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Dear Caelan,
Your grandfather(my father), Arthur Ferguson Shuey, Jr., was so good at being angry that he literally made himself explode. Certainly, his cirrhosis and diabetes made it easier for him to blow his brain and liver up than it otherwise would have been. He called me on the phone on the night of April 16, 1978, extremely mad because I had gotten married earlier that month without asking his permission, and told me that he was going to kill himself because of my lack of respect for him, then died due to overstimulation of a system already weakened by cirrhosis and diabetes. His funeral was held on my 21st birthday. I divorced that wife within two years and have no colorful stories about her.
Arthur, Jr. was the same grandfather who helped man get to the moon by way of his recognition and use of the electrochemical properties of aluminum. Though consistently difficult and burdensome to his family and friends, he was intellectually gifted in many ways. He had two Ph.d.s and three masters' degrees and taught economics at Miami University in Ohio for a couple of years before being fired through the influence of a congressman whose son had failed his course for labeling Karl Marx a communist on his final exam. While Marx was indisputably the father of modern communist theory, he was technically a socialist, as any economics student should know, but this was not a popular bit of knowledge to insist on in the McCarthy "Red Scare" era.
Before the teaching job, Arthur, Jr. was completing his lengthy stay in college. Before that, he was part of the Anglo-American force that fought the Japanese in Burma and India during World War II. The Army thought that boys from semi-tropical Louisiana would fare better than recruits from other regions in jungle conditions, and many "coon asses(as people from Louisiana used to be called)" served in Burma, but Arthur, Jr.'s route to the Far East was particularly colorful. Halfway through his senior year of high school, on the morning of Friday, December 5, 1941, he was expelled from high school for repeatedly skipping his classes to play poker for money with a group of firemen, who had turned him in after catching him cheating. On the afternoon of Sunday, December 7, 1941, the Shreveport, Louisiana draft board held an emergency meeting on the front porch at 902 Prospect, home of one of its members, Arthur Ferguson Shuey, Sr., to figure out who to draft and send off to war.
Possibly because of bad water supplies, it was a custom in Louisiana in those days for everyone to drink liquor or wine throughout any social gathering, and it was another custom for the youngest person present to mix and serve the drinks. Therefore, during its deliberations on whom to first send to war, the draft board was confronted throughout the afternoon by a boy they thought was the ideal candidate. Bright and resourceful yet a discipline problem, with no firm plans for the future and with great teeth, Arthur, Jr. was the first Shreveport draftee of World War II, despite his flat feet.
His response was to run away from home, reappearing at 902 Prospect finally in late February, 1942 after working for several weeks on a Cuban vessel that worked sneaking liquor into secluded south Louisiana bays and bayous to avoid paying federal taxes (in short, a rumrunner) to get more clothes and some fishing gear. Arthur, Sr. happened to come home for lunch while Arthur, Jr. was there, and beat him with a razor strop before calling federal marshals to haul him off to basic training.
While in training, Arthur, Jr. became an accomplished marksman with the Thompson submachine gun, an ugly little thing that squirted 750 heavy, slow bullets per minute out of a 19-inch barrel, kicking and bucking like a very strong, very angry snake. Already interested in cooking and physics (two passions which remained with him for life), he figured out that the best way to control the tommy gun was not to grip the forestock with his left hand, but to bear down on the top of the barrel to keep it level while firing, protecting his hand with an oven mitt all the while. Because of his marksmanship and IQ test scores, and because the Army obviously hadn't remembered the sordid draft evasion months on the Cuban rumrunner, Arthur, Jr. was made a sergeant and put in charge of a platoon just in time for some Army maneuvers right back in Louisiana.
