Clusters of Grapes

Naval Fiction. Ever beento Hawaii???

Clusters of Grapes

            Getting battleships like the USS Arizona (BB-39) ready for deployment was a complicated, arduous process, especially for Ensign Matt Harmon. His wife Kelly and their daughter were killed when the japs bombed Pearl Harbor. At the time he was on temporary duty with the USS Enterprise (CV-6), one of the two of the carriers that was underway that morning. The young officer was managing the testing of a new air search radar that was slated to be installed on the Arizona; very sensitive, classified. I was a Gunners Mate first class in the weapons department. My name’s Joe Edwards out of Tulsa, and Ensign Harmon was my division officer. My friends used to call me Eddie.

 After the attack, when the carrier group returned to the devastation of what remained of Pearl, Mister Harmon needed a little help to finish his sentences for a while. Little Janie and her mom had the bad luck of being shopping at the base commissary when one of the Japanese zeroes strafed the building. Matt liked to think his baby and his best girl in the whole world didn’t know what hit them. Matt was subsequently assigned to the Enterprise as a watch officer in CIC. I can only surmise what it was like on that aircraft carrier during most of World War II because I was stuck on the Arizona, confined to the immediate area around Pearl Harbor, Pearl City, and the outskirts of Honolulu. Sea duty can be tough; especially when your combat magazine explodes right next to you and the deck sinks below your feet in your own homeport. Lieutenant (jg) Harmon sustained some bad burns USS Yorktown (CV-5) from one of the explosions from a kamikaze of the battle of Midway years later.

After the war Mister Harmon came back to Pearl Harbor as a regular lieutenant and with a noticeable limp. He was assigned to operations with the Harbor Master, which is where he met my kid brother. Scott wasn’t in the sublime ranks of gunner’s mates, but a real sailor just the same. As a boatswains mate second he had his hands full of deck lines, block and tackles, and deck apes with all their paint scrapers and chipping hammers. And Scott had a wife and six year old daughter that attended Pearl Harbor elementary school half a block away from the crumbling building that was once the military commissary where Mister Harmon’s family was shopping for groceries.

Rebuilding a naval community after such a devastating attack that drags a whole country like America into war is more than just repairing docks, replacing electrical systems and sewers, or setting up new grocery stores that sell baby bottles and clusters of grapes. The war had drawn all kinds of people from all over the world to the tropical shores of Hawaii, and the economy was booming. A few Hollywood movies were made with some big stars. And even though there were derelict ships at the bottom of the channel, Pear Harbor became a major hub for the Navy’s ships, submarines, and personnel. The Hawaiian people benefitted from jobs and the rivers of money that formed when tourist began to visit in droves. And the US Government made enormous investments to the communities near Pearl Harbor and Wheeler army base as wartime logistics paid off in spades.

When Scott Edwards, an enlisted man with a shy Hispanic wife, a beautiful little daughter named Jill, and who was also my kid brother, reported for duty he busted his tail on the docks and ships that were destroyed, along with the boats and quay walls that rejuvenated the function of the harbor. My old division officer took him under his wing after the workdays were over. Mister Harmon made sure that Scott’s Maria and Jill were housed in on-base housing, that they had all the creature comforts and necessities that a family needs in a secluded place like Oahu in 1946. Scott was promoted to first class and ensured that the restoration operations of the harbor were going well first hand.

Matt Harmon made the school a personal priority from the very start. The new high school started out to be a college university, at least in Matt’s dreams. It ended up as a junior/senior high because the funding applied for from Washington DC fell through; Hawaii was only a territorial possession at the time. Still a young enlisted man named Goldstein with aspirations of becoming an architect drew up the plans. A small stand of trees was zoned by the locals; a tribal mandate for a school would benefit the Hawaiian people as well as the military. After several months of requisitions and community meetings the materials began to arrive past the entrance to Pearl Harbor from the sea. Construction of the initial building took almost two years. The school had twelve foot ceilings with fans, a main office and two tertiary offices for the principal and coordinator, and six classrooms with enough school-desks for twenty students per room. There was a science lab in the initial blueprint, but it was deferred for more funding. When the building was finished in 1949, the opening ceremony saw all the sailors and officers in dress whites; the civilians wore their Sunday best. I’m not going to say any specific names of all the brass that attended, but I sure was proud as hell when Mister Harmon was given an Accom Medal and my kid brother got his first Achievement medal. Scott’s little sweetheart, lovely little Jill, wasn’t among the first to attend the new school, but she sure attended years later.

