Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir Page 6

  Useless memories, but they stick with me.

  Phase two of our military career took Huckins and me back to Oklahoma A&M—told we were being sent to college to prepare for our roles in the new high-tech Army. No more dreams of glory. We sewed on shoulder patches that featured the lamp of learning (“The Flaming Pisspot”) and the catch line of our marching song was:

  Take down your service flag, mother.

  Your son’s in the ASTP.

  On the bright side, the barracks adjoining the campus were much improved from the decaying CCC camp we’d left and the food was better. The shame of our shoulder patch was partly offset by the fact we were veterans of the infantry basic, which meant we could wear the musket on a slim blue badge of the Queen of Battles if we ever managed to join an Infantry unit. We were salty enough to be skeptical. Our commandant, for example, was old (at least forty), he was a West Pointer, and he was only a captain and should have advanced at least to colonel. What terrible deed had he done? It couldn’t be mere stupidity. Citizens drafted out of the real world knew stupidity was no impediment for advancement for West Point grads. Had he seduced a general’s wife or what?

  Whatever, he was an amiable commander. When bed check showed we were violating curfew, he was willing to believe—time after time and without checking—that we had been studying in the A&M library and not hanging around the downtown movies trying to meet girls as had been repeatedly reported to him.

  My memory holds little of any significance from the ASTP phase of the real war. My classes were pretty much the same stuff I had studied—the big difference being I now had money, shoes properly Army brown, and wasn’t assistant dishwasher, janitor, and ditch cleaner as well as student. I actually was making A’s in my physics and math classes. Another difference was in the gender field. I had learned in my first tenure on the A&M campus that starved-out civilian freshman boys were simply invisible to coeds looking for more promising males. Now we were visible, but were looked upon with scorn. Patriotism had replaced social caste among the coeds. Why weren’t we out there with their big brothers defending the flag?

  That scorn may have been more imagined than real, a product of the way we felt about ourselves. We told each other that ASTP actually stood for Always Safe Till Peace. How could we escape nerfdom and resume our pursuit of glory? Huckins, always full of risky ideas, talked me into joining him in applying for a transfer to the paratroops. We applied to the captain. Don’t worry, he said. You’re out of here any day now. And we were—sent to fill the ranks of the 103d Infantry and get ready to join the battle. But before entering phase three of the real war, what is there in any of this that bent me toward writing fiction? Not much. No romance. No halls of ivy here. The groundskeepers of this Aggie school had prepared for the future arrival of spring by fertilizing the campus with literally acres of manure from the cow barns, pigpens, horse stables, and (most aromatic of all) the poultry grounds. When the winter sun warmed this bizarre landscape of animal excrement, the aroma was pervasive and I talked myself into one up-close-and-personal encounter with it.

  We were walking back from the gym after our daily workout. (Why did the Army think its selected scholars need muscles? We’d soon know the answer.) I was regaling my friends with my remarkable ability to endure cold. A kid from Chicago scoffed at the Oklahoma version of winter, noting Polar Bear Club members break the ice of Lake Michigan for a swim. I pointed to Theta Pond. “I’d swim across,” said I, “if it wouldn’t get me in trouble with the Army.”

  No males need to be told how that worked out. A challenging bet is made—five bucks against my honor. I accept, hoping that with payday far behind they won’t have the fiver. They did. I dive through the skim ice in my exercise togs, a sensation still vivid. Everything works except lungs, which refuse to inhale. I splash to a tiny island that decorates the center of the pond and is crowned with a thick crust of fertilizer. I sat there on that mountain of frozen chicken droppings getting my lungs working again and deciding that I preferred freezing on the island to completing the swim. Alas, the taunts and jibes of my friends drove me back in the water. They signed the fiver for me and I carried it for more than a year until my wallet fell into the hands of medical personnel when I was wounded.

  The only concrete contribution here to my future efforts as a writer involved an odd friendship of a fellow I’ll call Jack McKeen. He showed me a side of humanity I hadn’t known. I remembered him while I was trying to make a creditable baddie in People of Darkness.

  McKeen was the only son of a banker, and was tall, handsome, charming, and witty. If he had sisters (or a mother) they were never mentioned. In McKeen’s worldview humanity fell into two segments—the prey and the predators. The prey included all women and most males; the predators Jack’s dad, Jack, and a handful of other males. We got acquainted at a music store near the campus, where I was having a Bach recording played for me by a skeptical clerk. Jack came by, said Bach was okay but for real music I should be listening to Wagner. Since Jack had been actually buying records the clerk made the change. We listened to Wagner. Jack was taking the ASTP even less seriously than the rest of us. He’d done his high school in an expensive military academy and was awaiting a pending appointment to West Point to come through.

