THE AQUA-VELVA OFFENSIVE
Bougainville, Solomon Islands · 1943
The story told and as remembered by his son
Let us first pause -and try to take in and imagine this remote, steaming green hell of a jungle that was known as Bougainville Island. The year was 1943.
My Dad, Frank Robinson — at age of nineteen was already a veteran of Guadalcanal, and a young man who had now seen horrors in the Pacific he never imagined — and now he crouched in this steaming jungle foliage watching anxiously as the Japanese forces began to mass on the island.
The air was so thick with humidity that you could practically chew it. The sounds of the jungle at night were sounds of a world that did not care about you at all and so very alien to the chirping crickets he remembered on summer evenings in far, far-away Fredericksburg.
Somewhere out there, he knew that there were Men preparing to kill him.
And then, as a visitation from some distant and deeply confused voice came the sounds of the loud drone of military cargo planes blackening the skies overhead.
THE PLANES COME
Every day they came, right on schedule, the big American cargo planes thundered over Bougainville and rained down supplies. Bless them and God bless every one of those pilots and their magnificent, patriotic and completely deranged cargo drops.
White bread. Thousands upon thousands of loaves of military issue white sliced sandwich bread - to do what within the Jungle? - make banana and scorpion S’mores?
And oh yes, the Aqua-Velva too. Gallons of it. Cases of it. An absolute Mississippi river of Aqua-Velva after-shave lotion pouring from the heavens, apparently dispatched by someone in Washington who had looked at a map of the Pacific theater and thought: “Gee, those boys are going to want to smell real nice amongst the lizards and centipedes!”
The Marines of Bougainville stared at this bounty with the hollow eyes of men who had been asked maybe one question too many by the universe.
“What,” said my father, with the eloquence that the situation demanded, “the f*** do we need all this bread and Aqua-Velva for?”
It was, by all accounts, a broadly shared sentiment among the young Marines.
Thus - The PYRAMID BUILDERS
Because these were United States Marines, and United States Marines do not sit around in the jungle contemplating the failures of the supply chain. They adapt. They improvise. They overcome. They meet their Needs! - and -They build WHITE Pyramids.
Eight feet tall. Constructed entirely from slices of white bread, stacked with an architectural ambition that rivaled the ancient Egyptians, rising up from the Bougainville jungle floor as monuments to American ingenuity and self-medicating in equal measures.
Climbing to the top of 12 foot ladders created from lashed together bamboo, the Marines poured — slowly, deliberately, with the focused patience of men who had a very clear goal in mind — they poured and they poured Aqua-Velva down through their white bread pyramid
Gallon by gallon, case by case, the bright blue lotion dripped and snaked down through thousands of layers of soft white bread slices, filtering through the baked filter and surrendering its alcohol to the cause, dripping out at the bottom of the pyramid as pure and clear and absolutely potent alcohol into whatever buckets, canteens, and helmets that the men had to collect the liquid.
My Dad on Bougainville Island (1943)
DISTILLED, CONSUMED and MEDICATED
The bread pyramids of Bougainville stood as monuments to the fact that while the United States government could not always give a Marine what he needed, a Marine could always, always, figure out how to get there anyway.
My father drank it. Shit, they all drank it. Nineteen years old, ten thousand miles from home and waiting to go into combat against an enemy that was very real and very close and very dangerous. They drank their bread-filtered Aqua-Velva alcohol and felt the warm ridiculous fire burn away their fears and their deep longings for loved ones
Was it courage? Was it insanity? Was it simply what young men do when they are scared and far from home and the jungle is full of sounds that just don’t care whether they live or die?
Yes. All of it. Exactly that.
They went into combat the next morning smelling of cheap after-shave and gunpowder, armed with rifles and whatever chemical courage the bread pyramids had provided, carrying the absolute unwavering certainty of youth into a nightmare that would cost some of them everything.
My father came home. Not all of them did.
But he never forgot the pyramids. Never forgot the absurd, beautiful, completely American ingenuity of it — boys from Fredericksburg and Pittsburgh and Tulsa and Fresno, standing in the humid jungle at the edge of the world, turning aftershave into courage to confront the madness of war … for yet another day.
Semper Fi.