Look Homeward, Fighter

WITH MY HEART IN MY MOUTH--Duncan Norton--Taylor--Coward--McCann ($2.50).

Duncan Norton-Taylor is a home-lover's Quentin Reynolds. Correspondent Reynolds is 6 ft. i in. tall, weighs 220 lb., dines with generals, calls everybody by his first name, and gives the bide-at-home a keen sense of participation in great and dangerous affairs. Correspondent Norton-Taylor is 5 ft. 4 in. tall, weighs 130 lb., is surprised if a major is nice to him, is frightened by clouds, prefers fingers to cotton in his ears when any firing is going on, and in general gives an endearing sense of what most fighters want most: to get back home and stay there.

Three In One. With My Heart in My Mouth is the unpretentious story of a visit Duncan Norton-Taylor paid (for TIME) to the Pacific war last summer. He felt about as warlike as most Americans. In Honolulu, he made a heartbreaking tour over the death-stinking decks of ships being raised from Pearl Harbor; and when he lunched with a group of nurses, "the least composed person at the table was I." He lost his Abercrombie & Fitch trench coat, the true war correspondent's caparison, in New Caledonia. He took a kind of tourist's gander at quiet Guadalcanal, rode around uneventfully on a destroyer, slept comfortably a few nights in a Noumea hut "between sheets that had covered some well-known newspapermen," and moved up with his wrangling colleagues of the press to watch the New Georgia show. Everywhere he went he was troubled by his name, which fitted him like an outsize hat. "Say, are there three of you guys from TIME aboard, or what?" asked a puzzled yeoman who saw his papers on one ship. "I got a Duncan, a Norton and a Taylor."

Duncan Norton-Taylor observed that the correspondents' technique was to pick their spot and hope that action would flow in their direction. But finally, to his surprise and consternation, he found too much action flowing his way in one of the Pacific war's most furious naval battles--the action of July 5-6 in Kula Gulf in which U.S. forces sank three Jap cruisers and five destroyers at the cost of one ship, the Helena. He describes the battle in words which give C. S. Forester a run for his nautical money.

But the main fact which makes this book so homely-good is that its author's heart is in the right place: whenever it is not in his mouth, it's back in Montclair, N.J., with his wife Peg and his daughters Joan, Susan and Nancy. As a refrain, all through the account of fighters and fighting appear touching snatches from Peg's and the girls' letters--the perennials Peg won at a bridge game, Susan and her clarinet, Nancy's i sth-birthday trip to New York, the Girl Scout hike, the bicycle trek to Newark. Peg wrote: "Your office always asks me if I have any message to add to their cables and I can't think of any except my love."

What Warriors Think About. Correspondent Norton-Taylor's favorite service acquaintances felt the same way about home. Red Quigley became a father at sea, and when the baby daughter's ringlet came from home it was bright red and father Quigley was very proud. Karl Kawa was a married machinist from Buffalo who had made a little model of the house he planned to build back home; the roof came off so that he could look inside.

In the end Duncan Norton-Taylor got home to give a finis to his book which every fighter wants as a finis to his war: "... the bus was jammed with a weekend crowd going down to Rehoboth and Ocean City. There had been a long drought and the cedars along the highway were pale with dust blown from the cornfields of Talbot County, Wye Mills, Longwood. It was nighttime and our headlights laid a path along the narrow road which wound around the woods and farms. Easton--Harrison Street. Peg and the girls were standing on the sidewalk in the dim light which fell from the windows of the Red Star bus station."

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