On April 18, 1945, 18-year-old Wesley Carroll stood with the other recruits in line for the 120-foot high dive at the Great Lakes Naval Station in northern Illinois. As he neared the ladder, a man from the master-at-arms’ office approached. He pulled Carroll out of line and told him he was needed at once in the main office.
Carroll gathered his things and followed. As they crossed the drill field, Carroll asked the officer, “Well, what the hell kind of trouble am I in?”
“You’re not in any trouble,” the man said. “Your dad got killed.”
EARLIER THAT DAY, around 7 a.m., Gene Carroll was out milking cows. The Carrolls — mom, dad and nine children — had a few acres on the edge of Kansas City, Kan. Gene’s mother was in the house fixing breakfast. The children were getting ready for school. Gene’s father had gone out to the garage to finish welding a plow.
Gene was 13 at the time, and was nearing the end of his morning chores when he heard the blast. Gene’s mother raced out to see what had happened. The other children followed. The entire garage was sheathed in fire. His mother shouted for Gene to shoo the cows from the barn, which he did. The children called out for their father, but there was no answer. The fire traveled quickly, eventually reaching the cow barn. The telephone lines were down that day, and so the fire department was slow to be notified. The children, with their mother, searched everywhere for Mr. Carroll, but to no effect. The acetylene tank he’d been holding had exploded in his arms. He was killed instantly.
“They finally found him,” remembered Gene. “But it wasn’t good.”
“They told me he was blown up into the hayloft,” said Wes. “And a guy down the road, he says it shook him clear away from his breakfast table.”
WES BORROWED $30 from the Red Cross to take a train back to Kansas City for the funeral. But the war was still boiling in Europe and the Navy needed him. In a few days, he was back at boot camp, and soon after that he shipped out to Pearl Harbor, where he remained through the end of the war.
Asked to recall that day in August when the last of the Axis powers surrendered, the 90-year-old offered this account: “Well, I’ll tell you, we had to give $45 for a fifth of Paul Jones whiskey. Oh, hell yes. That was your black market over there. That’s what you had to pay for stateside whiskey. Oh, you could get kanaki juice and beer, stuff like that. But, anyway, we were at the outdoor movie that day, 15th of August, 1945. All of a sudden, all the lights on the base come on — search lights, street lamps, every damn light. And over the loud speaker, we heard: ‘THE WAR HAS ENDED.’ We got crocked. We had about four cases of beer, two gallons of kanaki juice and we had that fifth of Paul Jones. I tell you, that night that whole damned island lit up.”
THEY DON’T make them like Wesley Carroll anymore, and that’s too bad. But it should be said that Wes, who attempts through a great deal of indirection and joking, to conceal his inherent gentleness, also has the grand habit of cussing like it’s going out of style. This, then, may be the place to warn gentler readers of the mild four-letter oaths that lie ahead. To remove these words entirely from his way of speaking here would be like plucking every piece of candy from a fruitcake — you could do it but you’d lose all the flavor. The more scabrous words, I’ve struck from the article or else replaced with brackets. The nicer ones, though, I’ve kept.
IT BECAME immediately clear, after the accident that killed the elder Carroll, that the family would require a new provider. In December 1945, Wes left Pearl Harbor for Seattle, where he was discharged, given dispensation from the Navy so that he could return home to take care of his family. The next day he boarded a train bound for Kansas City.