In 1950 the Russians tested some nuclear weapons which started some major changes in Washington. A new war department was formed called the National Security Council (NSC), and they generated a document called NSC-68 which was classified at the time, and after reading it Mister Harmon went berserk. I’d known the man for a lot of years but I never saw him so angry. I watched him after one of the other officers took him to the officer’s club to try and calm him down. Now I’m just a first class gunner and I don’t rate going into the officer’s club, so I just hung outside the door of the O’club lobby. When Matt and Commander Ryker finally came out Mister Harmon was staggering a little, which was VERY unusual for him. No matter how much he tried, Mister Ryker couldn’t get Matt to calm down, to stop shouting stuff like ‘the Kremlin’s methods’ and ‘backup infiltration with intimidation’ and ‘rebuilding the West’s defensive potential.’ I remember Mister Ryker trying to get Matt to shut up by putting his hand over Matt’s mouth and shh-ing’ him, and then Matt pushing the commander’s hands down and screaming “God damned Korean commie b******s!!!” at the top of his lungs. Well finally Mister Ryker got very angry and walked away, not wanting to become implicated by some of the classified stuff Matt was so upset about.

As Matt staggered over to his car he slammed his fists down on the front ends of a few vehicles in the O’club parking lot until he got to his own deuce coup. He stood there for a moment, his hands over his eyes, composing himself in the darkness. Dropping his hand from his face, he shouted something unintelligible and climbed behind the wheel of his car. Then Lieutenant Harmon, very unusually drunk as a skunk, systematically and efficiently drove his car into a palm tree about a quarter mile down the road from the O’club. When he crashed into that tree, Matt was thrown to the beach and his left knee mashed up against a chunk of coral washed up on the sand. He almost lost his whole leg. Instead he lost his commission, a medical discharge from the Navy. Matt wasn’t involved in the Korean War, not like Scott was.

As the conflict with communism in Korea broke out and subsequently continued, Scott became Chief Edwards on a US submarine while Lieutenant Harmon became Mister Harmon, the math and science teacher at Pearl High School. His scars and his limp a hindrance to how he walked, Matt took to teaching very well. Pearl High was his pet project, and though Matt never remarried, he planted his roots into the seaside community of Pearl City, Honolulu, and Pearl Harbor through his classroom and his lesson plans. The Navy base remained functional, in fact grew as the war progressed. Pearl Harbor grew into a major staging area between Korea, Japan, and America. As Hawaii became the potential fiftieth state, more funding became available, and Matt’s school started to grow in size as the community flourished. After Armistice was finally settled in 1953, Scott came home to lovely Maria and his budding, thirteen year old daughter. Jill was in the eighth grade and had two classes in which Matt Harmon was the teacher.

Matt and Scott were very glad to see each other, and once again my old division officer took my kid brother under his wing. Scott had seen some long, hard, and onerous days in the Navy’s silent service, and he believed that he’d given enough of his time to his country. He wanted to settle down and give the rest of his life to his wife and his daughter. Matt was able to cut through the red tape to ensure that Scott’s college education was paid for in California. So Maria and Jill and Matt flew to San Diego in 1954. After Scott got his degree in education and psychology in 1957, Jill was able to attend her junior and senior year at Pearl High. Plus she had a new baby brother named Joseph, of all things. Matt welcomed Scott back to Hawaii with a “Hawaiian Statehood” button for his jacket and a curriculum of seventh and eighth grade Social Studies for the upcoming September semester starting in just over a month.

