The Long Escape Read online

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to my wife, Meryl, who has awakened me from thousands of nightmares over the past three decades. Thank you, Sweetheart!

  Additionally, the book is dedicated to all of the descendents of Bob and Mary (Betty) Noonan with sincere appreciation for their ongoing efforts to live life to its fullest while always helping the less fortunate.

  Copyright 2011 by John J. Noonan

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2011918710

  ISBN-13: 9781466434264 ISBN-10:1466434260 eBook ISBN: 978-1-61916-458-1

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author

  Table of Contents

  Chapter Title

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  N/A Prologue

  1 Escape, Please Escape!

  2 The Teen Years

  3 The Army

  4 Boot Camp

  5 Destroyer Life

  6 My Aunt, The Innkeeper

  7 Goodbye Deck Force!

  8 Opportunity and Responsibility

  9 Bob, Will You Make Me a Virgin?

  10 The Orient

  11 Typhoon!

  12 Christmas in Japan

  13 My Name is Edith!

  14 Stateside Studying

  15 Love Lost Forever

  16 The Great Baguio Adventure

  17 Bar Battles, Russian Ladies, & Binjo Ditches

  18 Goodbye Cogswell

  19 Montana at Last!

  20 Great Lakes

  21 Home for Christmas

  22 Never Pick a Fight with a Destroyer Sailor

  23 Bath, Maine

  24 It’s Great to be a Bar Hero!

  25 My First Shakedown Cruise

  26 Goodbye, Little Sister

  27 My Second Shakedown Cruise

  28 No One Will Ever Find Your Body

  29 USS Belknap, Bath, Maine

  30 Quebec City

  31 Vive Quebec Libre’

  32 A Frenetic Engagement

  33 Brothers at Sea

  34 The End of Alone

  N/A Epilogue

  N/A The Author

  PROLOGUE

  The scene before me was weird, but pleasant. I was standing just inside of the mouth of a cave, and a swarm of small children were playing in front of me, deeper in the cave. I could see big Dan, little Danny, Danielle, Michelle, Kacy, Nathan, Tim, Kelsie, and Madison. There were others behind them, further back in the cave. “That’s odd” I thought in a strange, detached, way, “I didn’t realize they were all the same age”.

  “Dad, look out behind you!” It was little Michelle, screaming to warn me.

  I spun around and it was there again, this time in the mouth of the cave. This time it was a huge snake with the jaws of an alligator and a body that looked like black smoke.

  I yelled, “Get out!” but it kept moving toward us. I kept yelling and went into the boxer’s crouch that Dad had taught me eons ago. I flicked out a left jab that went right through the beast, startling me. I followed with a roundhouse right and this time I felt something, but it was a soft something.

  The kids were all screaming and I could hear my voice screaming along with them. I came out of the roundhouse right with a backhanded slap at the creature’s face and this time I connected. I could feel the pain coursing through the back of my hand. The snake’s face was as hard as a board!

  “Wake up! Jeff, Wake up! You hit me and you’re screaming again! You’re scaring me!” It’s Meryl, shaking me awake as she had done countless times in the past thirty years.

  I come awake slowly, feeling the pain from where I backhanded my nightstand. Still half-asleep, I mumble, “Sorry, Hon. Did I hurt you?”

  She answers, “No, I’m okay.”

  I give her a hug, “I’m really sorry. It was another bad dream. I’m okay now.”

  But I know that I’m not. I’m sweating and shaking uncontrollably. It’s the same old dream and I know that it will have the same old results. I won’t get back to sleep for hours. It’s been this way for over fifty years and it isn’t going to change tonight.

  The dream is pretty much the same every time. I’m in a hole in the ground, sometimes alone and sometimes with friends or family members surrounding me. The hole is often the size of a coffin, but it can get as large as a dry dock. There is always something trying to get into the hole, something deadly—something that is looking for me. It’s usually a faceless giant, but it sometimes comes into the dream as weird noises or a smoky creature that I can see through, or, often, just a huge snake. But it’s always evil. In every dream, there comes a point where it gets too close, and I wake up terrified and shaking. In the worst of the dreams, the thing almost catches me, and then the earth opens and I fall…and fall…and fall…until I wake up screaming. After the dreams, I always lie awake for hours with my mind invariably going back over the decades to my childhood.

  Tonight is no different. My shaking slowly subsides as my mind is inexorably drawn back to the pleasant memories of my early childhood and then on to the later, more difficult, years.

  *

  My early childhood was probably no more eventful than that of any other child of the time. I was born in 1940 at the end of the Great Depression, just before the start of World War II. I was destined to be the oldest of eight children, and the first of them, my sister Kathy, was born about two years after me. Just over a year later, she was followed by another sister, Patty. Both girls were born while Dad served in the Marines during the war.

  Patty was born disabled and never walked or talked. She never had any control over her body, not even her most basic functions, and she spent her entire life totally dependent on the family. But she was a beautiful child, who, like me, was born with a full head of bright red hair.

