There were five more C heats to run and two consolations before we got around to the B heats. Frankly, some of them stank to high heaven but some were pretty good. There were maybe a dozen spins and some minor wrecks – nothing serious, thank God, and as I recall only one or two Jeeps were damaged enough to have to drop out.

Then it was time for the B heats. Just to make life interesting, Frank and Spud had announced that the starting order for the B heats was going to be by car numbers again, but in reverse order. That meant I was starting in the outside of the back row, with Goober on my inside. I guess both Goober and I had the same idea – try to pick up some positions by sling-shotting the start – in other words, hanging back a little and dropping the hammer before the flagman flies the green. You have to time it about right or you get egg all over your face. It was my first real try at that little stunt. I headed outside, while Goober dove inside. I’m pretty sure that we were four wide when we went by Spud, and he really should have thrown the red flag but he was too busy diving for cover. All of a sudden I saw a hell of a cloud of dust and someone getting sideways, so I dove even further to the right, clear off the track, but I kept my foot in it. As soon as I was past the wreck I cut hard left back onto the track and tucked in behind Goober, who had cut the corner way tight to avoid the wreck.

The wreck was bad enough that Spud had the red flag out as we came to the start-finish line. Goober braked to a stop and I stopped right behind him. Fortunately nobody was hurt and none of the Jeeps were banged up too bad, but a couple were too beat up to continue, so there were only six of us lined up single file.

While we were lining up, Spud came over to me and said, "Austin, you idiot, get your ass up on the high line and stay there. I think he can outturn you down low, but you can outrun him up high."

"Kinda figured that," I told him.

"Listen to me, run high," he said, and turned to finish up the lineup.

I tried to slingshot Goober on the restart but he wasn’t buying it – he was a sharp cookie. I was right behind him on the restart, but went high right in the first corner and stayed there, while he took the low line. Since he had the shorter route he pulled ahead of me in every corner, but since I was already going faster I’d catch him in the straight. We got to the point where we were running side by side, sometimes with him ahead, sometimes with me ahead, and we were running the hell away from the field. In fact, we were lapping the field. We split one car on the back stretch of the next to last lap, both passing him at the same time, him low and me high, of course, then another on the front stretch. We come up on a third in the last corner, and he was running a low line – way low, in fact. Goober tried to go to the high side of him but I was already there, so he had to lift a bit and that got me into the lead at the checker, by maybe half a Jeep length.

"Hey, man, one hell of a race," I yelled to Goober as we shut the Jeeps off, close to side by side.

"Ayah, ’at was one raat mean son of a pup," he yelled back.

We sat and shot the shit while they put together and ran the other half of the B heats. The guy in the 24 car – I don’t think I ever knew his name – started in the back of the field and just worked his way through it. He was in the lead by the time there were three laps left, and he had maybe a quarter of a lap lead when the checkers flew. He was clearly the class of the field in that heat, and Goober and I agreed we were going to have our hands full with him.

We took a little breather there, mostly to give the guys from the second B heat a chance to get settled. During the wait, Frank and Spud took a couple of Jeeps that hadn’t made it into the feature and went out for their grudge match, with Carnie handling the flags. It was a damn close race. They started side by side, exchanged the lead a half dozen times in the ten laps, and finished with Spud’s front bumper a good foot in front of Frank’s.

Then it was time for the feature. I had the pole position, with the 24 car outside me and with Goober right behind me. I had the inside line – and I had the hot rod. In a real race you’d start rolling, but here it was a drag race to the first corner – and I had a Jeep that would accelerate through the gears a little better than everybody else’s. Because of going up through the gears and the inside line, I had pulled out a good car length on Goober and less than that on the 24. I wanted the high line because my Jeep worked better up there, and the guy in the 24 wanted to be down low because normally that’s the preferred line. Of course, Goober was also down low and wanted to stay there. The 24 couldn’t power past me, but dove down inside just as soon as I got a bumper thickness in front of him. He misjudged it, though, diving into a space that Goober was already occupying. His left rear banged into Goober’s right front, and both of them spun right there. Even in that short a distance the three of us had pulled out enough in front of the field that there was room for the other cars to get around the two of them. Nobody was hurt and neither of them even came to a full stop, although I imagine there were some cuss words exchanged while the yellow flag flew.

Since they got moving, although at the tail of the field, we ran under yellow for a couple laps to get things sorted out – laps under yellow didn’t count – and then we got the green again with a single file restart. This time, I had a clear field with nobody arguing the first turn with me, so I just got up in the high line and let ’er roll. I wasn’t pulling out that fast, but I could see over on the other side of the track that there was some action going on and I figured Goober and the 24 were going at it – when the whole field is made up of dark green Jeeps it’s hard to tell who’s doing what to who. I found out afterward that Goober and the 24 worked up through the field while trying to lay bumpers on each other, and it was one slam bang race that completely overlooked the fact that unless something happened they were unlikely to catch me. Of course, with about ten laps to go they got three wide in a place where there really was only room for two, and the 24 spun again, putting him back several places before he could gather it up – the field had stretched out by that much and I had already lapped a couple cars.

