Before Their Time: A Memoir (2 page)

The Army Specialized Training Program couldn’t last. We knew that. After only two months, Congress voted it out of existence, under sharp pressure from rebellious constituents, who claimed that we were being coddled; it was the old populist cry of elitism. As it happened, folding the program turned out to be most convenient for the Army, surprising none of us. The boys of ASTP would provide a trained pool of 18- and 19-year-old infantrymen—
175,000 in all, from schools all over the country—to fill out lean divisions like the Yankee Division in time for the invasion of Europe and for what might follow.

We turned in our books, packed up our duffel bags, and said good-bye, feeling sad and betrayed (easy enough when you’re eighteen). We were also scared, which was soon to be our common, ongoing state, even more so because we were still without clear orders. But soon enough, within only a couple of days, we were on our way by train to Tennessee, where we were told that the Yankee Division was bivouacked in the middle of spring maneuvers. I had to check a map to find out exactly where Tennessee was.

As soon as we arrived, we were sucked into the innards of the division, whose officers and non-commissioned officers could hardly believe their eyes when they saw us. New meat, in their hungry words, fresh beef, and young (virginal, too, in most cases), a windfall of malleable human flesh when it was really needed. No division could ask for more.

As for me, I was assigned to the first squad, third platoon of C Company, 104th regiment, former winner of the Croix de Guerre. At that point, C Company, like many other companies in the Yankee Division, was severely understrength, although not catastrophically so, as it would be just six months later, in October of 1944.

CAPTAIN Michael Antonovich commanded C Company, but only in a manner of speaking, as I liked to think. And I was not the only one with doubts about him. Everyone in the company had them, including the non-commissioned
officers. Antonovich had pursued his mandate in standard fashion, joining ROTC while in college, then entering Officer Candidate School after he was drafted, and finally, as he moved up the ladder, finding his present post in the Yankee Division, which needed young officers as much as it needed enlisted men.

Almost everything that Antonovich knew about military operations he had picked up from someone else, mostly in school, sometimes in the field. It was all secondhand, by the numbers, memorized. But secondhand knowledge was a commonplace among Army officers then; the Army was building an officer corps in quick-time and moved accordingly. Naturally, there were anomalies. The fact was that Michael Antonovich had never fired a real weapon beyond target practice. His head was stuffed with standard infantry tactics, out of textbooks; some of those tactics went back to the Civil War. He was strapped and bound by the Army’s wartime limitations but not unhappily. It suited Antonovich to try to be what he had observed in others and not to venture too far on his own.

Antonovich was from Columbus, Ohio—not from New England—a former football tackle at one of those vast Midwestern state universities: Nebraska or Kansas, I never got it straight. He looked the part, too, with a massive body, thick legs, and a square-skulled head that carried a dense, unhappy expression around the eyes whenever he was expected to think clearly. At those moments, his right eye tended to wander slightly, perhaps from the strain. Whatever, this walleyed effect could be disconcerting when C Company came face-to-face with it.

The cruel fact that everybody understood about Michael Antonovich was that he was mentally out-of-synch
with his physical capabilities. He could run faster than most of us. He could lift weights that were beyond our reach and outlast almost anyone in C Company on forced marches. This is not inconsiderable for the head of an infantry company, who must always it least appear to excel. But Antonovich wasn’t really intelligent enough to be a company commander—not that brilliance is needed for the job, although soundness is. As it was, the captain lacked both. His judgments were too often unreliable, as though he was depending on guesswork, and he indulged, again too often, in the unpleasant discriminatory habit of playing favorites. (I was never one of them nor were any of my pals.) This left some of us nervous in Captain Antonovich’s presence. We never knew what to expect of him, and my guess is that he didn’t either. Not auspicious, I thought, from the first meeting.

