Tales of the South Pacific - James A. Michener [136]
For example, it was Tony's job to run the Wine Mess at Segi Point. Officers who drank more than I never missed Segi, even if they had to wreck their planes to justify a landing. Admiral Kester might be low on whiskey; Tony Fry, no. Where he got the stuff I never knew until one Christmas. And that's quite a story.
Word seeped out that there would soon be a strike at Kuralei or Truk. There was pretty good authority for the belief that the crowd at Segi Point would be in on it! Therefore the skipper said, "This will be our last Christmas here. We'll make it the best there ever was!" He appointed the chaplain to look after the sacred aspects of the holiday, Tony Fry was given the profane.
It was the third week in December when Tony discovered that he could get no more whiskey from his regular sources. I was his guest at the time. He was a mighty glum man. "Damn it all!" he moaned. "How can a man celebrate Christmas with no Wine Mess?"
Now nothing prettier than the phrase "Wine Mess" has ever been devised in the armed forces. It is said that an ensign fresh out of divinity school once went into a Wine Mess and asked for wine. The man behind the bar dropped dead. A Wine Mess exists for the sole purpose of buying and selling beer, whiskey, rum, gin, brandy, bitters, cordials, and at rare intervals champagne. It is called a Wine Mess to fool somebody, and if the gag works, so much the better.
Well, Tony Fry's Wine Mess was in a sad state! He decided to do something about it. With nebulous permission from his skipper he told Bus Adams to get old Bouncing Belch stripped for action. The Belch was a condemned TBF which Fry and Adams had patched together for the purpose of carrying beer back from Guadalcanal. If you had your beer sent up by surface craft, you lost about half of it. Solicitous deck hands sampled it hourly to see if it was getting too hot.
The Belch had crashed twice and seemed to be held together by piano wire. Everything that could be jettisoned had been tossed overboard, so that about the only things you could definitely rely upon when you got up in the air were gas tanks, stick and wings.
Four pilots had taxied the Belch around the South Pacific. Each loved it as a child, but none had been able to finagle a deal whereby it got very far from Tony Fry. It was his plane. When ComAirSoPac objected, he just sat tight, and finally Admiral Kester said, "Well, a certain number of damned fools are killed in every war. You can't prevent it. But Fry has got to stop painting beer bottles on his fuselage!"
For every mission to Guadalcanal Tony had his crewmen paint a rosy beer bottle on the starboard fuselage. The painter took pride in his work, and until Admiral Kester saw the display one afternoon at Guadal, the Bouncing Belch was one trim sight as it taxied in after a rough landing. Tony always rode in the bombing compartment and was one of the first out. He would pat the beer bottles lovingly and congratulate the pilot on his smooth landing, no matter how rough it had been. His present pilot, Bus Adams, was just slap-happy enough for Tony. Fry was mighty pleased with Bouncing Belch. It was some ship, even if he did have to scrape the beer bottles off. "I suppose," he philosophized, "that when you got braid you have to sling it around. Sort of keep in practice so that if you ever meet a Jap..." His analogy, whatever it was, dribbled off into a yawn.
We started out from Segi one stinking hot December morning at 0900. We had with us $350 in mess funds, four dynamotors, a radio that would pick up Tokyo Rose, and an electric iron. We proposed to hop about and horse trade until we got refreshments for Christmas.
Since we knew there was no whiskey in the warehouses at Guadal, we decided to try the Russells, the secondary liquor port in the Solomons. At Wimpy's, the jungle hot-dog stand where pilots came for a thousand miles to wink at