I am flying in the navigator’s seat of a B-25 Mitchel looking down at a calm turquoise South Pacific. We fly low bucketing and creaking, it’s a plane with a lot of hours, through heat waves of turbulence. We lose rivets on occasion and have bullet holes in our vertical stabilizer.

Our engines, two 1700 horsepower Wright Cyclones are throttled way back to save the always precious fuel, the power filled radial engines gently thunderously rolling over pulling us along at 1500 feet altitude at 150 miles per hour. We are constantly on the lookout for Zeros. For the Zeros we have .50-caliber machine guns mounted fore and aft, as well as on the top canopy, and two waist gunners. We are lethal.

My breast badge says Sir Paddington. That in fact is my name; however, for family and friends you can call me Pats. You are probably wondering about my Scottish officer’s suit in the photograph. I was purchased from a kennel in Scotland and flown to America. My owner dressed me up for a party once, it made her happy, simple as that.

Once, then, in what now is another life, I was taken as a small tan puppy, to live with my lovely whitehaired old mistress Mary in splendor and peace in our gentle oasis in Palm Desert, California.

My velvet heedless days were filled with hot southern sun, warm love, and attention to my every need. You don’t know what hot is until you live in the desert. In the desert the air is dry. There are cacti, roadrunners, palms, swimming pools and so much more. In the desert the mountains are distant, edged with purple and everywhere you look there are flowers. I love the desert.

Even now as sit here in this B-25 looking down on the South Pacific, I can still see Mary standing in her spacious tile lined kitchen, Glen Miller on the radio, dessert sun slanting in over the San Gabriel mountains and across her delicate shoulders, pulling little morsels of hot moist white– I like white meat better than dark, pulling those little nuggets of white succulent bits of chicken off the steaming carcass and popping them into my mustached mouth. The juices ran down my cheeks and she was ever ready with tissue to pat my mouth clean.

Stoly, as she called it, was her favorite vodka, “two shots, one rock” she would tell the bartender. Sometimes when she was drinking, we would talk a lot about George, her husband who disappeared in a ceremony before I was born.

In those days I had my bath at Pampered Pooches every Friday morning with Jason. I liked Jason he always had a doggie biscuit for me at every visit. Jason had tattoos everywhere. Once to be funny, he shocked my old Mistress by pulling down his lower lip and showing Mary what he said was his social security number, whatever that is, written on the inside of his lower Lip.

Stars! I remember the stars in the desert so clearly and on some nights when I felt the voices of my ancestors calling to me across the ages, I would go out on hole eleven, that’s where our home was. I would sit out there up on the tee-box in the cool night grass by myself, look up at those reefs of clear twinkling stars and sunflower moon and howl. It would just come over me this sense of loss that I didn’t, at that time, know anything about.

How could I know anything about loss when all was bliss?

Late one morning the phone rang, and I raised my head from my slumbers to see our maid come out the sliding glass door with the phone in her hand calling, “Mary, phone.” As my Mary took her lime green cowboy hat off her face and stood to take the phone, she breathed in like she was going to call me then she simply jumped a little funny move and fell heavily onto the grass, crumpled really, her head near mine where I lay beneath her lounge. She opened her eyes for a moment, looked at me and said, “Remember Paddy, two shots, one rock.” She closed her eyes, and our Maid went running and yelling, help, through the flowers to the neighbors. My stomach hurt.

I slept on her bed alone that night, trying to smell and remember her sweet scent. I curled into a tight ball of misery, my head on her pillow where she had slept the night before.

The next day her son, Crist, drove up from San Diego where he was getting ready to be shipped to the South Pacific. I heard him tell Bob next door, that he was a Marine Raider, and they were getting deployed overseas, but couldn’t tell him where to.

As Crist looked at me that afternoon, seeing a big strong dog, he suddenly, laughing at the same time, grabbed me by my head and shaking me back and forth said “I have an idea: how would you like to join my squad in San Diego? We have six more weeks of jungle training; you could train with us to be our war dog. We are short on dogs, my commanding officer will surely ok you.” What choice did I have? As he held my head, he had tears in his eyes as he looked deep into my eyes and said “You miss her don’t you Pats? Me too.”

That’s how I proudly became a Marine Raider.

I trained, rigorously. The soft life was over, and things became much more exciting. I trained for the love of Mary to certain death for our enemies.

