The World Is My Home: A Memoir Page 11

  ‘Where’s the gear?’ I asked, and the Navy guard said: ‘I told you—he stole it all.’

  I was aghast, for to empty a building that size Tipi must have made scores of trips in his truck, and his fellow thieves confirmed what he said.

  ‘First time easy, small stuff. Then bigger, still easy. Everything easy, he just keep goin’ till all gone.’

  ‘Where did it go?’

  ‘Like before. Small things, PX food, like that to people here. Big things take four men to carry, always on little ships to other islands.’

  ‘You mean, everything that was in here—you shipped it all out?’

  ‘Yep. All go.’

  ‘What happened to the little red truck?’

  ‘Shore police gettin’ suspicious. Him, me, we paint it white.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Maybe ship to Ha’apa Group, maybe Vava’u, maybe Tipi go fetch when he get out of jail.’

  I felt a keen desire to see this mastermind and persuaded the Tongan officer to let me visit the rude jail. I happened to be entering just as an attractive young woman was on her way in to see the prisoner. It was Meredith, Tipi’s friend, who had proved so helpful in Tipi’s plans. We talked for about an hour, and I deduced that Tipi had propelled Meredith into The Commander’s bed not primarily to provide cover while he emptied the warehouse but rather to enable each of them to cadge a newly built house from the Navy. Everything in Meredith’s house and his, including walls, ceilings and roofs, had been either stolen from the Navy by Tipi or given to Meredith by The Commander, and I could believe the report that the citizens of Tonga, especially the young women, had profited to the extent of at least one million dollars from the occupation, not counting lawful salaries.

  ‘Did you really like The Commander, Meredith?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Kind man, he help me fix my house.’

  ‘He gave you many things?’

  ‘Yes. He one good man, got two babies Oklahoma.’

  I asked Tipi what he would do when his prison term ended and he said brightly: ‘I think maybe go back work Navy. Old commander go, new man maybe need help.’

  ‘Where did you get the little red truck?’

  He considered this for some moments, then said: ‘It belong Commander. Navy blue. Two men, me, we paint it red one night, he never guess.’

  ‘Where is it now?’

  ‘Vava’u.’

  ‘You bring it back when you get out?’

  ‘Yes. My brother have it, he give it back when I ask.’ As I was about to leave the pair he asked: ‘You speak me good, police? Tell them I needed at naval base?’

  Our base was much reduced when I berthed there during the writing of my report, but as the Marines say in their famous poster, ‘We’re looking for a few good men,’ and I made the recommendation to Queen Salote, who towered over me as I spoke. She told me how gratified everyone on her islands was that the American occupation had gone so smoothly, and that without sensible and understanding men like The Commander this would not have been possible. She asked: ‘If we pardon this Tipi fellow, would you reemploy him at your base? and I said a firm ‘Yes.’ I needed what only he could tell me.

  Halfway through the writing of my report, when I was distressed by the ravages The Commander and The Doctor had visited upon our friendly ally Tonga, I drafted a paragraph that was intended as an evaluation of this gross miscarriage of military deportment:

  If the Tongan experience proves anything constructive, it is that incompetent base commanders must be identified early and moved out quickly. But they should not be replaced by medical doctors just out of civilian life who love revolvers and have dreams of military glory, especially if there are attractive girls about who have larcenous friends.

  But later my attitude was somewhat softened:

  When these two lovable clowns were finally removed from Tonga, their place was taken by a fine young lieutenant in the Naval Reserve named P.G. Polowniak whose wise administration had the place back on track within three weeks. They should have sent him two years earlier.

  My last stop was Matareva. Just as with Tonga, Matareva had been vitally important in the early days of the war. When the threat of Japanese invasion waned, the real fighting men were moved north. A cadre was left behind to guard the place, and an officer not qualified for the job was left in charge, a mirror image of The Commander at Tonga.

  But there the similarities end: Tonga was manned by happy-go-lucky sailors, Matareva by a company of sharply trained Marines; and where events on a bypassed and forgotten tropical base at Tonga led to comedy, on Matareva they would end in tragedy.

