Last Updated on May 22, 2026 by admin
She was born on the Fourth of July, 1944, in the engine room of the USS Fremont, an attack transport carrying troops toward the worst fighting in the Pacific. The crew called her Pooli, and by the time the war ended she had four battle stars and three service ribbons pinned to her tiny canvas vest — more decorations than most of the sailors who slept beside her.
A Kitten in a Ship at War
Pooli was tortoiseshell, small enough to fit inside a sailor’s helmet, and almost unbearably loud when she wanted to be picked up. She had a habit of climbing into hammocks while men were trying to sleep, kneading their chests until they relented and let her stay. The Fremont’s crew adopted her without ceremony. She was a ship’s cat in the oldest sense of the phrase — part mascot, part mouser, part reason to keep going on the days when there wasn’t one.
The Fremont was an APA-class attack transport, which meant it carried Marines and soldiers to the beaches and brought them back if they came back. Pooli rode through all of it. The Marianas. The Palau group. The liberation of the Philippines. The black sand of Iwo Jima. Four campaigns. Four battle stars.
What the Ribbons Meant
She wasn’t given the decorations for show. Battle stars in the Navy are awarded for participation in a designated combat campaign. They aren’t honorary, and they aren’t issued lightly. A sailor with four battle stars has been there, repeatedly, when the shooting started. Pooli had been there too — sometimes carried in a duffel bag, sometimes hiding under a gun mount, sometimes asleep in a coil of rope while the deck shook from incoming fire.
The crew made her a small vest out of canvas and stitched her ribbons onto it themselves. There’s a photograph of her wearing it in 1959, fifteen years old, sitting calmly on a sailor’s lap in dress whites. She looks like a small, dignified veteran. She looks like she remembers.
The Quiet Job
What did she actually do? Officially, she controlled the rat population that threatened the ship’s food stores and electrical wiring. That alone was real work — rats on a transport could chew through hundreds of pounds of rations a month. But unofficially, she did the other job, the one no one wrote into the manifest. She gave the men something soft to touch on a steel ship in a steel ocean. She slept on their bunks. She walked across their letters home. She purred while the radio crackled.
The men who served with her would later say, in interviews and reunion notes and the small books some of them eventually wrote, that Pooli was part of why they made it through. Not in a metaphorical way. In the actual, daily, get-through-the-next-watch way that combat veterans understand and the rest of us only glimpse.
After the War
When the Fremont was decommissioned, Pooli went home with a sailor named James Mason. She lived out her years in California, fat and quiet and finally on solid ground. The photograph of her in her vest was taken at a Navy reunion when she was elderly and her whiskers had begun to gray. The ribbons were a little faded by then. The cat looked utterly unbothered.
She died at the age of fifteen, which is a long life for any cat and an extraordinary one for a cat who spent her first year inside an attack transport in active combat zones. The sailors who had served with her sent condolence cards to Mason. Several of them mentioned that they had carried photos of Pooli in their wallets for the rest of their lives.
Memorial Day, the Cats Edition
There is a small, persistent tradition in military families of remembering the animals that served alongside the people. The dogs at Iwo Jima. The mules of the Burma Road. The pigeons of WWI. And the cats — Simon of HMS Amethyst, Faith of the London Blitz, Unsinkable Sam who was supposedly torpedoed three times, and Pooli of the USS Fremont with her four battle stars and her tiny canvas vest.
These animals didn’t choose the war. They didn’t enlist. They were carried into it, often as kittens, and they made small kindnesses possible in places where no other kindness was available. When we list the names of the people we lost, on the last Monday of May, it’s worth holding a small space for the names of the animals who held space for them.
Pooli. Born July 4. Fifteen years old when the photograph was taken. Four battle stars. Three ribbons. One small canvas vest. A cat who was already, by the strictest Navy definition, a veteran of the Pacific. 🐾
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