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by Patricia McGuire-Hughes
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for Grandpa Mac
Grandpa sat on his hunter green La-Z-Boy, his elbows resting comfortably on its wooden arms, while I lounged on the itchy red sofa across from him. Photos from his military days were displayed on the coffee table between us and medallions from the Korean War and WWII lined the wood-paneled walls of his basement, marking a time in his life so distant from the one I knew.
“The problem is those duds were killing the cowboys,” Grandpa said, sharing one of his rare stories. “They picked them up when they were out herding cattle during the day, put ‘em in their saddle bags and threw ‘em in the corral in the evenings.”
“Duds?” I asked.
“Unexploded ordnance,” he said. “Bombs that hadn’t detonated. This was August 1954; two years after Korea.”
He said it casually, in the same tone he could have said, “Looks like we’ll have rain next Tuesday.” And yet, he could have just as calmly said: “This was two years after I almost froze to death.” Or even, “This was two years after I didn’t know if I’d make it home to see my son and wife again.” He could have told me about how his legs froze beneath him on the Chosin Reservoir when he was far from home—fighting a war that wasn’t his. Wasn’t even America’s. Yet he doesn’t talk of those days very often. Instead, he told me a story about pineapple fields.
Well, he would get to that part eventually.
“Hawaii was my first assignment after Korea. I was the Supply and Administrative Officer and oversaw day-to-day operations like payroll and supplies. The U.S. Army Pacific Commander had tasked one hundred and fifty men to search the one hundred thousand acres of Parker Ranch, where the cowboys were finding the explosive duds.”
I was in college, barely twenty years old, and visiting for the weekend. Aware of our diminishing time together, I wanted to know my grandfather; know myself. It was one of those unseasonably hot days in September, surprising and unwelcome. We had turned on the air conditioner and changed into shorts trying to escape the heat. Grandma was upstairs making spaghetti and the scent of oregano and garlic made my stomach growl.
“There was one Navy and two Army guys assigned to each team,” he said. “The Navy handled underwater demolitions. They’d go inland and blow-up causeways and anything else that blocked where we needed to land.”
“It sounds dangerous,” I said, shifting my weight to find a more comfortable position. I tried to envision Grandpa coordinating supplies as they trudged over fields searching for duds. I couldn’t imagine doing something so perilous.
He shrugged. “They were just doing their jobs.”
He paused and took a gulp of sweet tea. Through the tall cut-glass, I glimpsed his signature lemon slice floating on top of the sea of brown and ice just before his index finger gently pushed the yellow circle down into the liquid, past the cubes. I took a sip of water, and enjoyed the momentary relief it provided.
“The military had used Parker Ranch for bombing and strafing training. Problem was, some bombs were faulty and hadn’t gone off on impact. Most of the duds wouldn’t explode, but every once and awhile they did, see, and those cowboys didn’t know the difference and got into trouble.”
With the euphemism trouble ringing in my ears, I could only guess what he meant and wondered how many cowboys lost their lives before the duds were removed. I remembered the day before when he’d jolted awake from an afternoon nap.
“Are you okay, Grandpa?” I’d asked.
He nodded as he sat up. “Just a bad dream.”
“What were you dreaming about?”
“I can’t tell you,” he said, shaking his head. “I just can’t tell you.”
I didn’t ask him anymore about it. My parents told me once that Grandpa hadn’t talked about his combat experience with anyone until the surviving Chosin Few started gathering formally in the last two decades. He’d spent most of his life carrying these memories alone. I couldn’t begin to understand what that must’ve been like for him.
“After approval was granted by the Governor King, the commander brought in men from Ft. Shafter and Schofield Barracks to help with the search and to man an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Team,” he said.
“So, all those men were basically heading into a minefield?” I asked.
He nodded and glanced away briefly. “We were all just doing our jobs.” His common refrain seemed like a deflection and I wondered what he was thinking.
“I wasn’t out there every day, but I would occasionally check in on them and make sure they had everything they needed,” he said.
