To the End of the War (4 page)

“The son of a bitch,” repeated Gettinger. “He looked at my heel once and poked his finger into it until I hollered. Then he laughed and told me to quit acting, because it wouldn’t do me any good: I couldn’t get out.”

“Sure,” said Wilkinsson. He held up his right hand. The second finger was completely gone and the first joint of the third finger was missing. His index finger was completely stiff. “The lousy bastard. He told me I was better off than I was before I got hit. He said my fingers only got in my road anyway.” The upper half of Wilkinsson’s right ear was missing also.

“You know what I told him?” said Gettinger. “I asked him if he was a doctor in civilian life or if he learned to butcher in the army.” Gettinger laughed harshly. “It made him mad; he said sure he was a doctor in civilian life. So I said: ‘How did you manage to make a living? You’re lucky the war came along.’ He got madder’n hell and wrote me down to go back to duty, right then and there.” Gettinger was becoming angry. “What right has a son of a bitch like that got to be where he is? What does he know about the goddamned war?”

“Take it easy, Red,” said Wilkinsson with a sour grin.

“Look,” said Gettinger angrily. He unlaced his right shoe and pulled off his sock. The heel of his naked foot was red and angry-looking. The flesh was twisted and raw with scar tissue. There was a hole in his heel that he could have stuck his little finger into. “I’ll be a hell of a lot of good in the Infantry, won’t I? Walking my fifteen to twenty-five miles per day? Balls,” he said as he put his shoe and sock back on.

Wilkinsson laughed, “We all will,” he said. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked Johnny.

“I got a piece of mortar shrapnel in my left ankle,” he said. “Right in the joint.” These two men were strengthening his own opinion. They all had a raw deal in being sent back to the Infantry, let alone the possibility of going overseas again.

“Jap?”

“Yeah.”

Wilkinsson gestured at his ear with his crippled hand. “That’s what got me. And I got my right leg full of the same stuff,” he said. “Where were you?”

“Guadalcanal,” Johnny said.

“I was in Attu,” said Wilkinsson.

They began to talk of their outfits: Wilkinson was in the 7th Division: The 7th had gone straight from desert training to the sub-zero beaches of Attu. With improper clothing and thinned blood they had made their initial landings through the icy surf and had crossed the frozen mountains in leather boots.

“There’s two wards full of men in this hospital,” said Wilkinsson, “who lost either one or both feet from having them frozen. And not another scratch on them.” He spat angrily into the red dust.

Gettinger had been with the 32nd Division in New Guinea, the old Red Arrow, Hindenburg Line Division, made famous in the last war. A Jap .25 rifle bullet had torn off the butt of his right heel.

The chief clerk stuck his head out of the window. “All right, you two men,” he said. “Get that equipment loaded in the back of the truck.” Wilkinsson and Gettinger rose reluctantly. “Come on. Come on,” said the chief clerk. “Move. A soldier’s no good, without his equipment. You’re supposed to be pulling out of here,” he added with loud sarcasm.

“What does that bastard know about soldiers?” said Wilkinsson. “Does he think we’re going off and leave it? What difference does it make whether we put it in now or later?”

Nobody answered.

They sat back down in the shade after throwing the bags into the truck. Johnny was thoughtfully cleaning his fingernails with a file he had taken from a small kit he carried in his pocket.

“Ah, this frigging hole,” said Gettinger. “I’m glad to get out of it. Even if it does mean going back to duty.” He looked off across the dusty red quadrangle of raw new brick that glared dryly in the bright sunlight,

“But I’ll sure hate to leave Memphis,” he added with a grin.

“Not me,” said Wilkinsson. “I been in this hospital eight, nine months and I’ve been out of it five times: once on pass, and four times over the hill. I’ve spent the last two months in a lookup ward; Memphis don’t mean nothing to me.”

The three men looked strangely identical sitting on the porch edge: each with the summer uniform, each with the same five ribbons pinned in the same place: over the left pocket. All three wore the Purple Heart ribbon, although Johnny’s had an Oak Leaf Cluster in the center of it. Each wore the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign ribbon with Bronze Stars, Johnny noticed that Wilkinsson wore an extra ribbon in addition to the five, one that he and Gettinger did not have. At first he could not place it, and then he recognized it for the Distinguished Service Cross. Blue with wide red stripes at the ends and thin white stripes between the red ones and the blue field.

