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Show 13. There was a parade on Market Street with all the Pacific war heroes we had riding by in convertibles. When the flag went by I stood at attention and felt very patriotic. I felt like enlisting--at least before I got drafted so that I could get into the service of my choice. But so far I hadn't even been asked to register, I'd recently gotten a raise at the shipyards, I was learning to enjoy spending money like a city man. On the other hand my friends were starting to join up, my brother Henry had joined the Army Air Corps and my brother Davy wanted to drop out of high school and go too. Even Ross was talking of it, having noticed how girls love a uniform. I think what really swayed me, though, was the lack of love in my life. I yearned for it, I suffered without it, and so what else? Join up to go to war to kill people. It seemed reasonable at the time. Ross and I went first to the Fairmont Hotel where a man was recruiting for the Royal Canadian Air Force, which seemed the most glamorous to us. He told us he could not take us unless our own air forces had turned us down, and since we'd heard that the Navy was tougher to get into than the Army, we went down to the Ferry Building to get rejected there. The Navy took us. Ross they took immediately; it took me weeks. I looked so young and innocent that I had to write to Colorado for my birth certificate to prove I was eighteen, and when I received it, having resigned myself to strangers seeing the shame of my full name, Chester Erasmus Brocken, I couldn't believe what was written on it: "Baby Brocken." My parents had not had a name ready and later forgot to change it on the record-understandable and even forgivable if it does not happen to you. I hated them. When I reflected that they had |