Under Antonovich, Francis J. Gallagher served as third platoon lieutenant. Gallagher came from a small milltown near Worcester, Massachusetts, a National Guard enlistee who had been tapped for OCS early on and eventually graduated near the top of his class. Gallagher was only five feet four, very small for an officer, very small for a man, with shanks like fishbones and a frame as delicate as a cobweb—a marked physical type, exactly the reverse of Michael Antonovich. And the two officers were opposites in many other ways, too, which was, perhaps, a touch of good fortune for us. Unlike the captain, for example, who sometimes seemed to be sleepwalking as he led his company on parade, Gallagher was all feist and snap, with a little man’s high-pitched tenor that keened jokes and good-natured barbs at anyone who got in his way. That
included Captain Antonovich and higher ranks as well, without too much discrimination or intimidation on Gallagher’s part.

Gallagher was not shy. We liked it that he never hesitated, never dallied. You only had to come on him unexpectedly out in the field where he would be squatting over a slit trench, pants down around his ankles, his buttocks the size of tennis balls, it seemed, while the turds dropped out of him without apparent preparation or struggle. No, there was no shyness there. In that primitive position, unfazed and unself-conscious, he was like a perfect miniature B-26 calmly releasing its bombs through an open bay onto the earth below, and we marked him as an ace for it.

Wisely enough, Gallagher and Antonovich kept their distance from each other. We rarely saw them together. It was as though they had decided that ordinary social contact would produce an irreparable, head-on collision. (Sooner or later, differences in temperament and sensibility would effectively do the job.) When all else failed, as it often did in the Army, Antonovich tended to fall back on hysteria, like so many oversized men. While Antonovich screamed and his right eye wandered, Gallagher, in the same situation, merely grew shrill. I found the contrast between the two officers interesting. It quickly began to assume aspects of an athletic contest, and I soon was taking sides in any conflict that involved the two of them, rooting my favorite on as the game proceeded, for it was still a game at that point, before we landed in France. At the time I write of, Captain Antonovich and Lieutenant Gallagher could still occasionally joke with each other in front of us, however they might really feel. On the other
hand, I don’t know what passed between them when C Company was not around to observe the action. Presumably plenty.

Between Antonovich and Gallagher stood the bandylegged figure of Rene Archambault, the company’s master sergeant. Archambault, who was from Presque Isle, Maine, and claimed partial Indian ancestry, was one of those men who are always dissatisfied with the world: a chronic complainer. He was also one of those who insist on trying to fix it: a chronic meddler. Maybe that’s the nature of master sergeants, for whom everything exists to be corrected. For example, he was not happy with the name Rene. It was too sissy for him; and sissy marked the depths of contempt in Rene Archambault’s Army, as everywhere else. How well the smart ASTP kids knew it, and how often our master sergeant liked to remind us of it. I think he probably also disliked his family name, which he pronounced as they would in France: “Arr-chahm-bow.” Spoken with the merest suggestion of self-mockery, as though he expected us to laugh at it. He wanted everyone to call him Arch, insisting on it, in fact, in what we all perceived as an attempt at false intimacy. We were uncomfortable with that, always.

Arch was a steady, compulsive worker—also part of the nature of master sergeants—issuing orders in a surprisingly reedy voice that was not unlike Lieutenant Gallagher’s, scurrying around on his bandy legs, glaring at us over his scimitar nose, which in profile made a perfect half-moon arc. Such perfection in noses is not given to most men. Perhaps it was part of his Penobscot heritage.

I think of poor self-conscious Arch, going through life having to pronounce his name slowly, syllable by syllable, then spell it out for everyone he was meeting for the first
time: the tedium of it, the resentment. I could sympathize with that. I had been spelling my name for strangers for years. I even had to do it for Rene Archambault, twice.

We all belonged to the three of them, Antonovich, Gallagher, and Archambault, and on their own terms. Company C and the third platoon was their common property. For better or worse. To make or break. Life and death, in fact. And few questions, of any kind, were ever allowed us, even by Francis Gallagher. As Rene Archambault used to say, standing over us with his hands on his hips, as though his words would explain everything, “There’s a war to be won out there, you dumb fucks.” Spoken with a cheerless smile, too.

Such were our leaders.

AND the first squad and its leader?

I find that I have to struggle to get the names right after all these years. I have to reach deep down for them, digging into the marshy pit of memory. When the names surface, if they surface at all, they must then be tested against the accumulation of a half-century of other names, and I don’t feel especially confident about the process.

