To the End of the War (21 page)

And also stories about him got around in the company. One night during the week he remained a corporal, there was a non-com’s meeting in the company dayroom, a long low building, the other half of which held the orderly room and supply room. The dayroom contained a ping-pong table with a broken leg and a badly warped surface, a magazine rack without magazines, a number of straight-backed wooden chairs, and a Coca-Cola machine. The captain gave a lecture on gas and the use of gas masks from behind his gold spectacles. After the lecture was over and the non-coms had stopped fidgeting, the captain said; “Corporal Carter, perhaps you’d like to tell us what provisions were made concerning gas masks and gas in your company while it was in combat.”

“We didn’t use them, Sir,” Johnny said. “When my outfit went up to the line the first time, everybody threw their gas masks in the bushes.” This was the literal truth.

A couple of the non-coms sniggered, and the captain’s eyes narrowed behind his gold spectacles, his pinched face became more so. “Weren’t you ever worried about being gassed? Wasn’t your company commander somewhat anxious about what might happen if his company were in a gas attack?”

“It’s not as simple as that, Sir,” Johnny said. “None of us were worried about gas masks. We had too many other things to be worried about. Besides that, the Japs had discarded their own gas masks, too.”

“That seems very inefficient to me. But I suppose that is the way the Regular Army works.”

Johnny returned the captain’s pinch-faced stare without looking away, something not considered a wise action in the association between enlisted men and officers. “Combat is always inefficient, Sir,” he said. It was evident the captain did not believe this. “There are too many elements which are not taken into account. In fact, all possibilities can never be taken into account. The same thing never happens twice in the same way. From my own experience, I’d say that a man has to unlearn everything he’s been taught from the Soldier’s Handbook and begin all over again as soon as he gets under fire. Then he begins to pick up little tricks of the trade that keep him from getting killed, for my part, I don’t believe combat will ever reach the point where it can be efficiently mass-controlled.”

The captain blinked behind his gold spectacles at this. “Well,” he said. “We didn’t know as much detail about modern combat when your outfit went in as we do now. But there are men who have devoted their whole lives to the study of combat. We have found that the best way to prevent casualties and defeats is to follow a prearranged set pattern of action in which each man does his particular job obediently, synchronizing the whole into a welded action.”

Johnny said nothing to this, realizing that especially in the army is discretion the better part of valor. But he immediately thought of his old CC, Captain Rosen, who had refused via sound power phone an order from the battalion commander, who was eight hundred yards to the rear and out of danger; the battalion commander ordered Captain Rosen to proceed with a frontal attack as planned. Captain Rosen informed the colonel he had lived with the men in his company for a year and that the colonel could kindly kiss his ass. By this action Captain Rosen saved his company from annihilation, made a flanking attack and captured the objective, and was at once relieved of his command and sent back to the States in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, for which transfer he was duly grateful, even though it was considered a disgrace in the army.

The story of Johnny’s tilt with the gold-spectacled captain made a very good joke on the captain, who was not liked by the men in his company. The non-coms spread it around, and while they enjoyed the story, they looked upon Johnny as a damned fool for deliberately antagonizing the CC. No man who argued with his CC could be classed as intelligent.

The barracks were very lonely when everyone was gone. Johnny bought several pocketbooks at the PX, but those books had to be hidden away during the mornings when the battalion adjutant inspected the barracks. They could not be kept under the pillow, and they could not be kept in the wooden footlocker, for the adjutant was also a disciplinarian and inspected the footlockers of all the men who were not out in the field with the company. Johnny found a library in the main Service Club, but this library was ordered to be closed until after Retreat which was at five-thirty.

