Uncertain Journey

UNCERTAIN JOURNEY

This one's for you, Dad. Dreams really do come true. Dedicated to your family.

A Note from the Author's Family

Dear Reader,

This is our father's novel, Uncertain Journey, written more than eighty years ago. For most of our lives, it existed as a stack of typed pages. We never really thought it would see the light of day.

And now, we are finally able to share it with you.

Our father, Joseph J. Grimm, M.D., began writing Uncertain Journey during World War Two while serving as a physician and eye, ear, nose, and throat surgeon in the U.S. Naval Reserve. He was forty-two years old when he sailed from California for the South Pacific, not knowing where he was being sent or what awaited him.

He eventually arrived on Banika, a small island in the Russell Islands, where he served at U.S. Navy Mobile Hospital Number Ten, a massive shore-based, one thousand three hundred bed hospital complex of Quonset huts, later redesignated Fleet Hospital Number One hundred ten. The conditions were difficult-oppressive heat and humidity and demanding medical work. Young Marines arrived from the fighting with terrible wounds. Some had suffered devastating eye injuries and would never see again.

And somehow, amid all of this, our father wrote a novel.

Writing became more than a way to pass the time. It gave him an outlet for feelings that were difficult for him to express. In one of his wartime letters, he wrote:

"Writing has been my salvation and a valuable escape mechanism for my pent up and unexpressed emotions."

He wrote whenever he could-after rounds, late at night, and in whatever spare moments he could find. Three young servicemen helped type the growing manuscript. They refused to accept payment, so our father compensated them with bottles of beer from his weekly allotment.

War correspondents Gerald A. Waindel and Hans R. Johansen spent hours reading and discussing the manuscript with him. Others who read the manuscript and offered suggestions included Marine Corps war correspondent and Washington Star journalist James F. Moser, photographer Norris G. McElroy, and our father's medical colleague, Dr. Hollis K. Russell.

He wrote nearly the entire original manuscript on Banika and worked intensively on the final chapters during his last month in the South Pacific, while stationed in Nouméa, New Caledonia.

The manuscript was enormous. In a résumé he later prepared, he recorded that it had once reached eight hundred seventy-six pages. Over the years, he kept returning to it, revising and paring it down-first to six hundred pages and eventually to about four hundred.

I remember him working on it.

As a little girl, I would see him in our living room late at night, hunched over his manuscript, writing and revising. Years later, when my siblings and I were old enough to help, we strapped copies into awkward cardboard boxes and mailed them off to publishers.

Our father did not live to see Uncertain Journey published, but I like to think he would be smiling now.

So here it is for you, Dad. Dreams really do come true.

A Word from the Author

The writer knows whereof he speaks, for the tale of the "Uncertain Journey" is based on happenings he encountered and people and places he met, lived in, and fought for and with during the Second World War. There are scenes he actually witnessed and acted as a medical doctor in the United States Navy. The novel deals with the war and the people involved in it, their struggles to survive, and their lighter moments of pleasure and romance.

While the book is based on fact, all the names of characters and events that happened, outside of actual battles, are entirely fictitious, and any connection between persons, either living or dead, and actual happenings connected with them is entirely fictitious.

The author hopes his readers will derive at least some measure of enjoyment and enlightenment concerning the war; the hardships, eternal vigilance, and fight to keep alive and to outwit the enemy, and the thrills of love and romance in wartime, in the wonderful tropical island.