Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [50]
He waited until the last minute, until the draft notices started to arrive in July 1942. He decided he didn’t want to be drafted into the Army—“every man’s for himself in that operation,” he would say—and so on the first of August, 1942, Frank went down to the recruitment center at the large grade school and signed up to be a Marine. A Marine? “The Marines fight as a team,” he told his friends. “They look out for each other.” But his brothers (all of whom would soon enlist themselves: Bill in the Air Force, Herbie in the Navy, and Lornie in the paratroopers, where he would die from a sniper’s bullet in the last months of the war) told him, “Marines are sent into the worst of situations. You’ll get killed in the Marines.”
“Perhaps,” said Frank, “but the Marines never leave a man behind.” After thirteen years of crushing Depression, Frank had had enough of being left behind.
The enlistment officer asked him when he could get his affairs in order to ship out.
“What’s the last possible date I have?” Frank asked.
“August 31,” the recruiter replied.
“I’ll take that day.”
Frank spent that final month enjoying the life he had: working, going to Knickerbocker’s, helping his mother. On the day he packed his duffel bag, he left quietly and went down to the bus station by himself. When he arrived he found himself waiting on a bench with fifteen other Marine recruits. A photographer from the Flint Journal snapped a picture of them and captioned it “READY!” The look on Frank’s face in the photograph was anything but READY! and apparently this wasn’t noticed by the copy editor, who let the ironic caption go through and be printed on the page the next day. By that time, Frank was on a train, on his way to basic training outside San Diego, California.
The delay in enlisting not only had bought Frank a few extra months of peace, it caused him to miss the first large Marine amphibious landing in the war—on the island of Guadalcanal. Over 7,000 Marines and soldiers would be killed, along with 29 ships sunk and an amazing 615 planes lost. Frank would not arrive in the South Pacific until the end of the Guadalcanal campaign, and thus he avoided one of the worst massacres of the war. But there would be plenty of other opportunities to die in the next three years.
“Private Moore,” the sergeant whispered. “Cap’n wants ya.”
It was sometime around 11:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve, 1943. Frank Moore wasn’t sure if it was Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, and he didn’t care much for this thing called the International Date Line that meant he was always a day ahead of his life, the life he left back home. Instead of trying to do the math, he just decided to keep himself on “Flint time.” Easier. Friendlier.
He and a thousand other Marines had bunked down early on this night on the transport ship as it headed toward the battle on New Britain, an island that was part of Papua New Guinea, a few hundred miles off the coast of Australia. There wasn’t much Christmas celebrating going on, though there were, no doubt, many, many prayers being said. Because at 0700 hours they would be loaded into amphibious assault vehicles and lowered into the Pacific Ocean just a mile off the coast of Cape Gloucester, New Britain. But for now, Captain Moyer wanted to see Frank.
“I hear you can type,” Moyer said to the young private.
“Yes, sir, sorta,” replied Frank, not quite understanding what typing had to do with killing Japanese or Christmas.
“I want you to stay behind here on the ship,” Moyer said. “I need someone who can type up the casualty reports.”
“But sir…”
“Listen, this is important. We need to be accurate and we need to be accountable. If not to HQ, at least to the families of these men.”
This was, Frank realized, a free Get-Out-of-Dying card being offered to him. Stay behind on the boat. Don’t die in the wave of bullets and mortars that will spray across the chests and the necks and the heads of his friends and fellow Marines. Live for another day. But there were no guarantees of living in the days or