They're Always Short

ARMY & NAVY

TIME Correspondent Carl Mydans, who has spent eleven months with U.S. fighting men and 21 months in Jap internment, recently witnessed a scene not infrequent in World War II. He set it down as he saw it. Last week he cabled 'from the Pacific :

The ship's mail had just been thrown aboard, and throughout the destroyer there was that warm excitement, stimulation and laughter which always follows the operation.

The executive officer was a young one and he liked his men--which is saying that his men liked him.

I saw him that morning as we lay off the beach at Tarakan leaning on the rail, an enlisted man beside him, a letter in his hands. He was reading. Then he folded the letter deliberately, put his arm around the sailor's shoulders, and handed him the letter. A moment later he appeared beside me on the bridge. He lighted a cigaret.

A signal man standing nearby whispered: "The smoking lamp is out, sir." He jerked into consciousness, rubbed out his cigaret. He turned to me: "That's the third one we've had this month. And this time it's the best man we've got on the ship. I've watched that kid change slowly from a Middlewest farmer to the best machinist's mate I've seen in the Navy. When we wanted a job done we turned it over to him and that was like saying the job was done. But he's through now. He's through for a while anyway. We'll keep him busy. We'll keep him ticking. But we won't give him anything to do that has any responsibility connected with it."

He was mad. He reached for another cigaret, then jabbed the pack into his pocket. I let him talk: "He just got a letter from his wife. Just came in with this mail. He came up to me and I knew (here was something wrong before he spoke. Matter of fact he didn't say much. Sometimes they talk. But he just couldn't. He just handed me the letter and said: 'This is the first I've had from my wife in six months.'

"I knew what it was. I didn't have to read it. It was short. They always are.

" 'Dear James,' it read, 'I know you will understand. I've met the only man in the world and I want you to give me a divorce. You can get one through the Navy. They say it's easier through the Navy. You can have Vicki. I hate to lose her but this thing means more to me than anything else in the world.' "

The lieutenant pointed with his chin: "There he is. He's sitting out there on the fantail alone."

On the black, oily beach a thousand yards off, a strip of LSTs and LCIs lay high & dry. Jap artillery and heavy mortar was splashing around them. Farther inland our naval barrage was laying in some white puffs amid the jungle green. We had been at general quarters since dawn and the machine-gun bursts from the shore side told of men fighting and dying there. But to the machinist's mate sitting alone in the quiet of his anguish, the war and all its noises had faded away. The war had lost its meaning. Everything he had been trained for had lost its meaning. "The best man on the ship" had been sabotaged.

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