“This is the first time I’ve been outside a building in two months,” commented Wilkinsson. “But it ain’t unusual: I been treated like a convict ever since I got here. When I put in for furlough, they wouldn’t let me have it because I wasn’t ‘well enough.’ And all the time the ward officer had me pulling fatigue details in the ward: sweeping up and mapping and cleaning the latrine. You’re well enough to do that, but not to have a furlough.”

He looked at Johnny and grinned malevolently. “So I took my own furlough,” he said.

When they had waited forty-five minutes on the driver of the truck, the first lieutenant stuck his head out of the window. “What are you men sitting there for? Don’t you know you’re moving out? Set up off of there and get into that goddamned truck. The three of them rose. “Corporal,” called the lieutenant from the window. “Come over here.” Johnny walked over to the window and saluted and stood at attention. “Watch those two men, Corporal,” said the lieutenant in a loud voice. “They’ll try to take off on you. I don’t want to hear of you reporting in to Campbell without them.”

Johnny made a salute to the lieutenant, said “Yessir,” to the warning, and walked back to the truck. “Okay,” he said, “Let’s climb in.” Wilkinsson and Gettinger stared at him with narrowed eyes. As they climbed into the back of the truck and sat on their barracks bags, it was evident they had completely withdrawn from Johnny and shut him off. Johnny, as the non-com in charge, climbed into the cab. In the sun it was hot, and they sat irritably, sweating and waiting for the driver. It was another hour before he came strolling up.

He was wearing clean fatigues with big grease spots on the knees. He climbed into the truck, lit a cigaret, and stared boredly out across the dusty red quadrangle. “What a rotten hole,” he said to nobody in particular.

“Come on,” said Johnny irritably. “Let’s get the hell out of this.” He felt like ripping off his corporal’s stripes. Because he was a corporal, these hospital bastards seemed to think that qualified him as a prison-chaser to ride herd on a bunch of men like an MP.

“Take it easy, Cawpr’l,” drawled the driver sarcastically. “You’ll get back into combat soon enough.” But he started the motor and sent the truck lumbering out of the opening of the brick fortress toward town.

In the back end of the truck, Wilkinsson and Gettinger sat precariously on the barracks bags and bounced around heavily. The truckbed was filled with dust and particles of debris from a host of former rides. They sat in the hot sun and breathed the dust and cursed.

“That chickenshit corporal,” said Wilkinsson. “You might know they’d stick him on us.”

“Ah,” said Gettinger disgustedly. “What is it makes a man a ass-kissing son of a bitch as soon as he gets a couple of stripes. It’s a wonder they didn’t issue him sidearms.”

“Did you hear that lousy lieutenant?” growled Wilkinsson. “The goddamned Medical Administrative Corps. They learn military courtesy if they don’t learn anything else. Them boys sure do a whole lot for this war. Every squinch-eyed bastard looking for a soft deal puts in for the Medical Administrative OCS.”

Gettinger spat disgustedly at the omniscient dust. He was unable to think of an epithet strong enough.

They sat and jounced and coughed and tried to hatch up some plot by which they could get away from the corporal.

When the truck stopped in front of the railroad station, Johnny climbed out and got his bag out of the back. His officer’s topcoat which he had bought at the same time he bought the forbidden uniforms, he carried slung over his shoulder. As he pulled his bag off the truck, he became aware again of the estranged looks with which the two men watched him. He cursed the lieutenant silently: leaders, officers and gentlemen. They sure knew how, by instinct, to frig up everything they put their fingers on.

They all went into the station, the other two lugging their cumbersome barracks bags, and Johnny went to find out how soon their train left. The driver took the truck on out into the stream of traffic, mentally calculating if he had time to run up to North Memphis and show his truck to his latest broad, without getting picked up or having his ass eaten out when he got back. He decided it was worth a chance. She would think he was a big shot to be running around in a truck all by himself.

“Hey, you guys,” Johnny said, walking back to them from the information window. “Our train doesn’t leave for an hour yet.” He did not want to be at odds with these two; he was on the same side of the fence they were. He thought of himself as a soldier, not an MP.

