For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck ’im out, the brute!”
But it’s “Savior of ’is country” when the guns begin to shoot
—Rudyard Kipling
For Dad
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to my agent Robert Mackwood, who found the perfect publisher for this book. ECW Press’s belief in this project has been unswerving, and their professional attention superlative. Special nods must also be given to Michael Holmes, whose substantive edit made the text leaner and tauter; to copy editor Steph VanderMeulen, who ensured accuracy and consistency with a raptor’s eye; to Erin Creasey and Rachel Ironstone; and to Tania Craan, who designed the arresting cover. “For all, our thanks.”
In conclusion, it is a pleasant duty for me to acknowledge the invaluable help of the U.S. National Parks Board personnel I met aboard USS Cassin Young. As always, the internet can’t do everything; writing is like fighting — one must get in range. It wasn’t until I was spinning the pitch cranks of a 40-mm Bofors aa emplacement that I comprehended what exquisite skill it took to nail a diving Judy. It wasn’t until I saw the size of a five-inch high-explosive shell — as long as my forearm and ten times as heavy — that I grasped what Bataan endured off Okinawa. I remain in awe.
WIA
Toronto, 2012
List of Acronyms
Some Navy acronyms, real ones in italics and the rest imagined:
AA: Anti-aircraft
ABM: Attack bomber (carrier-based)
AG: Air group (carrier-based)
BUPERS: Bureau of Personnel
BURNAVORD: Bureau of Naval Ordnance [weapons]
CAP: Combat air patrol (carrier-based)
CIC: Combat Information Center
CINCPAC: Commander in Chief, Pacific
COMETUMICH: Commandant [of] Meteorology, University of Michigan
COMINCH: Commander-in-Chief
COMNAVUMICH: Commandant [of] Navigation, University of Michigan
CVL: Carrier Vehicle Light (Independence Class carriers)
DBM: Dive bomber (carrier-based)
GMT: Greenwich Mean Time
IC: In command [of]
ICNAV: In command [of] navigation
2IC: Second in command [of]
LCDR: Lieutenant Commander
MET: Meteorological Section
NAVINFO: [U.S.] Navy Information Office
PACTEMET: Pacific Theater Meteorology Section
SOWESPAC: South-West Pacific Command(er)
SUCOSOWESPACOFO: Supreme Commander, South-West Pacific Occupation Force
TBM: Torpedo bomber (carrier-based)
USMC: United States Marine Corps
XO: Executive officer
Some Naval Terms
Coffeegrinder: A yacht winch with crank handles and a vertical axis, resembling an old-fashioned hand-powered device for crushing coffee beans.
“Meet her”: Command to helmsman meaning, ‘The wheel has been turned far enough and must now be turned back for the ship to settle on its proper course.’
Sheet: A rope that loosens, tightens, and secures a sail, especially a jib.
Shot Polaris: A nighttime alternative to a noon sun shoot for determining latitude in the northern hemisphere. Stella polaris [Latin ‘star of the pole’] is directly overhead at the north pole, i.e., 90 degrees from the horizon at 90 degrees north latitude (and 30 degrees above the horizon at 30 degrees north latitude, etc.).
Sideboy’s glove: Sideboys [c. 1800] were young ship’s crew who saluted the arrival of naval officials wearing wrist-length, close-fitting white gloves.
Snotties: Centuries-old term for midshipmen in the U.S. and British navies.
Torpedo depth: U.S. torpedoes did run too shallow in 1941–43, and because of this were ineffective until later in the war. It took the sustained effort of dozens of officers such as Captain Cassidy to get a hidebound burnavord to address its oversight.
1963
Long afterward, when he’s in his fifties and for the first time almost prosperous, Tommy hears a so-called expert say on the radio that poverty is learned. Only when youngsters go to school and encounter people with manners and accents deemed more posh, says the expert, do kids see themselves as poor. Till then they’ve been carefree in their barrios, ghettos, walkups, trailer parks. They assume their life is normal, dignified, and desirable, because it’s all they know.
What shit, Tommy thinks. I knew at five. Christ, I knew at three.