The barracks were lonely even when the company was in. Johnny was a stranger in a new outfit, an outfit in which there were no old friends, no men who saw things as he saw them, no men with common experiences to be remembered and talked about. Johnny spent a good bit of time writing poetry, most of which he tore up and threw away. His new attitude of mind acquired in Endymion was not conducive to the writing of poetry, which never explained enough, and he found he had no aptitude for writing it anymore. He was concerned with more prosaic things. After the comparative freedom of expression in a combat outfit and in a hospital, the severe regimentation of this outfit was hard to take. If he had had a job, he might not have been so depressed and dissatisfied.

As soon as his bust orders came through, the job part was taken care of. As a private, he was made permanent latrine orderly. The captain called him in and informed him of his reduced status. As is customary, he was offered a chance to appeal this decision to a court-martial if he was dissatisfied with it. While political pull in the army, just as in civilian life, is never acknowledged openly, there is no man but what knows of its existence and governs his actions accordingly. The captain’s friend, the colonel, would sit as president of the court-martial if Johnny requested one; it would be asinine to imagine he might get an honest judgment from such a court, even if the reduction in rank was unjust—which it was not. He was not dissatisfied with the judgment, which he considered abnormally light; he was dissatisfied with the outfit, with his place in it, and with the army in general. He made no appeal, and the captain informed him of his new job.

Being a latrine orderly is usually acknowledged as being a particularly odious task. Usually, it is worked on the duty roster so that the job rotates daily among the privates, a portion of whose lot in life it is to do such jobs when their turn comes. One of the inducements offered toward becoming a non-com is that a man no longer has to pull such details. It is a policy that a non-com is used more for his brain than for his back. While it is not physically one of the hardest jobs in the world, being a latrine orderly is not as easy as generally supposed. When a company comes in from the field and mobs a latrine, of which there are two for something like one hundred and fifty men, they leave it in a poor condition. Sergeant George Baker has aptly handled this situation in one of his
Sad Sack
cartoons. It’s not an easy job to clean it next morning after they’ve used it again so that it is fit to pass the daily inspection.

Johnny Carter, being physically disabled, was a fit person to fill this most disliked of jobs. He was not able to go out in the field, and his disability did not keep him from being useful here. Of course, he could have been a cook’s helper, or a permanent KP, or an additional clerk, or an aid in the supply room—all of which jobs, like clerking and supply, he had had previous experience in, as his records testified.

Being a malefactor and in no position to gripe, Johnny forced himself to do the job, and which is much harder, forced himself to say nothing about it. The gold-spectacled captain had every ground for being in the right: Johnny had been over the hill, had been busted, had been ostensibly insolent, was not fit for field duty. But to Johnny—especially knowing the army as he did—the captain’s attitude was just a shade too personal and too righteous. Johnny was in a position where he could do nothing or say nothing, could not protest or fight back. His only alternative was to get himself into a worse situation. Only a man who has been in such a position can appreciate or understand what a man goes through in that kind of setup. It’s a kind of setup very common in the army. Johnny thought that it must be the way many criminals must feel in prison under the personal jurisdiction of a guard, and he did not wonder that now and then a criminal goes berserk and becomes a Public Enemy of a society which fosters such things. Of such a nature was the legend proudly displayed by guards armed with pick handles in the Post Stockade of Schofield Barracks: They pridefully informed prisoners that John Dillinger served six months in the Schofield Barracks Post Stockade, and forever after swore that if it took the rest of his life, he intended to get even with the United States.

To Johnny his job was an indignity. He saw it as a deliberate attempt on the part of the captain to humiliate him or to break him to heel. He could not walk out as he had done with Erskine, he could only force himself to act like he liked it and thus dull the captain’s pleasure a small bit. For him, with his experience and his intelligence, it was the worst kind of slap in the face a man could give him. He had to keep forcing himself to turn the other cheek. When the captain made his own personal inspection, as he often did before the battalion adjutant came around, his praise of Johnny’s “work” and his impersonality were much too studied and much to obvious to be believed. Johnny would look up unexpectedly and catch his eyes now and then and detect the faintest kind of a twinkle of relish behind the gold spectacles.

