest, but he is energetic, vigorous, and active in civic and philanthropic affairs in his city.

  His tour with the Black Sheep was shortlived. Joining us for our second combat tour, he was injured in a crash at Bougainville not long afterward, evacuated, and hospitalized; he did not rejoin us until we returned to Espiritu Santo. He completed his overseas duty at Green Island, came back to the States, retrained, and immediately volunteered to return overseas.

  “I felt I hadn’t done anything toward the war. The senior officer at San Diego said, ‘What the hell are you doing here? You just got back a few months ago. You don’t have to go overseas.’

  Al Marker

  James M. Reames

  “I said, ‘Hey, I know, but I’m going.’ At the same time, I had this gut feeling, Frank, that I wouldn’t live through a second tour of duty overseas.

  “They sent me to the Marshalls, where we spent all our time bombing a little rock. I was totally frustrated; it was extremely disappointing. I came home assigned to Norfolk, giving out jackets to Marines who were coming back from overseas. By this time, the war was over, and I had enough points to get out, so I did, staying in the Volunteer Reserves.

  “By the time the Korean War came along, I had been married about two years, had a child and a good job, but I still wanted desperately to get into the war. I remember vividly: I was on the phone with Bill O’Brien, who had a responsible position in a squadron forming up. He said, ‘Do you really want to get in?’

  “I said, ‘Hell, yes, Bill, what do I do?’

  “About this time, my wife came into the room, and she went swissssh, right through the ceiling. It was the first time I’d seen her mad. She said, ‘You’re not volunteering for anything! You have responsibilities; you have a wife and child.’ And I had to agree with her, Frank.

  “But I suspect I’m still not over the disappointment, the embarrassment, the feeling that I just didn’t do my job. As far as I was concerned, my job was to shoot down planes, not to strafe barges or blow up bridges or anything like that, however successful. And I had done everything possible to get into position where, somehow, some way, I could do my job.”

  I reminded him, “Some guys never left the U.S., and others hung onto their civilian jobs and got promoted. Tell me about your life after the war.”

  “I worked for a couple of printing firms for about 20 years, then bought my own company. I specialized in a very narrow area of the business, focusing on service. As a result, I was grossing a million three when I sold out.

  “I just ran out of gas. I’m not a good delegator—tried to do everything myself. I lost my partner; there was too much entertaining to do, and I got tired of that. So, I got lucky. I sold the place and expect to live happily ever after.

  “I figured I’d play a lot of golf, and we’ve been doing some traveling. But I’ve always thought I was fortunate and wanted in some way to ‘repay my debt to society,’ So all of a sudden, I found I was a board member of Sonoma Valley Family Center, a counseling organization with a 24-hour crisis line we call Help Line. It may be wife- or child-beating, or a lonely person, or a life-threatening situation. Our volunteers make recommendations. Usually, the people come and talk, and pay what they can afford. I became chairman of fund raising and spent a couple of years at that. I also spent a year on the county grand jury, two or three days a week.

  “I guess I’m still trying to do my job.”

  Doctor

  James M. Reames

  Doctor James M. “Happy Jack” Reames drove up to Altadena from his home in Whittier to meet me at Fred Losch’s place.

  At the time Doc was tapped to become Flight Surgeon for the Black Sheep, he had been attending casualties being evacuated from Guadalcanal on hospital planes. He was a natural for the squadron position. He had graduated from Navy Flight Training and Aviation Medicine courses at Pensacola, so he was both a doctor and a pilot; at 26 he was barely older than most of the pilots so they could understand one another.

  Reames possessed a gentle, compassionate, nonabrasive spirit that enabled him to get along with absolutely everyone. Everybody loved him, and not because he had a footlocker full of medicinal brandy. It was his southern charm, his wide-eyed college-boy enthusiasm over the performances of our young combat eagles, the optimistic outlook that enabled him to find something cheerful in everything.

  His soft accent sounded as though his throat had been bathed in olive oil; we called him “King of the Yamheads.” But his easy talk disguised a quick mind, as his poker opponents paid dearly to learn. Because of his slow, slightly bumbling style of play, it was a while before we learned enough about his game to call him “Diamond Jim.”

  Sitting in Losch’s den, Jim didn’t appear to have changed very much. Older, yes, with glasses and gray hair—he looked like what he was: a solid, respectable family physician. Even so, it was not hard to visualize him, sleepy eyed, at the poker table, asking, “What y’all gonna do?” Or exuberantly passing out tiny bottles of brandy, shouting, “Eleven Zeros!” Or holding onto an upright at 3:00 A.M., saying incredulously: “Strafe Kahili?”

  “I’ll never forget those Black Sheep days,” he said. “Those wild rides down the hill to the airstrip when we came under bombing attack, and jumped off the truck, and crawled into that muddy culvert for safety, to find out the next day it was a bomb storage dump we’d huddled in.

  “Or Kolombangara, collecting Japanese rifles, and I picked up what I thought was a nice brass souvenir and stuck it in my pocket, then knocked around the jungle a couple of hours before I went back onto the boat. I was showing it around when an ordnance man said, ‘Hey, that’s a live detonator off a 90-mm shell!’

