War Stories

Primix Publishing

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© 2022 J. J. Zerr. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by Primix Publishing 02/01/2022

ISBN: 978-1-955177-94-8(sc)

ISBN: 978-1-955177-95-5(e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022901086

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

What Kind of Man Are You?1

Wimmin’25

The Noble Guerilla35

The Short, Happy Love Life of Heiny Bauer49

The Free Upgrade69

Stuff Happens75

A Writer Wannabe at the LA Book Fair89

The Past Is Neat; the Present Sucks99

The Face in the Mirror107

Newbie121

Darling, Daddy, Dead Vietcong Maker*131

Forwards137

Voices†149

Author’s Note157

______________

* Published previously in Well Versed, Literary Works 2013 by the Columbia Chapter of the Missouri Writers’ Guild (CCMWG). Published here with permission of CCMWG.

† Published previously in Our Voices, by the Military Writers Society of America in 2013.

Also by J. J. Zerr

The Junior Officer Bunkroom The Happy Life of Preston Katt Noble Deeds

Sundown Town Duty Station The Ensign Locker

For Roy and Tom and for Jerry and his family.

For wimmin’.

Even in paradise, Adam couldn’t get along without one. Getting along with wimmin’ is a struggle—sometimes.

But then I think about

my One and Only Squeeze, my daughters, my mom.

Without having had them in my life, I cannot imagine who, what, where,

or why I’d be.

Thanks, as always, Karen; the Bubbas and Bubbettes from Coffee and Critique; and Margo, Plumgrace, Holly S., and the semianonymous but totally excellent editors at iUniverse. Remaining faults are all mine. None are theirs.

There is an appointed time for everything … A time of war, and a time of peace.

—Ecclesiastes 3, the New American Bible

We offer each other Christ’s peace in church,

but it doesn’t even last till we get out of the parking lot.

—Karen Zerr

What Kind of Man Are You?

My name is Joe Bob. What I am is a pilot.

Some folks may see me as other things. But I’m talking about if all the skin-deep stuff is stripped off me and I look in the mirror, what do I see? A pilot.

Pop didn’t talk about what he was, except with his World War II buddies. Even as a kid, I noticed how alike they looked, Pop and his buddies. Tall, hair cut short, faces tanned. Slender to the point of being skinny. Pop’s flight suit—zoom bag, he called it—hung on him as if he were a scarecrow with nothing but naked sticks to cover. Pop didn’t say much about anything else either, except when he got together with his -17 cronies. Then he spewed words like an oil well that had been drilled deeper and deeper, and just short of the foreman giving up and moving his roustabouts someplace else, it came in a gusher. Listening to Pop and his friends, I figured out what he was—a B-17 pilot who had flown twenty-five missions over Germany.

After the war, he found flying jobs and eventually started a crop dusting business, but none of those things changed what he was. The way I looked at it, if God or the devil had taken a corkscrew and pulled the B-17 pilot and twenty-five missions out of him, it would have been like pulling the sticks out of a scarecrow. There’d be nothing left of him but an empty zoom bag piled on the ground.

Pop taught me to fly, and I dusted for him during my high school years. He and the other three pilots he employed flew a lot of missions in the early-morning hours—in the dark. The air was still and didn’t blow the chemicals to hell and gone. He wouldn’t let me dust at night, though I could have.

You log two hours of night time every month, he told me, punctuating his words with that skank eye of his, though as rarely as he talked, he didn’t need to embellish his words, or I’ll kick your ass.

Halfway through high school, I had fifty hours of nighttime in my logbook. I asked Pop if I could dust at night.

No.

Why not? Y’ain’t ready.

Well, when the hell will I be

He skank-eyed me and walked away. No point in bringing that up again. So I dusted in the dawn’s early light.

Then in the summer after my senior year, and two weeks before I was set to leave for college and the US Navy ROTC program, Pop surprised me when he pulled a chair up next to my desk in the ops shed. It was dark out, and he was flying that morning. He plopped onto a battered metal fold-up chair and looked at his big callous hands as if he hadn’t seen those strange things before.