  When the war finally came to an end, Dad was discharged, and we returned to his hometown in Montana, where he soon found work as the school janitor. With a job in hand, he was able to lease forty acres from the state, and we began building our home on the outskirts of the small community of St. Regis.

  Building the home was a family project. Dad would cut the logs and do the heavy work. It fell to Mom and me to trim the bark off the logs and shape them to go up on the walls.

  I was five years old when we started building the home. Mom was soon pregnant with my first brother, Tim. Even pregnant, Mom worked with Dad and me on the house while my grandmother took care of Kathy and Patty. Fall came and I started school, but we kept at it all that winter, working every evening and weekend. Somehow we pulled it off and managed, between us, to build a home. It was, at that time, one of the largest houses in town.

  Dad used his GI Bill to order a LaSalle Correspondence Course in radio and television technology. He completed the course with honors, but never used the knowledge except to fix our equipment and that of our neighbors.

  Before marrying my mother, Dad had been a both a professional boxer and a park ranger in Glacier National Park. He loved the Zane Gray westerns and Tarzan adventure novels of the era and saw himself as a kind of “Old West Hero” who could do no wrong. He was an incredibly intelligent individual, but his ego never let him admit to a mistake of any kind. Similarly, he couldn’t seem to understand that he had to study or otherwise prepare himself before starting major projects. He seemed to think that his intellect was enough to overcome any obstacle, so he had no need for education or preparation.

  Dad honestly tried to do exceptional things, but somehow, he never quite succeeded. For example, in 1947, with a herculean effort, he planted over twenty acres o
f our leasehold in potatoes—by hand. But he had not looked into any type of recorded history for this type of project and the entire planting froze that spring. During this period, Dad’s reputation in the community grew, but he never recognized his successes and every small setback became monumental in his mind.

  He kept trying, but things just never seemed to work out the way he planned them. He never complained and I never saw him cry, but slowly life seemed to be destroying him. With every setback, his drinking increased. This was particularly bad because he was a big man who was violent and abusive when he drank.

  Mom had had a different upbringing from Dad, and she was able to smooth off some of the old boxer’s rougher edges. She was a handsome woman who had been raised on the prairies of Saskatchewan. Her father was a Polish immigrant who had worked hard and done well. The family owned a large wheat farm as well as the first commercial electric power plant in that part of Canada. Mom was the eldest child and was raised in a relatively luxurious environment. She graduated from a teachers college in Saskatchewan and was licensed to teach in Canadian schools.

  But in the manner of the old country, the family holdings were passed to the sons. The girls were expected to marry and develop their own lives. So after college, Mom found herself on her own, with no financial support from her family.

  She had been making her living as a teacher in a one-room Alberta school for several years before she met my father. They were married in 1938 when Mom was twenty-six and Dad was twenty-nine years old. She was a gregarious person who got along well with everyone, but she had been raised to believe that the man was always the head of the household and was not to be defied. She lived this philosophy very happily for many years. She absolutely adored my father and, for a very long time, would not dream of contradicting him on anything.

  The years passed, and Dad found work in one of the lumber mills that had sprung up to supply the post-World War II building boom. He became a lumber grader, a prestigious position in the sawmill community. In 1948, the family produced another brother, Lyle. With five kids, one of whom was disabled, the family pressures mounted and Dad didn’t handle them well. He just could not reconcile his “Western Hero” self-image with the fact that he was a family man with a day job.

  Dad had been an outspoken Democrat for years and, by 1952, he was the county’s Democratic Committee chairman. Then, with absolutely no preparation, he made a life-changing decision, declared himself a candidate for Congress, and made a serious run for the office. I was eleven years old and remember the campaign well. He often took me with him when he made speeches or visited with the voters door to door. Somehow, even though I was so young, I was fascinated with this process. On the issues of the day, Dad was far ahead of his time, talking about the need to install fish ladders on the dams and stop clear-cutting the forests. Most of the people he visited with, even hardcore Democrats, didn’t agree with this type of thinking. In that era, environmental preservation just wasn’t a concern to most Montanans.

  The run for Congress was an honorable effort, but Dad had no financial backing and he put everything he owned into the effort. He ran against a sitting member of the Montana Supreme Court, a Democrat with years of political experience. But that fact never entered his calculations. In a manner typical of him, he decided that he wanted to be a congressman and proceeded to run for election with absolute confidence that he would win.

  He lost in the primary and soon had to declare bankruptcy. This was the beginning of the end for Dad. His drinking went from bad to uncontrollable. The violence and abuse got much worse and the Dad that I admired slowly disappeared.

  Dad had once been a great father. He took me fishing, taught me to box, and was a real friend. When I was in grade school, and he was the school janitor, we had a regular after-school routine. I would help him with the after-school cleanup, and then we would walk home together. On the way, we would either stop to pick up groceries for Mom, or we would stop at the local bar for a drink (me Coke—him wine), then go on home. Sometimes he would carry me home on his shoulders.