  Since Jack eschewed library work he had a lot of idle time and I’d often find him in the music store listening booth, headset on and Wagner booming away. He appealed to me as a Martian might have. He was interesting. He was a year older (big deal when you’re eighteen) and he’d been around. I think I appealed to him as the only one in the barracks willing to listen to his philosophical and political theories. I’d been reading Plato’s stuff. He said Plato preached nonsense. Teaching morality and ethics is useful, Jack would say, only because it helps keep the majority placid in its role as prey for the predator class. The philosophers worth reading were Nietzsche, Zeno, and Hedon—the apostle of the Superman and the two disciples of living only for self-gratification. Why was I a Catholic? Nietzsche taught that Christianity was the greatest curse ever imposed on humanity but his dad said it must be supported to keep the working class calm. Never ever think that social rules apply to you, said Jack. They apply to the gazelle, not to the lions; to the goats but not to the tigers.

  Pretty heady stuff, and Jack McKeen practiced as well as preached. For example, one day he showed me a diamond tiepin his uncle had sent him as a birthday present, along with the jeweler’s documents appraising it as a flawless 2.2 karats. Jack suggested we get a pass to Oklahoma City. I’d take the pin and pawn it. He’d report it stolen and if the police didn’t locate it, he’d go to the shop, pretend to be shopping for a diamond stickpin, recognize it, call the cops, and reclaim his property. Then I’d keep half the pawn money as payment for taking the risk.

  The Army separated us by abolishing the ASTP and shipping us down to fill gaps in the 103d Infantry Division at Camp Howze, Texas. I went to Company C and Jack to Company D. Weeks later, I was ordered into the office of Captain Curtis C. Neeley, commander of Charley Company. Neeley told me Private Anthony G. Hillerman had been arrested in Oklahoma City the previous weekend without the required pass. Before he pronounces sentence, do I have an excuse for this? I do, having spent the day in question far from Oklahoma City cleaning grease traps in the Charley Company kitchen for Sergeant Carl Pohlad, our mess sergeant. The captain reads my serial number off the report. Is that mine? It is. We look at one another. Will the captain call Pohlad to confirm my story? Will he ask me who did this to me? Will I answer him if he does? The captain decides not to test me, nods, says I’m dismissed. He goes back to his paperwork. I go looking for Jack McKeen.

  Does he deny it? Of course not. Predators don’t apologize to their prey. But why me, I ask. Because mine was the only serial number besides his own that he knew.

  (If any baseball fans are reading this, Mess Sergeant Pohlad survived the war as an officer and became owner of the Minnesota Twins.)

  It was about then I gave up on
the idea of converting Jack to Christianity and I only saw him again on three occasions. Once was just a few days before we shipped out to Camp Shanks, the staging base for our boat ride to Europe. Jack told me he was not going because his transfer orders to become a West Point cadet had finally come through. He wished me well, reminded me that the prey were the dead heroes, the predators survived. Next I saw him at a truck park somewhere up the Rhone Valley, still with Company D. The class at West Point had been filled, canceling his transfer. But the senator friend of his dad had arranged an appointment to Annapolis—always his first choice. Weeks later I saw the machine gun section of D trudging up a rainy road in the Vosges Mountains but I didn’t see Jack. I slid down the muddy slope to inquire. Shot in the fighting at St. Dié, I was told—a machine gun bullet in the head.

  I don’t know what finally has become of Jack. I know he survived the head wound because he showed up at the University of Oklahoma. It was January 1946, when the waiting list for cars was at least a year long. Jack was driving a shiny new sedan. He removed his golf cap and showed me where a metal plate was replacing missing bone. He called my attention (without introduction) to the lovely girl waiting in his car. He asked about my eye patch and my limp. He’d enroll at the university, join his dad’s fraternity, and become a lawyer. We’d get together.

  I never saw him again but for me he lives on as B. J. Vines. McKeen made it possible for me to create this character. Papa tried to teach us not to judge others, but McKeen made what Vines did in the People of Darkness plausible and his death justified. I pray for a happier ending for the bona fide Jack McKeen.