Joe Bob, he said to his hands, so many guys didn’t survive twenty-five missions. I did. Then he looked me in the eye and really surprised me. I didn’t know the man talking to me. The hell of it is—all those who died, I feel like I ought to remember their names. But I don’t. I can’t even call up their faces anymore. What I do see is bombers blowing up or wings coming off and bits and pieces of aluminum raining out of the sky trailing orange fire and black smoke. Sometimes there were parachutes. Sometimes not. That was a boatload of words from him. If he’d said a few of those to Mom, she might have stayed living with us. I didn’t think he was done talking, but he was.

He stood up abruptly, spun on his heel, walked out through the door across the ramp, and climbed into his plane. After dusting a peach orchard to kill some vermin imported from some foreign country, he flew into power lines. Killed himself. He’d found out the day before he had cancer.

His B-17 buddies showed up the day before the funeral. One of them, Ralph, put his little hand on my shoulder and looked up at me. I’m a good two inches taller. He probably didn’t weigh one seventy, so I had him there by fifty pounds. He told me I had to deliver the eulogy—that it was my duty as his son.

Contemplating your hanging on the morrow is supposed to concentrate your mind. So does eulogizing your father.

We held the funeral in Galveston, in the church we’d gone to when Mom was still with us. In attendance were the four -17 guys, the three pilots from Pop’s business, and the three old women who never missed Mass on Sunday or a funeral on any other day of the week.

I told them what Pop was. "And for the longest time, I thought that was all there was to him—you know, like there was no real man wrapped around the what of him. I did get a glimpse at the real man, the who of him, the day he died. I wish I could have seen more. But I didn’t. I always admired the hell out of him.

Pop was a man of few words. I think he’d admire it of me, if I were that way too.

As I walked back to my pew, I saw the women in the back of church, all three of them, dabbing lace-edged hankies at their noses under the gauzy veils. They always sniffled at funerals.

Ralph had a tear running down his cheek. I hadn’t expected to see that.

I buried all of that with Pop. I never thought on it again, about the who and what of a man or what makes old women, and men, weepy. Well, for thirty some years, I didn’t think on it. Now that I’m in my forties—early forties, well, midforties—it has come back to me. Thinking about the what and who of a person. Of me.

The what was easy. Me, I’m a pilot. A stick and throttle jockey, a driver of airplanes. The who I am, though? After watching other men try to tell people who they were, I’ve concluded a man is not a good judge of his own character if he gets to thinking on it. Who a man is is for other people to figure out.

I decided to tell my story so that maybe someday, some people will know who I am. A tually, there’s one person I hope understands the who of me.

My story starts in 1976. It could start earlier, but I don’t care to talk about Vietn m—the war we lost. Though I sure as hell didn’t lose my part, the stink of losing hangs on me like when I step on a dog turd and don’t realize it until I get in my pickup. The year 1976—that was when BUPERS, the US Navy’s Bureau of Personnel, who I love about as much as I love losing wars and stepping in dog’s doings, sent me to be the flight deck officer on the USS Marianas. Back then, an aircraft carrier flight deck was not a place for sissies. My bet, it’s still that way.

On a flight deck, lots of things can kill a person or, worse, maim him. Jet exhaust, now and then, blows an inattentive sailor over the side, or it rolls him down the rough, nonskid deck, flaying clothing and skin off at every tumble and then blows him over the side—bleeding. Carriers dump a lot of garbage. Sharks love garbage. And bleeders. Occasionally, a careless maintenance man is sucked down an intake, which turns out some kinda ugly. Once in a while, a landing plane crashes against the steel cliff at the back end of the boat and spews shrapnel and burning fuel down the length of the deck, scything away and frying anyone in its path. No sir, not a place for sissies.

But of course that’s exactly what the Bureau of Personnel sent me to crew up my flight deck during a Mediterranean cruise. Sissies. My seventeen-year-old recruits were pansy-asses who couldn’t do anything but grow pimples.

