No Ordinary Joes (2 page)

Fitzgerald was one of a new breed of captain who had been hurried into battle; the top level of Navy leadership was now encouraging these newer graduates of the Naval Academy to “go in harm’s way” and take the war to the enemy. His approach was more aggressive than that of the older and more conservative sub commanders in charge at the start of the war who believed the purpose of submarines was to scout for the Navy’s surface fleet rather than to attack.

From long range and on the surface, Fitzgerald considered firing torpedoes, but at this stage of the war, the available torpedoes were notoriously ineffective, either running too deep or failing to explode on contact. Instead he closed to 2,500 yards.

The freighters discovered the ship’s presence, possibly by radar, and turned searchlights in its direction. Fitzgerald ordered the men manning the three-inch deck gun to commence firing. Immediately, the two freighters returned fire, neither side scoring a hit.
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Knowing the
Grenadier
had been spotted, Fitzgerald quickly turned direction, electing to make a surface end-around, which would put the sub in front of the enemy, in position to submerge and attack. But while the
Grenadier
moved twice as fast on the surface than it did when submerged, it would take the
Grenadier
all night—twelve hours—to accomplish this maneuver. The crew—eight officers and sixty-eight enlisted men—stood down from their battle stations.

Bob sat down at a table to write a letter to his wife, Barbara. He would post the letter as soon as the ship returned to Fremantle. Barbara was living in San Francisco, where they had gotten married a week after Pearl Harbor, six days before he’d shipped off to war. She’d gotten pregnant during those six days, but the excitement he’d felt when he’d gotten the news was soon offset by sadness when she lost the baby. He still had a year to go on his duty.

Seated at the table with Palmer were three other men just as anxious to get back to port—Tim McCoy from Dallas, Texas; Chuck Vervalin from Dundee, New York; and Gordy Cox from Yakima, Washington. Tim and Chuck had met the women they thought were the loves of their young lives on their last leave in Fremantle, and both talked of marrying these young Aussies and taking them back to America after the war. Tim’s girl was the reigning Miss Perth. Gordy, the fourth man at the table, had also met a girl, but he was the shy type and wasn’t sure she liked him as much. Still, he hoped. He’d even written his mom about her. He’d never had a girlfriend growing up.

As the
Grenadier
made its long circle, Tim and Gordy had time to talk. The two sailors, neither yet twenty-one, were total opposites. Tim was extroverted, cocky, and full of Texas bravado; Gordy was slightly built, quiet, and not confident in his ability to learn the complex set of submarine skills necessary to advance beyond his rank of seaman first class. Despite the close confines of the sub and their shared experience in battle—which included being scared shitless—they barely knew each other. Gordy’s initial impression was that Tim was a little too full of himself.

Chuck got up from the table and walked to his bunk, where he pulled a picture of Gwen, his nineteen-year-old girlfriend, out from under his pillow. He’d met her strolling through an arcade in Perth a few months earlier. Two nights before the
Grenadier
had shipped out on this mission, Gwen had given him a Saint Christopher’s medal for good luck and protection. He promised he’d never take it off; she promised she’d wait for him. During their last night together, he confessed that he had an uneasy feeling about this patrol, much more than before the other four he’d been on. She asked why. “Because for the first time in my life I have somebody I really care about,” he answered.

Throughout the night, the
Grenadier
sped along the ocean’s surface at its top speed, 18 knots. Just before daylight it neared its attack position. As
it closed on its targets, Fitzgerald ordered it to submerge and for everyone to man their battle stations. But the freighters had unexpectedly changed direction, and Fitzgerald watched through his periscope as they zigzagged out of sight, leaving only smoke plumes visible on the horizon.

More eager now than ever for a kill, Fitzgerald ordered the
Grenadier
back to the surface for a rapid pursuit, disregarding standard naval operating procedure, which advised subs to patrol on the surface only at night. The sun was now up, and so was a Japanese fighter plane sent to look for the
Grenadier
. For Bob Palmer, Gordy Cox, Tim McCoy, Chuck Vervalin, and the rest of the crew, the war was about to take a terrible turn.