  8

  Charley Company

  At last! At last! At last! Herded off the train at Gainesville, trucked to a sprawl of shabby barracks on the rolling North Texas plains, down the gravel battalion streets, dumped off in little bunches at various company headquarters buildings, depending on what our orders said. Mine said “Company C, 410th Infantry, 103d Division”—finally a genuine, bona fide combat outfit.

  Up the wooden front steps, through the door, into the company clerk’s office, hand my orders to a corporal who glances at them, unimpressed. “Another quiz kid,” he says to the first sergeant. “Get him back to supply,” says the First.

  I trot back to the supply room, where a six-by-six truck is parked, its driver unloading bundles of clothing. I report to another corporal. “Another quiz kid,” says the corporal. “Just in time,” says the supply sergeant, who is standing checking a list with the driver. The driver climbs back into the cab, starts the engine. The supply sergeant points to the truck bed, says: “Hop on, soldier, and toss out stuff.”

  I hop on, confused. The truck is rolling down the alley toward the battalion street—supply sergeant and corporal running behind, motioning me to start tossing. I toss. As the truck turns up the battalion street, the door of company headquarters opens, two men dash down the steps and join the sergeant and the corporal, picking up the bundles I’m tossing and encouraging me to toss more. One of them is wearing captain’s bars. The truck slows, turns up the alley next to Company B headquarters. I bail out, walk back to Charley Company to resume my efforts to report for duty at the supply room. The four bundle collectors are there, including Captain Curtis C. Neeley, our company commander, doing his duty, taking care of his own.

  Neeley’s own was an oddly mixed bag who could be roughly classified in two groups, the standard US and THEM division of American society. THEM were the cadre, those who had survived the Louisiana Maneuvers, most of whom were officers and noncoms, but some were privates who had managed to be overlooked when the division was looted to provide replacements for the riflemen being killed in Africa, the Pacific, and Europe. US were those who hadn’t endured the horrors of the Louisiana war games—mostly replacements poured in from the aborted ASTP projects and would-be flyboys dumped into the infantry grinder when the Army noticed it was training more flight personnel than it needed.

  We called the cadre “lifers”—the insulting term civilian soldiers applied those days to regular Army personnel. Some were regulars, but many were Arizona National Guard troops of the 103d’s original life. That didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except The Maneuvers. They produced a treasury of anecdotes—tales of heroic exploits, drunken foolishness, endless bug-infested food, notable Army stupidities, and unspeakable agonies endured. Those Maneuvers also produced the bonding that only shared misery seems to cause. We quiz kids and the flyboys were outside this fraternity—apparently forever.

  We made the first crack in that Iron Curtain one sweltering August day, thanks to another outsider—a newly commissioned second lieutenant just out of Officers Candidate School at Fort Benning. He had been a halfback on the Georgia Tech football team. He was in superb physical condition, but he hadn’t done the Louisiana thing. He gets the job of leading the company the required ten-mile, end-of-training forced march that would demonstrate to the Inspector General, or whoever judges such things, that we were ready for combat. I’ve always suspected our new lieutenant volunteered for this as an opportunity to demonstrate to The Maneuvers fraternity that he was every bit as tough as they were.

  Alas, he did.

  This ten miles is supposed to be completed in two hours carrying full field equipment. In my case that was sleeping bag, a “shelter half,” which when combined with the other half formed a pup tent, two tent stakes, a blanket, a day’s rations, a canteen of water, an envelope of salt tablets, and everything else you owned, plus your weapon, a ration of ammunition, etc. For the average grunt it worked out to about sixty pounds, not counting one’s steel helmet. In my case, as the gunner in my mortar squad, the burden also included a leather box containing the sight, the mortar barrel, one of those .45 caliber pistols designed to knock down berserkers at point-blank range during the Philippine Insurrection, and a couple of extra clips of pistol ammunition. I never learned to like that pistol but one day it would save my life.

  It is axiomatic in the Army that wherever you are it is the hottest summer, dustiest spring, coldest winter, deepest snow, etc., in the memory of man. Thus the temperature was to rise that day to one hundred and eight degrees Fahrenheit. Add a blazing sun and high humidity. Away we go down the dusty trail, warming up on the first mile with the infantry’s standard three-miles-in-fifty-minutes pace, getting us ready for mile two. That mile we run. We rest in the roadside ditch, butts down, feet up the embankment, steel helmets (too hot to touch) set aside and the plastic helmet liner used to keep the sun off our faces—a technique we’d learned in basic. Our lieutenant walks up and down the row, warning us to take it easy on the canteens and to take our salt pills. I still remember thinking with foreboding that he looked fresh as a daisy.

