Weapons of choice

Two white guys and a nigger-sorry, Negro-sorry, African American serviceman-were standing at the entrance. He could see that the confusion on their faces was quickly congealing into anger and there, a few feet away, was the cause. A Marine Corps sergeant and half a dozen of his buds were barring their way.

"Shit," he said to himself as he started to hustle forward. Unfortunately he wasn't the only one with the same idea. The crowd heaved toward the scene of the confrontation, and the resulting crush actually slowed his progress. He could see the marine sergeant blocking their entrance with one arm as a phalanx of men packed in behind him.

He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. The barman had placed a well-used Louisville Slugger on the bar.

Mohr could feel it coming. He'd been in enough of these things to know.

He struggled to push forward through the crush and got himself close enough to hear the exchange. One of the visitors, a white marine, was arguing with the sergeant, explaining that his great-granddaddy drank in this very bar before shipping out to get himself killed on Iwo Jima. It didn't impress the sarge much.

"Yeah, but your fucking granddaddy's not here now, asshole," the noncom declared. "And if he was, he wouldn't let you in neither, not with no fucking nigger in tow. This is a whites-only establishment."

The three things Mohr remembered later were that he was sure the guy had said heshstabishment, and it wasn't the black marine who threw the first punch. It was the guy whose great-granddaddy had just been insulted. The other thing was that the big, dumb oaf trying to keep them away from the bar was fucked from the get-go.

He was definitely drunk, but Mohr would swear for the rest of his life that even stone-cold sober and waiting on that punch, he'd never had a chance. This other guy's arms just sort of blurred. The sergeant's head snapped back, teeth flying in a long high arc halfway down the back of the bar and one long gobbet of blood landing-splat! — right on the poster announcing the Andy Hardy movie.

The room surged forward. It felt like being sucked into a big wave on a surf beach. A hundred voices roared and Mohr distinctly heard the scratch of the record player's needle as someone dragged or knocked it across the grooves of "Remember Pearl Harbor." Then the crowd surged right back, unbalancing a lot of them and upending those men whose footing wasn't certain. Sailors, marines, and army noncoms all piled into one another, spilling precious drinks, tripping and stomping on each other's feet, swinging left and right with elbows and fists to clear some room.

The original cause of the melee at the front of the bar was forgotten or ignored by most of those present as personal insults and service rivalries sparked an all-out brawl. Mohr ducked instinctively as a bar stool flew past his head and smashed into the mirror behind the bar, adding the crash of broken glass to the patchwork of shouts, curses, exploding bottles, collapsing furniture, and a roiling pandemonium of slamming fists and thudding boots.

About two dozen men decided to back the sergeant in his feud with the newcomers. Mohr wasn't surprised. He figured some would be genuinely pissed at the idea of a black man having the gall to show his face in their bar. Others were hurting from the battle at Midway and looking for payback. Some were just plain ornery, and some of these guys genuinely enjoyed the prospect of a good clean fight.

If anyone was worthy of sympathy, it was these last, poor, stupid chumps. They sailed into the fray with ham-fisted gusto, only to find themselves targeted by a focused and unforgiving type of violence with which the average American was unacquainted, even in the early days of 1942. The three men who braced themselves in the door of the bar didn't seem to place much store in dramatic flourishes. They quickly and somewhat mechanically crippled anyone foolish enough to attack them.

The thing that stayed with Eddie Mohr was the look on all their faces. They weren't snarling defiance or obscenities. They weren't scared. They just looked blank. Like they were somewhere else. They fought like machines. It was fucking Midway all over again.