Memorial Day 2012

Three of my five children were here at the house in Central Point, Oregon for a Memorial Day barbecue. That included grandson, Connor (7) and two caregivers that help Morgan and Alicia. Missing was Daniel, last known location, the Marine Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan. Elias is still training and working based out of Florida with the Air Force Combat Controllers.

I was never in the service myself, just started to apply for a very selective Navy program when I was at Oregon State University, but stopped when I saw how really selective it was. Only two people in all the colleges on the West Coast were selected. I had taken a course from the Navy in navigation and liked it. Jesse had spent two tours of duty with the Army in Iraq, so he had some memorializing to do. And another Vet friend of his was present. But it was my father who was on my mind that day.

Dad had been in ROTC at the University of Washington in the '30s while pursuing his degree in fisheries. His brother Arnold was there in Seattle living with him in the Chi Phi fraternity house. Arnold was taking flying lessons and they shared their first car, a Model T Ford. Dad was back in Petersburg buying fish at the Petersburg Cold Storage for Whiz Fish Co. of Seattle when Pearl Harbor happened. He was sitting on the second stool from the wall when the news came through. My brother Arnold was given that stool by Dave Ohmer when Trident Seafoods bought the old Pastime Cafe building for a mess hall and bunkhouse for their plant.

Dad went back to Seattle to join the Navy Air Corps and started training in the old Stearman Bearcat bi-plane at the Sand Point field on Lake Washington. I think he was doing OK as a pilot, even being the only one in his flight to make it back to the field when the mechanics forgot to fuel up a who flight of Bearcats. Planes were dropping into the potato fields east of the lake, and even into the lake trying to make it back. Dad made it back to land crosswise on the runway, which he caught hell for. He had to have an operation on his septum when he went to Texas for more advanced flight training, to make it easier to equalize the pressure on his eardrums. It was there his future as a dive bomber pilot ended. Probably a good thing, as he might not have survived if he had gone to Midway. Whole flights of dive bombers were shot down there.

He next went back East to talk to someone about getting assigned to a ship. He was questioned about his experience in Alaska snd he was given a ship to command when asked if he had navigated the Wrangell Narrows. The Narrows was known to them on the East Coast too. It has the most aids to navigation of any body of water that length in the U.S. I used to get a kick out of taking wheel watch on seiners at night in the Narrows myself. So they gave Dad a 385 foot Landing Ship Tank, aka, LST.

On his first convoy to Europe his ship was blown in half and he anchored the bow half. He lost 17 men. It was such violent explosion he never believed it was a torpedo, but a mine that hadn't been cleared. He said he was just sitting down when the explosion occurred, so wasn't injured by standing or sitting.. He spent some time in London and searching the beaches at Land's End for survivors after that. His next ship was similar, a Landing Ship Infantry, and he picked it up on the West coast.

After some time anchored in San Francisco Bay and hob-nobing in the finer watering holes of the city, they sailed for the Philippines. I'm sketchy on what operations he was involved in in the Pacific Theater, but he ended up at the invasion of Okinawa. He was hauling Marines around in his overgrown landing craft, and even carried smaller landing craft on deck. The old Alaska State ferry we bought and were restoring in Seldovia Bay seemed a miniature version of those LST's dad ran. After all, the 'Chilkat' was a WWII design 100 foot landing craft and not much more modern construction, having been build only ten years after the end of the war.

Dad saw the munitions dump on Okinawa go up when a Japanese sapper snuck in with a satchel charge and touched it off. And his ship shot down one Kamakazi. Mostly he worried a lot about being blown out of the water again. Not that they couldn't see lots of other ships being sunk all around them, but dad had been sunk once and knew the feeling. That was what occurred to me to get me writing this. Dad was skinny as a rail when he got back to the states after that. I think his nerves were shot.

He might have been fairly observant before, but when I was around him he liked looking out to sea and all around. A little like Jesse when he got back from Iraq and stayed with me and Terry for a spell. Any restaurant we would go to he would sit at the corner table with his back to the wall while packing heat. He'd been shot in the middle of the armor on his back once. Dad was just plain full of energy for the most part. I recall him pacing his office while giving an interview, and staying at his cannery office until 11:00 every night all summer to keep track of the tenders and be of assistance to any of his fishing boats. I'll never forget his call sign, 'KWB 91 Petersburg,' and the sound of his voice when he said it. I think there a number of skippers in Petersburg and elsewhere who remember that as well, but they are getting fewer all the time.

In the years leading up to his passing, two years ago in May, he traveled to San Francisco to meet a group of his former shipmates. I read where a group of these ex-LST sailors restored one in Italy and were fixing to run it to the States for fine tuning. Some guys were doing that to a PT boat in Portland recently too. I can really identify with this kind of thing, especially after my floating shipyard work in Alaska's remote Seldovia Bay.

This memorial to Enge family veterans of foreign wars wouldn't be complete without mentioning Dad's brother Arnold, and my brother Arnold named after uncle Arnold. Dad's brother was killed ferrying a defective war-plane to Juneau during the war. He crashed near the airport in Juneau. A tenderman we had when I was running a fish processing plant there, named Ole Nelson, saw it happen. I've talked about this in another blog post. Maybe not the mystery of how he was coming from Sitka with a wheel plane before the runway was completed there. These days you don't even want to mention things like 'military secrets' on the Internet or you'll go on  a watch list, after mentioning one of 667 words or phrases on Homeland Security's super-computer. Oops, I forgot.

Arnold had his own flight school in Ketchikan before the war. He had a Belanca on floats. I sure don't know how he financed it, except the family probably pulled together on it. His dad, my first skipper, was a highline fisherman in Petersburg and in '29 had build the first actual architect-designed home there.. He trained some famous Southeast Alaska pilots like Bub Bodding of Ellis Airlines and Alaska Coastal-Ellis fame. You're talking the predecessor airlines of the iconic Alaska Airlines of the present. There is still a flight jacket of his at Mom's house in Petersburg that I used to use. When I had my Harley-Davidson 250 (not an 1100) in Petersburg in the early '70s, guys liked to call me 'Bronson.' after a TV character who rode a Triumph motorcycle around and did good deeds. (I met a woman here in Southern Oregon whose mother was the leading lady in that TV series.) Small world.

I know more about my brother Arnold's service in the Navy on board the aircraft carrier 'Enterprise' during the Vietnam War. That's a story for another time as well. Here's to all our Veterans, but especially my Dad this Memorial Day week. Maybe someday I can fulfill Dad's wish to put a replica statue of the Navy sailor  in the Memorial Park in Petersburg. And there were a lot of Navy sailors that came  from Petersburg.