To the End of the War (22 page)

“The captain is mistaken, Sir,” he said, not dropping the formal third person, “if he thinks I am dissatisfied with my present job. I’m quite content where I am—until my transfer goes through. I have no desire to remain in the captain’s organization.”

The captain’s face became more pinched, until it was almost prissy. His eyes squinted narrowly. “Very well, Carter,” he said. “This war is going to last a long time, and you might as well reconcile yourself to it. You may go.” It was apparent that the captain was pleased with his own generous humanitarianism. As he left, Johnny wondered if the captain could actually believe those things he obviously felt about himself. He couldn’t really believe them, and yet he apparently did. It was obvious that the captain would not be too displeased if “this war lasted a long time.” Being an officer in the army seemed to have the strangest effect on most men! If the people of the country could only understand the way their army worked.

A week later, Johnny was transferred from the 26th Division to the quartermaster, along with about a third of the captain’s company. They were assigned to a newly activated Gasoline Supply Company which had only a cadre of seven men from which to build itself.

A month after his transfer, he was made a buck sergeant.

At about the same time, the captain got his majority as a reward for his efficiency, sincerity, and success as an officer in the AUS and immediately began bucking for his lieutenant colonelcy.

Jones, assigned to the 842nd Quartermaster Gas and Supply Company, was promoted to sergeant on March 1, 1944, but he was, as Frank MacShane wrote in
Into Eternity
, soon distressed that a Jewish officer he admired was forced out. Earlier, in Hawaii, Jones had been helped by Captain William Blatt, another Jewish officer. Blatt knew about Jones’s interest in writing and encouraged him. Blatt was admired by his men on Guadalcanal because he ignored orders he knew would result in many deaths. Instead, he chose an alternate plan that achieved the desired result but with fewer deaths and injuries. Because of his disobeying an order, Blatt was relieved of his command.

Jones was not afraid to expose anti-Semitism in the army.

CAMP CAMPBELL, EARLY WINTER, 1943–1944

T
HE NEW OUTFIT TO WHICH
Johnny Carter had been transferred was suffering its birthpangs. It was in a state of metamorphosis, from idea to reality, and was encountering all those problems which are never provided for. Compared to the much older though inefficient 26th Division it seemed to be fluctuating wildly, grasping at straws.

With the exception of the original seven-man cadre, the new company was composed completely of men who had been officially marked unfit for the rigors of Infantry duty. Over fifty percent of them were men who had seen overseas service—overseas
combat
service—that designation is important, particularly to a man who wears the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, because the greatest percentage of men who go overseas never are in combat. These men, like Johnny, had been shipped back because of disabling wounds, or evacuated because of severe cases of malaria or dengue fever or jungle rot or trench foot or yellow jaundice—for any one, or several, of the fifty or sixty diseases combat soldiers are subject to and have to suffer in addition to danger.

The other fifty percent of the company were men who had not been overseas at all. Most of them had been in the 26th Division for three years, going from one maneuver area to another. They were also classed as physically unfit for Infantry duty. A great many of them were, because of illnesses or wounds contracted on maneuvers. Some of them weren’t.

The most disabling thing about all of them, including the combat men, was their morale. It had been knocked, cut, cursed, blown, and beaten out of them.

A man in the Infantry, to get himself classified as physically unfit for the Infantry—even if he is—must raise more hell and create a bigger stink than any congressman who tries to get his favorite pet bill passed. To raise that much hell, a soldier must have reached the saturation point of disgust, to where he doesn’t give a good goddam about his officers’ opinion of him, his comrades’ opinion, or anybody else’s opinion of him. And most men care more for other men’s opinions of them than they care for their own, or would like to admit. The men in this company were a great contrast to the short-haired young kids who comprised the greatest part of the privates in the 26th Division.