  During mile three the first man takes a dive—a buck sergeant in one of the rifle squads. We pass him sprawled in the ditch. Several more fall out doing the mile-four run. On mile five it gets serious. Charley Company had always been notorious in the 410th Infantry for singing while marching. No songs left now. We trudge along in stony silence looking for the telltale tilt to the right in the man ahead of us, which signals he’s about to tumble. Soon the roadside ditch is well populated. During the break before mile six, the word spreads among us that one of the loftier noncoms has fallen out, gotten back to company headquarters, and reported to Captain Neeley. Ambulances have been dispatched, we hear, and Neeley has called off the exercise.

  If he actually did, our lieutenant didn’t get the word. Off we go on the six-mile run. More dropouts, more canteens being drained, more fellows leaning to the right and then following their rifles in the tumble into the ditch. During the break before mile nine, Bob Lewis and I discuss whether our sense of manhood would be too badly damaged if we join the fainters. Before we can decide, we are trudging away on mile ten. Finally the end is in sight and it is too late to do the sensible thing.

  In the latrine showers after the ordeal a huge truth dawned on us. Those of us who had finished the ten-miler were almost all qui
z kids. Nearly all of the fainters were the Louisiana Maneuvers tough guys. Captain Neeley noticed this. Everyone had. The only formal and official notice that the ten-miler was behind us was the handing out of a second copy of the little blue bar with the musket device to pin on uniform shirts certifying us as infantrymen. More important, we were being accepted as soldiers by the old hands. Some kidding still, but no more blatant disrespect.

  I’m sure the same was true for the rookie lieutenant. It developed that he had misread the map and our ten-miler had gone thirteen, but trouble with maps seemed to be no handicap for officers in the 103d Division. He became leader of one of the rifle platoons.

  The last time I saw him was on a much colder day in the outskirts of Villa, a smallish French town we were wresting from the Germans. He’d been knocked off the street by the blast of a mortar shell, part of his face chopped away by a fragment. The snow was blowing over him and one of the aid men was kneeling beside him, trying to stop the bleeding. But the mortar rounds were still whistling in and we were running for cover. No one stopped to say good-bye.

  That epic ten-miler also marked the end of training. We were now battle-ready. A division review was done so the top brass could look us over, we were trucked south to parade through the streets of Dallas with bands playing and regimental flags flying, we scrubbed the floors and whitewashed the rocks at Camp Howze so it could be abandoned shipshape to the wind and weather, packed our gear for the train ride to the seaport, and got passes for a final good-bye.

  9

  The Sentimental Journey

  I walked out to the highway and hitchhiked north, en route to Oklahoma City and a farewell visit with Mama and Margaret Mary. And this, I think, requires a digression for those young folk who won’t remember how hitchhiking was in the olden days. The Depression had made it socially acceptable to be out on the road without bus ticket money. With the unemployment rate about 30 percent, those fortunate enough to be driving certainly had friends or relatives uprooted and homeless drifting around in the hope that they’d find work over the horizon. Then came the war, further uprooting, gasoline rationing, jam-packed public transportation, and millions of men trying to get home or back to camp. Failing to pick up someone with his thumb out was antisocial. Passing up one in uniform was akin to treason. For servicemen hitchhiking became so common that a protocol was developed. If others were seeking rides on your stretch of highway you moved down the line past them. They were expected to suggest to the driver who picked them up that you, too, would appreciate a ride. The point to the above being that hitchhiking was easy, orthodox, sometimes exciting. Exciting? On my way back to camp after this very leave a LaSalle limo driven by a middle-aged woman and already occupied by three girls and a private with red artillery braid on his cap stopped to pick me up. The young ladies said the driver was the madam of the place where they worked in Tulsa—moving them to Dallas where business was brisker. Why didn’t I come along? I said my pass was expiring. The girls suspected my reluctance was due less to duty than to fear (the hygiene movies the Army showed recruits were far more terrifying than the best Stephen King has produced) so they showed me the needle marks left by their anti-VD inoculations. But my moral standards clicked in. And we were about to ship out to the real war. I couldn’t risk missing it.