Last Updated on May 23, 2026 by admin
Inchon, September 1950.
The Marine private who found him was eighteen years old, from Wichita, Kansas, and had been off the LST for forty-eight hours. The cat was a small ginger-and-white kitten with a torn ear, sitting on a sandbag outside the mess tent.
The mess sergeant said: “He’s been here three days. Eats the bacon ends. Won’t go inside.”
The private named him Boomer because, he said later, the cat had not flinched at the artillery.
Boomer rode with the unit through the Pusan perimeter, the Inchon landing, the long winter advance up to the Yalu, and the long winter retreat back down. He slept inside the private’s parka. He ate field rations. He weighed, at his peak, four pounds.
In June of 1952, the private rotated home.
Boomer did not, technically, rotate with him.
The seabag the private carried off the troop ship in San Diego was unusually heavy in the middle and unusually quiet for the first six hours. By the time the private had cleared the customs line and reached the bus to Pendleton, Boomer was awake and unhappy and the private was sweating through his service blues.
Nobody asked.
Boomer lived in the small house in Wichita until the spring of 1968. He was, by then, an old cat with a torn ear and a habit of sleeping in the Marine’s footlocker, which the Marine had brought home from Korea and which sat at the foot of the bed.
The Marine died in 2014. His daughter still has the footlocker. It is in a closet in Wichita.
There is a small mark inside the lid, made by a kitten’s claw in 1950, that has not gone away.