Something about a soldie.., p.18
Something About a Soldier, page 18
Coslow told me that the best job in the Army was to be a straight-duty infantryman. All a man had to do was to keep his rifle and his nose clean, and he would be let alone. But that didn’t appeal to me. Coslow had loved being an anonymous infantry private, but because he got out of shape physically, and could no longer march twenty-five miles with a full pack, he had been forced to re-enlist in the Air Corps and take a desk job.
Henderson was planning to re-enlist in the infantry and go to Chilcoot Barracks, in Alaska. In Alaska infantryman were given ten-day hunting passes, and they could sell the valuable skins of the grizzly bears they shot with their Army rifles. During the summer months enlisted men were given time off to work as stevedores unloading ships and were paid union wages. During a two-year tour in Alaska, Henderson claimed, a man could make and save two or three thousand dollars.
“You’ll freeze your ass off up in Alaska,” I told him.
“So what? Think what you could do with two thousand bucks back in San Francisco.”
“Think of all the things you’ll have to do to make that two thousand. You’ll freeze all winter, and in the summer, working on the docks, monster mosquitoes will suck out your last drop of blood. Besides, you’ll still have to train as a rifleman, which means long hikes in freezing weather, and guard duty at night in snowstorms.”
“What do you know about it? You’ve never been to Alaska.”
“No, but I’ve read Jack London. Did you ever read The Call of the Wild., White Fang?”
“Those are kids’ books. All I read is Tiffany Thayer.”
“I’ve read him, too. The Old Goat, and Three Sheet. But he doesn’t write about Alaska. And that’s another thing, talking about Tiffany Thayer—except for Eskimos, who don’t take baths, you won’t get laid in Alaska either.”
“I don’t worry about gettin’ laid. If there’s an army barracks around, there’ll be women within spitting distance.”
Henderson was probably right about that.
I ALSO RENEWED MY ACQUAINTANCE WITH TULLIO MICALONI. He was no longer the same guy I had met on the boat coming over to P.I. He was still in good physical shape, except for a small beer belly, but his olive face was lined and drawn. His personality was subdued, and his sienna eyes had receded into his head. His skin was a couple of shades darker than I remembered, and he was no longer the cheerful person he had been two years earlier. His speech was slower, almost halting, and he rarely laughed.
What had happened to Tullio Micaloni was Fort Drum.
On the way over, Tullio had thought he was going to spend a couple of pleasant years at Corregidor slapping Cosmoline on the artillery pieces, but he had been sent to Fort Drum instead. The big artillery pieces on Corregidor could easily prevent any naval invasion of Manila, but there was one blind spot, a gap that couldn’t be covered by Corregidor’s guns. So the Army had built a small concrete platform in the bay, armed it with some large guns to cover the blind spot, and then put a small complement of artillerymen aboard the concrete fort. Fort Drum could only be reached by boat from Corregidor. Some weeks, when the tide was running high and hard, or there were rough seas, and they couldn’t send a small boat over to Fort Drum, supplies ran low. For recreation the men on the concrete platform had a sixteen-millimeter movie projector and two silent films. They alternated running these films every night. Tullio said that eventually every man knew what the actors and actresses were saying, and the dialogue bore no resemblance to the printed captions flashed between scenes.
The men Cosmolined the guns after breakfast, and then, at eleven a.m., a recorded bugle sounded “Beer Call.” Fort Drum was the only camp, post, or station in the Army that had an official Beer Call. The men drank beer until lunch, and then, after eating, they were through for the day. They could sleep or drink more beer. Sometimes, Tullio said, they would fish off the rail if the bay was calm. Few fish were caught, but it was something to do. So long as a man had to sit or stand around anyway, he might as well stand there with a fishing pole. But even when beer is only ten cents a bottle, twenty-one dollars a month won’t last a man till the next payday. There are too many other expenses—laundry, toilet articles, cigarettes, losses at blackjack and poker—and a man needed a few pesos to spend when he took a monthly weekend pass to Corregidor. Some men, Tullio said, flat broke from gambling losses, never left Fort Drum for the full two years. Tullio had only been to Manila once, although he went to Corregidor several times during his tour. During the rainy season, when it rained for eight or ten days in a row, life on Fort Drum became even more dismal. Tempers were short, and a good many fistfights broke out.
