A Trust Betrayed (2 page)

Tom starting picking up the brass remains of shell casings that had dropped from the plane. They were hot, so he quickly scooped them into his baseball cap and ran home. His parents were still asleep, so Tom pounded on the door, burst into the bedroom, and dumped the warm metal on his father's chest, exclaiming, “Here you go, Dad. The Japanese are bombing Pearl Harbor!” Arthur Townsend shot out of bed and scrambled into his uniform, then went out and sped away in his refurbished 1930 Model-A Ford, headed to his ship.

For a brief time, the
St. Louis
was a sitting duck at the dock. Repairs had just been made on one of the ship's boilers, so a big section of the hull was open to provide access for the work crew. Arthur Townsend was the damage-control officer, a lieutenant colonel at the time, and he immediately took charge of having the ship welded back together. In short order the
St. Louis
was moving toward the harbor opening, at twice its usual speed, while planes roared overhead, bullets whizzed past, and explosions echoed across the water. It rammed right through a cable it encountered in the harbor and barely skirted the reef where ships must make a hard turn on their way out to sea. A Japanese submarine sent two torpedoes toward the
St. Louis
, but the bombs struck the reef and exploded away from the ship. Gunners fired a few rounds back at the sub while the cruiser headed out, on its way to rendezvous with the aircraft carriers that were still safely in the Pacific under the command of Admiral William Halsey Jr.

Nietta Townsend had been the head nurse at Mercy Hospital in Jackson, Michigan, when she met her future husband, so she spent most of December 7 caring for the wounded at the Pearl Harbor hospital. Jack Townsend was in the high-school
ROTC
program, so he was put on guard duty at one of the water or power facilities on the island while martial law was in effect after the Japanese attack. That meant Tom, twenty-four days shy of his eleventh birthday, was left alone that evening, sitting in a dark house under a mandatory blackout, listening to the reports of war on a San Francisco radio station. Occasionally he would slip outside to listen to the sounds of gunfire that continued through the night, and at one point the lights suddenly went on at the main power station down at Honolulu—Tom thought it was probably an act of sabotage by local Japanese.

The
St. Louis
spent a couple of weeks in the Pacific after the war began, transporting troops and briefly assisting in a fight with the Japanese occupying the Aleutian Islands near Alaska. The cruiser was back at Pearl Harbor right before Christmas, just in time for Arthur to help his family get to the mainland along with thousands of other Americans being moved out of harm's way. (Before he went home, Arthur found his Model A still parked near the dock, riddled with bullets. He vowed revenge against the Japanese for damaging his prized possession, and it was a promise he would keep in the years ahead.)

On Christmas Eve the Townsends were told they were to report the next morning to the
SS
Lurline
, a luxury liner that had been pressed into service to transport civilians and some of the wounded sailors from Hawaii to San Francisco. “So we packed our bags,” Tom Townsend remembered. “I was given a Christmas present and put it in my suitcase. My brother and I were put in a cabin and my mom was with the nurses. At the pier they were loading the wounded below. I didn't see them but knew what was going on. My mom had told me it had been horrible—there were so many burned in oil and fuel fires.”

There were probably a thousand children on the liner with their families. The ship's huge ballroom was converted into a kind of
playground, with dozens of Monopoly games going on all at once. The adults on board were too nervous to be entertained; the ship's constant zigzagging was a reminder that there were Japanese submarines lurking below the surface that could attack at any moment. The
St. Louis
had been assigned to be part of the convoy; for Nietta, knowing her husband was on duty nearby helped ease the anxiety.

The
Lurline
arrived in San Francisco on the afternoon of December 31. The cold temperature was a shock to Tom, who was still dressed in his Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes. A Red Cross volunteer gave him some long pants and a sweater. The Townsends reunited with Arthur, who found his family a room in a hotel on Market Street, not far from the piers. The boys settled in, and while Arthur and Nietta went out to dinner, they locked the door to the room, turned out the lights, and tossed water balloons from the window into the street below, which was filled with revelers for New Year's Eve.

