By: Joe Strupp The latest issue of The New Yorker has a first-person account by Washington Post legend Ben Bradlee of one of his most memorable experiences. But this tale is not on his Watergate or Pentagon Paper days.
The lengthy piece in the Oct. 2 edition follows Bradlee's April tour of Guadalcanal, the Far East war zone where he served aboard the U.S.S. Philip, a World War II Destroyer.
"I rarely talked even to friends and family about the war," Bradlee writes in the descriptive story. He adds later, "I though that people who sat around and talked about the war were terrible bores. And yet, for me, it was the most important period of my life."
Bradlee's return, he writes, came about after reading of a 12-day tour aboard a cruise ship up "The Slot" -- the 300-mile waterway in the Soloman Islands where Bradlee's Navy ship, and others, fought the Japanese. He first spoke about the trip in March to E&P just weeks before it was to occur.
Now, months later, Bradlee writes about taking the tour with his youngest son, Quinn, a documentary film student who sought to record the event for his own memories. Bradlee's record of the trip bounces between war-time stories of 1943 and this year's excursion, both complete with vivid detail and thoughts of others -- whether a veteran like Bradlee regaling him at the cruise ship bar this spring or a friend recalling the dangers and horrors of war back then.
"I don't think I was afraid of a Japanese bullet," Bradlee writes about first shipping out in 1943 aboard the Philip. "But I was afraid of going into a battle and how I would behave. Would I pee in my pants or go crazy, as so many of them did? One man on our ship tried to jump overboard. For the first few months, any observer could have seen fear and even panic in our eyes. But when you realized you could behave properly, it was an exhilarating feeling."
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