“We might as well go uptown and get a couple of brews,” he told them. They eyed him suspiciously for a moment, as if he were trying to pull some kind of fast one on them. Their faces had the furtive sullen look soldiers always direct upon inimical authority against which they are powerless. If there had been an officer in charge of the party, Johnny knew he would have looked at the officer in the same way. These men saw him standing between them and freedom, frustrating their desire. He was now Authority, with a Capital A. It made a bad taste in his mouth.

The three of them checked their baggage and sauntered out of the cathedral-like gloom of the station into the bright sun, looking for a beer joint. Walking up the street, unconsciously in step, they made a queer picture: tall Wilkinsson and short Gettinger with Johnny in the middle, a stair-step effect, all dressed alike and with the same ribbons. Wilkinsson and Gettinger both limped in the right leg, and Johnny, limping in the left leg, made a sort of rhythmical counterpoint to their main tempo.

It was early morning and they had to try several beer joints and walk quite a few blocks before they found one that was open. The beer joints in Memphis were enjoying a boom from the army and navy nearby, and they could plutocratically afford to remain closed until eleven or noon. Finally they found a place open and went in and sat down at a table in the cool mustiness. They had no passes, but even the most belligerent MP could hardly run them in for coming downtown to get a beer while waiting on a train. He might order them out and make them go back to the station, but he couldn’t very well run them in.

Johnny ordered three beers and looked around the place. It was a typical dingy beer joint. There was no one there that early in the day except a couple of those whiskered old men one saw all through the South, loafing around and talking and doing little else. They sat at the very rear of the counter, drinking beer and talking to the barman.

While the barman was drawing the three beers, Wilkinsson tapped Johnny on the shoulder. “Don’t order me no beer,” he said sullenly. “I can’t pay for it.”

Johnny turned to look at Wilkinnson angrily. These guys were carrying a good thing too far.

“Neither one of us got any dough,” Gettinger said. “We’ve both been red-lined for three months, and we haven’t got paid a nickel.”

“Take it easy,” Johnny said, somewhat mollified. “I got plenty of dough. If I hadn’t intended to pay for the beer, I’d have asked you if you had dough. I’m paying for it; if you don’t want to drink it, I’ll drink it myself.”

Gettinger grinned. “Okay, Cawpr’l, okay.”

Wilkinsson relaxed a little. “Okay,” he said. “I just wanted to get it straight: I ain’t bumming no beer off nobody.” He implied not even a corporal, but he didn’t say it.

By the time the barmen brought the glasses, they had warmed up enough to accept the beer without comment, “To the end of the war,” Johnny said, and they clinked glasses and drank.

With the taste of the beer bitter in the back of his throat, Johnny watched Wilkinsson. To the end of the war. There was no end to the war. Worse than that, there was no beginning to the war. The war was not yet begun. Pearl Harbor was a song in the jukebox. People praised the Lord and passed the ammunition. But that was not a war. The Lord had nothing to do with ammunition or with the war. The German and the Jap were fighting a war, but the American—except for a few like Wilkinsson—only fought, fornicated, and fell back. They bought their monthly war bond, but still there was no war.

Wilkinsson was tall and very dark, but there was that sallow look about his face and long neck sticking up out of the cheap ill-fitting collar of his issue shirt that showed he had been sick a long time. His face was sharp and thin-looking, and there was a look of strong rancid bitterness about it. His mouth was twisted to one side and gave him a cynical sneer that never left his face. His eyes were dead, but occasionally a wide-eyed uncomprehending stare would come into them. At such times, the stare seemed startlingly out of place in so twisted and knowing a face.

Their antagonism toward Johnny was still strong, in an impersonal way, although the foray uptown after beer had assuaged them somewhat. Johnny knew that he had become, after the lieutenant’s warning, a symbol—as were the lieutenant and the chief clerk—of the wartime home front army. He recalled a lieutenant who had come into his old company as a replacement; this lieutenant had been a home front soldier. But after a few quiet artful warnings from the members of his platoon, the lieutenant had dropped his military courtesy and discipline routine and become a soldier and a leader and an enlisted man’s type of gentleman.

“. . . sure do; them squinch-eyed little bastards are plenty good,” Wilkinsson said. “They been training for this for a long time. They can drop a ninety-millimeter mortar shell on a dime. Our sixties and eighty-ones were so damned bad the only way we could put a Jap ninety out of action was to send a patrol to blow it up with grenades. Nobody knew anything but the riflemen, and all they knew was how to shoot. And every time we sent out a patrol like that, about half of them wouldn’t come back.”