  “And the foxhole full of rats we swore we wouldn’t get into.

  “The strangest was on Munda when they found a Japanese soldier in our chow lines. He’d scrounged a Marine’s fatigues and had been a regular customer.

  “And the flight surgeon who circumcised the colonel and saved the shriveled foreskin. He used it as bait a few days later, and landed a 150-pound marlin.”

  “That sounds like an old-time ditty,” I chuckled. “Perhaps that bait was specially attractive to marlin. In any case, not too easy to come by—colonels’ foreskins, I mean, not fish.”

  “Or when we were in Sydney,” Jim went on, “I was afraid Boyington was going to cause an international incident. We were in the bar at the Australian Hotel, and Boyington somehow got into an argument with two Australian enlisted men. I followed them outside, and they were squared away about to tangle. I rushed inside and found the highest-ranking Australian officer; he went out and told those enlisted men to beat it.

  “The thing about the Black Sheep was that they were, with few exceptions, all eager to go, gung ho. None of them had any combat fatigue. The British had already discovered that the younger men are more eager than the older men. They’re more daring.”

  After his two Black Sheep tours, Reames returned to the States and was assigned to the Marine Corps Air Station at Mojave, California, where it sometimes cools down to 100 degrees in the evenings. Scheduled to go out on the carrier Franklin, he was grounded because of his eyes. His replacement was killed when the Franklin was bombed and heavily damaged.

  Medically retired in July 1946 because of his eyes, Jim opened a general medical prac
tice in East Los Angeles, where he has been extremely successful.

  One of his patients was Pappy Boyington. During the course of a physical examination, X-rays disclosed a spot on Boyington’s lung; lab tests proved it to be cancerous. Reames assisted at the operation, which took place a number of years ago.

  Beyond Social Security retirement age now, Jim works a slower pace; he gets in regular fishing and bird-hunting trips, with an occasional junket to Las Vegas to keep his hand in at poker and dice. And he attends our Black Sheep reunions.

  Real Estate Appraiser and Bon Vivant

  Don Fisher

  Don “Mo” Fisher picked us up at Savannah’s airport and drove my wife and me to Beaufort, South Carolina, a lovely old city of 14,000. The Fishers live just outside of town in Port Royal, a community of 2,000. Their plush Spanish-style home, a two iron shot from Parris Island, is built over the remains of an old fort, overlooking Spanish Point and the scenic waterway leading into Beaufort’s waterfront area. There’s a steady stream of boats drifting past his patio window.

  Fisher’s hair is grayer and his forehead higher, but he is still big, vigorous, affable, friendly, and outgoing, and he still loves to arrange everything for a get-together.

  He insisted on putting together a party: he picked up a couple of bushels of oysters; Lou Markey, the Chance Vought technical rep who’d been with us at Vella Lavella, brought a huge package of venison from a deer he’d bagged; a retired Marine general brought a rum cake he’d baked; my wife, Carol, helped Mo’s wife, Bette, prepare a batch of eggplant from the Fisher garden. It was a feast, with Fisher his typical hospitable self.

  I asked him why he left college to join the Marines, what he remembered.

  “I don’t mean to sound patriotic. It was something the majority were doing. I had a civilian pilot’s license and had gone through the CPT program in 1940, so I joined up.

  “After training I went to Glenview and checked out on the carrier Wolverine, then to San Diego and overseas. On Espiritu Santo, we got checked out in Corsairs: somebody showed you how to start it, you sat in the cockpit, and they pointed out a few things.

  “When we first started going to Rabaul, there was tremendous air opposition—I saw my only Japanese carrier in Rabaul Harbor—but toward the end of our tour, there was no air opposition.

  “After the Black Sheep were broken up, I went to Green Island, back to Cherry Point, then to Congaree. I put in my letter to become a regular. I flew off a carrier with a stunt team to represent the Marines—sort of like the Navy’s Blue Angels except that we flew in a group of 16; they fly in fours.

  “I went out to China in 1948, assigned to the ground forces in Tsing Tao; I was the Air Officer for what they called the Fleet Marine Force of the Western Pacific.

  “A year in China, then back to the States, then out to Korea on a jeep carrier flying close support. Back in the States, I commanded an attack squadron for a year; went on a Mediterranean cruise; saw Japan for a year; went to Quantico for four years on the Senior School staff.

  “In 1964, I came to Beaufort as CO of MAG 31. My wife had an operation and needed to stay near the hospital, so when it came time to leave, I retired. That was 1966.

  “I read in the paper that the Beaufort city manager had resigned. Playing golf with the mayor, I asked, ‘What is this city manager job?’

  “He said, ‘Do you want it?’

  “Later, while I was in Tampa, the mayor called and asked me to come up for an interview. I took the job and stayed for five years. I resigned to try construction work, and that evolved into real estate, and that into appraising. Now I have so much work I’m thinking about expanding, renting a building, and hiring a couple of assistants.”

