Barbers Point NAS
What a life! We’re all getting calluses on our asses from sitting around doing nothing. I suppose all hell will break loose one of these days. Went swimming this morning. Wrote to Noje in answer to a letter of his. Sent him a check for $250 for a wedding present. Had looked around out here for suitable present, but no soap. He’d most likely prefer the money anyway. With that check I wash my hands of him and his financial troubles. I’ve given him over $1000 in little more than a year, and I’m certainly in no position myself to be giving money away at that rate.
Noje’s letter spoke of his visit with Lynne to Chicago and a dinner with the McCaheys. He then proceeded to bawl me out for what I had done to Claire. Said that I had hurt her very deeply, all of which made me feel lower than all hell. The last thing I ever wanted to do was to hurt that kid, and yet, if I had let things go, she might’ve jumped to all sorts of conclusions, which would’ve hurt her even more in the end. I told her in my last letter how I felt; that as long as the war lasted I was forgetting marriage and that I didn’t want the affair to get any more serious as my life and the lives of seven or eight men and my crew depended upon my mental alertness, which in turn was affected by my degree of “mooning” about the “girl back home.” Sounds pretty cold-blooded and selfish, but I can’t help it — that’s the way I think.
What good would it do me, or even Claire, if this thing were patched up? I could never marry the girl, now that I thought it over. She is deeply attached to her family and her Chicago friends, while I, in turn, thoroughly detest Chicago, and the East in general. I absolutely refuse to even consider living back there.
Claire, while truly charming, is only a child, despite her age. She has been sheltered by her family from the harshness of life. Her ideas are romantic in a fairy story pattern, and she is an out-and-out sentimentalist. Lovable, but impractical. I’ll admit though, that she is the only girl I’ve ever considered marrying, and also, that she’d make me the best wife of anyone I’ve ever met. She’s a romantic, a music lover, pretty, vivacious, Catholic, and heiress to a brewing fortune — something tells me that I’m going to live to kick myself yet. O’well, to hell with everything — on to Japan!