Baa Baa Black Sheep Read Free

my uniforms and civilian clothes. There were about three thousand dollars’ worth of khaki, blues, whites, mess dress, full dress, and sword. This was not an excess of uniforms prior to World War II. They were required by regulation, but what little I had paid on them in the last five years hadn’t made a dent in their original cost. All of the uniforms went on the floor and the back seat of my sedan. Civilian clothes, except those I was wearing, went on top of the heap. This way I knew the dog and I wouldn’t be crowded in the front seat.
    After packing I returned to the bar and was given the hero’s farewell, no doubt the first one since the Marines last fought in Nicaragua. Finally Fella and I were ready to start for the West Coast, but it wasn’t until after the Negro bartendersaid: “Closin’ time, gentelmun, that’s all for tonight.”
    My parents came down to San Francisco from their apple ranch near Okanogan, Washington, to say good-by and pick up my car. My mother tried to talk me out of going on such a wild-goose chase. She said: “There are other ways of paying off one’s indebtedness.”
    My answer was: “Oh, don’t worry, Mom, I’ll get by okay. I haven’t got an enemy in the world.”
    A feeling of remorse came when I saw Fella standing on the clothes and uniforms, looking out the rear window as my mother and father drove off for Okanogan. The dog seemed to be saying: “Why are you leaving me? What have I done wrong?”
    Most of the pilots waiting to go overseas were two or three years younger than I was, and they had virtually no flying experience other than what they had received in flight school. Some I recognized as recent graduates from Pensacola. There was only one thing to believe, naturally; all of the vast experience was already in China.
    Another thing, these pilots were taking their golf sticks, tennis rackets, and dress clothes. I guessed they were proper in doing this, because the captain had said: “You will be gentlemen in every sense of the word. Wherever you are stationed, you will have an interpreter who will act as a valet.”
    Of course I didn’t know anything about the Orient, other than what little I had learned in school. And I didn’t believe that the United States would ever be at war. But I did stop to realize that anyone with twenty years of combat experience, which means something in most businesses, would have been buried for almost eighteen years. Come to think about it, the underwriters were making book on seven years for military pilots at this time. In addition, their actuarial figures didn’t have a damn thing to do with getting shot at in the bargain.
    And again, I must have been dragging on an opium pipe when Dr. Margaret Chung, of San Francisco, gave each pilot a jade charm on a silver chain to wear about his neck, and said: “You are now one of my many sons. I pronounce you Fair-haired Bastard Number——”
    Later the pilots referred to their charms, because they couldn’t remember the Chinese words, as “The Jade Balls.”
    We stayed in the little-known hotel for a very goodreason, but conserving money didn’t happen to be it. How in hell the press never got the early scoop is beyond me! There must have been a minimum of ten bars in each square block in downtown San Francisco, and each of us was in every one of them during the two weeks, as had been the two detachments that preceded us. There was the captain, too, in uniform, with his prized “LaFayette Escadrille,” extra pair of wings, adorning the lower part of his blouse, which was the proper place to wear such an honor.
    Nobody seemed to know who we were, where we were going, or anything else, and apparently didn’t give a damn.

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    Ex-captain Curtis Smith of the United States Marine Corps Reserve was in charge of our detachment. Our recruiting captain had placed him in command, for he himself was remaining in the United States. Smith was thirty-five years old and had held the