  Don has also served as a member of the city council, as mayor for two years, and as president of the Rotary Club. As we walked along the streets, it was obvious that everybody knew and liked him, pausing to exchange a few friendly words.

  Some things don’t change.

  Don Fisher

  Denmark Groover

  Trial Lawyer

  Denmark Groover

  Denmark “Quill Skull” Groover drove 400 miles round trip from Macon to Savannah, Georgia, to meet me for dinner. A busy trial lawyer, he had to be in court the next morning to defend a woman who had stabbed her husband. Groover’s hair is no longer coal black; he has less of it and it no longer sticks out. Today he looks distinguished.

  He became a flyer, he said, because “I got seasick if I rode in a boat, and I didn’t want to wander through the mud.”

  Commissioned in December 1942, he was shipped overseas in mid-1943. I asked how he felt on his first mission.

  “I was wondering whether the hell I was going to get back or not. There’s no substitute for experience—I realized the only reason I got shot up was that I had extraneous matter in my mind.

  “When I got shot up my right arm and leg were paralyzed, my right aileron cable was severed, and I had no rudder control. My instruments were all out, but I made the best landing I ever made—rolled to the end of the strip where I just kept going around in a circle until they got me out. At the emergency room, Doc wanted to give me a shot, but for some reason I was afraid of it. He gave me one of those bottles of brandy, and I got as high as three tall pines. They took me to Guadalcanal, and after a week I started to come back, but they caught me and operated on my right arm and ankle. I was there for a month before I came back for the second combat tour.

  “The Black Sheep were different; we had a strong feeling of camaraderie. Boyington was a motivating factor; you were a stabilizing factor; and Doc Reames had a knitting, cohesive effect on the group. It was a maturing experience. I came from a section of the country where prejudice was the order of the day, and it knocked a lot of that prejudice out of me. I remember selling some whiskey to the mess boys, who were black, for $60. Boyington found out about it and made me give the $60 back and let them keep the whiskey, which was a damn good lesson to me.”

  After the war, Groover went back to the University of Georgia, got his law degree, and commenced practice in Macon, Georgia, 41 years ago. He served as a member of the state legislature for three terms and then as general counsel for the Georgia Farm Bureau, which owns an insurance company that does some $70 million a year in premiums. In 1984, Groover was reelected to the state legislature.

  He also has a broad general law practice, handling everything from criminal cases to contests of wills—anything that has to do with trial work, where he has earned the reputation of being a master. Law classes make it a point to adjourn to the courtroom to listen when Groover sums up for a jury.

  One of the swiftest ways to get his temper boiling is to mention the TV series about the Black Sheep. “It amounted to mass character assassination. I thought of suing them when it came out, but that would have just given it more publicity. The show brought down and deprecated men of considerable bravery and valor, and for them, by God, I resent it.

  “I feel some compassion for Greg; I am sure he participated because he needed the money. I am delighted, of course, that he is able to get something of a financial reward based on his combat record. It does seem a shame, however, for the others who contributed so much to the squadron’s record, and indeed made possible Greg’s record, to have been vilified—that was unnecessary, as well as completely ridiculous.”

  “As for today, there’s a disturbing difference in the young people. The problem is having too much of everything; they’re used to getting all they want with little or no effort. It’s the ‘government will look after me’ syndrome. We were raised in the Depression, when a dime was a dime and we had to work for it. Even those with money recognized what it was all about, and there was still pride in your country, pride in being a part of it.

  “When I listen to the radio on the way to work, half the telephone calls coming in to this talk show disc jockey are from people employed in the biggest air materiel area in the country. They’re at work, sitting around calli
ng in on some damn show instead of doing their jobs.

  “What happened to that pride?”

  Business Consultant and Philosopher

  Bill Case

  Bill “Casey” Case picked me up at the Seattle/Tacoma International Airport. Although his hair is now graying and has receded somewhat, he is still alert and energetic, his frame compact and well maintained. We took the ferry to Bainbridge Island where Bill lives, a small bedroom community lying in Puget Sound between Seattle and Bremerton. We talked of old times, sitting in the den of his comfortable home.

  “I’d taken Civilian Pilot Training in college, and went into flight training a couple of months before Pearl Harbor. My first combat tour was at Guadalcanal with Marine Fighter Squadron 122. I saw no enemy planes in the air.

  “About the time we were ready for another tour, Boyington was reassigned from the Operations Office to us. We did some training in June; then Ed Schiflett, a pilot in 122, broke Boyington’s leg in a Saturday night ‘wrestling match,’ and Greg got shipped to New Zealand while we went up to combat. At the end of that tour, the squadron number was sent back to the States. Several of us needed a third combat tour before we were eligible for home leave, so we were part of the beginning of the Black Sheep.

  “I was naive about combat, never thought that I was going to be hurt or could be shot down. I took it for granted that nobody in our outfit was dragging his heels. It was a chance to get out and be productive at the game of fighter pilot we were playing. The Corsair was a superior airplane, would get us out of any trouble we might get into. We had a strong sense of cohesion, of challenge, and not a sense of doom.