Here Comes Trouble (17 page)

Frank’s battalion moved out on the left flank to head toward higher ground, while other battalions pushed straight through the jungle. Frank and his men were again surprised at the absence of Japanese gunfire or resistance. Within the hour, moving fast, they began to climb Hill 250. It seemed too easy.

They were right.

For some reason they had found a magical crack in their own front lines and, without realizing it, slipped right through it with no one noticing. They were now in Japanese territory, a good thousand yards ahead of what everyone believed were the front lines of the United States Marine Corps.

Their map indicated it might be Hill 250. It is generally believed that during a battle, it is better to be on top of the hill than at the bottom. You don’t need to be a West Point graduate to understand that. So Frank and the others began to make their way up the hill. The Japanese at the top of the hill didn’t want any company that day, so they lobbed everything they had on the lost battalion. Then, out of nowhere, a monsoon rain erupted, making it impossible to see more than a few yards ahead. That gave the Marines the cover and the advantage they needed, and they quickly made their way up Hill 250. With grenades, 37mm machine guns, and sheer force of will, they took the hill. The Japanese on top of the hill had no way of knowing that this was just a small unit of Marines; they assumed that they were facing an invading horde of hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans. So they retreated down the other side, where the larger force of their Japanese army lay in wait.

As the Marines secured the ridge, the rain stopped. This first victory felt good—not exactly flag-planting good (they had barely advanced onto the three-hundred-mile-long island) but good enough—and there were remarkably no casualties.

It was then they heard the sound of airplanes. This was a welcome sound, as it was the sweet hum of a Wright Cyclone engine on a B-25, the sound that said,
Here we are, boys! The Cavalry to the rescue!
The grunts on the ground had cleared the hill—now it was time for the flyboys to swoop in and take out the valley!

But as Frank squinted at the planes backlit against the now-punishing tropical sun, he saw a plume of smoke coming out of one of them. The plane had been hit. How could that be? They were coming from behind, coming from American-held territory—who would have shot at an American plane from back there?

In fact, it
was
Americans back on the beachhead who had actually fired on the American planes, thinking (wrongly) that they were Japanese bombers. The American planes, in turn, thought that the Japanese had hit them (two of the B-25s went down in flames), and so when they looked down on Hill 250 and saw the “Japanese” whom they thought fired on them, well, it was payback time.

But, of course, these were not Japanese on Hill 250; these were the men of my dad’s unit.

Swooping in at almost treetop level, the B-25s strafed Hill 250 with their bullets. Frank and the men had no time to signal that they were on the same side. There was nowhere to run for cover. They threw themselves down and prayed for the best. Frank could see the tracer rounds coming from the planes straight at them. He accepted that this was the end of his life, and he closed his eyes as that life, with all of its scenes of joy and poverty and family, sped by him in an instant. He knew that the next instant would be his last.

When Frank opened his eyes, his life was not over. But the scene in front of him was one he had never wanted to see. Lying beside him was one of his friends. His face was gone. Frank looked up and over the body to see a dozen or so of the men in his unit lying there, riddled with bullets, many crying out for help, some alive, some perhaps dead, their uniforms beginning to stain broadly with the blood that was oozing out of the numerous wounds. In all, fourteen Marines were hit and one was dead. Only Frank was alive and untouched. For a moment he was convinced that he must be dead, too, as it was simply not possible to survive that many bullets fired from so low, bullets that not only penetrated the bodies of his comrades but also chewed up the volcanic rock all around him. How could this be? Why was he untouched? And why in God’s name did this good Marine next to him die at the hands of other Americans?

Frank had little memory of what happened next. Apparently the Marines on the front lines behind him had witnessed the whole stunning incident. They reached Frank and the others as Frank was trying to administer first aid to his buddies. Medics and stretchers were called in, and after the wounded were attended to, Frank was brought back down to the staging point near the shore.

“I’m OK,” Frank said after a few hours of rest. “I’m ready to go back.”

“It’ll be night soon,” a corporal told him. “I think it’s OK if you stay here with us.”

He thought perhaps someone would want to talk to him, to file a report or something. But there was a war, a real war, going on, and after he asked one lieutenant why this tragic mistake had happened, he was told this happens in war all the time. “You just have to move on and win.” After that, Frank never asked about it again.

The following day, he got word that Captain Moyer and the five men with him had all been killed on their recon mission. He could see that this was the way it was going to be. Death, then more death. Soon another captain from the front line appeared with two privates who had “cracked” under duress.

“These guys are my wiremen,” he told the officer in charge. “They’re no good to me now. Trade me these for one of your guys.”

The lieutenant looked at Frank.

“This guy’s a machine gunner. I’ll trade you him.”

“Don’t need a gunner, need a wireman. Someone who can carry spools of radio wire, run fast, and duck.”

“This guy knows how to duck. Believe me.”

“A wireman?” Frank asked. “Carry and run the radio wire from the front lines back to the command post?”

“Yup.”

“No more firing a gun?”

“Nope. You can’t fire a gun and carry wire at the same time. But they will fire at you. They go after the radio guys first so we can’t talk to HQ. You take this job, you better have some guts and know some fancy dance moves to dodge those Japs.”

Guts? Dance moves? Why didn’t he say that in the first place?

“I was a wireman for the rest of the war,” my dad said as he finished his story. “I would never carry a machine gun again. I would be shot at over and over, but I couldn’t shoot back because I had to carry the spool of wire. It was kind of a crazy decision.”

