The engine revved, but our jeep’s wheels spun futilely in the sand. Stuck! It was another hot night in the fall of 1945, on the Pacific island of Saipan, and my corporal had taken me out on patrol duty. Sometimes servicemembers would sneak a vehicle off base to cruise around the island, then ditch the vehicle when they were though. It was our job to bring those vehicles back. We’d noticed a set of tire tracks trailing off towards the beach and pulled off the main road to investigate. Now, the jeep refused to budge from its place, lodged in the sand.
While the corporal radioed base for help, I climbed out of the jeep to see if I could get us moving again. I thought of my mother back in Pittsburgh. “I’ll be praying for your safety till the day you come home,” she’d told me on the day I left for duty. I was only 18-years-old at the time, and she worried about me terribly.
Actually, Mom’s prayers must have been working. I hadn’t been in grave danger since my arrival on Saipan. Initially I’d been scheduled to go to Okinawa, the heart of combat. But the army had another plan for me. “You’ll stay here in Saipan,” they informed me, “and serve in the military police.” I greeted this with relief, knowing that my chances of seeing home again were now considerably higher.
I took a closer look at our jeep. The frame had caught on a mound of sand, so that the tires were slightly elevated and unable to gain traction. Nothing to do but wait, I thought. I could hear the waves of the Pacific in the distance as I scanned the sandy path in the jeep’s headlights. That’s when a dull, metal object illuminated in the headlights caught my eye. Hardly two feet in front of our vehicle, something small and pointy, sticking up from the sand. A 14” navel shell, unexploded and ready to go off at the slightest touch!
My corporal radioed base again for additional support to help retrieve the bomb. I couldn’t help but think again about my mother’s prayers. Why had our jeep gotten stuck at exactly that moment, when the other vehicle whose tracks we’d followed had apparently rolled on down the beach?