“I always looked forward to K.P.,” Tullio said. “It gave me something to do.”
I can’t say that Tullio was unhappy, I can only say that he was resigned to whatever it was that was going to happen to him. When a man is resigned, it is not the same as being indifferent. Indifference means that a man has a choice but doesn’t make it because he doesn’t care. But when a man is resigned, it means that he has given up on the idea of making choices. When I thought about what had happened to Tullio Micaloni at Fort Drum, it seemed to me that common sense should have given the commanding officer at Corregidor enough insight to rotate the men at Fort Drum every thirty days or so. Any man can stand a month on a concrete rock without too much trouble, but to be stationed out there for two full years could only be considered by the man who was sent there as some kind of dire punishment. And if he was being punished, what had he done? Not knowing, he would feel guilty for the rest of his life. I never discussed these ideas with Tullio, however. My tour had been so much better than his, there was no real comparison.
Tullio, as I mentioned earlier, was planning on re-enlisting, but his major concern was to get into almost any other branch of service except the coast artillery. His two years on Fort Drum had made him cautious, and he planned to wait until he got to Angel Island and see what the recruiters had to offer. Almost all the branches with vacancies sent recruiting sergeants to the island when a boat came in, because every outfit preferred a P.S. man to a recruit. Good deals were offered, like a ninety-day reenlistment furlough before reporting to duty, and sometimes they had an open T.O. slot and could offer a man a P.F.C. or corporal rating to fill the slot. The trouble with a ninety-day re-enlistment furlough was that all of your furlough time would be used up in advance and you would then have to go three years without any more leave.
Tullio asked me questions about the Air Corps, too, but he was discouraged by the things I told him.
“No,” he said with his sad smile. “I couldn’t hack that kind of life, Will. Every man, even a private, should have some kind of self-respect. And a man who washes airplane parts in gasoline all day can’t respect himself. I slugged my share of Cosmoline in the coast artillery, but all the same I was a gunner and I knew my job. If the time ever came to fire the damned piece I knew what to do and how to do it.”
“You don’t have to be a mechanic, Tullio. Parachute rigging, for example, isn’t a dirty job. All you do is take the ’chutes apart periodically, and then refold them after inspection.”
“Shit,” he said, “if I had to do that all day, I might as well get me a civilian job in a restaurant making sandwiches. No, Will, I’m a soldier, and I can’t see myself sewing canvas with a needle and thread and folding oversized handkerchiefs.”
As it turned out, these conversations were academic. When I reported to Machine Gun Troop and had my first meal in the mess hall, the guy sitting across from me was Tullio Micaloni. But we didn’t know, either one of us, that we were going to re-enlist in the cavalry. At the time, we didn’t know what we were going to do.
The majority of the men on the boat, at least those who were finishing their first enlistment, planned to get out and stay the hell out of the Army. All of us would have some money coming, thanks to the clothing allowance we hadn’t used, and a few guys had even managed to save five dollars a month by putting it in Soldier’s Deposits at four percent interest. I had never saved anything, but thanks to guarding my clothing allowance money, and with a month’s pay coming in, I knew I would have close to a hundred dollars. With that much money I wouldn’t have to re-enlist right away.
In the Philippines, when I had seen sailors in Manila pouring into the bars from their naval base at Cavite, all loaded down with cash they had saved at sea, I had considered re-enlisting in the Navy. It was a clean life, and sailors at sea ate five times a day instead of only three. But the thought of joining the Navy evaporated on the U.S. Grant.
