Fred Mitnick

“"They drafted me two days before Pearl Harbor, but I was sent home because my heart was wrong. My this was wrong, my that was wrong; everything was wrong. That was on a Friday. On Sunday, Pearl Harbor happened. Monday morning, the Army calls me back again. 'We have to reexamine you.' And what do you know? I turned into the healthiest guy in the world. They put me in a cab with a couple of other boys and took me to the O'Hare airfield in Chicago. Eight hours later, I was in Hawaii. They told me I was in the Seventh Air Force. I met with the captain and he asked, 'So you're a pretty good mechanic?' 'Yeah, yeah,' I told him. I lied. The next day I met with my newly assigned captain. 'Captain,' I said, 'everything you see on that record is a lot of BS. I only worked as a mechanic for about three weeks.' He looked at me for a while—the way teachers have looked at me certain times in my life. 'Okay, at least you're honest,' he said. We hopped from island to island, following the Marines as they knocked them out to get to the Japanese. We were sent down to a little island called Kanton in the South Pacific. It was as big as a postage stamp. No dirt. No trees. Just plain white sand. My officer would tell me, 'Fred, you're going to get all kinds of garbage. God willing, I want to have the maximum of forty airplanes ready to fly. Beg. Borrow. Steal. Except one thing: if I ask you what happened, I want the truth so I know how to cover for you.' Some days were calm and we had fun. And there were some days when we were under attack. We would get into a foxhole until it was over. We'd push our way out of the sand. There was always damage. People always got hit. So we had to have regular burials." Edited from The Last Good War, published by Welcome Books, text by Veronica Kavass”