Chapter 31

Bud's brother Philip joined the Navy in the fall of 1942. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, there had been several conversations around the family dinner table that winter and spring about the war and about schooling. Bud's parents insisted that his older brother graduate from high school before he enlisted. Phil maintained that he was old enough at seventeen to make up his own mind and that several boys from his class had already joined up.

Bud wished he were old enough to be Marine and began doting on war-story comic books and the adventures of Blackhawk and his band of flyers in their twin-engined Grummans.

Eventually a compromise had been reached despite some fairly long and loud arguments often ending with Philip storming away from the table and stomping up to his room, his napkin flying through the air. That first summer of the war, when Bud had still not finished building his flying model of a Spitfire, his older brother took an English course at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School and went through a hurried graduation ceremony with several other young men and one girl.

Then, with his parents' permission and his father's signature, he enlisted and was sent off to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center with thousands of other young men. His letters home told about long days of classroom and drillfield work as Philip learned new tasks and a whole new vocabulary, some of which he kept to himself. He gained weight in the always-crowded mess hall and finished boot camp sure he had made a good decision.

Phil was assigned to a landing craft school on the Gulf Coast but given a week of home leave before having to report for duty. He sat on his duffle bag for most of the train trip back to Maryland. He brought Bud some copies of magazines with pin-up girls in them and a white cotton hat just like his own and showed him how to roll it up so it would take and hold the customary shape. He had sent his sister a blue wool hat she could wear as a beret. He gave his mother a gold-plated USN pin that she wore on her dresses for the rest of the war. And he brought his father a carton of Camels after hearing how most first-class cigarettes had all but disappeared. His father did not tell him about the hoarded cigarettes he kept under the counter at the store for his regular customers. He listened to the problems sugar rationing was causing and almost got one of his old girlfriends to go to bed with him.

Halfway through his training in Biloxi, Phil and many of his fellow apprentice-seaman classmates took a long, multiple-choice test one afternoon. A month later, wearing his third-class stripe, Phil was transferred to the V-12 program and sent to officer-training school at Purdue University. He found himself carrying a full load of college courses and undergoing ten or twelve hours of physical training each week at well. His letters home suggested that he and the Navy might have made a mistake.