The U.S. Grant was an army transport, not a naval vessel, but 120 sailors were in the ship going back with us to San Francisco. They had all completed thirty-month tours in the Asiatic Fleet. The Grant, in my opinion, was a horror ship. Anywhere below decks it was incredibly hot, with little or no ventilation, and there was a constant, nauseating reek of oil, paint, and vomit in the stale air below decks. Many guys who stood for two hours in the mess line, breathing that sickening oily air, couldn’t eat the food when they got it. Sometimes a seasick soldier would get his food, sit at a table, and then vomit into his tray. When a man did that, the table cleared in a hurry.
We had salt-water showers, and after a few of these, red splotches would break out on your skin. It was impossible to get any lather out of the so-called salt-water soap they issued for the showers. Bunks were tiered, four or five in a vertical ladder, and they were so close together you had to get all of the way out of your bunk in order to turn over. And your two barracks bags were crammed into the bunk with you. Instead of sleeping below, I slept on deck until after we left Honolulu and it got too chilly.
But the sailors, amazingly, thought the U.S. Grant was paradise. They were constantly exclaiming what a great ship it was, and how easy it was to do K.P. in the mess hall. The sailors carried everything they owned with them, including their hammocks, and they would put their hammocks up anywhere and catch a few hours’ sleep.
I talked to Henderson about these sailors. “If these sailors think the Grant is the best ship they’ve ever been in, can you imagine what it’s like on one of those destroyers or battlewagons?”
“They like the Grant," Henderson said, “because they don’t have to work. They don’t mind pulling a day or two of K.P. because this trip is like a twenty-one-day vacation for them. On a regular ship they have to work four hours, and then they’re off for eight. After a couple of years on a schedule like that, being off duty twenty-four hours a day seems like heaven to them.”
“What about the stench below decks? They still have to smell it.”
“Sailors can’t smell anything. There are little sensor things in your nose, and after a time, like when you work in a sawmill town, these little sensors are killed. After that you can’t smell anything.”
“But if you can’t smell anything, you can’t taste anything, either.”
“That’s right. That’s why the sailors think the chow is so good on the boat. If you blindfolded a sailor, you could feed him shit and tell him it was mashed potatoes and he wouldn’t know the fucking difference.”
Henderson was probably right about the sensors in your nose, because toward the end of the voyage it didn’t smell so bad below decks to me, either. I supposed that my nose had gotten used to the stench, but these joyful sailors, walking around the Grant with their moronic grins of happiness, put the idea of joining the Navy out of my mind forever.
NINETEEN
HENDERSON HAD A TEN-DOLLAR BILL AND FOR TWO days before we got into Honolulu I tried to wheedle a loan of four dollars from him. I didn’t want to go ashore without a cent in my pockets. He didn’t want to go ashore alone, and he knew I would pay him back when I got my discharge money, so he finally agreed to a loan.
He changed the bill in the Black Cat Cafe in downtown Honolulu and handed me four dollars. At the same time I saw the headline in the Honolulu Advertiser reporting the death of Thomas Wolfe from tuberculosis of the brain.
I didn’t buy the paper, but read the item on the top of the stack outside the cafe, and this news put a damper on my shore leave. Wolfe, who was only thirty-eight, was much too young to die, and although he wrote prose I identified with him as a fellow poet. A lot of his prose reads just like poetry, and there weren’t all that many poets left in the United States. As if on cue, a black cloud came over, and a sudden rain pelted us for five minutes. The rain stopped abruptly and the sky cleared again, as it does in the tropics anyway, but I took the swift, angry rain as a bad omen.
Henderson, who only read Tiffany Thayer and Donald Henderson Clark, had never read anything by Thomas Wolfe, so I couldn’t talk to him about the tragedy.