Just like you do for us, I thought. Whenever the family got together, Grandpa took on that role with us, too. He’d organize and execute breakfast omelets each morning and coordinate the dessert efforts after dinner. He had a way of making sure we were all taken care of and I’m sure he was that way on this assignment as well.
“One day when I was out there with the guys, they were searching an impact area between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, two large volcanoes that had last erupted many years before,” he said. “The lava flowed down the mountains, taking the steepest route to the ocean.” He moved his hands like waves. “Some duds were buried in crevices along the lava pathways, so we had to watch our step.” He propped his feet up and clicked the little plastic remote to turn on the ceiling fan. Blades slowly whirred to life above us.
“It’s amazing you can remember those names so easily,” I said, squeezing another lemon wedge into my water.
“Well, don’t ask what I ate for lunch yesterday because I can’t tell you, but if you need to know details from forty years ago, I can do that.” He chuckled.
I laughed and folded my legs underneath me.
“We plodded over the lava fields, which was that hard, rock stuff. It looked like black icing, but it was solid and tough. Some lava had been there for years, which made it look crustier. And boy, it would really eat up a pair of combat boots. Seems like I was issuing the men new boots every week.”
I remembered visiting Hawaii as a kid and hiking on those mounds of dark, hardened goo. It felt a little bit like a fairy tale–climbing on something that was once flowing lava and now smelled like over-boiled eggs.
It had been hard to visualize bombs going off in such a beautiful place.
Grandpa wore blue shorts and a white T-shirt that fluttered subtly in the fan breeze. His bare legs, sprinkled with liver spots, were stretched out on the recliner foot rest.
“Were they going into the fields at random? How did that work?” I asked.
“It was just a skirmish line of men. They had it mapped out, you know. Some duds were as big as tree trunks, others were the size of a loaf of bread and everything in between. Sometimes, we found ones with fins on the shell that were partly underground. There were big bombs too—500 to 2000 pounds—but we didn’t try to classify the duds. If we found anything at all, we knew it needed to be checked by the EOD team, so it was marked. But we didn’t pick anything up. You see, that’s what had gotten those ranchers in trouble.”
There was that word again – trouble. I didn’t know what he meant exactly, but I felt too nervous to ask.
Grandpa’s drawl was distinctly from the Ozarks. Although he’d traveled the world and lived in Ethiopia, California, Virginia, Texas…he always remained a Missourian and pronounced it “Missour-ah.”
I peered down at the coffee table between us and saw the faded black and white picture of him and his WWII Army buddies in a small metal frame. Grandpa was a young man, probably eighteen or nineteen. They all stood in uniform next to an Army jeep with cigarettes and canteens in their hands. He’d once handed me that same photo and said, “I’m the only one of those guys that made it out alive.” In small but explosive snippets like that, he disclosed excruciating fragments of his experience with war.
Had he suspected he might get injured or killed? Was he afraid? Or did he always have the sense he would survive? The things I feared (bad grades, social rejection, getting into an accident) seemed so different, so inconsequential from what Grandpa’s fears might have been. Yet, I wondered if perhaps the fear he felt actually was inconsequential to the greater task at hand. Just doing their jobs.
“Then the EOD team would come in and detonate the duds marked by the searchers.”
He pulled his reading glasses from his flimsy t-shirt breast pocket and placed them on his face as he leaned forward. Grandpa never did anything too fast or too slow. It was always just so and I’d wonder later if this was his temperament or the effect of benzodiazepines prescribed for chronic pain from neuropathy due to nerve damage in Korea. He picked up the framed photo of him and his Army buddies.
We sat in silence a moment, then he sighed and positioned the picture back on the table. Before I could ask what he was thinking, he continued his story.
“The whole operation lasted three months,” he said. “Then we headed back to our home stations.”
“Were you on the way to Parker Ranch when your plane crash landed or on the way back?” I asked. This story was family folklore, the one story Grandpa would tell because he could chuckle while he told it. Because we’d all been to Hawaii together on vacation and had seen Parker Ranch.