  When I first landed on Matareva and was driven from the airstrip to the Marine base, I was struck by the vast difference between this reef-lined island and Samoa. Here there was no coral road edging the sea and lined with palms and handsome fales; the road was mean and provided no vistas. Certainly there were no smiling maidens rising from the sea to wrap sarongs around their handsome brown bodies. This was Melanesia, and a general gloominess seemed to prevail. The base was defended around its entire perimeter by three strands of barbed wire, inside which stood a row of unpainted barracks, now three-fourths empty; no flowers and only a few trees relieved the starkness. As soon as the Marines landed in early 1942 the site had been bulldozed to prevent any Japanese infiltrators from finding cover. In those days the danger had been real and a Major General Tompkins had run a taut ship, but by 1943 men of his stamp were long gone.

  My pressing desire upon entering the base was to learn as much about Captain Mark Dorn as I could, but after the total housecleaning prior to the big court-martial there were no Americans stationed here now who had known him. There was just hearsay, residual memories: ‘We know that he came from an FFV …’ When I looked puzzled, a junior officer explained the initials: ‘First Family of Virginia—going way back. He’d been chairman of the Honor Board at the University of Virginia—very strict outfit—one peek at someone else’s examination booklet and you were out on your ass, no appeal if Mark Dorn’s board decided you were guilty.’

  ‘He’d been in R.O.T.C.,’ another man volunteered, ‘either on campus if they had a company or in summer training of some kind and had elected to join the Marines—Quantico—gung-ho all the way—Jack Armstrong, the All-American boy. I’ve heard from men who were in training with him that he was moderately well liked, but that real tough guys thought he took the book of rules too seriously. He didn’t smoke or drink, and poker games would have been quite beyond him.’

  ‘He had a normal experience in the Corps, I guess,’ the first officer said, ‘but I can’t say what it consisted of. Next you hear of him after Quantico, he’s on this rock.’

  And there the discussion ended, because no Marine, especially no officer, was willing to speak in even the most guarded language about Dorn’s experience on Matareva. I went to my bunk that first night aware that I was not going to learn much from the present gang occupying the island. Just as I was about to fall asleep I saw through the open window by my bunk—there was no glass anywhere in the barracks—the three strands of barbed wire surrounding the base and they loomed so ominously in the starlight that I thought: They wired themselves in and prevented the therapy of nature from helping. And the longer I remained on Matareva the more constricting that barbed wire became.

  From my study of the court-martial summaries in the files at Noumea I had learned that the other Marine I had to get information on was Staff Sergeant Mike Hazen, but when I tried to probe his case with my new bunkmates, I got absolutely nowhere. No one knew anything about him or about his service on Matareva or on any prior duty station, and no one cared to know; he was a man who never existed, and my queries about him were not welcomed.

  However, outside the gates of the base there were many who had known both Dorn and Hazen, Matarevan men and women who had worked inside the wire during the first hectic days and also in the quieter days when Dorn was in command, and one old fellow had a photograph of the
two, which was helpful. As he handed it to me he said: ‘Habit our island, kids see white man have camera shout “Poto me! Poto me!” same word you call take photo. I standin’ here Dorn this side, Hazen that I shout like a kid: “Hey, you poto me!” and the one guy do … fine picture I think—this me, this Hazen—this Captain Dorn.’

  Flanking the dark man, who looked younger then, stood Captain Dorn in work clothes with head uncovered, showing hair, parted neatly down the right side and not Marine crew-cut-short but more like the cut of a young businessman. His shirt was open at the neck and betrayed signs that he had been working hard and sweating, but he was apparently in excellent shape, for he showed no fat, and his eyes were bright. Except for his slightly long hair, he seemed the typical Marine junior officer, able, well trained and ready for anything.

