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Upstarts
I have no way of knowing what thoughts ran through PFC Yazzie's head as he
approached the active part of the war. His Navajo forebears were warlike, we know, but theirs
was a different kind of war, and World War II was a war for a cause of no direct interest to the
Navajo Nation. I think we can assume, however, that having spent some two years in learning to
fire cannon at an imaginary enemy, he might have looked forward to using his skill for real. And
that he valued his buddies in B Battery and wanted to stay with them.
Battery B landed mostly on D+1. They were led to a little field fenced in by hedgerows,
arriving after dark, disoriented, scared, and dog tired. There the cannoneers labored in the dark to
clean the cosmoline off the howitzers and get them into position, ready to fire. It was a long,
tedious process, but they were ready by daylight, when their surroundings became something
more than shadows and looming shapes, and they could see clearly the hedgerow in front of
them with the trees growing out the top.
About that time, the battalion fire direction center (FDC) called on B Battery to fire a
registration (an esoteric but necessary rite of artillery which requires only one howitzer to fire),
and the Number One Howitzer crew was given the commands to fire it. The gunner looked
through his sight and cranked the gun to the left to get it laid in the proper direction, the #1
cannoneer cranked it up to the proper angle of elevation, PFC Philip Yazzie handed a round of
ammunition to the #2 cannoneer, who loaded it into the breech of the howitzer. The #1 closed the
breech and grabbed the lanyard. The rest of the crew stood back, away from the recoil of the
howitzer barrel. They were ready to fire their very first round in combat.
"Number one ready to fire," sang out the chief of section. "Fire!" called the executive
officer.
Number One cannoneer pulled the lanyard. The cannon fired with a thunderous report,
followed instantly by a louder boom as the shell struck the top of a tree in the hedgerow ahead
and exploded, spraying the field with shell fragments.
No one was killed, but several members of the second section were seriously wounded.
Philip Yazzie was evacuated with a completely shattered elbow.
I never saw him again. But I did get word about him.
I don't recall where I heard it, but I found out that Yazzie had ended up in Bruns General
Hospital, in Santa Fe, my home town. Probably the nearest army hospital to the Navajo
reservation.
Next time I wrote my father, I mentioned this fact and suggested that he might look in on
the patient and let me know how he was progressing. The prognosis turned out to be bad: the
elbow was gone and the right arm would always hang limp.
However, there was a surprising up side. It had never occurred to me that Dad and Yazzie
would become friends. As Dad told me later, he first found him in bed, looking unhappy. When
he approached and asked if he were Philip Yazzie, the expression did not improve: it turned
glum and suspicious. Too many bad things had happened already: what was this stranger about to
do to him?
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