It was great to see Scott and Maria and Jill again, but for Matt his attention was focused on the renovations to the high school. They were adding a floor with four more classrooms, two with labs. They were also building a new gymnasium and an auditorium.  The construction was more than halfway completed when Matt showed Scott around, Matt with a cane in his hand and a lot of grey in his goatee. As they walked down the new hallway their voices echoed down the twelve-foot high corridors. It seems that inasmuch as the cost of the building was barely covered by military and senate appropriations, there were some that the cost of were coming up short, namely paint, light bulbs, handrails; those sorts of things. The original building was painted with some extra white paint that Scott found stored long before December of ’41. The new walls were sheetrock covered with only thin paper, and the wiring for the overhead lights was laid out in the ceilings but there were no fixtures to insert the light bulbs, let alone the bulbs themselves. But at least the floors were done with surplus asbestos tiles from the army storage at Wheeler field. Matt was told that exactly one hundred school desks were shipped from San Diego in late spring, hopefully to arrive at least at the beginning of the school year.

“I tell ya,’ chief, I’ve applied for the credit myself for as much paint I can get my hands on,…” Matt liked to call Scott ‘chief,’ he was so proud of the young bos’n who’d done so well. “…but labor is not cheap, even around these islands. And I’m at a loss of where to get the light fixtures. I was hoping that maybe you could get with some of your old buddies down on the docks to see if anything’s lying around.”

“Yessir, I suppose that I could check down around Ford Island and see if we can scavenge a fixture or two. I know ol’ Jonesie’s still around, because he sent me a Christmas card last year, and Jonesie’s one of the best electricians I’ve ever seen.” Scott called Mister Harmon ‘sir’ out of pure training and habit. “Now you may just have to come to terms that some classes just might have to be given in want of a few things for the benefit of overall school, at least to start with.” Scott had given his share of on-the-job training, and taken more than a few courses without the benefit of books, desks, or adequate lighting. Of course he wasn’t in the Navy anymore, but he didn’t want to subject the youth of Hawaii to those kinds of conditions just because he had to during two wars.

“Yeah, well let’s not plan on our senior class sitting on the floor and taking notes with crayons just yet.” Matt opened the door to the auditorium, smiling at the excellent acoustics. “We’ve always got the benches of the theatre!” His voice echoed sharply from the thirty-foot apex of the ceiling.

In the following weeks Mister Harmon and Chief Edwards were back busting their tails for the Pearl of Oahu. The difference was that they painted and scrounged and installed outdated electric equipment during the day, while they reviewed and revised their lesson plans at night. Word got around and two weeks before the first day of classes a small group of military dependents and local native civilians showed up with ten gallons of extra paint, light blue in color, paint brushes, and donated kerosene lamps. The new wings were painted white in some areas, blue in others, and there were only a few empty holes in the ceiling in the new hallways; the two principal offices donated their electric lights in lieu of the four donated kerosene lamps. The school desks didn’t arrive in time.

The first day of classes went very well, especially for Scott. He’d become a chief petty officer for good reason; he was a very effective instructor and communicator. All the work seemed to have taken a toll on Matt, just the same his math and science classes went very well. Unfortunately Matt had forgone checking with his doctor prior to putting so much work in at the school. The second day of classes, as Matt was writing reading assignments for his ninth grade biology class on the chalkboard, his heart gave out and he collapsed in front of fourteen students seated on the floor. Matt died in the hospital that night.

The next day Scott and the English teacher, Missus Benitez, were talking as they walked down the hallways of the new wing of the school. All the students were in class and the high ceilings echoed their words in a strange, eerie way. The young woman was frustrated about having to teach kids grammar without the benefit of a blackboard.

“Mister Edwards, this is ridiculous! Not only do the kids have to share books three to a book, but they have to sit in chairs and write on their laps.” She was of Hawaiian descent, the wife of a Navy engineering officer. “It’s very incondusive to a proper learning curve for such impressionable minds as seventh and eighth graders.”

“Missus Benitez, I understand that explaining to a distracted teen the need to conjugate adverbs and pronouns with out visually showing them how is ineffective at best.” Scott was dealing with the death of his old friend and department head. His eleventh graders were still spending the morning seated on the floor. “Try to keep in mind that at least we have a school to try to explain it to them as a group. Ten years ago they had to learn things like English and math from their parents.”