  Staff Sergeant Hazen was quite different: barrel-chested, jutting jaw, hair clipped tight almost to the scalp so that he looked like a skinhead, mean eyes and hamlike hands—a fighting Marine, who could have been used on a recruiting poster. But one thing bothered me: he was a staff sergeant, not a drill sergeant, and when I asked about this the old fellow explained: ‘Hazen he type, keep papers in office. He check my work slip, sign his name, other man pay me.’ Mike Hazen was not your typical yeoman, the name we used for his position in the Navy.

  From the native I picked up only desultory information about the two men: Dorn was a competent commander, but no fiery leader like his predecessor, and Hazen was far above average as an office-bound sergeant—his men liked him and some of his Matarevan workmen considered him the best ever. However, from odd bits of information I got the feeling that Hazen had played favorites and that it was not always merit that had led to promotions among the native work force; but I was really getting nowhere until one of his former workmen told me: ‘Mo bettah you talk Ropati, Burns Philp store—he knows all.’

  When I walked the short distance to the island store, one of the chain operated by the historic firm in Sydney, Australia, I found behind the counter a young Matarevan whose father or grandfather must have been an English sailor who took up beachcombing on this or some other island, for I was later to learn that his legal name was Robert Weed, known locally as Ropati, a fine-looking chap probably in his late twenties, with a light-tan complexion, very black hair, white even teeth and fluent English: ‘I’m not employed here. Just helping out. I heard you’d flown in from Nadi.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose it’s already known that I came here to check a few points about the Dorn-Hazen affair.’

  ‘You’re about the fifth American officer who’s come here to ask me about that. Who sent you to see me?’

  ‘The old fellow who used to run the motor pool at the Marine base.’

  ‘Yes. Now, anything he told you is apt to be true. Excellent man, very loyal to the Marines. They ought to give him a uniform.’

  ‘He was vague about what job you had held.’

  ‘Jobs,’ Ropati corrected. ‘Why don’t we sit on the porch?’ In any island town the center of life tended to be the Burns Philp store—a combination of grocery, dry goods store, automotive repair shop, bank and a place for gossip—and as we sat there in the warm morning air several customers stopped by, all greeting Ropati and nodding when he said: ‘The boy inside will help you’ while he remained with me.

  He sat, I remember, with his right foot resting on the bench we shared, his arms clasped about his knee, a position that would have been impossible for me and I commented on this: ‘You must be double-jointed?’ and he laughed: ‘Exercise. Tennis on the court over there.’ I told him that I was an avid tennis player and he said: ‘We must have a try one morning. Early, before it gets too hot.’ Then he added: ‘Captain Dorn built the court. Enlisted the help of scores of people like me. Said he must not use any Marine money for such a project and was careful to provide his personal money for net and wire for the backstop.’

  ‘An honorable man?’

  ‘A gentleman. To him everything had to be done honestly—“up front” he called it.’

  ‘Why did he get into trouble?’

  Ropati drew his knee tighter against his chest, and, weighing his words very carefully, said: ‘If he had whipped out his revolver and shot Hazen that first day— You’re not going to write about this, are you?’

  In the few minutes we had talked I had gained considerable respect for this young man and was eager to have him talk freely, so I leveled with him in the manner I hoped he would with me: ‘I read the full court-martial report up to the point where they broke it off—they didn’t want material like that in the record where someone might uncover it later.’

  ‘We heard they ended it abruptly. They were going to fly me to Noumea to testify, and I was at the airfield, ready to go, but then they called it off. Best for all, maybe.’

  ‘Best for all. But since you now know what I know, I’d really like to zero in.’

  ‘Now, that’s strange. Coincidental you might say. For some time I’ve been wanting to clear my mind about this affair.’ He paused, as if ashamed or embarrassed about what he was going to say next: ‘I’ve thought that some years down the line I might want to write about this. Brett Hilder, the Burns Philp ship captain, told me I ought to think about writing. You know that Louis Becke and Robert Dean Frisbie both worked for this company accumulating ideas about the South Seas before they started writing books.’