In my backpack I carried two stilettos, piano wire to strangle the enemy, four clips of BAR ammo, fifteen clips for the M-1 and three .55-caliber rounds for the Boy’s antitank rifle. I also carried first aid supplies and on my pack was a mail pouch.

I was taught how to silently attack an enemy by his throat, and I never could get used to the taste of Jap blood. I was taught to never bark unless commanded to, how to crawl for a mile on my belly, how to point out the enemy like a bird dog, and how to clandestinely carry messages in all manner of light and darkness, rain, and shine. I was trained to be alert for smells and footsteps of the enemy to alert my squad. I was good at this.

By the way, our squad was made up of a Navajo code talker, a BAR man, a dog handler (Mary’s son), and me, Sir Paddington.

It turns out that once we were on the troop ship that we were going to a place called Talagi, which I didn’t know from a T-bone. Speaking of which, that was my favorite beef bone.

On board our troop transport, as we steamed west and south across the ocean the men constantly worked on their weapons and equipment.

The Raiders were a lethal force major. They carried an arsenal of weapons. I guess one of the most highly regarded weapons they had was the Bowie-type knife, with a nine-inch blade known as the “Gung Ho.” There was also the stiletto-type, lighter and designed to penetrate the enemy from the clavicle to the heart, deadly. The stiletto was issued to all the raiders. Other standard issue weapons included the famous BAR, the genius of John Moses Browning, the rising gun, the Garand, the carbine, and who can forget the 1909 .45-caliber pistol? Some men even brought their own weapons.

All the way to Talagi, the men fired at floating targets as well as birds foolish enough to fly close to our transport. The men fired pistols, the M-1, the BAR, the Thompson sub-machine gun– my ears are still ringing. We, me included, pioneered camouflage gear. As we neared the island, we all dressed in our new gear and we felt we were Americans fighting for a grand cause and were ready for whatever the enemy threw at us, a good feeling.
We were “Gung Ho,” enthusiastic. As one of Crist’s buddies said, “We were given a job and we done it.”

As we steamed closer to Talagi, we could see the night skies lit up from our station out in what is now called “Iron Bottom Sound.” Our troop carrier was in complete blackout. Everyone was at battle stations as I sat right up next to Crist on a gun mount. All around us were various ships of a Japanese surface fleet but somehow, we were never spotted. Men were crying for help, out in the dark ocean, flares sent up, and endless heavy gun fire. Around us was debris from sunken and sinking ships, ships on fire, the water was on fire, bodies were floating face down, we hauled men up over the sides men with faces coated black with bunker oil. It was painfully clear we were not in Palm Desert anymore.

The wounds and bandages you see on me are from Talagi, mostly bomb shrapnel and grenade frags except the hole through my ear, a near brush, too near, with lead heated to extinction, a Jap sniper. Snipers were all over that island, up in the palm trees, under dark ledges, in caves, under piles of leaves — they were everywhere. They were professionally trained assassins and extremely gifted at silent infiltration. The fact that I am not dead I chalk up to my color, my speed, and the luck of my ancestors. “Luck’s a chance,” my dear old grandpa Nevis used to say. As they loaded me into the boat bound for the South Pacific, I remembered something else grandpa Nevis said, “Remember this and you will come back home one day soon a happy puppy. Consistency is a hobgoblin: never take the same trail twice.”

This was good advice, for even on the trails less traveled, I had bullets tear off branches over my head, had leaves torn, dirt ripped up between my legs. I stepped on a mine once as I was running at my fastest that blew up behind me; that’s the bandage on my butt, from the exploding mine.

Once racing pell-mell through the jungle, I inadvertently ran right through a small bivouac of resting Japanese soldiers sitting eating with chop sticks. Their eyes got big as my Palm Desert water bowl and they shouted terrified as I ran through their small clearing surrounded by dense jungle, “debiru doggu,” devil dog.

Man was I feeling good, I love to run, they didn’t even have time to get a shot off at me, I was there and gone, gone, gone, like the Kamikaze, I was the “Divine Spirit Wind.” Out of the jungle and back into the jungle, snap your fingers, just like that, I was there and then I wasn’t.

Douglas Granum August 10, 2021

Didn’t read Part I of War Dogs? You still can! Read it here