1913
Dorris, California, is ninety miles from nowhere. You can drill a well deep down to sulfurous water, but the lowland where the village squats is dry and the bordering scrublands drier. Sometimes there’s rain, but it comes in brief torrents and disappears into soil that’s always thirsty. Next day it’s as if it’s never rained. Summers are so dry your skin itches and it hurts to swallow, so parched you flush your outhouse not with water but with dirt. Dorris is sixty-one people farming sand.
On the horizon sits a big cone that’s pure white. What is it? Tommy asks his father. His father doesn’t respond. Tommy asks his mother and she tells him it’s Mount Shasta. Why is it white? It’s covered in snow. What’s snow? Snow is rain that’s frozen. What’s frozen? Tommy’s mother looks at him. Of course, she says, you’ve never seen snow or ice. He hasn’t even seen ice cream.
Tommy’s dad is a doctor and rarely around. It’s not just the hours he spends driving his patched-up Democrat and spavined horse to distant births and fevers; even when he’s there he isn’t there. His eyes are big and dark and look through you without registering you. He never says I’m home or Fine dinner to his wife. He never says What did you do today? to Tommy or Tommy’s brother. He eats in silence, reads in silence, and goes out after dinner while Tommy’s mother cries in her room. He stays away till breakfast.
Tommy’s dad has a nurse, Gladys, who visits the house. She’s young and pretty and kind to the boys, and she smells sweet. Tommy’s mother has a sour smell that goes with her red hands and lined face. One day, Tommy sees a picture of a smiling woman prettier than Nurse Gladys. She wears a floppy hat and a white dress with puffy shoulders, and she holds a frilly umbrella. Tommy asks his mother who the lady is. That’s me, says his mother.
You?
Yes. Before I knew your father.
They’re dirt poor. Dad’s practice is big, he’s always busy, but the people he treats are even poorer, drought poor, and rarely pay in cash. What money comes in goes to Nurse Gladys, who wears bright dresses. Tommy’s mother’s clothes are the color of dust.
One day Dad comes home, stands before Tommy’s mother, and says something. Then something happens that Tommy has never seen. Mama goes alkali white, then slaps his father across the face. It sounds like a buggy whip. Her husband looks at her a long time, dark eyes unblinking, then turns and stalks out. Tommy’s mother feels her way to a chair. She doesn’t shiver as she usually does when she cries, but tears slide down the creases in her face.
Children, she says, we’re moving.
Aurora, Oregon, up near the Washington border, is sweeter country. Tommy’s grandparents farm two hundred acres that straddle the Pudding River. Most of the time the Pudding is hardly a creek, though in March its flow grows a hundredfold and Tommy’s told to keep away. Last spring a boy drowned. The land is green for nine months, white for three; Tommy loves being able to speak and swallow without tasting grit. At last he sees ice, though not ice cream.
While the landscape is gentler, daily life is not. Tommy and his brother sleep year round in an unheated porch that’s open to the weather. The farm has no electricity, no newspapers, no vi
sitors. The kitchen has a woodstove, but his grandmother often forgets to heat a brick for the boys’ beds on bitter nights.
Twenty years later, Tommy will realize he’s made for the Navy. His childhood has inured him to life at sea.
Mornings, his grandparents are up at five to feed cows and shovel manure. Food is plentiful but dull. Grampa is a wiry man of medium height who sports a chin beard; he thinks it makes him look like Jefferson Davis. Tommy’s great-grandfather came across the Oregon Trail in 1848, and Grampa was the first white child born in Oregon Territory. Sixty-eight years later, he reads only the Old Testament and is quick with a switch. To him, his daughter and grandsons are permanently fouled, tarred, stained by divorce.
Five-year-old Tommy works all day. He shucks corn, pods peas, fetches water, feeds and drives the stock. He hangs and gathers laundry, sets and clears the table, scrubs pots. There is no time to play. His only recreation comes with the odd trip south.
Klamath Falls is two hundred miles from the farm. It’s on a lake and is more civilized than Aurora. Tommy’s Aunt Ida and her husband Jack live there. Uncle Jack is a pharmacist and seems to be rolling in dough. Uncle Jack drives a shiny black Ford, not an unsprung buggy, and lives in a tall tree-shaded house with wraparound porches and a velvet lawn that slopes down to the water.
