Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir Page 7

  The first driver who picked me up on this three-day pass wasn’t as memorable. But the second ride was with a World War I veteran full of stories of trench warfare, mustard gas, and lice. He said he could get me twenty miles up the road toward Oklahoma City but then was turning eastward—headed for Ada. Ada is only about twenty-five miles from Sacred Heart. I decided to detour, take a nostalgic look at the home place, and then go visit Mama. Two rides later and a little after midnight, a truck driver dropped me off at Higdon’s Corner—less than a mile from home.

  I have an unsatisfactory chronological memory, marked by great year-long gaps and vacancies. The few hours that follow in the summer of 1943 take up more space in my subconscious than the ten long years of the 1980s. It was a mild night, three-quarter moon lighting the front of the house, the familiar smells of a hot, dry summer, a mockingbird on the roof ridge producing an imitation of a blue jay’s call. The front door was locked. I have no key and need none. I slide up the sash on the bathroom window and climb through—into those smells of dust and emptiness one finds in deserted houses, into dark rooms where the electric switches are inoperative and where I need no light. I open windows to admit the night air, sit at the kitchen table remembering the supper when Mama, Barney, and I sat here deciding I’d be a scholar, remembering the meal when the odd grinding sound we couldn’t identify proved to be the sound of the injured pup Papa had brought home chewing the leg on Mama’s Victrola, remembering hugs, happiness, and huge dreams.

  I went into the front room and sat in the chair where Papa had rested in those last weeks until he could sit no longer. Moonlight through the front window was now illuminating the couch where he’d spent the days when he could no longer remain upright—and where he had died Christmas morning.

  Margaret Mary, home from nursing school, had driven us to the monastery to see if we could find a priest who wasn’t busy with Christmas services to come and give him what we then called “The Last Sacrament.” We couldn’t, but it was too late for that anyway and we both knew it. Papa was already dead. I think we both also knew that he didn’t require that terminal blessing. He had fed the poor, clothed the naked, carried his cross, and somehow persuaded us kids that we were special and the same sort of conduct was required of us.

  That’s not the sort of thinking one needs after an exhausting day of hitchhiking. I climbed the stairs into the room Barney and I had shared, opened the windows, and sprawled on our dusty bed. The mockingbird was gone now but the whippoorwill was singing his sad, lonely song in the woods on Old Man Mann’s farm, just as it had done every summer. With that in my ear, I fell asleep. I was feeling deprived, lonesome, sorry for myself. I intended to do great things in this war. Damn it, Papa should be alive to know about it.

  I remember awakening the next morning with the sort of hunger fast-growing teenagers feel when their last meal is eighteen hours and a lot of walking behind them and there is absolutely no prospect of even a drink of water for breakfast. That, and the reality of submarginal farming poverty I was seeing, cut short my inspection of the home place. If I was writing fiction now, I’d describe a stop at the top of the hill, a backward look, and a lot of emotion. I didn’t stop. I had a mile to go to the major gravel road where I’d have a chance to catch a ride. Besides, I didn’t need to look back. I remembered every bit of it (and still do). It had been a happy place but I sensed I would never live there again.

  My first ride that morning was the truck of the cattle dealer named Davis who’d bought our little herd when my call came from the draft board. We talked about that a little, about how the price of beef had shot up in the year since then, about how we’d have a hard time buying back in when the war was over. But mostly he wanted to tell me about Papa. He delivered a series of anecdotes, how Papa had gone and got old Agnes Brown and took her up to the asylum at Norman when she went crazy, how Papa had talked a Potawatomi family into holding out for more money when a lease buyer was trying to cheat them, rattling off names of families Papa had helped feed when the price of cotton dropped to four cents a pound at the gin. I don’t remember many of them but I do recall the exclamation with which he concluded each of them. He’d slap me on the knee and say: “Gus was a goodun!”

  Davis dropped me off at the village of Asher, on the paved road toward Oklahoma City. No café there, but I drank about a gallon of water from the hose at the filling station and the next ride was with a woman who worked at the plant where Douglas Aircraft was churning out C-47s for the Army. It was nonstop to Oklahoma City. There I received food, the farewell advice and instructions younger sons get from mothers with the good-bye hugs. Margaret Mary wasn’t there. She’d married Frank Chambers, an artillery forward observer in my regiment, and had gone to Texas to see him off.

  Our next stop was Camp Shanks, New Jersey, and our troop ship. While awaiting the ship, we were allowed very brief leaves, long enough to get into Manhattan via ferry and back again in time for the morning wake-up bugle, and long enough to teach me two memorable lessons. One of our four-man patrol claimed enough big city experience to know how to meet girls. He had us clustered around a sidewalk grating, and staring into it as if fascinated. As he promised, it soon collected a small throng of the curious. Although these quickly left after deciding we had nothing interesting to look at, we eventually gave pause to three girls, teenagers like us, who asked us what we were doing. When we confessed we were simply trying to meet girls, they agreed to go to a Fats Domino concert with us.