Because everyone in the story survived.
“On the way there,” he said. “Twenty-five of us were in our Army fatigues in a C-47 and this plane was not plush.” He shook his head. “We’d sit down, put our feet in, and it was like being crammed in a bucket with just a couple three straps to hold us in. Our duffle bags and gear were stacked in the middle like piled up cord wood. We didn’t talk much that I can remember because it was noisy—real noisy.”
I leaned forward.
“We were about 5000 feet in the air when one of the engines completely stopped. The co-pilot come back and told us to put our parachutes on because we might have to ditch the plane in the ocean. I was thinking about hitting the water and wondering what our next move was gonna be. ‘Here we go again!’ I thought. ‘Why is this happening to us?’”
What a question, I thought. They must have been scared, but also brave.
“When you fly from O’ahu, you just skirt along the islands and don’t usually fly very high and we were along the island of Lana’i. I supposed we were going to have to ride the plane down. The co-pilot wanted us alert and ready.”
“Ready to jump out of the plane?” I asked, amazed.
“I don’t think anyone could have jumped out of that plane,” he said, chuckling. “Boy, I don’t know…” He paused, caught his breath and continued. “None of us had any paratrooper training and the parachutes weren’t sitting at our feet or anywhere near us. Seems to me they were hanging somewhere behind us, I reckon. Yet we never put them on because the plane was so crowded, we wouldn’t have been able to get back to our seats.”
I wondered if he felt powerless as the plane descended and all he could do was wait for instructions. Did his stomach drop like he was on roller coaster? Did it smell like sweat and metal? Did he grab the straps on his bucket seat to brace himself? He couldn’t talk to the other men on the plane, but I pictured them with wide eyes and heavy breathing. My heart thumped in my chest, imagining the claustrophobia and uncertainty I would have felt.
“I guess the pilot thought he could land on that dirt airstrip,” Grandpa said. “It was normally used for crop dusters. There wasn’t anything else there—no nothing—just us and the pineapples. Looking back now, it really didn’t take very long. But at the time, it seemed an eternity—we didn’t know whether we would have to jump in the ocean. We were just riding it out; waiting.”
Grandpa had always said he was raised in the “School of Hard Knocks” and I guessed that meant he expected difficulty in life and wasn’t surprised by it, but was just riding it out; waiting.
“He was a very good pilot and, all things considered, he landed the plane safely. As we landed, though, there wasn’t enough dirt in that little landing strip, so we ran off the runway and into about three rows of pineapples.”
I tried to imagine the sweet smell of pineapples, the sunshine, and the adrenaline as the plane landed.
“Pineapples grow in mounds, you know, and it took the undercarriage—wheels—right out from under the plane. Luckily, no one was hurt and we just walked off the plane.”
He chuckled to himself again and I did, too.
“I’m glad that dirt strip was there,” I said, leaning back.
“We waited till a bus come and took us over to a larger airfield on Lana’i. They sent another plane over to the Big Island and Parker Ranch the same day. All in one afternoon, really.”
This conversation felt full of unexploded ordnance. Afternoon nightmares, young men who never made it home, and life-threatening frostbite lay just beneath the surface, ready to detonate with a particular question or memory. Yet with careful and intentional precision, we could label the duds and enjoy the Hawaiian scenery. We could manage and make sense of it all.
What a difference two generations can make; a few decades in history. Many times, during his story I wanted to ask, “Were you scared, Grandpa?” Or “How does it feel to remember that time in your life?” Or “Is it sad to think about it all now?”
But I didn’t.
This was the story he told. This was what he could share.
And I listened.
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Patricia McGuire-Hughes is a writer and mental health counselor from the Midwest. She graduated from the University of Central Missouri with degrees in both psychology and creative writing and went on to complete her master’s in counseling. After living in India for a few years, Patricia now lives in Nashville. She is a member of the Bellevue Writer’s Group and enjoys spending time outdoors with friends and family. She is intrigued and humbled by the complexity of relationships and the narratives that shape our lives.
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