  Dad was a big, tough, man who, during the early years, prided himself in being fair with everyone. I will never forget one evening when we stopped at the local bar on the way home.

  We walked into the bar and were faced with what appeared to be a huge brawl. It took me a moment to sort it out. When I did, it became obvious that some Oriental men had come into the bar and were being badly beaten by a group of local loggers.

  The Orientals were screaming “We are Americans. We are Americans.”

  The loggers were calling them, among other things, “Fucking Japs” and “Gooks.” The loggers were far bigger than the Orientals and were beating them mercilessly. I watched in horror as two loggers threw a man repeatedly into the air, kicking him as he came down. They were making drunken sport out of cold-blooded murder.

  Dad never hesitated. As soon as he walked into the bar, he started swinging. When he finished, two of the loggers were on their way to the hospital and the others were still running. (I heard later that they hid from Dad for weeks following that night.) When he was done with the loggers, he helped patch up the Orientals, after which he bought them a drink and made sure they were all right. When everything was calmed down, he took my little hand in his big one and we went home.

  As we made our way home that evening, he explained to me, in great detail, that all men are equal and that no man should ever be made to suffer because of things beyond his control. He talked about people he had known and respected (mostly boxers) who were Mexican and Negro. He told me about the Japanese-American soldiers who had fought on our side in Europe. He told me about the people he had known in his youth, when he had lived on an Indian reservation. He made me promise that I would always treat all people cordially until they gave me a concrete reason to dislike them.

  After explaining this bit of his philosophy, I never again heard him mention that night’s battle to anyone. It was as if he thought it was just a normal thing that anyone would do if given the opportunity.

  That was the father that I had known for the first twelve years of my life. He was a man I was terribly proud to call Dad. But all that gradually changed while I was still approaching my teen years.

  Mom was always my confidant and counselor. I spent hours just talking to her and absorbing her thoughts on life. Although it seemed to me that she was usually pregnant, I was always amazed by the amount of work that she could get done in a day. The day-to-day burden of caring for Patty must have been immense, but I never heard Mom complain.

  Even with her workload, whenever there was a social event in the area, Mom was usually in the middle of it. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, she and Dad often hosted evening get-togethers and barbeques at our home that brought together some of the best and brightest in the area. Dad would play his guitar, and another of the neighbors would play banjo. Everyone sang. The parties would go on until the wee hours of the night. Those were the happy days.

  When Dad decided to run for Congress, Mom wholeheartedly supported the effort. She told all who would listen about Bob Noonan, the great man to whom she was married. (She really believed every word of what she said.) She hosted political get-togethers almost weekly. She became great friends with Senator Mike Mansfield and his wife as well as several other well-known political figures of the era. She even became friends with Dad’s main opponent, Lee Metcalf, who went on to a distinguished career in the US Senate. She was still a Canadian citizen, but that never slowed her down. Even then, she could talk politics and policy with the best of them.

  But her world changed after the election loss and the family’s bankruptcy. Dad’s drinking started to eat into any money that came in and times got very tough for Mom. His brutality when he drank began taking a real toll as well. But it must be said that she still adored her man. (In fact, many years later, when she was in her nineties, she still spoke of him as her one true love—and she meant it.)

  Mom had a rou
gh time feeding the family in the 1950s and early 1960s. She often had to change grocery stores because she couldn’t keep the bills paid. Though they were our friends, the grocers couldn’t afford to carry us past a certain point, and they would cut off our credit. Then Mom would try to pay the old grocery bill down while charging food at a different store. This way, with the old bill paid, Mom would be able to beg for credit at the last place when the new grocer had to cut us off. This cycle went on for years.

  During most of the 1950s and the first part of the 1960s, Mom could have been the poster-child for a study of battered women. She had her nose broken twice, her ribs smashed several times, and was forever bruised and obviously beaten. She was trapped at home with a brood of children (including Patty, who was totally dependent on her), and she had no money. She was on her own with no way out that she could have foreseen in those dark days. These had to have been the bleakest, most hopeless, times of her life.

  These experiences led me to vow that I would never raise a hand in anger against a woman. Nor would I ever have more children than I could afford. These vows I have kept. Dad did a good job of teaching me what not to do.

  I also took it upon myself to be the family guardian when Dad’s drunken tantrums threatened us. To this end, I dug three carefully hidden “bunkers”—modeled after pictures I had seen of World War I bunkers—in the woods behind our home. They served as hideouts for the family whenever Dad went on one of his drunken rampages. We spent many nights hunkered down in these holes while we heard Dad screaming threats at us in the nearby woods.

  Hiding in the bunkers was our only defense from Dad’s tantrums. We had no modern police force to fall back on. There was only one policeman, the sheriff, for the entire county; a county about one and a half times as big as the state of Rhode Island. The sheriff was just too busy to be worried about a father’s “disciplinary methods.” Family problems just weren’t a priority in those days and law enforcement didn’t interfere unless someone ended up dead. So we endured the beatings and tried to live as well as possible. We just didn’t understand any other life.