So, the yellow flew again and the field bunched up, with Goober back in about third and the 24 car several cars farther back. Again, when the restart came I got up high, while Goober managed to get under the guy that had been running second. While he was getting around him, though, I was winding it out, so I had maybe thirty yards lead and managed to extend it a little each lap while the 24 was fighting back through the field again. However, he only made it to third and wasn’t really closing on Goober when the checkers flew.

Even with the hot rod Jeep, the victory wasn’t easy, but I’d won it. It was a thrilling way to finish up V-J Day, and the troops had been treated to some pretty good racing. After the race, at the start-finish line the general presented me with staff sergeant’s stripes, and a trophy – actually, a polished Jeep piston mounted in a rough chunk of Okinawan hardwood. Somebody, somewhere around headquarters knew how to do engraving and had the tools to do it with, because on it was lettered "Okinawa-Pacific Stock Car Champion, 1945."

That trophy sits on my mantle today, and I’m looking at it as I tell this. It was a big day for me, but in light of later experiences I can’t help but cringe at the thought of racing in open Jeeps, without even a notion of a roll bar, wearing steel pots for helmets, in a field of absolute rookies. Why the hell it wasn’t a slaughter is beyond me. Believe it or not, my real speed secret for winning the race wasn’t the hot rod Jeep – but the fact that I wore a seat belt to keep me from sliding around in the seat so I could concentrate on powersliding the corners better. Some seat belt, too – an Army web belt pulled out to its full length and wrapped under the seat. I learned something from that, too.

But we were young, and we were stupid. We either thought we were invincible or considered with the war our lives didn’t matter all that much. It seems dumb as hell now, but I sure would like to be that age again, knowing what I know now.

And so, I got out of the Army, went home and got into racing for real . . . not hardly. In fact, I didn’t get to do any of those things anytime soon.

As soon as the war was over with there was a great clamor in the states to "bring the boys home." In fact, it had already begun, and people were already being brought back from Europe at a fast rate, although many of them had been retained in case they were needed in the Pacific, which, of course, had turned out not to be the case.

Of course, some people had been out there a long time, while others, like me, hadn’t been out in the war zones much at all. To keep things fair, the Army worked up a points system to rough in the order of who got to go home when. You got so many points for time served, so many points for time overseas, for medals earned and for the number of children you had. I didn’t even bother to add up my points because I figured that if I did I might discover I was eligible for discharge in, oh, 1952. When the initial cutoff was announced on September 1, you could go home if you had eighty-five points. As I recall, Frank had ninety-some points and a good quarter of the division was over the cutoff. You had to have an adequate replacement in place when you left, and Frank decided that I was adequate. He was gone by the end of October.

By November they lowered the cutoff to where Spud could go home, too, and a whole bunch of the division was with him. Of the four of us that had been such good buddies back in the summer, only Carnie and I were left. About that time they concentrated those of us who were left into just one regiment, and we had to go join the occupation forces in Japan. We loaded all the vehicles that would run onto LSTs and pretty soon we landed at Sasebo, the big Japanese naval base on Kyushu.

Over the next several months I didn’t see much of Japan outside of our motor pool, although I got to see Nagasaki one time and see what a mess the bomb had made of it. While some of the other troops in our regiment got out and around confiscating arms and the like, we in the motor pool just spent most of our time fixing up the damage caused to our vehicles by the terrible roads.

One of the good deals about winning the race back on Okinawa was that I was made a staff sergeant. The troops, three stripe sergeants and under, had to live in some really primitive Japanese barracks, but we higher NCOs got to live in some better quarters if still nothing special. A few of the three-stripe sergeants got to live there as well, and Carnie was able to talk his way into the billets and be my roommate.

One of the bad things about the deal was that even though I was a staff sergeant, I was still only nineteen, which was awful damn young as far as some of the older guys were concerned, so Carnie and I were pretty much outcasts, pretty much on our own for what we did off duty. Actually, most of the time that worked out pretty well, since Carnie had a nose for stuff that helped make the time pass. We never seemed to lack for Japanese beer, for example.

While things were all right for us, it was a pretty tough damn winter for the Japanese civilians. I don’t want to say that there was a lot of starvation, but things were mighty damn lean for them. There were a lot of people that would do anything they could to get a little ahead, get something to eat, or like that.

Most especially, if you had a candy bar or a pack of cigarettes you had no problem getting laid. I don’t want to say that every woman was a whore, but there were a lot of women that would spread their legs out of sheer desperation.

It got awful damn tempting. Now, I still was a virgin at the time – hell, I hadn’t even had a date in high school, we were that poor and that far out of town. We couldn’t even go to some of the rare social things like Grange where you might get to know a neighbor girl a little, so I was pretty inexperienced when it came to women. I’d never made much mention of it since there always seemed to be guys around with lots more experience, but one night when Carnie suggested that we go and find ourselves some ass, I got embarrassed and sort of blurted the whole thing out.

