Once upon a war
On May 13, my 104-year-old cousin, H. B. “Boots” Claunts, died. Cousin. Growing up I knew him as Uncle Boots. But his mother and my mother were sisters, the eldest and the youngest in their family. So, cousin he was.
On May 13, my 104-year-old cousin, H. B. “Boots” Claunts, died. Cousin. Growing up I knew him as Uncle Boots. But his mother and my mother were sisters, the eldest and the youngest in their family. So, cousin he was.
Death arouses the curiosity of others. The most frequently asked question? Where did he get his nickname?
His given name is Hubert Bluford. The nickname rose from his younger and only brother, John Wesley “Tag” Claunts, attempts at pronouncing Bluford. Bluford came out Boots. Boots stuck.
He made a single request of me when it came time to construct an obituary for him. “Tell’ em that I graduated from Stigler High School in 1936 with both of your parents (Follie Belle Lane McBride and Shearon McBride) and write down that I lettered in basketball and tennis.” So, I did.
I have pages of notes describing his experiences at our Grandparent Lane’s dirt floor log cabin in the Boston Mountains of western Arkansas. He enjoyed detailing daybreak squirrel hunts followed by a breakfast that included biscuits and squirrel gravy.
Like many of his generation, World War II brought education and morning hunts to a crashing end. World War II marked them all. Boots was unique. Many Haskell County men told stories of how they rushed to the recruiter’s office following Pearl Harbor or their 18th birthday or when they lied about their age. Boots saw waiting to be drafted as a more common-sense approach.
Once inducted, Boots spoke of his goal as being not to get shot at. A few years ago, he joked with the Sedona (Arizona) newspaper describing himself as a member of the “Financial Fighting Corps”. An officer had asked if anyone was good with numbers and he held up his hand. “Knew I’d be safer with a pencil than with a rifle.”
After a short time in Seattle, he was assigned to an accounting division in Burma-China theatre keeping up with the supplies flown “over the Hump” into China. Then in his own self-deprecating fashion, he would describe how he would find himself in the cargo hole of a DC-3 pushing supplies out the cargo door and praying they got back to fighter cover before the Japanese Zeros found them. That and Boots knew if he died his mother would never forgive him.
I remembered Eugene Sledge’s quote from his memoir With the Old Breed. He wrote, “Courage means overcoming fear and doing one’s duty in the presence of danger, not being unafraid.”
I like to believe that in 1944 somewhere over the Himalayan Mountains in the cargo bay of a DC-3 Boots found a way to make death less fearful and there he found the secrets to a long life.
It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived. – George S. Patton Hal McBride writes a column, Just Thinkin’, published each week.
