Last Updated on May 18, 2026 by admin
The cat was born in a shipyard at Pearl Harbor on July 4, 1944.
Her official name was Princess Papule. The sailors who actually shared a bunk with her shortened it almost immediately. They called her Pooli.
She lived on the USS Fremont — an attack transport ship that spent the last year of the war moving men and equipment across the Pacific. Pooli moved with them. She did not request a transfer. She did not have a rank. She was, in the language of the Navy, a ship’s cat, and that meant she was nobody’s specifically and everybody’s permanently.
She sailed through the Marianas.
She sailed through the Palau group.
She sailed through the Philippines.
She sailed through Iwo Jima.
The thing about being a small animal on a ship under fire is that there is nowhere on a ship to go. The ocean is below you. The deck is exposed. Whatever the men are taking, you are taking. The men, at least, have been issued a helmet.
Pooli had developed a method.
When general quarters sounded — that specific tone that meant battle stations, get below, the next interval of time may not be survivable — she ran. She ran the same direction every time. She ran for the mailroom. Inside the mailroom, she found a mail sack and burrowed into it and waited.
The sailors noticed she did this. The sailors began checking the mail sacks after general quarters. The sailors began bringing her out the same way you bring out a small child after a thunderstorm — slow, low voices, an offering of food.
The ship was hit. The ship was shot at. The ship lost men.
The cat survived every interval.
By the end of the war, Pooli had been at sea for nearly two years. She had been to four major Pacific campaigns. She had not chosen any of this. She had simply been the small living thing the men chose to protect, and she had done what small living things do under fire: she had hidden in something soft and trusted that the people who fed her would still be there when the noise stopped.
They were.
Pooli came home.
She lived out the rest of her life in California, on land, in a house with a yard and no general quarters alarm. There is a photograph of her, taken on her 15th birthday, wearing three campaign ribbons sewn onto a small dress uniform. She looks, in the photograph, like a cat being made to wear a small dress uniform.
She does not look impressed. She does not look bothered. She looks like a cat who has been through worse.
This Memorial Day, somewhere in the back of the long list, there is an unofficial second list. It is not a list of names. It is a list of the small, soft creatures the men brought home with them — and the smaller list of small, soft creatures who had to come home with the men because they had been at every single battle the men had been at, and they had survived the same way, and they had earned it the same way.
Pooli is on that list.
She slept in a mail sack through Iwo Jima.
She came home. 🐾
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