  When I told him that only a few weeks ago I had rescued Frisbie from Pukapuka, he became intensely interested: ‘One of the best writers we’ve had. A poet of the lonely reefs.’ And the knowledge that I had recently helped Frisbie and conversed with Hall’s friends encouraged him to trust me. Now he wanted to talk.

  I debriefed him—the military phrase covers nicely such interrogation—over a period of about a week, long talks interspersed with good tennis, and in that time I learned the main details of what Ropati described accurately as ‘the long downward slide of Captain Dorn.’

  ‘It must have started in his boyhood. He showed me pictures one Christmas of his family in Virginia. Prussian Germans who had crossed the ocean to fight in the American Revolution, stayed on to buy a plantation. Fought in the Civil War, too, with Lee. His mother seems to have been hewn out of rock, raised him to see situations as black or white whenever moral decisions had to be made.’

  Recalling things Dorn had told him about his family, Ropati asked: ‘Did his record show that at the University of Virginia he was chairman of the committee that administered the honor system? Real big at Virginia, drum flourishes and all that.’

  ‘What job did you have that allowed you to be so close that he would tell you such details?’

  ‘Liaison. I had been appointed by the Colonial Office in London to see that relations between the Marines and the Matarevan natives were conducted honorably—fair pay and all that.’

  ‘Was it a productive relationship?’

  ‘The best. Never met a finer man than Dorn. A bit tense, but sane and sober and, above all, a man of the most severe attention to honor in all details.’

  ‘Too rigid for his own good?’ I asked.

  ‘Not at all. He understood and appreciated Marine traditions to an admirable degree. In the beginning his men understood this and respected him.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘Staff Sergeant Hazen. If I were writing about this, and someday I might—’

  ‘Where did you get your education? You use proper words, as in “If I were writing.” ’

  ‘University of Auckland. Those New Zealand schools, if you get the right professors, can be excellent.’

  ‘So if you do write, what will you say about Hazen?’

  ‘I would place before my reader the problem that Shakespeare posed when he wrote about Iago: “Can there be pure, unmotivated evil in the world?” and more important: “Can a good man remain blind to the fact that an evil one is out to destroy him?” ’

  ‘Hazen was that kind of evil?’

  ‘He was. I detected it fa
irly early. Dorn never did, until it was far too late.’

  ‘What did you see that Dorn didn’t?’

  ‘That from the first day Hazen arrived on base—Dorn was here first by a good margin—Hazen was determined to destroy him. He hated him. He envied his Virginian upbringing, the fact that Dorn had gone to university and he hadn’t. The fact that Dorn was proud of his family, while he had none that he knew of. But what really galled him was that the Marines respected Dorn for being a gung-ho type, the kind of man the Corps wanted, while he, Hazen, was just a staff sergeant shuffling papers.’ Ropati stopped because he suspected that what he had to say next might be too revealing: ‘He hated me, too, because I had the ear of the British government and a limited kind of power over the islanders employed at the base.’

  ‘So how did Hazen start his moves?’

  ‘He tried to sabotage every order that Dorn issued. In subtle ways. Not getting the word passed. Letting the men know they really didn’t have to bother about that one. Snide comments. Telling me that Dorn’s treatment of the Matarevans was unjust, not realizing that it was I who’d set the wage scales.’

  ‘But if you saw, why didn’t Dorn see?’

  ‘He was what you call a Boy Scout. A true believer. To him Hazen was a Marine who had been promoted to staff sergeant by his superiors, so he was in Dorn’s eyes a good one.’

  When I asked a more probing question he evaded in a curious way: ‘I think at this point you’d better talk with Tetua. Parts of the story she knows better than I do,’ and he led me to the grass-roofed hut of an island girl whose movements were like palm trees swaying in the wind. She was lovely, with long black hair falling to her waist, a radiant smile and a serenity that seemed impervious to any storm, any disappointment. She had the kind of natural unaffected beauty that Gauguin loved to paint, and it was evident that she represented the best of half a dozen different nationalities—English, German, Chinese, Australian, French, Polynesian. Her English was soft and perfect, showing that she too had been to school in New Zealand.