Dare to Be...
Autobiography of Rabbi Morris Gordon
By Lori and Morris Gordon, ghostwritten 
by Lulu Torbet

Rabbi Morris Gordon, who died last year, packed an inordinate amount of adventure, laughter and service to others into his ninety years. The following excerpts from his autobiography, Dare to Be… Autobiography of Rabbi Morris Gordon, ghostwritten by Lulu Torbet, recount a couple of his escapades during World War II, when he was known variously as "Flash Gordon" and "The Chaplain of the Burma Road."

Reporting for duty

I had enlisted in the army when the war broke out but had not been called. Any romantic illusions I had about the glory of war were summarily dispelled by Albie's [his brother-in-law's] death, but I still felt it was my duty to serve for my country, and to avenge the death in our family. I was always a maverick; I wanted the action. And one other thing. I had just heard from my old schoolmate Baruch Silverstein that he was in basic training at Harvard, where they prepare chaplains for military duty. 

"One thing I'm doing without you," his note read. "I'm going to Harvard to get my Lieutenant's commission as a Chaplain in the U.S. Army." 

I couldn't let that happen. The next day I was on a plane to Washington. Evading several gatekeepers, I barged right in to the office of the general who was Chief of Chaplains.

"I've got a story to tell you," I started right in, "a romantic story."

The impressively decorated general stood up from his impressive desk in his impressive office. 

"Just who are you?" he bellowed, "and how the hell did you get in here?"

I didn't flinch. "You've got to hear my story." I launched into the tale of how I'd met Baruch when he couldn't speak a word of English, and we'd become best friends, and gone through Yeshiva together, and then there he was at City College, and then he turned up at seminary and we both got our master's degrees at Columbia, and now he was in chaplain training at Harvard, and speaks perfect English without a trace of an accent.…

"So why are you telling me this?" By this time the general was interested. He'd sat back down, and called in some other officers to hear my tale. I got the feeling that they thought I was a raving lunatic at first. Then they thought I was just funny, and finally they saw I was serious.

"I want to go to Harvard and surprise him and be there at the same time. I enlisted over a year ago, but you haven't called me."

The general appeared to be considering my plea. "I'll put orders through for you to go to Harvard on the condition that you report for overseas duty immediately. I assume you know that as a chaplain you're exempt from active duty." 

Chaplains don't have to go overseas, they don't have to sign on for active combat, don't even have to enlist for that matter. I think he was testing my sincerity. I told him that of course I wanted to serve on active duty, and the general OK'd my orders.

So off I went on what was to be one of the most challenging and exciting adventures of my life. I flew to Cambridge and reported directly to Baruch's bunk, where I'd been personally assigned by the Chief of Chaplains. Baruch was the platoon commander. 

"Rabbi Morris Gordon, reporting for duty," I saluted him as I entered in full uniform. 

He was dumbstruck. "How did you pull this off?" he demanded.

At four a.m. that morning there was a forced march, through a cold, dank Boston blizzard. Baruch and I were talking animatedly in Hebrew, while he intermittently shouted orders to his troops in English. He's giving me the business. "How did you get here? Who let you in? What possessed you? Don't I get to do anything without you horning in on it?" We're so engrossed in our conversation that he forgets to give orders to make a left turn, so of course the soldiers continue marching right up onto the stoops of the Cambridge townhouses in front of them. 

Unfortunately a captain who happened to be riding by witnessed this sorry spectacle. He starts blowing his whistle furiously. "Who's in charge here?" 

So Baruch gets three demerits because of me on my first night at Harvard, and I took over his post. Really, I didn't do this on purpose, I told Baruch with an innocent smile, but maybe there is a higher purpose that we don't understand. In any case, he never forgave me.

Far from home with the "Fighting Tenth"

Our unit of about a thousand men was known as the "Fighting Tenth" Air Force, part of the Air Transport Command. This encampment in the middle of the jungle was the central dispatching point for the bombing missions that protected the Burma Road. Our mission was to ensure that we could get equipment safely into Western China and Burma. These supplies were flown into Western China via the air route over the Himalayas known as the "hump." It was hazardous duty, as the territory was mostly uncharted and unexplored. The flying weather was awful: severe turbulence, with crosswinds up to 150 mph. 

I was paid the same as any other officer, and dressed the same, except for my chaplain's armband. But I received double pay for flying combat missions. The crews liked to have the chaplain along for good luck, so I frequently flew with the lead aircraft. By the end of the war, I'd earned three oak battle clusters for flying these missions. In the course of this massive supply operation, 460 aircraft and 792 men were lost, often because of the severe weather and aircraft malfunctions. Once you were in trouble, there were no rescue operations.

Trapped in a whirlpool

One night at mess I was drafted into accompanying a couple of my buddies on a secret mission. "Just show up at five tomorrow morning, with your knife and gun and provisions," I was told. In a misty dawn the next day, in total silence, we get into a narrow metal boat. 

The navigator climbs into the prow, the sergeant sits in back. I'm in the middle with orders to lie low. I don't understand the silence and secrecy. The kamikazes are not strafing us here. 

We push off into the Irawaddy River, gliding silently along the banks. About twenty minutes of this and bullets start hitting the boat. We quickly push further out into the river, where fast currents sweep us downrange of the shooting.

It turns out we were literally sitting ducks. Our job was to act as decoys to reveal the whereabouts of snipers in the trees, so that our soldiers on the ground could surround them and shoot them down. I'm still trembling when my compatriots announce, "OK, Chappie, we're going out again." 