Henderson bought a pint of Gamecock bourbon, which tasted as if it was half fusel oil, but it was the cheapest whiskey in the drugstore. We drank half of the bottle in an alley before walking to the Dee Rooms. The Dee Rooms was purported to be the best whorehouse in town, although I doubt if there was that much difference among them. The prices were all standard, a straight two dollars, no matter what you wanted, with a ten-minute time limit. The women were all fairly young, recruited from the States, and most of them had signed a one- or a two-year contract with the madam. On paydays they could take on fifty or sixty guys apiece from Schofield Barracks. In two years these young women made a lot of money; then they went back to the States with a nice dowry and married some gullible businessman. When a transport like the U.S. Grant came in, or naval ships came back to Pearl Harbor after a month or two at sea, these women really cleaned up.
Henderson got laid and made the ten-minute time limit with no trouble (if you didn’t make it in ten minutes you had to fork over another two dollars), but I told Henderson I didn’t think I could do it that quickly. Actually, I was embarrassed about my lack of pubic hair. A little stubble had started to grow again, but I didn’t want some white American girl to laugh at me or to kid me about having crabs. Also, I was reluctant to pay two dollars after having paid only one dollar—or two pesos—for the last two years in P.I. A piece of ass would have to be twice as good, and I didn’t think that was the case—not with their American hurry-up policy. And these American girls, most of them from the Midwest, were large women, which meant bigger vaginas, not smaller, than the little Filipino girls had.
So while I waited for Henderson, looking these women over, I decided to save my money. The girls all wore rompers, with ribbons in their hair, and even though they were young, they weren’t young enough to get away with dressing like little kids.
When Henderson came out, I asked him how he had managed to beat the time limit, and he told me he had gotten a blow job.
“Jesus,” I said, kidding him, “you paid two bucks for a blow job? You could’ve got one of the sailors on the boat to give you one for nothing.”
“That isn’t the same, you bastard, and you know it. These girls are pros. Try the one I had, Pepper, she’s really good.”
“No. What I really want is a fried egg sandwich. I’ve been thinking about a fried egg sandwich for the last three days. That, and a glass of milk.”
Henderson didn’t want to spend fifteen cents on a fried egg sandwich, but while I ate mine he grinned and said, “You bastard. You didn’t want to get laid because you haven’t got any pubic hair.”
I had to laugh. “That’s true. But I didn’t want to spend two bucks either.”
“Why don’t you get a buzz job? It’s only four bits, and the girls are all Japanese.”
There were dozens of buzz joints in Honolulu, but they did their best business between paydays. On paydays the men from Wheeler Field and Schofield usually got laid, but during the month, when they were mostly broke, they could only afford the fifty-cent buzz jobs. A buzz job was a speedy release, because the girl tongued a man hard and then, with a hand massager, gripped his dick and turned on the switch. It was an incredibly fast jerk-off with the vibrating massager on the back of the woman’s hand buzzing away. A Japanese girl who knew how to handle the massager could get a soldier in and out of the room in less than two minutes. These Japanese girls, wearing kimonos, were very formal, and you couldn’t touch them because their fathers and brothers hung around to prevent any trouble with the clients.
But here I drew another line. A buzz job, I thought, was a demeaning mechanical procedure, for both the client and the girl. I wouldn’t have accepted one if I could have gotten it free. But I didn’t mention this to Henderson. In the Army, if a man has scruples of any kind, his only protection against ridicule is to keep them to himself. I had already noticed the line that I had drawn for myself was getting narrower and fainter as time passed. If a man wasn’t careful the Army could coarsen him, and I knew I had to protect my sensitivity if I was ever going to write anything first-rate.
At that exact moment I decided to get out of the Army. I didn’t tell Henderson about my decision. In another five days we would be docking in San Francisco. When I was discharged, the chances were that I would never see Henderson again. Besides, what I did or didn’t do was none of his business.
When we left the cafe, Henderson offered me the bottle, but I shook my head. “You keep it, Henderson. I don’t want to get drunk. I want to go down and take a look at Waikiki Beach. I didn’t see it the first time through, and I may not get another chance.”
“I thought you wanted to go up to Schofield with me. We can look up some guys I know, drink beer all afternoon at the spiff bar, and we’ll still have time to get laid again before we have to get back to the boat.”