Arthur Townsend was granted leave to relocate his family, which wanted to head for warmer climes. They decided to move to Sarasota, Florida, but didn't stay there long. Arthur went to war in the South Pacific, and Nietta moved to California so she could be with him whenever he returned to the base in San Francisco. Tom and Jack went to Michigan to live with an uncle near Jackson and go to school there. Jack joined the Navy after finishing high school, while Tom decided to move back with his mother and start high school in Berkeley.

Arthur saw plenty of action during the war in the Pacific, leading a squadron of destroyer-like ships that had been converted to mine-layers and participating in assaults on islands occupied by the Japanese. At Okinawa, nearly all of the squadron's twelve ships were hit by Kamikaze pilots; some had four or five planes crash into their decks and hulls. By the war's end, Arthur was unharmed
physically, but he was mentally exhausted. Put in charge of cleaning up mines, he forced some of the captured members of the Imperial Japanese Navy to do the job, saying he wouldn't put any more American lives at risk. He positioned his ship nearby with its guns pointed at the Japanese and told them if they did anything amiss he would blow them out of the water. Because his actions were considered too harsh, Arthur Townsend was told he could not attend the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945; instead, he would have to return immediately to the United States. He ended up spending a year at Bethesda Naval Hospital suffering from combat fatigue. After his release in 1946, he eventually retired. He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his service during the war.

Tom Townsend graduated from high school in 1948 and immediately took the entrance exam for the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He didn't do well enough for admission, so he decided to enlist in the US Marine Corps. His first stop was Parris Island in South Carolina for boot camp. Afterward, he landed an appointment at a Naval Academy prep school in Rhode Island, and in 1950, he ended up getting into Annapolis after all. “That was a hellish year,” Townsend said. “I was not a good midshipman.” He was now older than most of the students in the class above him, but that didn't stop them from treating him with the usual disdain for a plebe—it probably made things worse. “I didn't do well being harassed by the young punks,” Townsend said. “I had all kinds of problems. . . . I was belligerent.” His grades suffered, too, and by the end of the year Townsend was told he could either repeat as a freshman or leave the academy. After a trip to Europe to reflect on his life, Townsend decided to return to Jackson and use the academic credits he had earned to try to obtain a degree at the University of Michigan. Then he would return to the Marines.

Townsend carried a heavy load of classes at Michigan and also worked as a waiter and cleanup man at a fraternity house in return for his room and board. His schedule left little time for anything but studying and working. In his senior year in 1954, he had a blind date with a student at Michigan State Normal College (now Eastern Michigan University). Anne Taubitz had grown up in Greenbush on the shore of Lake Huron. Her parents ran a country store in the tiny crossroads town, and when Anne took Tom up to meet them, her father, a former Marine, instantly welcomed him into the family. Tom was going back into the Corps right after graduation from Michigan, this time commissioned as a second lieutenant. He went for his six months of training at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, and then he returned to Greenbush on December 28, 1954, to marry Anne.

Townsend's first assignment in the Corps was the artillery regiment of the 1st Battalion, 10th Marines, at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in January 1955. One of five lieutenants in the battery, he was designated as a forward observer on the firing range. During his first day at the base, Townsend was getting a rundown from the first sergeant at the range station when he heard some loud banging from the locker area. The sergeant scampered over and opened one of the lockers to reveal a young Marine stuffed inside. The grunt was ordered to keep quiet, the door was slammed shut again, and the unofficial punishment was continued for whatever breach had been committed—Townsend didn't ask for details. He eventually became good friends with the burly sergeant, often inviting him to home-cooked meals that Anne would prepare at their small apartment in the Tarawa Terrace housing complex on the base.

The year at Camp Lejeune flew by, especially after Anne became pregnant with their first child, Mark, who was born in late 1955. The following year Townsend was sent to Parris Island,
where he was assigned to the rifle range, a post he held for more than two years. Then he received a dream transfer, to the Marine Corps Air Station at Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, in July 1958. For Tom it was like coming home; for Anne it was a chance to enjoy a relaxed family life in a heavenly beach community. She also was schooled by her husband in “the social protocol of rank,” she would write later, “and adapted to wearing gloves while balancing a drink, nibbling an hors d'oeuvre and clutching an evening bag—while being mindful of the cocktail hat rule (is the party before 6 PM or after?).”