I was standing at the end of the hallway, unseen with the newly released spirit of Matt Harmon. I imagine I was frowning in aggravation just as bad as he was.

“Well why couldn’t Mister Harmon at least provide chalk, pencils, and more books?” The young woman had been up most of the night with a teething two year old, and she wasn’t completely listening to exactly what she was saying. “I mean, didn’t he have any consideration for the benefits of the children of this community when he was planning this school?”

“Consideration, for the benefits, …???”Scott was doing his best to hold onto his temper.

“I mean he had a nice little school house with the old school. Why couldn’t he provide the same…” Chief Edwards did not allow her to continue.

“Listen Missus Benitez, Mister Harmon built this school from the ground up with his own sweat and blood. The books and the desks and your precious chalkboard will arrive eventually because that man is providing them for you even now!”

“Don’t you raise your voice to me, you salty son of a b***h!” The lack of sleep and her husband’s rank got the better of her. “My people lived on this island for generations…”

“And they’d still be starving and earning a living selling coconuts if it weren’t for men like Matt Harmon.” Scott interrupted. “Do you remember December seventh when the war began and all those Navy people got killed here?”

“Yes I do, Mister Edwards, and my family put up four families for months afterwards.” Missus Benitez’ family was actually from the big island and she wasn’t aware of the whole story about Matt Harmon, or that she had raised her voice to that of yelling at Scott. “I don’t know where you were that day sir, but I can tell you that my family was …”

“Your family! Your family!” Scott roared in reply. “I imagine your family are all still alive, aren’t they?!” Missus Benitez nodded, ready to declare that her older brother was now a seaman in the merchant marines and that her husband was a Navy officer. “Matt Harmon’s wife and daughter were killed dead in the commissary, strafed by a jap zero, ma’am!! And he built this school for them, for my kids, for all the children on this island! Thanks to that man your family and your people will be able to get an education here! And he built this school for your kids TOO!!”

The chief boatswains mate’s heatedly yelled words echoed in a deep bass, reverberating throughout the ceilings of the gym, the auditorium, and the twelve foot high hallways of the entire school. Missus Benitez looked up at Scott Edwards as the sound of his voice cascaded back from the other side of the enormous building that Matt Harmon had built for her and for her people. When the echoed sounds of Scott’s voice faded they were replaced by the choking sobs of a man on his knees at her feet.

There on the floor in front of her was the ghost of a young ensign named Matt Harmon, holding the shattered body of a six-year-old girl, butchered by the gunfire of a Japanese warplane. The apparition of the young officer sobbed in a whisper as he laid the child’s body back onto the floor. He covered the bloody red of her face and shoulders with his khaki shirt, the gold bar on its collar twinkling in the supernatural light. The hand of a lovely young woman touched him on the shoulder, and Matt’s grief transformed to joy as he looked into the face of his long lost Kelly. Her blue eyes and light red hair shimmered in the morning light of the school hallway. Matt stood and took her in his arms. Kelly pulled away from him, reaching down to take her young daughter’s hand. The child’s face and hair and body restored to youthful life and reflective joy in her eyes from those of her daddy’s. Without looking at Scott or Missus Benitez, the small family, now clothed in shimmering white, turned away and walked down the hallway. They disappeared into the wall at the end of the corridor. Scott and Missus Benitez, who later introduced herself to him as Angelina, looked at each other and the heated argument in frustration disintegrated with the ghostly vision of the vindicated casualties of war.

I believe that Scott and Miss Angelina never spoke of seeing Mister Harmon’s reunion with his wife and daughter, but I really can’t say. I’m just a gunner first class aboard the USS Arizona, USN. It’s tough duty sometimes. But then again there’s some pretty good liberty here in the paradise of the Hawaiian Islands.

SR Urie

Reviews

[Donald Meikle]

Thanks for the memories, for me CIC was aboard a Connie from Barber's Point. (Before the Arizona Memorial)