Doug Kelleher, then (ASTP), Bern Keaton (also ASTP), and the others, Roger Johnson, Paul Willis, Barney Barnato, and Rocky Hubbell (actually and unforgettably, J. Rutherford Hubbell, Jr.), who was our squad leader.

No one in the first squad ever called Rocky Hubbell “Rutherford.” There were too many comic overtones to the name, too many possible easy shots. He himself tended to joke about it. “I’m saving Rutherford for my old age,” Rocky used to say. “Like capital,” he would add, raising a laugh.

But all those names covered a nice range, Kelleher, Keaton, Kotlowitz, Willis, Barnato, and the others, somehow wholly appropriate for an army of draftees. If I have them right, that is. If I didn’t invent some of them in the passion to remember. Also, I’ve discovered that I get a little heated when I write the names out like this. A small tremor of nervous agitation seems to go through me, and I shiver a little.

AS SOON as we arrived in the hills of Tennessee from the University of Maine, Rene Archambault co-opted us. That was his right as master sergeant of C Company but not necessarily his duty. (Master sergeants can do anything they want.) What Arch did was to make Doug Kelleher, Bern Keaton, and me the squad’s BAR team, the three-man Browning Automatic Rifle unit. This happened almost as soon as we detrained, just minutes after we had been assigned to the third platoon; and it did not thrill us.

To begin with, the life expectancy of the BAR team in combat, we had learned at Fort Benning, was about eleven seconds. (That is not hyperbole, it is scientific fact.) Then the BAR itself was an unusually clumsy weapon, which everyone rightly tried to avoid, halfway between a machine gun and a rifle, a deadweight all the way. Among the three of us, we would be carrying one BAR, two M-1 rifles, ammo for all three, and a cluster of hand grenades. That was Arch’s welcoming gift to us. Doug was made team leader, Bern and I were the assistants; on marches we would share the weapon, rotating it among us every couple of miles.

No, we were not thrilled.

Then, as soon as Arch finished with us, he swept through the rest of the company, repeating the first squad’s shuffle, getting the old National Guardsmen and aging draftees off the hook, freeing them of the terrible burden of the Browning Automatic Rifle. (He had made Roger Johnson and Paul Willis, who were a two-man BAR team before we got there, happy GIs with a single order.) It was a pretty slick operation. Eventually most of the BARs in the Yankee Division ended up in the hands of the smart new arrivals from ASTP.

It was easy to read the future in that. We would be the division’s stooges, heirs to every unwanted job, the BAR to begin with, and KP, guard, and latrine duty as well. It would be a kind of stupid hazing with no recourse, and we would be its victims. Of course, we had to accept it, cursing among ourselves like big shots, and sounding like children.

But part of me, at eighteen, was eager to suffer the hazards and humiliations of war. In fact, I thought I had it coming to me. I was burning with a young man’s need to please and with a secret touch of patriotic fervor, two strong motives for performing without complaint. Also, as I’ve said, I really hated the Germans. It was a deeply personal loathing, not abstract at all, with powerful political impulses that had been inflamed by reports of concentration camps,
Kristallnacht
, and venomous anti-Semitism. And I was a Jew. In terms of motive, that went a long way in those days.

FOR THE moment, after arriving in Tennessee, we were all despondent. We had been wrenched out of a safe environment at the University of Maine. Our names had been
neatly arranged in alphabetical order and divvied up among various battalions, thrusting Kelleher, Keaton, and Kotlowitz together for the first time, although we had known each other on the Orono campus by sight. My real pals from basic training and Maine, my old buddies, were also being clustered in alphabetical niches, “A”s with “A”s, “B”s with “B”s, and so on to the very last Zed.

I soon learned that Kelleher was an Army brat, son of a career officer, a colonel sitting out the war behind a desk at Fort Dix, New Jersey, while Keaton was a parochial-school kid from Hackensack, New Jersey, who was suffering his first religious doubts, mostly in silence. I wasn’t much interested in Kelleher and Keaton, and they weren’t much interested in me—not at first. I wanted my old Orono buddies back, those who understood me and loved me without question, and they were gone now to other squads in other platoons, scattered by the necessities of the alphabet.