Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman by Neal Thompson Page A

and other naval virgins ran half clad through a “belt line,” the Navy’s ceremonial ass-whooping for those crossing the earth’s midsection for the first time.
    One night, as the Holbrook neared an archipelago of Japanese-held islands, an edgy officer on watch shouted into his radio, “Submarine on our port side!” The captain gave orders to douse all lights, even cigarettes, and for all aboard to keep quiet. Finally, as tensions rose on the unarmed
Holbrook,
the submarine broke the surface, and all aboard sighed with relief upon realizing it wasn’t a submarine at all. It was a whale. It took Shepard six weeks to reach the island of Biak, a jagged scrap of paradise off the New Guinea coast that had been recently wrenched from Japanese hands to become a midsea staging area for American ships and troops.
    Army and National Guard infantrymen had battled Japanese forces for months before gaining control of the island. Evidence of those battles gave Shepard his first whiff of death. Japanese soldiers’ bodies, some burned or beheaded, littered the small island, filling the sweltering air with their putrid odors of decay.
    Shepard’s arrival at Biak almost gave him the chance to meet his hero, Charles Lindbergh. The famous ocean-hopping flyer had spent a few months as a civilian “tech rep” at Biak, showing Navy aviators there how to conserve fuel. Lindbergh, who had initially argued against America’s involvement in the war (earning him much scorn), even flew a few bombing missions in the South Pacific and, despite the fact that he was a civilian and no longer an active duty colonel, shot down a Japanese Zero. The sailors and soldiers stationed there enthusiastically told Shepard and his friends aboutLindbergh’s exploits, although Lindbergh would remember Biak most for the sorrowful smell of dead bodies.
    Shepard would one day get his chance to meet the lanky, mercurial Colonel Lindbergh, to stand by his side on one of the most historic days in history. But that was twenty-five hard-fought years away.
    Meanwhile, Shepard’s efforts to reach the USS
Cogswell
were delayed when the “Stinkin’ Holbrook” was unexpectedly smashed by one of its own. Another ship coming into port lost control and slammed into the
Holbrook,
to the cheers of those watching the slow-motion collision from shore. While waiting for another transport ship, Shepard loitered on the beach, drank beer—“he could really put it away,” one shipmate said—and more than likely sipped some of the bitter home-brewed moonshine some Army soldiers had concocted.
    One day the crew of a B-25 bomber invited Shepard to join them on a practice bombing run. B-25 “Mitchell” bombers had been used—most notably by flying ace Jimmy Doolittlein 1942—to pummel Tokyo with bombs. Shepard jumped at the offer and was allowed to ride with the nose gunner, who sat in a glass bubble in front of and below the pilot. The gunner let Shepard take his machine gun and drill a few holes into an abandoned target ship. As the B-25 banked and turned back toward Biak, the pilot spotted a few straggling Japanese ships. The nose gunner grabbed the machine gun back from Shepard and strafed them. It was Shepard’s one and only airborne adventure of the war, and it marked the start of a yearlong and agonizing worship from afar of the Navy’s heroic aviators and their aircraft.

    Two months after leaving San Francisco Shepard finally caught up with the
Cogswell
in late October. As he tramped up her gangplank his eyes took in her horrid condition. The destroyer had been at sea for eight months, island-hopping and making war around the Philippines, New Guinea, and Indonesia. Rust-streaked and waterlogged, the ship looked like the hell it had been through.
Cogswell
had plunged into some of the more impressive skirmishes in naval history and pounded exotic, palm-fringed islands with tongue-twister names like Chichi Jima, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Truk, theMarianas, Palau, Mindanao,