Ice Brothers Read Free

they might let you go as skipper. They’d probably make you a chief boatswain’s mate. You’d get good pay and you’d probably get back to Boston every week or so.”
    â€œWhy don’t you do it that way?”
    â€œHell, I don’t want to fight the Germans with an old yawl. Give me a P-38. You were always the great sailor in the family anyway.”
    â€œI’ll check into it,” Paul said, but he already had decided that he too did not want to fight the Germans with an old yawl, despite the attractions of the scheme.
    â€œJust don’t get yourself drafted, boy,” Bill concluded. “I hear the infantry ain’t good for the health.”
    â€œI’ll see what I can do,” Paul said, and he envied the apparently carefree bravery with which his brother was planning to join the army air force. The only thing that scared him more than the thought of being machine-gunned in a muddy trench was the vision of crashing in a burning plane. Putting on his best blue suit, he drove to the Boston headquarters of the Coast Guard.
    This day, Monday, December 8, 1941, the streets and sidewalks were crowded with people and the bars were overflowing. Long queues, some of them stretching around a block, stood before each recruiting office. Every car, store and bar had a radio turned on loud to await news, and the sound of music was mixed with an excited babble of voices.
    Paul could not get anywhere near the district office of the Coast Guard. For half an hour he stood in a line that stretched over the top of a hill, seemingly to infinity. Gray-haired men with the collars of old pea jackets turned up around their ears stood in that line, middle-aged men, some of whom were kept company during the long wait by their wives, and many boys who looked too young to be out of high school. They were almost all unusually cheerful and joked about the possibility of the war being over before they got a chance to enlist. Their breath frosted in the cold December air, and some of them danced little jigs to keep warm. A good many carried bottles and were quick to offer a swig to strangers. When a pretty girl walked by on her way to a nearby office, a few of the men whistled. A tall thin man in a trench coat which looked much too thin for that weather called, “Come join up with me, baby!” Instead of sticking her nose in the air and hurrying away, she gave him a brilliant smile and blew him a kiss. The long line of men applauded, clapping their mittened hands together as loudly as possible. To this she responded with a pretty curtsy just before disappearing into a doorway and the crowd cheered.
    The long line appeared to move hardly at all. Halfway up the block a stout man dressed in a Chesterfield coat and wearing a homburg hat tried to cut into it and was jovially rebuffed by a short man in a brown leather jacket.
    â€œYou push ahead of me, Jack, and you won’t have to wait for no war. You’ll have one right here!”
    The crowd laughed, and with hasty apologies the well-dressed man hurried to the end of the line.
    All this was interesting, but Paul soon grew both cold and bored. Reasoning that he might do better with telephone calls, he ducked into a bar. Long lines stood there, too, both in front of the two telephone booths and at the bar itself, but here it was at least warm. A jukebox blared in the corner: “Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar.” At the crowded tables men and women sat drinking and talking intently to each other. They leaned against each other, touched a lot and held hands—the atmosphere was certainly a lot sexier than it ordinarily was in a Boston pub at ten o’clock on a Monday morning. When three chief petty officers, resplendent with gold hash marks, walked in, a place was immediately made for them at the bar. Many people offered to buy them drinks and asked them if they knew what damage had actually been done by the Japs at Pearl Harbor.
    It