A Shore Thing

Sitting through a half-dozen speeches on military base closings and the impact of new Pentagon budget cuts, I planned how I'd spend the rest of my day. By 3:30 I was at Bailey's Antiques & Aloha Shirts on Kapahulu Avenue, several blocks from the beach. There didn't seem to be any tourists around, except me, and dressed in a coat and tie I must have looked like the neighborhood wacko. Bailey's not only carries aloha shirts of every color and design, it also sells hula girl lamps, palm-tree ashtrays and pineapple-shaped Christmas ornaments. "Shirts are what people come for," said Deena, the saleswoman.

Actor Nicolas Cage, a Bailey's fan, once pulled up on a Harley and spent $5,000 on two shirts. Cage liked the vintage 1950s styles; taped to the cash register is a snapshot of him wearing one.

I'm going to the North Shore, I told Deena, who took me to a display of expensive "Endless Summer" shirts with various scenes from the renowned surfing movie in color combinations that would have freaked out Gauguin. They're nice, I agreed, but I was looking for something in the $50-and-under range. "You're an XL," she said, pointing to a rack of used shirts in the far corner. There's nothing wrong, Deena assured me, with wearing used aloha shirts, which get passed down from person to person, accumulating more aloha spirit with each owner. I picked out a black one decorated with blue, green and orange banana leaves. Deena guessed I would be the second or third person to own it. "Lots of aloha in this."

I didn't wear the shirt to the conference the next day. Maybe I hadn't gotten Washington completely out of my system, but with no tan and still coming to grips with the spirit of aloha, it just didn't feel right. The woman who had recommended Bailey's looked a little disappointed.

Day Two went by quickly. The highlight was a speech by Yuri Maltsev, an economist who had defected from the Soviet Union in 1989. Several years ago, Maltsev told us, he was in San Diego and ran into a former cosmonaut who was driving a taxi. The man liked his new life in California and didn't see his job as a comedown after being in space. He made more money, he said, and it was a pleasure to drive something that really worked.

I got up early the next morning and, after a breakfast of crushed pineapple and coffee, began driving north. With the "working" part of my vacation over, I felt like a free man. Maybe the aloha shirt helped, but so did the open road, which followed the mountains that divide Oahu into a windward side, where it rains a lot, and a leeward side, where I was, that's usually sunny.

A half-hour out of Honolulu, I turned off Route 99 and into Schofield Barracks. At the gate one of the guards asked where I was going. "This might sound strange," I replied. "I came to see some of the places in From Here to Eternity."

It happens all the time, he said. He checked the trunk and waved me in.

James Jones served in the 25th Infantry Division during World War II and was stationed at Schofield before shipping out for the South Pacific. He wrote From Here to Eternity after the war. When it was published, in 1951, it became an immediate bestseller and two years later was made into a movie. Driving through the base, I began to notice buildings and backdrops that appeared in the film. In the quadrangle where much of the movie was shot, everything about the place looked familiar: the manicured lawns and parade grounds, the enlisted men's quarters. This is where Frank Sinatra, who won an Oscar for his role as Pvt. Angelo Maggio, was sweeping the sidewalk when Prewitt, played by Montgomery Clift, first arrived at G Company. Up on the roof is where Burt Lancaster as Sgt. Warden, the epitome of a soldier for life, grabbed a machine gun and started firing at Japanese planes on their way to bomb Wheeler Field.

The barracks' museum has a wall devoted to Jones. I picked up a brochure that read: "A young infantry man named James Jones wrote an epic novel of those early days as he recovered from his battle injuries years later. From Here to Eternity became an American classic."

I was surprised that only one of the nine or 10 soldiers I talked to had ever heard of Jones's novel -- and he had never read it. It could be that the problems of GIs in the old Army aren't that interesting to today's high-tech fighting men. Over in the barracks' recreation room, a soldier was playing a video war game with sound effects that made it seem like the real thing. "Unit destroyed!" a recorded voice boomed every time he hit a target.

Jones wrote other books, many of them about World War II, but nothing to match From Here to Eternity. My guess is that Hawaii had something to do with it. In a way it was his paradise lost; nothing would be the same after Pearl Harbor, which gave him the perfect turning point in a story about men with a score to settle.