A flight deck officer didn’t get to choose his pansy-asses. Neither did he get a lot of time to turn them into hard-asses.

The wusses needed to function in the middle of a couple dozen jet engines packed close together and howling like pissed- off banshees. They needed to understand they sure as hell wouldn’t hear danger coming. Their heads on a swivel, they needed to look around, continuously. That was the only way a man could save his ass on the deck of a flattop. Flight deck officers hated to see their people get killed or hurt. It was a regular pain in the butt to train up new ones. And there was paperwork.

Once a kid got over fouling his skivvies just being on the flight deck during operations, I could teach him how to move planes from parking spots to cats, which is short for catapults, without dinging them or losing one over the side. Time was sacred; that was another thing they needed to learn. If a launch was scheduled for 0900, then number one cat better fire exactly at the instant that the second hand overlapped Mickey’s big hand pointing straight up. The other three cats fired Kaboom. Kaboom. Kaboom. Reload the cats and get twenty planes in the air in seven minutes, and as the last cat fired off the bow, the first plane landed from the previous launch.

During my indoctrination talk, I gave them one of my herds of words to the not totally stupid. They went like this:

Do not be the guilty bastard who screws up the timing. Propellers and jet intakes want to eat you and shit you outas spaghetti sauce.

Sharks following our flattop hope like hell jet exhaust blows you overboard.

I, Lieutenant Joe Bob Norgood, was a good flight deck officer. Packed with modesty, that statement. Training the pansies turned out to be a special talent. Besides having a way with words, I made the kids more afraid of me than they were of intakes, jet exhaust, crashes, or sharks. It wasn’t that simple though. The danger was turning them from sissies to stupid fearless, which pretty much happened to my first batch. In that business, you lost a few, you know? I adjusted. I developed finesse, a deft touch.

I became Lieutenant Buddy-Buddy, Mr. Nice Guy. But cocooned inside was a volcano, not a wuss volcano like Kileauea, Etna, or Vesuvius. I’m talking Krakatoa. The thing blows, and where a honking island once was, nothing remains but a smoking hole in the ocean. Stunning in its sudden violence. My teenagers never knew when the eruption was going to happen. Some days, I’d screw them up with Mr. Nice Guy all day. They’d think, For sure he’ ll go off tomorrow. At the end of the next day, just when my bepimpled minions were convinced it wasn’t going to happen, I’d Krakatoa ’em.

Finesse. Deft touch. Like that, see?

So anyway, one day on the USS Marianas—

Oh, one other thing. On a flattop, half the crew was assigned to the carrier—ship’s company they were called. The air wing made up the other half. Air wing they were called. Ship’s company hated the air wing. Without the 2,500 wing nuts, a carrier was the nicest, most pleasant boat to sail on. Workdays were four, five hours long. You had all the time in the world to eat chow and watch movies—skin flicks if that floated your boat. But then the assholes showed up with their eighty-eight airplanes. Jesus! The workday immediately extended to twenty hours, the ship became oily and dirty, and the chow lines were long all day and night. And the arrogant pricks thought the ship and ship’s company were there to serve them and their almighty airplanes! Pricks!

Actually, at the time I got that dicked-up ship’s company tour, courtesy of the even more dicked-up BUPERS, I was a pilot and had made two carrier cruises. There never was a point to bitching to BUPERS. They gave a you a gig, you pitched in, and you got the job done. The way it worked, a pilot checked into the ship, and by some sort of spiritual osmosis, by his second day, he was ship’s company, and the air wing sucked. The fact that he had just come from the air wing had no power to alter any of the preceding.

Back to that day on the Marianas, we were in the Mediterranean working cyclic ops, which meant we launched twenty planes every ninety minutes and recovered the ones from the previous go. It was nineteen minutes before the third launch, and we had one of those rare occurrences. All the planes were ready—four minutes ahead of time! A ross the flight deck, there wasn’t a single sailor anywhere scramble-assing