CHAPTER EIGHT
Fred pointed out to Arthur, “Hey, Sport, you’d better get on with your dessert and let it start settling before your mamma calls and we have to go eat. AND, if you don’t eat a belly full of her spaghetti, she is going to know something is up. You know what I mean?”
“You better believe I do. Mom knows everything I do. I can’t seem to get away with anything. You know the old saying, Mr. Tom. I believe she really does have eyes in the back of her head,” he stated emphatically as he started digging into the doughnuts.
Fred opened up, “So did you serve some time in Walter Reed Army Medical Center?”
“Yes, sir. Altogether about three years of my life was spent there, off and on” Tom replied. He hesitated a moment before continuing, “It was…uh,…operation, recuperation, try it out. Come back for another operation, recuperation, try something new. Come back….and so on and so forth.”
“I noticed you hesitated, Tom. You don’t have to answer anything if you don’t want to.”
“No, no. Uh…..that’s….not it at all. There’s so much that was going on at that time, I was just looking for some short way of telling the story. Believe you me, Walter Reed Hospital was great. But, man alive. The stuff you had to go through. It would bore you to tears if I went through everything,” Tom explained hoping throw him off.
Fred wasn’t really satisfied with his answer. His espionage years in the Army taught him a lot about human behavior. However, he had an idea that some things didn’t need to come to light right at this moment. He countered by asking, “I was just trying to figure out how you got acquainted with old General Horace Bennett. I mean, I know he was your commander in the Philippines, but it sounds like you got to know him pretty well if he invited you to his Christmas parties. I remember extremely well how much most of us would give to be invited to them. He was a pretty closed individual to most people.”
Tom downed the rest of his coffee before he answered. “He was a hard man alright. He fought the war hard. And, if you fought the war hard, he would watch over you like a mother hen. He probably told every volunteer the same thing he told us. He pulled us into Col. Mucci's tent and gave us our orders. When he finished, he looked us straight in the eye and told us that, no matter what happened to us that he would NEVER forget us. AND, if we did not come back from this suicide mission, he would NEVER forget our families.
“And he was true to his word. He visited me at Walter Reed Hospital. He marched into the admin office there and demanded to see my progress charts.” At this point a little smile was playing on Tom’s face.
Fred interrupted him with a big chuckle, “Dear God in heaven, I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall of that office. If only they had video tape replays of that ball game. Whew.”
Tom nodded his head, “Yeah, and double whew. I knew when I was fixing to get a visit. The orderlies would come in with a certain look on their face like their momma or daddy was going to give them a whipping when they got home. They asked about my comfort. They made sure I wasn’t hurting. I even had one come in and asked if he could take me to the bathroom. I told him I didn’t have to go and you know what he asked me?”
“Not a clue.”
“He asked me if I was sure that I did not need to go ‘cause he was more than willing to take me if I did. Old War Horace must have been on the War-path that day.”
Fred laughed at the thought, “Mercy sakes. I knew he could be a bugger at times but he must have been some kind of a terror that day.”
“Let’s say it this way, I was very glad that I was on his good side,” Tom declared with a laugh. “Anyway, when word got out that I was about to be released, he came to see me and I knew immediately that something else was up.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yep, those orderlies acted normal that day. I had no clue he was coming to see me until the moment he walked through the door.”
“He was up to something. wasn’t he?”
Tom took a deep breath and said, “Yeah, I guess you could say that. I was not only due to be released from the hospital, I was also going to be released from active duty. My mind was filled with one decision after another. Should I re-enlist? Should I get out and go home? Should I get out and go somewhere else? If so, where should I go? Do I have enough money to get there? There was just tons of stuff to think about.”
Arthur had finished his doughnuts and was just listening when something Tom said got the best of him. “You didn’t want to go back home, Mr. Tom?” he asked.
Fred watched an ashen color come over Tom’s face as he blankly looked at Arthur before answering, “There was nobody there for me to come home to, Arthur. Nobody.” Tom forced a weak and apologetic smile but Fred saw through it.
‘That’s the truth. Just not all of it,’ thought Fred. “So what kind of plan did Gen. Bennett have for you?” he asked in a way to guide the story.
Tom cleared his throat before answering, “Well, he needed somebody who was free for a couple of years to head up a special project that the Pentagon had dropped into his lap. One of his jobs was to search out mass graves and bring whatever we could find back to the states. He knew that I had a good…….uhm…….” he chuckled as he finished, “well…that I could get along with the natives real well. Yes, that’s………what he was looking for. Because, you see,……..they were positive….that is they knew from the survivors of Bataan that some of the soldiers had been taken away into the jungle and never seen again. Since nobody heard shots or yells, they presumed that they were going to be slave labor or something. We just didn’t know and he needed somebody to go into the jungle and find out.”
“Well, if it’s important for us to know all the truth, God will bring it out in His time. He’s stumbling now and I have to get him off of this track. I can’t afford for him to have another flashback.”