After being invited to join in, Boxer pulled from his belt a handmade tomahawk. It was their ‘communication specialist’, a soft spoken American Indian my father called ‘Boxer’. One afternoon, another member of their platoon walking by heard the noise of metal sinking into wood, and came to investigate. He and his fellow leather necks had reinforced the door by adding scrap wood and were throwing their k-bar knives over a variety of distances.
My father recounted how he passed the boredom common to soldiers by practicing throwing knives into the wooden door of his shared tent. The specific story that came into my mind when I first laid eyes on the Cold Steel Spike Hawk tomahawk was stolen when I was a child, by hiding myself in the shadows at the top of our stairs when my uncles were over for a late night visit. So the times when I could hear a story or two were rare. I was well into college when I realize that Guadalcanal was something more than just a name spoken in the same fashion as ‘toaster oven’. Like many war veterans, my father didn’t really like to talk about his experiences to his family, trivializing his involvement any time it came up.