I first stumbled across this story when a cousin of Barbara Palmer’s gave me a twenty-page story Barbara’s husband Bob had written about his life. It was an earnest tale of war and survival, but that wasn’t the part that sucked me in: the passionate love story Bob had written (he was eighty years old) brought tears to my eyes. A month later I flew from Portland, Oregon, to the couple’s home on the Maryland shore. Their love was even more evident in person. As Bob was telling me about all Barbara did for him, unapologetic tears rolled down his cheeks and the lump in his throat was as big as a fist.

For me, that was the beginning of a quest to meet the surviving members of the
Grenadier
’s crew. Bob, Gordy, Tim, and Chuck all had clear minds and acute recall of things that had happened sixty years earlier. More than that, they shared a kind of “ordinariness.” They were all enlisted men. They hadn’t been to prep schools or fancy academies. They had come of age, like others on their ship, during the great Depression, their childhoods hardscrabble and austere. Even before the crucible of war, these guys were tough-ass survivors.

Following the war, they returned to an America far different from the one they’d left five years earlier, and were ill-equipped to deal with it. Over the next several decades, for the most part they went quietly about their business. But they all had troubles in their relationships with women and, later, with their sons. They all admitted to having drunk too much.

And these ordinary men all had great—extraordinary—stories to tell.

It wasn’t just their heroic endurance in terrible captivity that intrigued me. The more I got to know them, the more I realized that the qualities that enabled these four sailors to survive unimaginable cruelties in war were the same ones that got them into trouble later in life. That’s what made them so much more than abstract embodiments of the so-called Greatest Generation—and so real, men whose lives describe the lifetime burden of war.

I
t had been a wet spring in the western foothills of the Catskill Mountains in 1928, and the rivers ran dangerously high. Arthur Vervalin told his wife not to let the kids anywhere near the water. People from those parts knew not to mess with the rivers.

Chuck, seven years old, heard his father’s warning, but when his thirteen-year-old sister, Beulah, set out for the swimming hole, he tagged along anyway. His concern was not the danger—only that they might get the belt when they got home.

In Chuck’s eyes, Beulah could do no wrong. All the Vervalin girls were pretty, but she was the prettiest, with green eyes and chestnut brown hair that fell in ringlets to the middle of her back. She watched over him and took him into town to buy candy, never making him feel like a pest. He loved the way she sometimes carried him on her hip or let him lick the bowl when she made cookies. She also took him with her whenever she ventured down to the swimming hole at the Unidilla River. She was the best swimmer in the family.

At the river, Beulah told Chuck and a couple of friends to wait on the bank while she tested the water. Her plan was to swim out to the sandbar in the middle where they usually sunned themselves, and if it was safe, she would come back and escort Chuck across. She’d done it dozens of times.

Halfway across, she began to flounder, the current pulling her downstream, away from the sandbar and the bank. Flailing her arms, she yelled
for help. A man standing nearby heard her scream and dove in after her. But the current was too strong, and he turned and struggled back to shore. Beulah disappeared under the water.

Chuck was still standing on the bank an hour later when several men carried his sister’s body on a board across the field. He watched them load her into the back of a truck and disappear down the road. Three days later, he was sitting in a pew at the front of the Congressional Church, Beulah’s pansy-covered casket nearby. Next to him, his mother and sisters wept, and his father fixed his cold glare straight ahead.

The Vervalins were a close family, all the kids helping with the chores, but there was also an abusive edge to family life, even before Beulah drowned, mainly because of Arthur. An imposing 300-pound Dutchman who liked to drink, he often took his belt to the kids, including the girls. Sometimes there seemed to be no reason for his outbursts. Chuck, the oldest son, caught the greatest share of his wrath.