I thanked him for telling me all this, but I was thirteen and, by the end of it, I was fidgeting around and checking the clock. I wanted to go outside and hang with the guys. My dad noticed none of that, as his mind was still back in 1943.

“Every Christmas I think about that day. I got to live, somehow… lucky, I guess… ,” he said, his voice trailing off.

“Dad, um, can I go, now? Maybe you can tell me another war story later?”

It would be years before I heard one again.

A Holy Thursday

“D
ON’T JUST STAND THERE
, the niggers are comin’!”

Walter was twelve, and he was only trying to be helpful.

“Whaddaya mean?” I asked while standing in his driveway with my baseball glove and a bat, hoping to get a game going before sundown.

“The niggers in Detroit are rioting! My dad says they’re on their way
here
right now! We’re headin’ up north!”

And sure enough they were. They were wasting no time hurriedly jamming their station wagon full of food and supplies and shotguns. Walter’s mother, Dorothy, was shouting orders to her six boys about what to load and what to leave behind. I stood there in awe of the precisionlike nature of this operation. It was as if they had run this drill many times before. A few doors down, I noticed another family doing the same thing. I started to get scared.

“Walter, I don’t understand. Why are you guys doing this? Are you going to come back?”

“Don’t know. Just gotta git. Dad says the niggers from Detroit are on their way here and will be here any minute!”

On their way to where?
Here?
They’re coming to
Hill Street?

“Walter, I think Detroit’s a long way away from here.”

“Nope, no, no, it’s not! Dad says they could be here just like that!” Walter snapped his fingers, as if by doing so he could magically make a Negro appear to prove his point to me. “They’re going to get together with the niggers in Flint and then come ’n’ kill us all!”

Although I had never heard anything this fantastical before, I was
not
unfamiliar with the attitudes in the town of Davison when it came to the issue of the Colored People. Black people—niggers, as many wistfully called them—were simply not welcomed. There was not, to my knowledge, a single black person living among the 5,900 people who inhabited the city of Davison. Considering we were just outside Flint, a city with fifty thousand black people, this was not an accident. Through the years, realtors knew what to do if there were any inquiries from Negroes looking to move out of Flint and into Davison. And the unwritten, though not always unspoken, agreement among the city residents was to never sell your house to a black family. This kept things nice and orderly and white for decades.

This attitude did not exist a century before. In the 1850s and 1860s, Davison was a stop on the Underground Railroad, a series of secret destinations that stretched from the Ohio River Valley north through Indiana and Ohio and into Michigan, all the way to the Canadian border, where escaping black slaves would find their freedom. There were over two hundred secret stops along the Railroad in the state of Michigan. Members of the new Republican Party in Michigan worked extensively on the Underground Railroad, assisting the runaway slaves, giving them safe passage, and hiding them in their homes.

But bounty hunters from the South were allowed by federal law to come into states like Michigan and legally kidnap any slaves they found and bring them back home to their masters. This was one of the many compromises the North had made over the years to keep the slave states happy and in the Union. Thus, a slave was not free by simply escaping to a free state; he or she had to make it all the way to Canada.

So it was with some risk that hundreds of Michiganders set about to protect the victims of this cruel and barbaric system. One such person owned the home on the corner of Main and Third streets in Davison, a mere fifty-nine miles to the Canadian border. It was said in later years that the family in this house had a hiding space in their cellar and that the townspeople kept this secret from the marauding bounty hunters. (This house would eventually become my grandparents’ home.)

It became a sense of pride in Davison that the village was participating in something important, something historic. Many of the boys in the area would soon be off to the Civil War, and when slavery ended, the people of Davison were proud of the small role they played in making this happen.

Such was not the mood on a sweltering August day in the summer of 1924 when twenty thousand people gathered at the Rosemore racetrack in Davison to attend a rally of the Benevolent Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Looking at the photos from that day, with thousands of citizens in white robes, one wonders how hot they must have been, especially with those pointed hoods! Many, though, did not wear the hoods, as there really was no reason to hide their identities because it seemed that everyone and their third cousin was a member of this fine organization dedicated to terrorizing and lynching black people.

But in the summer of 1924, it wasn’t so much the Negroes in Flint (most of whom had learned to know their place and remain quiet) that were the issue. No, the problem confronting the Klan on this Sunday afternoon was the “Papists”—the Catholics. Catholics, it seemed, had starting running for office. They were moving into neighborhoods meant for white Protestants, and this did not seem like the natural order of things. Catholics had also started to intermarry, something that created a deep, sick feeling among the gathered faithful. Marriage, as you were supposed to know, was to be between a Protestant man and a Protestant woman (and, yes, it could be between a Catholic man and a Catholic woman—but not between a Catholic and a Protestant).

My mother’s dad (Grandpa Wall) did not understand such rules (and he was to be forgiven as he was, after all, from Canada). In 1904 he, an Anglican, married my grandmother, a Roman Catholic. For his troubles, the Klan burned a cross on his front yard in Davison.

“It wasn’t much of a cross,” my grandmother would later remark. “You’d think we’d rate more than a four-foot-high cross!”

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Davison and other parts of Michigan were hotbeds of enthusiastic bigotry. From Father Charles Coughlin railing against the Jews each Sunday on his nationwide radio show from Royal Oak, to the Sunday Klan rallies in Davison (and Kearsley Park in Flint), there was enough to be ashamed of and enough to wonder about how far the state had drifted from the days of the loving humanity of the newborn Republican Party, a party that not only ended slavery but also the death penalty and sought to give women the right to vote. Now what we had were scenes like Henry Ford getting medals from Hitler.