Tommy minds his manners when he visits. His aunt and uncle are nice to him, but Klamath Falls still stings like iodine. Tommy can’t understand why he’s ashamed and angry the minute Uncle Jack’s Model T crosses the Willamette bridge. The big calm house makes Tommy realize his fingernails are dyed black and his socks have darning lumps. He knows he shouldn’t be so sensitive. Grampa says, Pride goeth before a fall. But something in Tommy says, I will not be a burden forever. I will have a place of my own.
In September 1916, Tommy goes to a one-room school. He hates it. He loves to learn things, but school has only a harried woman who ignores questions and frowns at noise. Finally, in sixth grade, Tommy gets a teacher who understands him. Foresters have identified trees that struggle in shade, then encounter sunlight and grow explosively. These trees are called late release. Tommy is a late release student. After sixth grade he devours English, history, geography, and above all math. As a high school senior he leads the state in mathematics.
1928
Mom. Stop fussing.
You have your toothbrush?
Yes.
Toothpaste?
Yes.
Two pairs of shoes?
One packed. One I’m wearing.
Tommy’s mother looks at him, tugs his collar straight. I’m proud of you, she says. You and your brother both. But especially you. Don’t tell him that.
No, ma’am.
Off you go, then.
A klaxon sounds. Uncle Jack’s becoming impatient. Tommy turns away.
Big day! Uncle Jack has a new car, one with a battery start. He’s dressed up; the new car is enclosed and there’s no need for coat, hat, and goggles.
Where you going to be living? Uncle Jack says.
I don’t know, sir. Boarding house most likely. As close to campus as I can get.
Not too close. Walking clears the mind. That’s professional advice, not just an old man talking.
Yes, sir.
My sister-in-law sure is sad to see you go.
Yes, sir.
You ever been this far from home?
Just your place, sir.
Corvallis is a nice little town, you’ll like it. Lots of pretty girls.
Tommy blushes.
Not that you’ll take any note. Well, you’ll note it, that can’t be helped. That’s instinctual. But you won’t act upon it. Right?
Yes, sir.
Save yourself, Uncle Jack says. Keep yourself for the One Girl.
Sir.
Oregon State is a flat campus with brick buildings. Uncle Jack drops Tommy off, shakes his hand, and roars away. Tommy wonders if he’ll ever stop feeling like a hick.
A scholarship has paid first-year tuition, but living money is up to him. He finds a room on Jefferson Street. It costs three dollars a week, which he earns waiting tables at a diner. There’s six hours a day for classes and labs, six for study, four for waiting tables, seven to sleep. The last hour he spends walking.
He likes calculus most of all. Dr. Gibb, his math professor, is a dour man who looks like Teddy Roosevelt. He wears string ties and keeps his rimless pince-nez on a cord. He talks only calculus and leaves the instant class ends. Tommy would be terrified of him if he weren’t so dazzled by the math.
Pop quiz! says Professor Gibb one October morning. Groans emanate, though not from Tommy. A girl in a long tweed skirt passes Tommy a form. He looks it over, realizes he has it down pat, and gets to work.
Question 8(b) puzzles him. It asks for the area under a curve, but the formula and the curve don’t match. Tommy checks the clock. He’s nailed everything else. Is 8(b) a trick question? He catches Dr. Gibb’s eye but is too shy to raise his hand. Dr. Gibb glares and Tommy decides to answer the same question twice.
If one uses the stated formula, he writes, then the integration is . . . And then: If one uses the curve as presented, whose formula differs from the stated formula . . . He checks both answers and submits his test.
At the end of next class, Dr. Gibb hands back the papers. Tommy’s classmates pore over theirs, comparing marks. Tommy swivels his head this way and that. He hasn’t got his paper. His classmates drift away and Tommy, puzzled, stands to join them.
Not you, Mr. Atkinson, Dr. Gibb says. Tommy sits slowly. He feels a hole where his stomach used to be.