After three happy years in Hawaii, where Tom was an executive officer in the artillery unit of the 3rd Battalion, 12th Marines, the Townsends moved to the Sandia Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the center of the US military's nuclear weapons operations. Tom was a training officer and one of the few field Marines at the joint facilities shared with the Army and Air Force. For entertainment in the desert wasteland, Townsend would sometimes dress as a commando and harass the Army units training in the sands, calling in his friend, who was the only Marine pilot at the base, to buzz the troops, which were amassed in large units with dozens of heavy weapons. Once when he was out scouting for action, Townsend strayed near the fence surrounding the nuclear weapons site at Kirkland Air Force Base and was immediately seized by Air Force guards. With no identification, wearing camouflage fatigues and black paint on his face, Townsend was seen as a serious threat, and the guards roughed him up against the fence while demanding an explanation of what he was doing. It was only after Townsend convinced them to call his commanding officer that the guards let him go. His days as a faux commando ended.

The Townsends' second child, Aimee, arrived at the Sandia base hospital in 1962. Two years later, Tom was shipped to Okinawa, Japan, to take over as logistics officer at the division headquarters
there for the 3rd Marines. The Vietnam War was starting to escalate, and he ended up being sent to Da Nang for the last few months of his thirteen-month tour overseas.

In August 1965, Townsend was sent back to Camp Lejeune to be a logistics officer, training Marines in the art of establishing field operations and keeping things running even under the duress of war. His wife and two children were thrilled to have Tom with them again. Their new home was a three-bedroom “cracker box,” but it was located in the special area called Paradise Point that was reserved for officers and their families. The following summer, when Tom was promoted to major, they moved to even larger quarters near the Officers' Club—“the best housing we would occupy in our more than twenty years in the Marine Corps,” Anne later recalled. Mark and Aimee loved hanging out at the club's swimming pool and had many friends on the base—life was good at Camp Lejeune.

Within a few weeks of their move into the “double-decker” that was designated as Quarters 2509, Anne discovered she was pregnant again, “an unexpected but most welcome condition,” she said. Christopher Thomas Townsend was born on March 16, 1967, a small baby at five pounds, ten ounces, who needed assistance to start breathing. When he was brought to his mother's room two days later, Anne noticed he had a high-pitched cry unlike any she had ever heard from a newborn, and he seemed to have problems feeding. But the doctor insisted all was well, and mother and son went home to Paradise Point on March 20.

Despite the reassurances from the medical staff at the base hospital, Anne had lingering concerns about Christopher's health. He was a passive baby and didn't retain formula well, often vomiting after his feedings. At three and a half weeks, the baby's color suddenly turned dusky while he was in his seat, but it returned to normal within a few minutes after Anne picked him up and moved
him around. It was a frightening moment that Anne described to a pair of visiting nurses who came to check on the boy a few days later, but they looked at his records and said there was no reason for concern.

The worries about Christopher subsided somewhat as the family prepared for Tom's latest
TDY
, or temporary duty. On April 26 he was to head to Vieques, Puerto Rico, to take command at Camp Garcia, a Navy training base on an island just off the Puerto Rican mainland. The
TDY
was expected to last four to six months, which left Anne, still recovering from Christopher's birth, with the unenviable task of looking after three children, including a newborn, all on her own.

Still, there was some comfort in remembering the drumbeat about “the Marine Corps family” that Anne had been hearing since she married into it thirteen years earlier. “During the early years there was one underlying message—do what's expected and the Corps will take care of you,” Anne wrote later as she looked back on her family's time in the Corps. “There was solace in this dictum because the husbands—our reason for being where we were—were most frequently gone. Never fear, even if your partner was ‘in the field' for several weeks, or
TDY
for several months, you were safe—looked after by the Corps. The husbands and fathers—the Marines—relied on this tacit understanding, knowing that their loved ones were, if need arose, looked after by a cadre of support personnel. This knowledge allowed them to concentrate solely on the mission at hand.” The slogan of the service,
Semper Fidelis
—Latin for “Always Faithful”—seemed to extend to the spouses and children of Marines, who shared the same bonds as the enlisted men and women, officers, and veterans.