The truck named ‘Juanita’

By David Rutter 

America’s military machine shop produced two million new trucks during World War II, all without evidence that Staff Sgt. Fred Arthur Rutter cared for any of them more than “Juanita.”                    

You will meet “Juanita” and the Kentucky girl who bore that name first in “The Watermelon Gang,” a historical memoir now available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble (shorturl.at/eCLZ9).  It’s the story of one Hoosier GI kid who grew up in that 1945 epoch, and left his mark on the ancient land of China’s western highlands.

Fred was my father and Juanita was mom but before I arrived, they made it through the Depression and World War II as kids who’d never met. They grew up 195 miles apart. The first year of their marriage — 1945— they spent apart. Mom was home in Danville, Ky., and dad was sent to China. 

A minor irony of that war? They would never have met without it, and the three children they produced would never have existed. I often wondered who I would have been without them as parents. Likely, I would have been an inconsequential  moment of cosmic curiosity had I existed at all. 

But “Juanita” the girl was always with Dad in spirit during their wartime separation, and the bright white letters he painted on his Army truck’s fender confirmed it.

As a kid, he had learned to paint large flowing letters in perfect script. So he painted her name on the right fender.

It’s a good piece of a larger story which became my book, “The Watermelon Gang.” But it’s only a passing footnote in the book, and I’m still not sure if it deserved more attention, or less space. Beginning writers often fret they don’t have enough worthy ideas to fill an entire book.  But eventually you become addicted to measuring how good your unsifted writing is.

As for raw material, I have found that life is filled with so much that you must put aside much of that experience when you write. Editing severely on yourself is necessary for the readers’ sake, but not as much fun as it seems. So I wrote about dad’s truck, and then pulled most of the story out of the book with regret.

But I think of the little truck occasionally. The Dodge WC-51 weapons carrier he drove over the Burma Road into China was the standard four-wheel drive 3/4 ton hauler that could tote 1,500 pounds effortlessly. It essentially was a utility truck.

He was a Quartermaster supply guru, and that was his personal vehicle until he left China.

He gave it away to a Chinese friend before heading for home. That might seem both odd and improper, but “The Watermelon Gang” reveals why it was neither.

As for the other 15,000 cargo trucks sent to China’s Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, they stayed in China, too. Except for the several hundred Rutter and his “Watermelon Gang” sabotaged under military orders.

Sgt. Rutter was largely indifferent to all of those trucks except as useful tools . But “Juanita” was unique and special in the way that some men honor mechanical contrivances. The vehicular “Juanita” was symbolically special and might well have been the most carefully maintained GI Army vehicle in Asia that year. 

He designated that specialness because it bore the name of his bride 17,000 miles away.

If that truck looks vaguely familiar, that’s largely because Dodge adopted the same basic “face” for its post-war Power-Wagon truck line, which became the nation’s first recreational off-road four-wheel-drive truck. Dodge Ram trucks still bear the lowly facial sign of their Darwinian origins. 

Observers at first assumed the “WC” designation for the war-era truck reflected its role — weapons carrier. But Dodge’s model name was only coincidental. It was the most utilitarian vehicle in the American inventory — Every part in its 52 variations fit in every other WC.

 The  Army ordered nearly 200,000 of that 5,000-pound truck they nicknamed “Beeps” for its horn. It’s a sightly deeper version of the Roadrunner cartoon beep-beep. It remains revered as one of the most sought-after collectors’ vehicles in the world even 78 years after the war ended. 

But there was only one “Juanita.”  That truck was significant to Rutter also because it was a tangible lifeline to home — to her. He had promised her he would keep himself safe overseas, and she took that promise seriously. Rutter’s truck would carry him to safety.

The truck was brand new when Rutter first encountered it at the allied railhead in Assam, India. It then carried Sgt. Rutter over the Burma Road through the Himalayas to China. Juanita Rose McGlone Brown Rutter carried his heart for the next 50 years before mortality parted them.

As far as I know, he never drove another truck the rest of his life. 

Though this story barely missed the cut to appear in the book except in passing, it’s still worth knowing.

And what happened to the one truck named “Juanita”? 

You’ll have to read “The Watermelon Gang” to fill in that blank.

Communion on a China mountain

By David Rutter

He’d never noticed colors before. Or acres. Or any geography, really.  Geography is just somewhere else. You seldom see what’s nearest your eyes. But now he could not avoid the world where he stood as a young stranger in a very old, strange land. 

He’d never viewed himself as strange or a stranger. But he  did now.

The moment seemed to demand attention for its strangeness.

He stood in the most profound place in his most profound moment, maybe of his entire life. When he looked up and then west, he could not see Everest though the purple gaze of rising mountains signaled its direction 1,000 miles away. 

Turn the other direction and witness the approaching hint of Kunming, the City of Flowers and Eternal Spring just 20 miles down to the valley.  

The world whispered to Fred, and for the first time, he heard it.

Dusk was close, and shadows climbed into the clear sky above him. It was one of those end-of-day kaleidoscopes that made you pay attention.

Though he had known hundreds of farms, Fred never paid much attention to why each was special, or even if they were special. They were all piles of plowed dirt and crops.

 Now he knew he had looked at his world, but not seen it clearly. Maybe no one sees what stands before them without a comparison. Would he ever have understood the grand announcement of sunset without seeing this one?

 “Not seen anything like this ever,” he told his friend standing near.

He never had seen a farm like this, or mountains like the amethyst purple Himalayas that stood as resplendent spires in a haze behind him. This was a violet that stuck to your soul.

Everest was just another mountain in that mist and haze not-too-far to the west.

And then soundlessly the flowers stretching out at his feet and miles in all directions began to change colors, rippling and flashing from yellow to pink to mint. It was biological magic. They became iridescent, flashing lightning strikes of color. The light waves were loud, then dim, then soft.

The ground sizzled and shimmered with electric storm clouds. There was a slight burr on the darkening air. It was alive.

‘What?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Just watch. You’ll see.”

The ground moved, and glittered as an illuminated blanket that was miles wide in the sudden sunset. The flickers overlapped in syncopation. This was harmony. It was a magic carpet of light.

Fred gasped. 

“I told you,” his friend said.

The incandescent cloud shifted and rose in the shadows among the rhododendrons, jasmine, hibiscus, daffodils, marigold, violets, and a thousand other relatives for which he had no name. And then he knew. 

Not a carpet at all.

They were a 10 million lightning bugs, all flashing and dancing and moving in different hues as one in a mating waltz as old as evolution.

‘“We call them yínghuǒchóng,” said his friend, Zhong, the master elder  gardener astride a mountain his people had named for him.

“Lightning bugs,” the GI Army sergeant  said.

“Yes. Fireflies.” Zhong said. “I thought you should see them. You know them, don’t you?”

Zhong smiled.

And in that instant the kid soldier knew more about China than was possible to explain. It was ancient and eternally new just as it was incandescent and enchanting. This truly was the China he had never known as a young man bound to the ground of Indiana and not much else, or could have known without this vision.

He had seldom felt geography or understood it. You endured geography. But he had never sensed the tangible distance to his country home in Indiana more intensely, or felt so close to its spirit.

It was 1945. 

It was China’s western highlands. Marco Polo might have been the last young westerner to see the firefly magic. He would have been just as breathless and startled as the American sergeant who would never see the magic again, nor forget it. 

But magic is a moment and all moments are, as is their nature, fleeting into past tense. The kid GI breathed in the moment, for there never would be another just like it for him.

He turned to look one more time as he walked back to Zhong’s house on Zhong’s mountain.

He was silent.

“China,” he said to himself at last but in hushed tones.

“Yes,” Zhong said.