You wrote a perfect paper, Mr. Atkinson. Perfect, that is, except for 8(b).
Tommy swallows hard.
You caught me out, Dr. Gibb says. You were the only student who discovered that the formula is at variance with its accompanying curve. Your answer taking the formula as canon is perfect. Your answer taking the curve as canon is also perfect, though necessarily different. Therefore, I cannot consider your paper perfect. Do you understand?
Tommy shakes his head.
Your paper is more than perfect, Mr. Atkinson. I have never before given one hundred and ten percent on anything. Very few hundreds, even. But I gladly give you a hundred and ten percent now. Extraordinarily well done.
The void in Tommy’s stomach becomes a glow.
Atkinson, Dr. Gibb says, consulting his class list. Initials A and H . . . What’s your first name, son?
A-A-Archibald, sir. Archie. Arch.
Good Scots name. But rather formal, wouldn’t you say? Do you have a nickname?
No, sir.
Dr. Gibb regards the skylights over the blackboard. Ever heard of Rudyard Kipling? English writer?
Yes, sir.
Ever read his stuff?
Just-So Stories. The Jungle Book.
He writes poetry, too, Archibald Atkinson. Barrack-Room Ballads, that’s one of his volumes. Fuzzy-Wuzzy and Gunga Din. Also a universal enlisted man called Tommy Atkins. It’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Chuck ’im out, the brute! Ring a bell?
No, sir. Sorry.
It does for me. And my star pupil needs a special name. I therefore christen you Tommy Atkinson, so to be henceforward and forever. Now, Tommy Atkinson: go grind your hundred and ten percent into your classmates’ faces. Give ’em a well-deserved gloat.
August 24, 1930
Tommy’s overnight train leaves Portland for Vancouver on a Friday afternoon in August. Tommy has a ticket on third class. It’s an overland route, Seattle to Everett to Bellingham, and by ten o’clock darkness masks the view.
Sun on his face wakes him. Tommy opens his eyes and for the first time in his life he sees the ocean. The morning is breezy and the Strait of Juan de Fuca is fretted with cats’ paws that constantly dissolve and reappear. Tommy lowers his wind
ow to see more clearly. The water has a color he’s never imagined, sapphire with a wash of pale gold. Minutes pass. Tommy smiles. Off to join the Navy when he’s never seen the sea.
A conductor in grey serge moves down the aisle, checking destinations.
Vancouver, Tommy says. En route to Annapolis, Maryland.
Long way, son. Take you a week. What sends you there, if I may ask?
I’m a plebe, sir. First-year student at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Good for you. Vancouver forty minutes, ladies and gentlemen! Vancouver fo-o-orty minutes!
Years later Saul Bellow will write: All travel is mental. Voyaging alone across the continent, Tommy’s mind logs more miles than his body. Minute by minute, hour by hour, the vast presence of North America slides by: brisk towns and sleepy crossroads, workers at harvest, the majesty of the land. Tommy’s on the northern route because it’s faster. Back south there’s a stop once an hour; up in Canada a single leg can run three hundred miles.
Inland from Vancouver they get an extra locomotive to take them over the Coast Range. The train moves up the Fraser Valley, crossing trestles far above wild water, threading tunnels blasted through grey granite hard as glass. There are cantilevers above cliffs so steep that there’s nothing but air out the window.
What a year it was.
Goddammit, Tommy, pardon my French. What did you do in question two? I used a Lorentz transformation, sir. We took it in physics and I applied it. Holy Abraham! You know this stuff better than I do. No, sir! Nemo me impune crisscrossit! Who’s the instructor here, you or me? You are, sir. You’re wrong, Tommy Atkinson. You can teach this stuff better than I can. So teach it! I’ll pay you what you make waiting tables. Never mind the paperwork. I’ll speak to the dean.
And Tommy became the first (last, youngest, oldest, only) freshman professor Oregon State would ever see. No one grumbled, he was that good.
Past the Coast Range and into the Okanagan: long flat valley, thin deep lakes. One engine does them now. Then three engines for the climb to Kicking Horse Pass. Rockies, foothills, badlands. And then the prairie.
Tommy Page 1
