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C H APTER 3 The War in Texas I WAS AFRAID A GOOD BIT OF THE TIME IN MY CHlLDH(x)O, AS I REMEMBER, BUT that didn't worry me. !twas usuaL The war with the Japs was there, and I came to consciousness ofmyselfand the place where Ifotllld myself located with the war as a steady presence and as expected and inevitable as the winter rain on the Texas Gulf Coast. I watched all airplanes that flew over the house, asking my mother if they were Jap or ours and particularly if they might be carrying Uncle Miller on his way to fight the Japs. At first she would tell me the planes couldn't all be carrying Miller Duff, but after having to endure the same questions from me about each aircraft that appeared, she finally gave up and said aU of them had my tlllcle as a passenger. I knew we were fighting the Germans as well as the Japanese, but I wasn't really afraid of the Germans the way I was of the yellow, slant-eyed, bucktoothed little men I saw in cartoons in the magazines my father read. These publications had names likeATffJsy and Man and Warrior, but the greatest ofthese was the magazine called True. What it presented was real, it said so on the front cover, and my father believed that. He read me the stories within, the true ones about Japanese torturing American soldiers and about snakes as big as a man swallowing children and tigers in India roaming from house ro house looking for live meat. I learned from True, as I leaned over my father's shoulder ro listen ro what he was reading to me, the smell from him a mixture of aftershave lotion, tobacco, and my father's own particular scent: the world was filled with paralyzing danger. One false move and you were chewed up, poisoned by venom, or drowned by bucktoothed Jap soldiers wearing thick glasses. Not only did True Magazine bring the truth into our house, but an actual captured Japanese midget sub was put on display in downtown Beaumont, across from the Jefferson Theatre, and my parents took me to see it. I was eager to go until we actually got there and joined the line ofpeople waiting ro see the 9 10 HOME TRUTHS submarine which the government was sending all over the country to encourage the terrified IX'pulace to buy war bonds. I learned that fact later from a documentary on PBS about Pearl Harbor and the uses to which the midget Japanese sub captured there in 1941 was put, but at the time I viewed the sub in Beaumont I assumed it had been operating just offthe beach south of Sabine Pass, Texas, not twenry miles from the Jefferson Theatre on Pearl Street. So as I climbed up the ramp to peer into the innards of the Japanese killing machine, I was already having serious second thoughts about the prospect. When I was lifted up by my father ro look into the open hatch of the cOIming tower, I was tmprepared for what my horrified eyes told me. Not only was I seeing into the guts ofthe tiny craft, but I was also seeing people. The Jap crew was in there, both of them, dressed in their strange greenish unifonns, wearing their thick glasses as they leaned forward to operate the controls of their craft from hell, aiming their deadly torpedoes at Texas, where I lived. I knew if I waited too long to get away from my perch over the conning tower that one or both of them would look up, identify me for the victim they craved and through some foreign war-loving magic, would be appearing in my bedroom that very night. I expect I screamed, of course, as I always did when confronted with what I feared and knew would get me in some way before too long, and I fought to free myselffrom my father's anus and escape. Ido remember the laughter and jeers of the crowd of people arotmd me as they pointed to the boy too scared to face the reality of the Japanese crew among us in Beaumont, and I remember listening to my mother explain over and over again that the little bucktoothed yellow men I saw in the midget sub were not real Japs at all, but dummies dressed up in captured uniforms. "What are they made...

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