  The second lesson came after delivering the girls to their subway stop for their trip home. At a bar/grill passed enroute to our ferry we paused. I ordered a Singapore Sling, advertised to contain eight kinds of rum. I drank this, plus some other stuff, and a bit later was advised by the waiter that the waffle on which I had poured syrup and was trying to cut was the photographed waffle on my menu. The subsequent hangover was a terrible thing.

  After subjecting us to the most foul-smelling spring in Oklahoma A&M records, following this with the hottest summer in Texas history, the U.S. Army capped it with the stormiest Atlantic crossing since C. Columbus. Captain Neeley had made this more onerous for his Charley Company wards by drawing the short straw when the company commanders decided to assign shipboard cooking and dishwashing duties by lot—sentencing Charley Company to scrubbing those vomit-covered trays (almost everybody was seasick) and saving us from the on-deck crap games. And for the first time ever, I was loaded with cash.

  Ever since basic training at Benning, I had dutifully set aside three or four dollars a month as my contribution to the payday crap shoot. While gambling was prohibited by the Army, it was Charley Company tradition that officers stayed away from the enlisted men’s latrine on payday evening—thereby avoiding the knowledge of evildoing. I always played. I never won. Not ever. This changed at Camp Shanks.

  On shipping-out eve, we were required to turn in all cash over one-dollar bills and coins in exchange for phony-looking script the Army had printed for use wherever we were going. This left us without much for investment in the farewell game. All those sevens and elevens that had eluded me now appeared. I cleaned out the game in Charley Company, accumulating a pocketful. A friend suggested that this run of luck shouldn’t be wasted and we drifted across the street to the Baker Company latrine. There my lucky streak continued. When I struggled up the gangplank the next morning, carrying every thing I possessed, my pants were sagging with untold pounds of coins and every pocket of my field jacket was abulge with wads of ones.

  On the ship and in France this wealth was utterly unspendable—and illegal as well. No good came of it. Months later I managed to convert the $172 I hadn’t given away to French villagers into a money order made out to my mother. Pending a chance to mail it, I kept it dry in a field jacket pocket. Before that chance came it was captured, along with my field jacket, helmet, mortar, and a sack of mortar rounds, by a bunch of early-rising German ski troopers. But more of that later.

  Nothing notable happened on the trip
across. Our convoy veered northward, which lent weight to generally believed reports that we were going to liberate Norway from the Nazis. We sailed through the fringe of a hurricane, which produced waves big enough to sweep over the flight deck of the convoy’s escort carrier and have us all confined below decks. When allowed up again we saw rows of landing gear still chained to the carrier’s flight deck but waves breaking over the deck had swept away the aircraft.

  About the time we saw Gibraltar, Axis Sally let us know Norway was not in our future. She greeted the 103d Division and our commanding general by name and welcomed us to Marseilles. We got there a bit late. The port had already been captured and the only greeting our landing craft encountered was a Frenchman in a motorboat passing out cards inviting us to a brothel.

  Exciting times, those, with the port city still smoking from the demolition projects of the retreating Germans and an occasional recon plane drawing antiaircraft fire. Grand adventure ahead, but first an exhausting march from the sea level landing area up the top of the plateau behind Marseilles followed by an extended introduction to life in the mud at the division’s tent camp.

  Some philosopher once described war as an infinity of boredom punctuated by occasional moments of abject terror. The only boredom I remember was experienced in this staging area. We spent about ten days living in our pup tents with nothing to do but dig the required sanitary slit trenches and be trucked down to the port now and then to help unload weapons and ammunition off ships.

  Bob Lewis and I slipped away from one such stevedore detail, found a sort of makeshift bistro nearby, and there met a trio of other layabouts drinking wine and wearing shoulder patches of the famous 45th Division. Mortar gunners, were we? They shook their heads in pity and sorrow. Too bad. Anzio horror stories followed and the information that the life expectancy of mortarmen in combat was something under fifteen minutes. They made combat sound even worse than the Louisiana Maneuvers, and while we recognized it was mostly the game veterans play with newcomers, it made the staging area boredom more tolerable.

  The only other memorable moments there came when Lewis and I and couple of others from the mortar section decided to slip away from the staging area under cover of darkness and see if we could find a little café we’d noticed while being trucked back from the wharfs. We didn’t, but we did find a massive villa, the long driveway of which was lined with Jeeps, weapons carriers, the ugly olive-drab sedans staff officers use, a few civilian cars and a couple painted the U.S. Navy blue. What could it be?

  A half dozen or so men were waiting on the porch for their time to join the crowd in the foyer. We had found a brothel, they explained. They were the end of the line. The wait was about an hour. We skirted the place, looking it over. One of us (I plead not guilty) noticed that by dumping out a rain barrel, rolling it from under its downspout to a lighted window, and hopping atop we could determine if this was actually a house of ill fame. It was, and the brief peek into the bedroom was even more antierotic than those hideous disease films we’d watched in basic training.

