“Dave, didn’t you fight the Japs?”
“Yeah.”
“So, how could you buy a Jap car?”

The evil object is a 2004 Toyota Prius, Motor Trend “Car of the Year” in 2004. No U.S. company makes a true hybrid.

Ironically, we pick up Jap-hater Joe and his wife at the San Pedro cruise ship port the previous day—a tedious and time consuming task. We drive them in our 2000 Nissan Maxima—also made in Japan; but, apparently Joe is oblivious, or he would make some kind of scathing remark.
“What did you do in WWII, Joe?”
“I was in Navy Intelligence.”
“That’s an oxymoron,”
“We were doing important work,” he replies angrily.
“What?”
“Identifying disloyal Japanese Americans.”
“How many did you find?”

I know the answer: Zilch. Nada. I guess that information is still confidential more than sixty years later, because he declines to respond or is unable to overcome his irritation at my attack on good old Navy Intelligence. I don’t bother to ask him if he scolded his father-in-law for bringing a huge Mercedes-Benz back from Germany. You remember the Nazis?

I have a strong case. Navy Intelligence is responsible for one of my most terrifying nights on Mindoro Island—December 26, 1944, when it tells us the Japanese are mounting a counteroffensive to retake the island and we can expect thousands of paratroopers and a large flotilla of landing craft to descend on us that night and kill every one of us. By 0300 it becomes obvious no such attack is going to occur, but Navy Intelligence does not bother to inform us, so we spend a sleepless night knowing we are going to die defending Cominawit Point.

But this is not my major complaint. Seven years after I complete active duty and am briefly involved in civil rights political activities in the San Francisco Bay Area, Navy Intelligence lowers the boom, arranges a kangaroo court martial and gives me an “other than honorable” discharge for waging political warfare against discriminatory practices aimed at African Americans. It’s ridiculous. I appeal the Kafkaesque decision, not once but twice. Finally, in 1987, thirty-four years after my discharge and a disgusting display of pleading on my part. (I don’t care about myself, but I have two kids and six grandchildren.) I served honorably, worked my butt off and went through hell for several months in 1944 and l945 in the Philippines—and this is the thanks I get from the Navy. I consider “oxymoron” a light slap at a dangerous and out of control military arm that has nothing better to do with taxpayers’ dollars than hound combat veterans for harmless and legal post-war political activities.

This PT (Motor Torpedo Patrol) boat is from my Squadron Thirteen, one of twenty-six boats in Task Unit 70.1.4. Its three 1,350-horsepower engines are pushing it up to forty knots in a calm sea.We lose three boats—one to a Japanese suicide plane, because Squadron Sixteen’s commanding officer is at the wheel and freezes. I watch the Japanese Val settle down squarely in the middle of the boat and see it explode, break in half and sink. Seven crewmen die. The other two boats are blown out of the water near Luzon by the “friendly fire” of U. S. destroyers that can’t tell the difference between seventy-eight-foot long PT boats and fourteen-foot Japanese suicide boats that are wrecking havoc off Luzon ramming our ships. My good friend, Mike Haughian, is blown to bits by a five-inch shell from one of the tin cans. Some of the PT boat survivors find their way ashore behind enemy lines. They are captured and beheaded by Japanese troops. War is hell. We suffer one-third casualties and earn the Navy Unit Commendation ribbon. And for this I earn an “other than honorable” discharge.

The U. S. Navy Intelligence officer who prosecuted me saw no action on WW II, but he knows I am disloyal because of my activity in exposing Oakland police brutality from 1946 to 1949 as the East Bay correspondent for a progressive newspaper. It’s none of the Navy’s business, but in the McCarthy era of 1953 the octopus tentacles of intimidation reach everywhere.

The official U. S. Navy Intelligence logo is displayed above. I hope they don’t come after me again at 87 because of my opposition to Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, but I’m sure to be on the TSA’s huge and confidential “Watch List.” I have sent several e-mail protests to Bush, the moron and untreated alcoholic Dick Cheney, skilled military duty evader and dangerous bird hunter who conned Bush into believing he’s the president. What we have accomplished in Iraq is not worth the life of a single U. S. soldier.

The NI slogan is “Strength through knowledge.” Tell it to the 6,800 Marines slaughtered on Iwo Jima because U. S. Navy Intelligence is unaware of impregnable, underground Japanese defenses. Tell it to my college classmate, Curly Brueggeman, who is cut to pieces within minutes of hitting the Iwo Jima beach. Tell it to my brother-in-law, Henry Hagen, who suffers near-fatal wounds at Iwo. Tell it to my wife’s cousin, Dr. Bill Murray, a U. S. Navy surgeon who treated as many as 100 Marine casualties a day for 45 days on that deadly little island. I say “U. S. Navy Intelligence” is an oxymoron.