Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [48]
“I want to tell you a story from the war,” he told me one day. “I want you to know why every day is precious and why I am thankful each day to be here.”
My dad was one of seven children, and they lived in twelve homes over eighteen years. They moved around a lot, dodging landlords who came to collect the rent they couldn’t afford to pay. The Great Depression had not been particularly kind to the Moore family of Kansas Avenue/Franklin Avenue/Kensington Avenue/Bennett Street/Kentucky Street/Illinois Street/Caldwell Avenue/Jane Street and other thoroughfares on the east side of Flint, Michigan.
Francis (or Frank, as he was known) was the fourth child of the family, and now, suddenly, at the age of twenty-two, his whole life—falling down the coal chute at two, clinging on for dear life at four while stuck on the running board of his dad’s car, getting cut from the high school basketball team the game before the state championship so that the coach could make room for a younger player coming in next year, getting fired the first day of driving the Coca-Cola delivery truck because he admitted he “didn’t much like the taste of Coke,” being placed by his mother temporarily at the age of ten in an orphanage along with his brother because she simply couldn’t afford to take care of seven children—all of this flashed before him as he lay exposed on top of Hill 250 on some miserable piece-of-shit island in the South Pacific, watching as the tracer rounds came out of the plane above, firing directly at him and his fellow Marines on Christmas Day, 1943. Except the planes, like him, were American.
How Frank came to find himself on Hill 250 on the island of New Britain made about as much sense to him as the fact that his own side was now trying to kill him with such ease. To begin with, no one ever explained to him how these hills got their names; it wasn’t as if there were 249 other hills he had to climb to get to Hill 250. In fact, to even call them “hills” seemed like some War Department cartographer’s idea of a joke. Maybe by calling them hills they would make an American Marine feel more like he was home—and that if he were going to die for this hill, then, well, at least he’d feel like he was dying for… home. Home had hills. Hills with trees and wildflowers with names like Yellow Lady Slippers and Jack in the Pulpit and Shooting Stars. Hills with pleasant hiking paths. Hills to hide out in. Hills to pick berries from. Hills where hobos could find a peaceful night’s rest. Hills where you and yours could find a small, quiet space to build a quick fire and make love beside it.
What led Frank to this particular hill was a worldwide war that had nothing in particular to do with his world. His world was one of hard work and sports and Saturday nights at the Knickerbocker Dance Hall. Though they lived the shared poverty of many in the worst days of the Depression, the Moore brothers—Bill, Frank, Lornie, and Herbie—each took extra care to always have a clean, well-pressed suit, a sharp haircut, and enough coin in their pockets to buy a pretty girl the first drink, if not the second.
They took dance lessons upon leaving high school, somehow figuring out that the fairer gender liked to go dancing. Because the other young men in town were slightly less adept at picking up on this, the Moore boys were always the first ones out on the dance floor, and this impressed the ladies. If nothing else, it showed the girls that they were fearless, and that in and of itself was quite attractive. Lornie, sixteen months younger than Frank, became known as the king of the dance floor and soon found himself teaching dance in a downtown dance studio. It dawned on him that he was in fact