By this time, he had begun to figure out some of the systems by which the Army operated, and figuring out systems, to your grandfather, meant figuring out how to cheat and beat those systems. When Arthur, Jr. and his platoon got off the train for the maneuvers in Ananias, Louisiana(where you could have a hereditary membership and room in a very nice 19th-century vintage lodge called "Jeems' Bayou Club"), he noticed that five boxcars on the train siding were filled with cases of Ivory soap, a precious commodity surprising to see in such quantity during wartime rationing. Finding and making friends with the supply people, Arthur, Jr. learned that the Army had accidentally sent five train carloads of soap when the actual request at the maneuvers camp was for five truckloads, approximately twenty percent of the amount beginning to soften in the Louisiana sun. The supply people were not happy about shipping all of the extra soap back to wherever it had come from, especially since the work would have to be done immediately to keep the soap from melting.
Arthur, Jr. helpfully suggested to the supply people that he would gladly have his platoon take care of the whole thing, commandeered some trucks, ordered his men to take the rationed soap into nearby towns and sell it door to door, and made a tidy sum of money before the M.P.s started asking questions. Prepared for this eventuality, he explained that he had conceived of the great idea of giving the soap away to civilians as a public relations gesture from the Army base. Immediately, too, he told his men to start doing just that. For this, he received a good conduct medal.
Finally, he arrived in Burma, where he utilized his knowledge of chemistry to construct a still in the jungle and sell moonshine made from fruit cocktail stolen from the officers' mess. Last year, I met a Louisianian who had served as a medic in that same area who plainly remembered an epidemic of lead poisonings brought about by moonshine at about the time Arthur, Jr. was there. Whether he was personally responsible for the lead poisonings and suffered a drop in sales or not, he began manufacturing, stealing, buying illicitly from the supply people or otherwise acquiring a number of items which he traded to soldiers and civilians alike at a profit. Everything from fresh venison for the British troops across the river whose canned corn beef had melted in the steamy Burmese heat to mortars and land mines for native communist guerrillas could be bought from the large tent he shared with the twin Indian refugee girls, Rani and Tani.
In some ways, it was an idyllic life for the young man, who grew in the Army from 145 pounds, 6'1" to 230 pounds at 6'3". Reminiscing about the war, he once told me that his only regret was having not been in the Seabees, because they had really big, expensive stuff like bulldozers and trucks to sell to the natives while he was limited to small arms, food, moonshine and the beer he talked newly arrived soldiers who didn't drink and who therefore had no use for their monthly ration into giving to him. It was, however, still southeastern Asia during a war, and Arthur, Jr.'s distaste for monsoons, mosquitoes, battles, orders and melted corn beef hash grew stronger and stronger, especially after he contracted the malaria which afflicted him for the rest of his life.
On Xmas Eve, 1943, Sergeant Shuey came up with what he thought was a brilliant way to get back home -- As soon as the cooks had started the turkeys the men were to have for Xmas dinner and gone to bed, he blew up the camp kitchen. "Now," he thought, "they won't want me in the Army any more." Incorrect in this surmise, he was assigned for the next three months to be punished with the grueling and gruesome task of going around after battles and bayoneting the Japanese bodies to make sure they were dead. Wars between nations of distinctly different racial makeup, such as the United States and Japan, generally include a higher proportion of such acts of barbarity due to the common man's inability to see complete humanity in anyone who appears significantly different. My father was still having nightmares about this duty when I spent the summer of 1976 with him.
Resourceful, sensitive and corrupt, he eventually came up with the idea of stripping all insignia off of his uniform so that no one would know his rank, taking his men not to the battlefield to bayonet Japanese but to the nearby mountains to hunt deer, then on to a British camp where, posing as an officer on an official goodwill mission, he took over their camp kitchen and happily made venison chili for the rest of the week. In gratitude for this polite culinary gesture, the British camp commander gave Arthur, Jr. a letter praising him highly, as well as a most welcome case of Bombay gin. Letter in hand, Sergeant Shuey and his men marched back to their own base, where his captain, outranked by the letter's author and unsure of what to do about disciplining someone who had disobeyed orders but who had still accomplished something positive, ended the grisly bayonet duty. Not particularly anxious to have his men poisoned and his kitchen destroyed again by this unpredictable noncommissioned officer, however, the captain had Sergeant Shuey transferred to a desk job with the Army Air Corps far away in India, where he spent the rest of the war.