"Somewhere in the South Pacific"

    The movement of WACs to New Guinea was beginning to escalate- more to Moresby, others breaking new ground at Oro Bay and Hollandia on the Dutch half of New Guinea which, incidentally, is the largest island in the world next to Greenland. Lt. Velma "Pat" Griffith, a Hoosier of f,'Teat good humor and press savvy served as the only public relations officer for several thousand WACs scattered over an area about the size of Western Europe. Without her, the war would have seemed much longer- and probably would have been.

    It was finally conceded that Pat deserved an enlisted assistant, and, in looking over the field, she decided that no one was more convincingly enlisted than I. The job was mine but I'd be stalled at yeronga while she winged off to Hollandia to prepare a place for me. In the interim, she suggested I make myself useful to a cadre lieutenant named Opgrand who hadn't the slightest idea what to do with me.

    Lacking direction, I cranked out hometown releases on the whole rear echelon which, measured in line count, produced my greatest body of work ever.

    Unofficially, I had also become the resident ghost writer of those let-down letters known as "dear Johns." With such a plethora of escorts close at hand, a number of my camp mates decided to tenninate earlier alliances with gentle words tl1ey felt unable to express. Thus I became proxy pen pal, trying to break off relationships through some of the most creative work I have ever done. Except, possibly, expense accounts in my later life.

    About this time, a lurid domestic jomnal called Truth was establishing a far from tmthful predecessor for what the States would later know as the supermarket tabloid. WACs did not escape attention.

    Its pages screeched the plight of war-weary diggers - liberated, evacuated, or rotated home - finding the girls they left behind occupied with an inexhaustible supply of Yanks. Truth claimed WACs were forbidden to date diggers and, given the availability of their own countrymen, wouldn't if they could.
First part: false; second part: probably true.

    The accusation should have been ignored. Instead, someone up the chain of command decided to make peace, not war, by committing four of us to an enchanted evening witl1 four of them. And Opgrand fmally fOtmd a use for me; I would chair this allied assignation.

    Tarted up in A unifonns and jeep-lifted to a deserted and darkening stretch of Brisbane docklands, we joined our escorts aboard a launch that looked like the last out of Dunkirk. Casting off for what we anticipated as a leisurely river cmise, the boatman steered to midstream, dropped anchor, curled up over the wheel and promptly went to sleep.

    At this point, we began to doubt the efficacy of detente. Displaying our best boarding school manners, we enthused over the picnic supper laid out on the cabin roof, then stuffed ourselves, ever so slowly, with its bounty (excluding the Matmite.) We admired the beverage choice (beer, gin, no mixes) and politely asked for water.

    Down to our last time-killing ploy, conversation, we talked long, enthusiastically, and without a whit of real knowledge about war strategy, Australian football, Labor Party politics, heroics at Gallipoli, and cricket. Despite the bone-chilling cold, we steadfastly stressed our preference for the bracing open air over the warm and cozy cabin below into which one of our hosts optimistically disapperu·ed to plump the pillows on two couches. His buddies, no grammarians to start with, were soon ending every sentence with a proposition.