(5 of 5)
Officers who have served with him report him a friendly, helpful, confiding commander, likely to grow stern when things go wrong. Almost all of them gain the impression that he is several inches taller than his actual 5 ft. n. A six-inch chest expansion helps.
Postwar Plans. In San Francisco, waiting out the war and trying to keep track of her family, is Mrs. Simon Bolivar Buckner,* who was born Adele Blanc, in New Orleans, but moved to Kentucky "when she was a quadruped." Her elder son, Simon Bolivar III, is a captain in the Signal Corps in France, her younger son, William Claiborne, a plebe at West Point. The daughter, Mary, is studying at the University of California.
For the postwar period their plans are set. They fell in love with Alaska, bought a homesite in Anchorage and a farm at Homer on the Kenai peninsula. Wild game, including black and grizzly bears, abounds at the farm. A vein of coal lies offshore, and the tide washes up more than enough lumps for heating. The Buckners plan to return there to live. Said the General: "I expect it will take me a solid year to catch up with my hunting and fishing. And I'll be so far away from things I won't be able to exercise a retired general's prerogative of cussing and swearing that the new army has gone to hell since he got out of it."
But all that is for the future. Right now the General confines his hopes to his favorite toast (invariably drunk in "bourbon and puddle water"): "May you walk in the ashes of Tokyo."
* The Tenth is the third U.S. Army to appear in the Pacific. The others: Lieut. General Walter Krueger's Sixth, Lieut. General Robert Eichelberger's Eighth, both operating in the Philippines.
* Mrs. Buckner calls her husband Bolivar; sometimes to rhyme with Oliver, sometimes (with the original Spanish pronunciation) to rhyme with retriever.
ncG1vNJzZmibn6PBprrTZ6uipZVjsLC5jq2gpp1fqMKjv8KroJudomSus8DInKOeZ2BhgHR8j3JjcG9laoRyeZRlZ2lmmKm6rQ%3D%3D