Commentaries by Cynthia

While growing up, my bothers and sisters and I enjoyed hearing our father speak of his days in the military.

Dad said one of the first things he learned in the Marine Corps was not to ask why or how. Those in charge would tell you to do something, and if you didn’t understand exactly what to do, they’d get offended and act huffy while providing instructions or more information.

As a very young private stationed in Santa Barbara, Dad was assigned kitchen duty for thirty days. When his sergeant told him that he would be responsible for making the mess hall coffee each morning, Dad flatly said to the sergeant, “I don’t know how to do that.”

The sergeant led him into the kitchen and pointed at the coffee machine. “It’s simple. You put the coffee in and you turn the knob so the steam will come on.” With that, the sergeant left.

In the supply room, Dad looked high and low for cans of coffee to no avail. Very reluctantly, he approached the sergeant and said, “I can’t find the coffee.”

Sighing in agitation, the sergeant escorted Dad back into the supply room. “It is right there,” he said, pointing at several burlap sacks on the floor. Then the sergeant left again, and Dad grabbed up one of sacks that he’d actually stood on earlier while looking for cans of coffee on the top shelf.

At the machine, Dad realized that he didn’t know how much coffee to put into the device. Again, very reluctantly, he approached the sergeant and asked the dreaded question.

Gritting his teeth in anger, the sergeant snapped, “You put the whole damned bag in the machine, Private!”

It’s unclear to me at this point, but I believe my father’s natural streak of mischievousness popped out. He stood at the machine and threw the coffee, still encased in the burlap sack, into the coffee maker. Then he turned the steam on and let the machine do the rest.

This process was repeated over the next couple of weeks. Not being a coffee drinker himself, Dad never tasted the fruits of his own labor. But countless others did, and they did not like the new flavor of their morning brew. Some people even noticed and complained about tiny particles floating in their cups.

The sergeant approached Dad one morning and said, “Private, everyone is complaining about the coffee. Show me how you’re making it.”

“Very well,” Dad said and went to the supply room and grabbed one of the burlap sacks. Returning to the machine, he lifted the sack and dumped it into the top.

“Wait a minute!” the sergeant yelled. “That’s what you’ve been doing? Brewing the sack, too?”

Innocently, Dad faced his sergeant. “Sir, you told me to put the whole damn bag in - and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.”

Red-faced and stunned beyond words, the sergeant decided to release my father from kitchen duty after that day.

Much later, after being stationed in Japan after the end of World War II, an engineering chief told my father to go and burn out the six-seater outhouse. Never having done this, Dad asked how the chore was performed. The chief responded briskly, “You pour in the chemical and light a match. That’s it.”

But Dad could not find the needed chemical and had to return to the chief. “Sir, I cannot find the chemical.”

“The damn stuff is out there,” he said pointing to a shed in the distance.

There were numerous containers in the shed, none of them marked. Unwilling to be reprimanded for not knowing which mystery container to select, Dad decided to fetch a little airplane fuel for the job at hand.

Another man was inside the outhouse. He was in the process of standing and pulling his pants up when Dad poured fuel into the first hole and threw in a match.

Fire shot out of all six holes at the same time and a loud ka-boom! sounded as the outhouse was literally blown off its foundation.

Thankfully, no one was hurt, and Dad’s eyebrows eventually grew back. Burned into his memory, though, would be the sight of the other man, running down the hill with his pants still down.

From that point on, no matter where he was stationed, Dad was known as “The one who blew up the outhouse in Japan.”

“Some things are just hard to live down,” he later told me with a familiar twinkle in his eyes.