In the midst of all this, Johnny received regular letters from Sandy Marion and from Eddie. These were like messages from another world, a world in which he was able to think rationally and clearly, a world in which there was good food and good liquor, a world in which he was able to read and to draw conclusions and to think out things that were too general and too far removed from his present position for him to even attempt. It was as if intelligences and processes of thoughts and ideas had dropped out of his mind as that world had dropped from around his body. There seemed to be nothing compatible between the two worlds, although he saw posters in the latrine every day that stated openly and honestly that this war was being fought for the existence of such a world for all men, not just a few. This seemed to be a vast incongruity, but his brain was not in the proper condition to dwell upon it and find the fallacy—if there was one. The world of thought and conversation faded more and more from his mind between letters, and with it faded his capacity and desire for the kind of thinking that generated such conversation. His face became more bony, his cheekbones more gaunt, his lips thinner, his eyes more burning. When he answered those letters, he did not mention what was going on with him.

After he had been on the latrine orderly job three weeks, the captain called him in. He walked into the office, saluted, and stood at a rigid attention. The captain began to talk without giving him the customary command of “at ease.”

“You will be transferred out of this company as unfit for combat infantry duty, Carter,” the captain said. “The papers are going through, but they are taking quite a while. We’re getting ready to shove off, and there will be an exodus of such transfers, all taking place at the same time. What kind of outfit you’ll go to, I don’t know. It will probably be some kind of QM outfit.”

“Would the captain mind giving me at ease. Sir?” Johnny asked, using the correct third-person address to a superior.

The captain was momentarily confused. “Yes,” he said, waving his hand. “At ease.” Johnny moved his left foot twelve inches, crossed his palms behind his back and slumped. The captain’s eyes narrowed behind his gold spectacles and his pinched face seemed to grow tighter. The first sergeant and the clerk were listening to all this in the outside room, the captain having neglected to have the door shut.

He looked up at Johnny from behind his desk. “I realize that your disability is the result of a wound and that you are not to blame for it. Also that you are not malingering. At the same time, there are a lot of jobs in my company that you could do, even overseas, if you wished to stay in it.” He raised his hand when Johnny started to speak.

“Wait just a minute. You’ve been a corporal and have enjoyed the privileges of a non-com. But you’ve forfeited all that by going AWOL. You’re starting back at the bottom. I’ve looked at your Service Record and your 201 file, and I know that you’ve had a lot of various useful experiences—you had a platoon once, didn’t you?”

“For two weeks, Sir. Temporarily, in combat.”

“Yes,” said the captain. “I know all those things.” He permitted himself a slight smile, which however was lost on Johnny who stared straight ahead at the wall over the captain’s head. “I also know that your AGOT score was extremely high. What I want to point out is that all these things are commendable, but they do not give you the right to set yourself outside the pale. You are just as subject to discipline as anybody else. I play no favorites in my company; you can ask the men.” Johnny had already talked to most of them on this subject, but he did not attempt to refute the captain’s statement. “And neither do I pick on anybody.

“You’re at the bottom again, and you might as well become used to it. As I said, there are lots of jobs that you could do in my company that would not be hindered by your disability. How would you like to be a clerk in my company? It would be better than the job you have now. But you would have to start at the bottom and work up. There are things that could be done in this office on your time off from your other duty, for instance, this stove needs to be cleaned. My clerks aren’t as efficient as I’d like them to be. This office hasn’t been cleaned properly for some time. If you went to start in that way, and show me you’ve got the stuff, fine. You’ll have to prove it to me, though. But if, in time, I see that you are conscientious and mean to work hard, I’ll treat you accordingly.” The captain smiled up at Johnny magnanimously, but the look in his eyes did not seem to go with his smile. Johnny thought suddenly of the ancient saying: “What you are speaks so loudly, I cannot hear what you say.” He was momentarily shocked at the audacity of this man who could so magnanimously offer him the honor of cleaning his stove—on his time off, in addition to his other duties.