Whether this emphasis on other people’s opinions is deliberately created to test the sincerity of a man’s disability is hard to tell. It may be that it is a natural outgrowth of certain social mores like
patriotism
or
self-sacrifice
or
heroism
or a continuation of the schoolroom authority. And it may not. In his
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
Gibbon says: “. . . and it was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline that a good soldier should dread his officers far more than the enemy.” Whether or no, it exists and every soldier must surmount it first before he can even think of getting himself out of the Infantry. He has to fight shavetail college-boy doctors at dispensaries, has to fight company commanders, battalion commanders, regimental burgeons, clinical psychiatrists, and as likely as not, face a court martial. So the men in Johnny’s new company were a wild and wooly bunch.

The first thing this new company did as soon as it had its men assigned to their barracks was to proceed to give them a Basic Training course, which consists of hikes, forced marches, creeping and crawling, extended order drill—in short, all of the things that are taught to a raw recruit the minute he’s inducted. And which he must forget as soon as he gets into combat. This to a group of men none of whom had been in the army less than two years, and a great many of whom had seen as much as nine months’ continuous combat duty.

The first thing Private Johnny Carter did when he was assigned to his new barracks and heard this news was to offer his services as an experienced clerk in the Orderly Room! They were accepted.

A Quartermaster Gasoline Supply Company is a separate company. It is connected with no battalion or regiment or division, except the one to which it ministers gasoline at the moment. The men in this new organization were there because of physical disabilities. They soon learned that their new job consisted mainly of loading and unloading “bays” of five-gallon cans in and out the back ends of trucks that reached to their chests. A “bay” consists of 125 five-gallon GI cans. Rectangular ones with three parallel handles across the top, the same type can the Infantry carries water in. And the company had something like twenty-five or thirty bays. Hoisting these cans in and out of trucks four or five times a day is a man-sized job, even for a soldier who is physically fit for Infantry duty. One man in the company was unable to wear a helmet because of a wound scar in his head from a shell fragment encountered in the second battle of Kasserine Pass. He was apt to pass out from extreme physical exertion and fainted four times in two weeks. He was refused a transfer by the medical officers. Another man had had half of his calf muscle torn out by a shell fragment. He, too, could not get a transfer. Several men were constantly dosing themselves with atabrine begged from the dispensary. The wild and woolly bunch became wilder and more woolly.

The cadre, consisting of acting first sergeant, mess sergeant, supply sergeant, two section sergeants, one cook, and a clerk, were supposed to be trained for the job they undertook. It developed more and more obviously that none of them but the cook and mess sergeant knew what they were doing. After two weeks, the acting first sergeant quit and went back to the ranks, and a big burly red-headed staff sergeant who had come down from the 26th Division was appointed to take his place. The acting clerk became Johnny’s assistant, and Johnny was instructed to teach him how to make out a Morning Report, Sick Report, and most important of all, the Payroll.

The ratings were completely tangled up. All the men who had come from the Infantry had been transferred In Grade, so that there were at least three rating for every job, almost as many non-coms as there were privates. The total number of ratings was fifty percent higher than that allowed by the company’s Table of Organization.

The company commander who stepped in to take over this mess was a first lieutenant, a young Jew, tall, stoop-shouldered, sad-eyed, and self-conscious. He brought with him another first lieutenant, a fiery Scotsman. Both men had been commanding Negro companies—what is known as a crummy detail at every white officer’s club. Both men worked themselves half to death, spending all day with the company, and half the night in the Orderly Room trying to straighten out the newborn records and reports. Johnny usually stayed with them and more and more assumed responsibility for the clerical work. His previous experience and natural quickness of thought were invaluable. The new acting first sergeant knew nothing about the job except how to handle men, which was no mean job in itself in this company, and frankly admitted his ignorance. Johnny spent a couple of hours a day teaching Red the first sergeant’s clerical duties. The company copy of Army Regulations became so dog-eared and thumbed that a new one had to be requisitioned and the old one salvaged.