Apparently the mission isn't over until the soldiers go out three times. If they come out alive, they're heroes. Many don't. We continue along the banks of the river, but they are ready for us the second time around, and again we scoot out into the current, which is pulling us along at an alarming speed. We're skimming along when the motor falls off the boat. Now we're dragging it along on a tether, but we're still flying. It was wild. 

Suddenly the swift current shoots us across the river, fortunately away from enemy fire. A moment later we are spinning around furiously and helplessly. There are two kinds of whirlpools, one that sucks you down, and another that just spins you around so fast you can't escape. The good news is we're not sinking. The bad news is that we're spinning madly, like an animated top.

The sergeant and the navigator are working feverishly to haul the motor into the boat, in the hope that it will power us out of there. I can't think of a way to be of help, so I start singing, "The music goes round and round, oh oh oh oh, and it comes out here…" 

I thought we might go on twisting there in the river forever, when suddenly an apparition appears at the river's edge, a lovely young Burmese woman, who is laughing merrily at us. When she's calmed down, she steps into a log boat on the shore, and maneuvers close to us with her one long paddle. She studies our predicament for a long minute, then extends the paddle toward us and, prodding our craft at just the right point, sends us spinning out of the whirlpool. 

I stopped my nervous singing and we paddled to shore, following the smooth motion of her beckoning welcome. Mooring our wounded craft, we followed her through dense jungle, surrounded by a symphony of animal and bird calls, cutting away branches with our knives. 

"Mama-ji, Papa-ji,' she calls out. We can't see a thing, until we realize we are the foot of a small village of houses built high up in a latticework of trees. Stunned and enchanted at once, we climb a vine ladder. These are Burmese water people; they live in the trees during the flood season. When the floods recede, they descend to the forest floor to forage and hunt.

We sat on mats on the floor, surrounded by a large multi-generation family: her parents, brothers and sisters, a dozen kids. Talking with the older man, who I think is her father, and the headman of this little village, I look up to see our rescuer, Matay, who had been muddied in the river, come back into the room wearing a fresh white sarong, with a white flower in her hair.

Now I know we're in trouble. My two companions are already ga-ga over her, and the custom is that if she sits next to you, it signifies that she likes you, and if you respond or show affection in any way, you have to take her as a wife. She sits down next to the sergeant, and I whisper, "Don't you dare touch her." 

"I'll take care of myself," he shoots back. 

Intricately carved bowls of exotic fruit and coconut are served, which I knew could make us very sick; we gingerly ate only the insides. Speaking in his broken but eloquent English, the head man explained that once a week they brought their fruit and vegetables to the American camp-in exchange for which, by the way, we gave them tobacco and cheap trinkets. Hardly a fair exchange. 

"I can't wait two more days," I told him. "You have beautiful women here, and I have two men who haven't seen a woman in a very long time. I don't want trouble." So he wisely arranged to have the boats packed and ready to leave that night. When my men found out, they almost killed me.

While we waited for their fleet of boats to be made ready, he took me to a room where he was teaching the children. In sweet singsong voices, they were reciting verses and lessons by heart. It reminded me so much of Yeshiva, one of many instances when I witnessed the common ground of human experience. I saw him as a man of God; he felt like a friend, a kindred spirit. When, a month later, one of their boats pulled up at the base with the message that the headman had died, I was bereft. I felt I'd lost a colleague as well as a friend. At their invitation, I later returned to their village to offer a prayer service, I in my white robes, their spiritual leaders decked out in purple and gold raiment. Hundreds of people from neighboring villages danced and chanted at the service.

Late that night we returned to camp, to find everyone worried about whether we had survived our dangerous mission. Heroes now, we regaled them with our tale of being saved from the whirlpool by the lovely Matay. Of course the story my men told had more to do with how I had cheated them out of their fun.

The indispensable Bhamo

The next day I realized that I was missing the indispensable Army-issue dagger that I used for everything from shaving to cutting brush. I hadn't seen it since we were in the village. A few days later, as I was about to conduct services, with over two hundred men gathered in the center of the camp, one of the tribe's log boats pulls up. Several of the men in the village had come to hand over to me a young man tied head and foot, completely immobilized, with my dagger fastened between his hands. 

Sheer terror had turned this young brown man white; his eyes rolled in his head. The escort tells me, in his pidjin English, that they are here to deliver the young man who took my knife, that in their tradition stealing is punishable by death, and it is the gods' will that I kill him in retribution for what he has done to me. 

As they stand there waiting for me to act, my mind is racing, trying to figure out how I am going to handle this matter without insulting their tribal customs. Finally I remove the knife from his bound hands and, with a dramatic flourish, I raise the knife above his head and bring it down swiftly and cut the ropes. "Our God does not kill people. I am a chaplain, a man of God. It is our custom to give a man a chance to redeem himself." They are disgusted with me. They spit on the young man and get back into the boat, leaving him cowering on the pier.

For the next six months, I had the best right-hand man you can imagine. I called him Bhamo, for the name of the area where we were stationed. Bhamo couldn't do enough for me. He made sure I always had hot water to bathe and shave; he caught fresh fish and cooked it for my meals-a great boon, since frequently I could not eat what was served in the mess hall. He was my protector, never leaving my side, and would lead our missions through the jungle. He knew which plants and fruits were edible, and how to prepare them. Pretty soon Bhamo's help and native knowledge had become indispensable to everyone in the camp. For a while I fantasized bringing him back home with me, though I soon realized how unrealistic that was. He was like a son to me, and it was terrible for us both when I had to move on. 

Just as a coda to this story, I should mention that I few days after we returned from our village adventure, Matay and a couple other young women in the village turned up waiting tables in the mess hall. I realized that I had limited control over my men when it came to such matters.