Books: Modest Marine

BAA BAA BLACK SHEEP (384 pp.)—”Pappy” Boyingfon—Putnam ($4.50).

“If this story were to have a moral, then I would say: ‘Just name a hero and I’ll prove he’s a bum.'”

In this long, rambling autobiography, one of World War II’s authentic heroes does his best to prove that he was also a bum. Gregory (“Pappy”) Boyington’s saga begins in the summer of 1941, when he was a Marine officer and a flying instructor on the naval air base at Pensacola. He was, as usual, restless. “I was forever going somewhere but never getting anywhere. For the most part I was always leaving some geographical location just prior to my being asked to leave.” Marine Corps Headquarters was getting tiresome about the growing difference between his debts and his income, there were frowns from his superiors because of his drinking, and the chance of getting promoted from first lieutenant to captain seemed slim indeed. Then he met a fast-talking World War I pilot who had come to Pensacola to recruit volunteers for General Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers. Boyington instantly sensed that it was time to be going somewhere. Within days he had resigned from the Marine Corps and was organizing a farewell drunk before leaving for Burma.

Boyington soon had learned to regret his impulse. The pay that had seemed so attractive—$675 a month, plus $500 for each Japanese plane—bought familiar pleasures: whisky and women. But though the Tigers were all technically civilians, Greg found himself jousting with superiors again. There was the old, retread captain who turned the boys out for a military muster every morning, and the group adjutant in Toungoo who threatened so many of his men with so many courts-martial that Boyington suspected “he must have been at least one jump ahead of a few himself in his military days.” There was Chennault himself, who “thought his face was a piece of Ming-dynasty chinaware he was afraid might break if he were to show emotion of any kind.”

But there were also P-4Os to fly. With terrifying shark teeth painted on their long, snarling snouts, they held their own and better with Jap Zeroes from Kunming to Thailand. And in them, Greg Boyington learned the unforgiving trade of the fighter pilot. He was an ace when he heard that the entire outfit was about to be drafted into the Army. By then, Boyington suspected that “Laughing Boy” Chennault was old-school Army, and had no use for marines. (“I shouldn’t think he would even want a dead marine’s body stinking up his precious China.”) So, just ahead of General Chennault’s efforts to get him into the new 10th Air Force, U.S.A., Greg Boyington beat it out of China and applied for reinstatement in the U.S. Marine Corps. In January 1943 he sailed for the South Pacific, a major in the Marines.

Talent for Trouble. Major Boyington got command of VMF-214. There were still back-area bluenoses to contend with, men who thought that even in tropical jungles a fighting outfit ought to be run by the book. And Greg Boyington still had a talent for stirring up trouble—mostly alcoholic. But he had a great fighter plane to fly, the gull-winged Vought Corsair. His men would have preferred to be known as Boyington’s Bastards, but they settled for Black Sheep, and they fell into the habit of calling their skipper Pappy. They went to war-says Pappy proudly, under the command of the oldest active Marine fighter pilot and “the biggest drunk in the Corps.”

Pappy Boyington was more than a drunk. He was a skilled and confident killer. He knocked down Japanese planes so steadily that by December 1943 he could claim a total of 25, just one short of the record held jointly by his Marine Corps buddy, Joe Foss, and Captain Eddie Rickenbacker of World War I. His tour of combat duty was drawing rapidly to an end, and he lived for just one thing: to shoot down just one more plane. He forced himself to fly although his body was covered with the running sores of “tropical crud.” He was so tired that just before a take-off he put grains of tobacco in the corners of his eyes to irritate him into alertness. On Jan. 3, 1944, he got his 26th plane; minutes later, the Japs got Boyington. He splashed in flames into St. George’s Channel off Rabaul, was rescued by a Japanese submarine and finished the war in a dreary tour of the toughest prison camps the enemy had to offer.

Faint & Far. Even for Pappy, all those battles now sound distant to the ear. Vella Lavella, Kahili, Munda, Rabaul—the roll call is of names now faint and far off. But they were places he loved, and even the prison camps belong on the list. For there life had a purpose; a man knew what he was fighting for, whether it was for honor, country or simply to stay alive. It was only later, when he came home a hero, that Pappy’s life began to run downhill.

The corps that had hailed him in war could find no place for him in its peacetime squadrons, and the man who received the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross was “retired because of injuries” at the war’s end. There were no jobs that could interest him, and there was never enough whisky to go around. He would awake from lost weekends with religious tracts in his pockets and no notion of who the soul savers were or where he had met them. Not until three years ago did he find the will power to swear off booze and settle down to the workaday world of a salesman (aviation products).

Here and there, this long confession suffers from the ex-alcoholic’s stubborn self-concern. But Pappy Boyington, now 45, never knew the recipe for being a bore. Some heroes may have been bums. But despite his ruthless honesty about himself —and perhaps because of it—Pappy disproves his own thesis.