"Well, we’ve got to fix that," he said. "And I think we ought to get you started right, not just with some candy bar girl."

We didn’t go out that night, but the next afternoon we both managed to get off at noon – it was a Saturday – and Carnie led me off base, to a nice house a couple miles away, and it turned out to be a former Japanese officer’s whorehouse. How he found it I’ll never know, but I knew Carnie had a knack for things like that and didn’t question it.

The Madame was an old girl with white hair, and she had a little English. She and Carnie had to talk it over a bit, but he made it clear that I wasn’t looking for some slam-bam-thank you ma’am but a girl who would take the afternoon and show me how this stuff was done. Once they got that all worked out the old woman went and got a pretty little Japanese girl named Myukio, who led me to an upstairs hotel room overlooking a little garden.

I could go into a lot of detail about that afternoon, since I remember it like it was yesterday, but let’s just say that the first time wasn’t the last time that afternoon and she taught me a lot of stuff in between. The cost for the afternoon? Four packs of cigarettes, and I threw in a fifth one for a tip. Since cigarettes were like gold among the Japanese just then, Myukio was thrilled to get them. I saw Myukio several times after that over the course of the next several months, never more than once or twice a month. A couple times she was busy when I showed up, and I wound up going with other girls.

As time went on and it began to be clear that the occupation was going to be peaceful, they started withdrawing troops and sending them home. Early in the summer of 1946 they worked their way around to our regiment. Although I was still a long way from having enough points to be released, I was sent home with the regiment.

I’d come across the Pacific on a couple of slow and very crowded troop ships, but when I went back it was in a little more style. In order to bring the troops home quicker the Navy had committed some big aircraft carriers to hauling troops. There were no planes, just thousands of bunks on the hanger decks. At that there were only bunks for half of us and we had to trade off, but I didn’t mind since they had that big old flattop wound up to like thirty knots, and its bow was heading toward the states. Pretty soon we were sailing under the Golden Gate, and I don’t think I saw a prettier sight in my life.

They had an out-processing center there in San Francisco. It took a couple days to jump through all the hoops and most of the way I was worried that someone was going to discover that I didn’t have anything like enough points to be released, but if anyone ever discovered it they didn’t say anything. Pretty soon I had my discharge papers and a voucher for a train ticket back to Nebraska. I said goodbye to Carnie then, figuring that I’d never see him again.

It turned out that it would take half of forever to wait out a spot on the train, but I found out you could turn the voucher in for cash. That’s what I did, and still wearing my uniform I stuck out my thumb. People were pretty good to men in uniform in those days, and it was still a time when you could get somewhere hitchhiking. It wasn’t long before I caught a ride with a trucker heading for Salt Lake City.

I suppose I ought to have some sort of a heroic, adventuresome tale about hitchhiking across the country, but really, I don’t. The driver was a Mormon and I swear he preached to me every inch of the way up US-40.

The route from San Francisco up through Reno is one of the prettiest drives you can imagine, and I got an eyeful of it. Once we got past Reno it turns to desert pretty damn quick and not very pretty desert at that. US-40 at the time was all two-lane blacktop and had been pretty beat up from the war years, but this guy wanted to get home to Salt Lake City for church so he drove straight through for a full day. When I finally told the old boy goodbye, I figured that whatever I was cut out to be it sure wasn’t going to be a Mormon.

I still had to get on to Nebraska, but I was tired, so I got a room in an old brownstone hotel, had a good night’s sleep and a bath, then hit the road again the next morning. I got a couple short rides, and then took one heading the wrong way. I wound up in Ogden, right next to the Union Pacific yards, so I got to thinking about hopping a freight. There were still a lot of hobos hopping freights back then, and the railroads didn’t like it, but it could be done. Fortunately, I happened to talk to the right guy about it, and he proved to be a conductor on a fast freight, so I got to ride a caboose all the way to Cheyenne, Wyoming, which is about as middle of nowhere a place as you could imagine.

While I was working my way out of the train yard I happened to see another train heading on east, not going very fast, and toward the front there were some empty boxcars with the doors open, so I threw my bag on one and scrambled onto it. That was a slow train, but it at least got me to North Platte, which was in Nebraska but on the wrong end of it.

Back during the war the ladies of North Platte had set up a famous USO canteen that met all the troop trains coming through, and I’d had a cup of coffee and a doughnut there while I was on my way to the Pacific. That was all closed now, but there was a bench on the porch of the building where it had been and that’s where I spent the night. In the morning I went across the street for some breakfast and happened to meet a guy driving to Omaha. That got me to Grand Island in the afternoon, but after that I had to get off the Lincoln Highway and take local roads. It was after dark when I got to Hartford and I had to walk the rest of the way home, four miles, but it was a trip I’d walked often enough before and it sure felt good to be back home.

By then it was a year and a half since I’d been home, not a lot compared to some people but long enough. The hell of it was, while it felt good to be back home, it didn’t feel all that good, either. I’d seen a bit of the world, not really the good parts and not enough to hold me, either – yet here I was coming back to the farm with no idea of what I wanted to do.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.