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The Dogs on Wake Island

Sharon Singleton

    It was a hot afternoon early in 1960 when I saw the beautiful dogs in large cages under the scrub bushes on Wake Island. Whining and barking, each was eager for exercise, as any healthy young German shepherd would be if cooped up too long. Wanting a closer look, I headed for the nearest cage. When I was ten feet away, the dog became stone still and fixed its eyes on me. At five feet, he hit the side of his cage full force, teeth bared and growling viciously.
    My heart and stomach plummeted, and I jerked to a stop. “Thank God he’s in a cage.”
    A young marine tending another dog looked up and said, “He don’t like strangers much.”
    “No kidding!” I gasped. “Where are they going?”
    “Vietnam,” he said. “We got advisers there that need ‘em for protection.”
    “Protection from what?”
    “From the commies. They’ve been ambushing the advisers. Soon’s the planes
ready, we’ll load ‘em up and be on our way.” He spoke to the dog, hooked a chain to its collar, and freed it from its cage. As the dog and its handler romped and played, a man approached across the shimmering white road.
    “Watch,” the marine said as the romp continued.
    When the man was about a chain-length away, a single word from the marine instantly transformed the dog from an overgrown puppy into a trained killer that lunged for the newcomer’s throat and came up short at the end of the chain. The man’s mouth flew open, his eyes bulged wide, and he stumbled backward. It was a demonstration impossible for me to forget.
    Wake Island is a tiny coral atoll in the Pacific and a fuel stop for aircraft. Less than three square miles in size, and lying 2400 miles west of Honolulu, it was the layover point for my Pan American Airways crew and me after working a long flight on non-jet aircraft.
    After two nights on Wake, we left for Manila, our next layover point. From Manila, we flew to Singapore, with a one-hour transit stop in Saigon. We arrived in Saigon an hour ahead of schedule, and the airport station manager provided us with a car and driver for a trip into the city. I was impressed by its beauty and how it differed from other Asian cities due to its French influence reflected in the city’s architecture. Nowhere did I see a marine or a military dog. Thirty minutes into Saigon and thirty minutes back to the airport was the extent for me of Vietnam at ground level.
    Flight schedules made transits through Saigon as little as five days or as long as five months apart. But on my next trip, the station manager’s son came aboard to supervise the Vietnamese ground crew workers. Feeling important as an employed twelve-year-old, he was happy to be working and no longer a student.
    “There must be an English school here,” I said.
    “Sure there is,” he replied, “but it’s closed. The school bus had to go over the same road where a jeep was ambushed last week, so they closed the school. I’d rather work with my dad, anyhow.” He assured me he wasn’t afraid of any terrorism.
    Reading newspapers aboard outbound planes and local English editions during layovers kept me current on world affairs. Although Singapore papers occasionally mentioned it briefly, I didn’t find news of Vietnam in papers from home, so I forgot about Vietnam between trips.
    Sometimes I worked on MATS flights – Military Air Transport Services flights - planes the military contracted with Pan Am for personnel transport. Usually, they were dull flights with the aircraft crowded to its maximum. But, I picked up one very different series of MATS flights. Bound for an unknown destination somewhere out of Thailand or Clark Field in the Philippines, the men were scared. They told me their mission was urgent and secret, and many feared they would never see home again. After working three legs of the charter, I was sure there was a military crisis somewhere. Based on gleanings from several trips, I guessed Vietnam. I read every newspaper I could get my hands on and found nothing unusual in any of them. I couldn’t wait to get back home to San Francisco and learn what was going on.
    “What happened in Vietnam?” I asked my roommates as soon as I walked through the apartment door. A student, a nurse, and a teacher, they prided themselves on keeping up on world events.
    “Vietnam?” they responded. “Where’s that?”
    “It’s part of Indochina, south of China, the Malay Peninsula. Saigon is the capital.”
    “Oh, yes. The French lost part of it around the mid-’50s. We haven’t heard anything lately, though.”
    “That’s strange. No news out there either.”
    “Why? What happened?”
    “I don’t know, but we’ve been flying military personnel out there for months, and we just took out several planes full of guys who were scared to death.”
    When the paper bounced off the door over the next several days, I grabbed it and searched for a clue. Just as my roommates had said, nothing! In fact, it was nearly two years before any significant items concerning Americans in Vietnam crept in for public knowledge.
    The years have passed, and I’ve learned the “commies” were the Viet Cong, the Cong, or Charlie. It’s hard to believe there was a time when I heard someone ask, “Where is Vietnam?” The ultimate hell of Vietnam’s escalation from economic aid to military aid and finally to thousands of Americans dying in combat became threadbare news.
    At home, civil disobedience grew from teach-ins to demonstrations, to large scale draft resistance and emigration, making it a war on two fronts.
    I tried to console my girlfriend after her fiancé was killed in Vietnam - one of 56,000 Americans to die there.
    At the end of a fun-filled Disneyland day, I was depressed by the sight of a group of disabled veterans having a “good time.”
Scarred, blind, double and triple amputees, paraplegics, some on crutches and others in braces and wheelchairs, they were evidence of the mutilated living victims, 74,000 of whom suffered at least fifty percent disability.

    During the Vietnam years, I had two sons of my own. Blond and happy, they were full of the spirit of life. But I worried about their future. Was the stage being readied behind a curtain that would rise on a new theater of war for them when they grew up?
Were facts of an imminent new front being omitted from the news or hidden from the public by misleading accounts, as in Vietnam? Should I raise my sons as ‘conscientious objectors’?
Seek citizenship for them in a traditionally neutral country? Or flee with them to the remotest jungles of the Amazon or the farthest reaches of the Australian outback? Nowhere was there a guarantee of immunity from the horrors of war.
    The dogs I saw on Wake Island became the proverbial ‘canary in a coal mine’ for me, foretelling of deadly times to come, and every time I thought about them, my soul cried for the future of my children.

Vietnam is fading into history, and I have a grandson now. As attention turns to new challenges in the mid-east and elsewhere, I pray my country remembers the ravages of Vietnam and rail against mankind’s eternal cycles of war.

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