From the moment he first stepped into the Orderly Room, Johnny worked savagely. He worked with a fanatical drive that carried the others along on his wave of energy. His mind was like a water-starved sailor, soaking up every drop of intense thought it could find. He worked constantly and gloried in it and in the release from himself that it brought. He forgot the existence of Johnny Carter. He cursed and threatened and raved at the old cadre clerk and the new assistant imported to help out. His intensity made them efficient at the things they hardly knew, in spite of themselves. His mind had been atrophied by looking at latrine walls, and it burst out now like a brilliant explosion which startled even him. He spent one whole day, worked clear through the night, and the next day till three p.m. making out the first Payroll and got it through the Finance Inspectors. It was the first Payroll he had ever made out in his life. He didn’t even take the rest of the day off.

The new company began to grow and take form as an embryo grows and takes form in its mother. But in this case the mothers hated the offspring. The men hated the company, the administrative staff hated the company, even the Jewish company commander and the Scotsman hated the company. Johnny hated it completely, but he nurtured its files like a midwife, worked like a maniac—as they all worked who actually had any work to do. The two platoons of men, sections as they were called here, hated it the worst, because they did not have the sanctification of unending work. Everybody hated the company, but it imperceptibly became the Company, instead of just the company. It became their pride, their place, their home—as near as soldiers can be said to have a home.

To the surprise of all the men who had known him in the 26th Division as a malcontent, Johnny became a sort of sparkplug, a dynamo of energy that you could attach your own plug-in to. His drive for speed and more work carried over even to his meals, so that he gulped his food down almost without chewing, even when he had no work in particular to do after the meal was finished. It was mostly for this drive that he got his sergeant’s rating, when the TO called only for a corporalcy for the company clerk. He immersed himself in the life and work of this company until he had forgotten the existence of any world outside.

This attitude was apparent in his letters. Sandy was puzzled by the change in them. They were more infrequent. They seemed very preoccupied. His typing fingers seemed not able to keep up with his racing mind that flew from one furious thought to another with such speed and cramming that the letters were hard to follow. He told her his new address and that he had a new job, but he didn’t have time to explain it in detail. His letters pounded the theme of work; work, work, work; a man’s life must be dedicated to work. Sandy was puzzled by the letters, but also less worried. He seemed to have made a contact with something. As the company began to take shape out of chaos, a new property began to show itself. The rating situation had finally been straightened out, not without great upset. Big Red ceased to be “acting” and became actual first sergeant, and acquired that subtle touch of authority that is so lacking in an acting non-com. A number of men had to be busted to get the TO back to normal. This caused a big stink, and the blame was placed by the men upon the company commander. The usual procedure is to absorb ratings—that is, if a man is broken because of inefficiency or insubordination, a new rating is not made, and the old extra one is absorbed. But Harry Weidmann, the Jewish first lieutenant, received explicit orders from higher up to get his ratings down, as soon as possible even if it meant breaking men who had done nothing wrong. This was where the new weight first began to make itself felt.

The effect on the company morale was bad and immediate. Several of the busted non-coms went over the hill for a week’s vacation. At night Johnny sitting in the Orderly Room working, with Weidmann across the room working, could hear some of the boys coming back from the PX 3.2 beer garden, drunk, and singing in close four-part harmony: “Oh, I’m just wild about Harry, and Harry’s wild about me!” and “My vild Irish R-r-rose, dah sveet-iest flour det grows.” Sometimes they even sang it: “My vild Jewish Rose.” Weidmann would look up and grin a tight painful grin and murmur something about thank God men have a sense of humor for a safety valve.

The company was under administration of the local Second Army headquarters, whose main headquarters was in Memphis. The Second Army headquarters in the camp controlled all the auxiliary troops, quartermaster and separate companies, under a “Provisional Headquarters.” Johnny, being in the office, was able to see and hear all this new force that was being directed at the company. Weidmann was given orders that he could issue no three-day passes. Other companies around them were giving them out. As a result, more men went over the hill and took their three-day passes. Weidmann was called up on the carpet because he couldn’t handle his men.