Mixed Signals

         The Photo: approved for release by the Department of Defense
         The Warplane: F4U Vought Corsair: wingspan: 41 feet
         Loaded Weight, with Fuel and Armament: 14,660 pounds
         Engine: Pratt & Whitney R2800-8w, 2,250 horse-power
         Speed: maximum air speed 425 miles per hour
         The Pilot: United States Marine Corps Captain Ben Fox: my dad

My dad had military medals in his sock drawer and a wartime photo of him was on a shelf in his home office. A photo that he rarely talked about. We kids were nervous whenever he did.

Dad was called back into the service during the Korean Conflict, now often called “the forgotten war.” Dad had phenomenal navigation skills and had flown many different planes in World War Two as a Navy Aviator. He had been transferred to the Marines with the rank of Second Lieutenant during that war. However, when the Korean Conflict began it wasn’t Dad’s navigational skills, but his expertise with the propeller driven Vought Corsair that the Marines needed. They offered him a promotion to Captain as a Marine aviator. I wondered if that day was on Dad’s mind when in later years he wryly warned us kids, “Often the first sign of danger is when someone offers you an up-front reward! You had better read the fine print several times!”

Like most everybody in our country at the time, Dad did not truly realize the dire straits into which the U.S. Marines had been plunged on the Korean peninsula. His squadron of prop driven fighters and dive bombers arrived in Korea to discover that besides bombing bridges and fuel depots, they were to launch strafing and napalm bombing runs. This was to provide close air-to-ground support for troops fighting in desperate hand-to-hand combat in sub-zero temperatures. In the macabre humor born among men facing death, one of his fellow flyers called this duty “crop dusting the harvests of Hell.”

In later years, only after a snifter of Brandy or glass of Scotch, would Dad describe the hazards of flying in combat. First was dodging through anti-aircraft explosions, then dropping to hilltop level on strafing and bombing runs. Runs so close to enemy troops that he could see the muzzle flashes from rifles and as he claimed, “Where I could tell which of them wore eyeglasses and which didn’t.” We knew he wasn’t exaggerating, because after a second Scotch he’d stare off over the horizon of the past, then quietly add, “Over the years I’ve named each one of those sorry S.O.B.s." But when he’d set out for Korea Dad had a different view and expectations of that “forgotten war.”

Most of the public was vaguely aware of an overseas war going on and newspaper reports about the troops would be published somewhere behind the ads for new Buicks and Frigidaire appliances. But Dad was lucky in a way. He was claimed by two towns as their ‘local boy’ at the front.

A picture ran in his Modesto, California, hometown newspaper and at the same time another photo appeared in the newspaper in Hutchinson, Kansas, where he had met and married Mom. But Mom hated both photographs, probably because Dad had just finished college and now had a wife and three kids to support on a Marine’s salary. Unlike much of the rest of the country, she fully understood this ‘policing action’ was an all-out shooting war.

Dad, however, had a favorite of the two photographs. The photo in the Hutchinson paper showed him in his cockpit checking his instrument panel before taking off on a mission. The second, which was his favorite, had appeared in the Modesto paper showing him in his leather flying jacket and silk scarf, leaning against the tail of his warplane. This photo hung in his home office, and he rarely discussed it, especially around Mom. But one time I was privy to the story behind that photograph.

An old service buddy, with a bottle of Scotch in tow, had dropped by and eventually he and Dad had drifted into the office. I followed them and melted into the background to eavesdrop on their war stories. Dad tilted his glass toward the photo, “That’s not the picture I originally wanted,” he said, “I was ready to head off to Korea, and I had hoped to make a keepsake for the wife and kids, but you know what sometimes happens in the service...” He’d shrugged his shoulders in resignation and his buddy laughed and finished the sentence, “It was the old Snafu!” Then Dad described his original suggestion.

“I wanted to stand in front of the plane, so as to get a photo of the famous ‘inverted gull wing’ of the Corsair. I also wanted a signal flag in the background; the fox flag, signaling my name. As the photographer jotted this down a Navy Chief, obviously unhappy at being assigned to a Marine Air Station, just exploded!

"The Chief slammed his clipboard down and to the delight of a grinning Navy Signalman, he snarled ‘God save us from Flying Leathernecks! Only a Jarhead wouldn’t understand that a front shot of the Corsair would disclose the aircraft’s armament to the enemy, and that signal flag! Good God! Sailor, wouldn’t you read that as flight operations under way? That’s if we’re on a carrier, which we aren’t, and which can only be ordered up by the ‘ol man’ who’s posted no such instruction!’ By then the Chief was purple with outrage.

"And that,” Dad had tipped his glass towards the photo on the wall, “is how I ended up leaning against the tail of my Corsair.”

Dad’s buddy had chuckled and said, “Nowadays if you’d asked for the ‘Foxtrot’ pennant, and added ‘Oscar’, and ‘X-ray’ that still wouldn’t spell ‘Fox.’ You’d be signaling ‘I am disabled! Man overboard! Stop, wait for signals!’ Not exactly the message to send out to a potential widow!” They’d both laughed, but Dad’s expression had turned serious as he asked, “Bettyjean always sees a cocky Marine flyboy. What do you see?”

Dad’s war buddy had stared at the photograph, and raising his glass of Scotch, answered, “I see a Warrior! Ben, we were all young warriors. Semper Fi!”

Dad had replied, “Semper Fi,” and they’d clinked their glasses in a Marines’ toast to all of the young warriors from that forgotten war fought so long ago.

Edited version was originally published fnasr James Fox, along with the photo in The Front Porch Periodical, 2004