  Then came the ride up the Rhone Valley to the forested foothills of the Vosges. What we had come for was about to begin.

  10

  At Last, the Real War

  The real war began for me one mild autumn day at a farmhouse beside the Meurthe River. Charley Company and the rest of the First Battalion of the 410th Regiment had sneaked down a steep and heavily wooded hillside the previous night, warned by our superiors that the least sound or glimmer of light would bring us under devastating artillery fire from the Germans on the opposing slope. We had arrived at a valley farm with only sprains, scratches, and bruises, moved into the farm buildings, and survived a peaceful first day on the front. Now, with evening approaching, my mortar squad comrades were summoned with members of a rifle squad into the farmhouse living room. There stood Captain Neeley, our platoon leader, and a stranger wearing the golden oak leaves of a Major. We were having our first experience with Army Intelligence, a term that we would learn is the classic oxymoron.

  Captain Neeley told us we were about to conduct a raid. The major would explain. He did. Just across the Meurthe River from our farmhouse, the major said, ran a railroad with a parallel highway. Every night German supply trucks came down that highway delivering ammunition to German forces holding St. Dié. We were to wade across the stream, establish positions, and ambush these trucks. My mortar, obviously, wouldn’t be useful on this mission and was left behind. To augment my .45 caliber pistol I was handed a “grease gun”—the crown jewel in the U.S. Army’s array of ill-conceived and misbegotten weapons. The major unfolded a map and explained things to the lieutenant who was to lead this venture. Upstream we would find a footbridge but it was mined and should be avoided. However, the river was only about three feet deep, not dangerously swift, and we would wade across it below the bridge, take up positions at the highway, and shoot up the trucks when they came along. Those standing closer to the conversation reported later that the major told our lieutenant the Germans had strong positions beyond the highway, that we should expect a quick reaction, and not delay getting back to our side of the Meurthe.

  Away we went, out into the darkness, quiet, well spaced, and, speaking for myself, nervous and excited—a rifle squad reinforced by mortar men. I think I can speak for the entire party when I say we were not yet experienced enough to have been as scared as we should have been. We moved silent as mice across the bare hayfield that lay between our farm buildings and the river. At river’s edge we hit the ground while the lieutenant and the squad leader talked things over. The footbridge wasn’t where the major’s map had shown it. Scouts were sent upstream and downstream to find it. They returned. No bridge. Another whispered conference. It’s about time for the German trucks to be showing up. We’ll just wade across here and get the job done. The squad leader walks gingerly into the water. There follows a muffled exclamation and a flurry of splashing. From where I was sprawled all I knew was that the sergeant had gone under. He emerged briefly, weighed down by steel helmet, rifle, ammunition, hand grenades, etc., and is swept away. Fifty feet or so down the bank we helped him crawl out. Clearly the major’s intelligence about the depth of the Meurthe is no more accurate than his location of the footbridge.

  I presumed we would now call this affair off, sneak back to the farm, and let the war wait another day. No such luck. The lieutenant was as green as we were and has not yet understood the invincible ignorance of military intelligence. The major had assured us the river was shallow so the lieutenant thinks we can find a ford. We move slowly downstream looking for such a place, managing only to get a couple more riflemen wet. But, alas, the splashing and yelling has not gone unnoticed—not by the Germans but by Company A, which is occupying high ground downriver from our farm. An Able Company mortar fires a flare. It ignites into a dazzling light above us and drifts down under its parachute. Then another flare, and another. We lie in the hay stubble as flat as the human form can make itself—trying to crawl into our helmets. Will Company A decide it has caught a German patrol in the open and mow us down? Or will the German machine gun positions across the river handle the job? Either way, it would be a short and inglorious war for us.

  But nothing happens. The flares burn out. By now even the lieutenant has had enough of this outing. We hustle through the blessed darkness back to cover.

  Day two. Our squad was alerted about 2 A.M We pick up our mortars, ammunition sacks, and containers of extra rounds. We cross the road away from the river and struggle through the darkness up the same wooded hillside we’d come down to reach our farm. We dig in. Our goal we are told is still to destroy German trucks that Army Intelligence now reports are parked under a railroad bridge across the river. Army Intelligence will tell us how to do that.

  Dawn comes. The major who seems to be running this antitruck operation radios orders for us to chop down a few trees to clear a field of fire. We do this. Somewhere across the river a German notices this activity, gets on h
is radio, and calls a half dozen rounds of artillery fire down on us. We dive into our holes. It’s scary, but no one is hurt. And now, we are no longer virgins. We have actually been shot at. As Winston Churchill said after his experience with combat in the Boer War: “Nothing is more exhilarating than to be shot at without effect.”