Arthur and his wife, Florence, scratched out a living on a 140-acre farm on the outskirts of Sidney, New York, with a couple of workhorses, a milking cow, pigs, chickens, vegetables, and an orchard with apples and pears. To help make ends meet, Arthur, an eighth-grade dropout, took an occasional job in town. Florence, an Irish redhead, worked from dawn to dusk, fixing meals, washing clothes, milking the cow, and feeding the pigs. Being pregnant, which she always seemed to be, didn’t slow her down. After each birth, she’d be back at work the next day, picking potatoes and cleaning the barn.

Like her husband, she’d dropped out of school before the ninth grade, but she loved the written word and she read to her children every night, including the poetry of Longfellow. She sometimes wrote poetry herself but rarely shared it. Arthur thought it a waste of her time. She also read the Bible a lot, especially after two babies were stillborn. She found comfort in the Scriptures.

As the Depression spread across the country, the Vervalins were unable to sell their milk, buy feed for their animals, or keep up with their taxes.
They lost the farm in 1930 and moved fifty miles west to Binghamton. Some of their friends and neighbors suspected the move had as much to do with what had happened to Beulah that muggy day in June 1928 as it did with the Depression. Arthur couldn’t stand looking at the river anymore. He never talked about it, but the kids knew that down deep he blamed his wife. If she’d heeded his warning, Beulah would still be alive.

After the move to Binghamton, Chuck missed the farm, especially the horses and riding on the tractor. There were now ten kids in the family, and times were tough. Even so, Chuck was energetic and quick to adjust. His mom signed him up for Boy Scouts, and he set his sights on making it all the way to Eagle Scout, earning half the necessary badges in his first two years. His other passion was baseball, and he and his friends cleared a makeshift diamond out of a farmer’s pasture. They had only one ball and bat among them, the bat held together by screws and electrical tape.

He was also popular, in large part because he always took the dare. When a pal challenged him to shoot a rubber band at the backside of his teacher, Mrs. Sabercool, he did it and got caught. The principal took the belt to him. Even when he wasn’t at fault, he was one of those kids that trouble seemed to find. If somebody threw a snowball and hit a passerby, Chuck got blamed. When a buddy threw a rock through a neighbor’s window during a game of cowboys and Indians, Chuck got the belt.

In 1935, when Chuck was fourteen, the Vervalins moved again, this time to a tenant farm just outside of Dundee, New York, in the Finger Lakes area, population 1,000. Dundee was only five miles from Seneca Lake, where summer yacht folks in fancy slacks vacationed, but to Chuck the lake seemed as distant as New York City. The family had moved to Dundee from Binghamton when natural gas was discovered in the area and Arthur got hired to head the purification plant, making him one of the lucky ones to have a job in the depth of the Depression. But his luck was short-lived—a coworker turned him in for drinking on the job and he got fired.

After that, Arthur worked a series of jobs for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the largest New Deal agency, which employed millions across America during the Depression to work on buildings, roads, and
other projects. Sometimes he’d go off to Binghamton or Elmira for weeks or even months at a time, sending part of what little money he made back home. Chuck wasn’t up on politics, but he heard his mother give thanks many times to President Roosevelt and his New Deal.

To Chuck, it was his mother who held the family together. Although she was usually soft-spoken and gentle, she was resolute, and sometimes showed a glimpse of a fiery Irish temperament. She never took a day off from caring for her family, even when she was sick. Chuck loved the way she read to him and his siblings, especially the westerns of Zane Grey. It provided an escape from the hard times and his father’s absences. He also appreciated the way she could stretch the little food they had, whether it was by making a big pot of soup out of milkweed or baking bread out of the buckwheat that grew on their property. She was adept at improvising, as when she brewed a home remedy for cuts from the leaves of plants that grew along the road.

Chuck did what he could to help. He especially liked going out to hunt or fish for food. He’d learned to shoot at an early age, and had a 16-gauge shotgun to go with his .22. He’d killed a lot of different animals for dinner—squirrels, woodchucks, rabbits, and even raccoons. He scrounged for whatever jobs he could find, such as selling magazines, but many nights he went to bed without anything to eat, or at best a bowl of beans and a little cornbread the neighbors had brought over. In school he’d get so hungry he couldn’t concentrate.