Something About a Soldier - Charles Willeford Read online

"I didn't know it was the major's dog, sir. The dog was running loose, and I was just following my special orders to shoot stray dogs."

  "Skippy wouldn't hurt a flea. Were you afraid of him, or what?"

  "No, sir, I wasn't afraid of him. I had the riot gun so when he came running up the alley I shot him."

  "He couldn't've been more than six feet from you. Didn't you recognize him?"

  "I just recognized that it was a dog, sir, that's all."

  "Never mind," he said, shaking his head. Then he began to cry and took his handkerchief out of his pocket. "You can go." .

  I saluted, did an about face, and went out into the orderly room. The first sergeant, a burly man who had been in the Philippines for ten years and who was married to a Filipino woman, said, "I hope you're proud of yourself, Willeford." .

  By that time I was angry, and I said something I shouldn't have. "If you don't want loose dogs shot, change the special orders."

  "Get the hell out of here," the first sergeant said.

  What the major wanted, and what the first sergeant wanted, I supposed, was an apology, but I wasn't going to apologize for following their orders. The upshot of this incident was that I did not make private first class, which was the rating the Table of Organization called for as a gas truck driver, even though I still had to drive the truck for the next fourteen months.

  To retum to my original point: Here was Old Raz, a decent but useless horse, but still worth $145 to the government on paper. Someone, somewhere, on paper, had to account for Old Raz, so there was no way that he could be shipped out to the Giglin open range without his whereabouts being noted. So his execution was avoided by a conspiracy of the troop commander, the first sergeant, the stable sergeant, and, of course, the veterinarian, who was a major in the Vet Corps. I should have realized all that, but I just hadn't accepted the idea that there could ever be any kind of cooperation between officers and enlisted men. I think my change in attitude toward the Army began the day we saved Old Raz from the knackers. Old Raz died about three months later, and they buried him where he fell, out on the Giglin range. But three months is three months, and no one ever turned Old Raz into dog food.

  But a life—and—death problem like Old Raz's would never have occurred in the Air Corps, and my story goes back to how I happened to join the Army Air Corps in the first place.

  TWO

  WHEN I JOINED THE ARMY IN 1935 I WAS SIXTEEN years old, and I had to add two years to my age. My parents had both died of tuberculosis when I was small, and my grandmother had taken me in and raised me since I was eight. As my guardian, my grandmother had to give her written permission, but she didn't have to lie for me because I joined the National Guard first—the 160th Infantry Regiment in Los Angeles.

  A friend of mine who was already in the National Guard told me they were going to summer camp in San Luis Obispo, and that guardsmen were paid a dollar a day for the two weeks they were in camp. Fourteen dollars seemed like a large sum to me, just for spending two weeks in summer camp, so I went down to the armory in Exposition Park with my friend and enlisted in Company E. Of course, I had to sign up for three years, not for just two weeks, but all a man had to do in the National Guard was attend drill one night a week, on Monday nights. The drill periods paid a dollar each, or were supposed to, but they made you wait for it. They paid every three months in a lump sum of twelve dollars. I saw through this slick trick right away: it was the same way slum landlords cheat their Negro tenants, only in reverse. Instead of letting Negroes pay their rent monthly as white people do, landlords make them pay every week. There are thirteen weeks in three months, not twelve, so slum landlords squeeze out an extra week's rent that way. The National Guard was also cheating us out of a week's drill pay by paying us twelve dollars every three months. The lower down on the social scale a man is, and a private in the National Guard has a lower standing than a Civilian Conservation Corps boy, the more apt he is to get fucked over by the people in power.

  The sergeant of the platoon I was assigned to in Company E was seventeen. He was also a lieutenant colonel in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps at Manual Arts High School. As a consequence he thought he knew everything there was to know about being a soldier, but when I asked him why I was being treated like a Negro on the pay situation and explained how we were being cheated, he was shocked by the analogy. As a sergeant, he was being screwed out of more money than I was. Still, the idea that I would question the right of the National Guard to beat me out of a dollar every ninety days was repugnant to him.

  "It's done that way," he said, "for the convenience of the government. Our oflicers are all honorable men, not slum landlords. And you'd better not repeat any of that shit to the other men in the platoon. If you do, I'll make your life miserable when we get to camp."

  "I know where you go to school," I said, "and if I'm not treated the same as everyone else at camp, I'll catch you after school and kick the living shit out of you."

  That was the trouble with the National Guard. You can't be a real soldier for only two or three hours on a Monday night, then be a civilian the rest of the time. The captain of our company pumped gas at a Standard station down on Slauson and Figueroa. When I learned about his job I found it difficult to call him "sir." I know that it's the uniform and the rank you salute, not the man, but all the same, once you know what a man's actual social background is, it becomes very difficult to overlook the man.

  Besides, no matter how hard he scrubbed his hands, I could always spot the grease beneath the captain's fingernails. I did, however, keep the pay analogy to myself after our talk, and my platoon sergeant turned out to be a decent guy after we got to camp. I enjoyed the camp, the little war games we played, and most of the classes we had. Every morning the regimental band (a lot of the band members were also in the L.A. Philharmonic Orchestra, as civilians) played stirring marches at reveille, waking us up, and the food was excellent and plentiful.

  We returned by troop train from San Luis Obispo. The train took us right down Exposition Boulevard, and we had only a short march to the armory. We were paid off and I had a ten-dollar bill and four silver dollars in my pocket, the most money I had ever had in my whole life. I gave my grandmother the ten-dollar bill and kept the four silver dollars.

  I didn't have anything to do until the following Monday night, and during the week I thought about the way my life was going; and the idea of joining the Regular Army, after my few drill nights and the summer camp, seemed attractive. In 1935 things were pretty much as they are now, in 1939, and there were few options open to me as a junior high dropout. Even our captain, who had a B.A. in English from the University of Southern California, was pumping gas, so there were no jobs available for a sixteen-year-old boy with an ambition to be a poet.

  At least a third of the members of the 160th Infantry were under eighteen, either high school students or drop-outs like me. Most of them, also like me, were attending the weekly drills for the dollar, not for the love of playing soldier. There were a few exceptions, however. Some men had been professional soldiers, and they still liked to wear a uniform—part-time. I am talking about the enlisted men, not the officers; the officers were a breed apart. It was possible, through politics, to buy a commission in the National Guard with campaign contributions. I wasn't aware of all the other ways to get a commission, but after I had talked with some of the older men who had put a hitch or two in the Regulars, it seemed like a good deal to me.

  The Regulars offered travel, adventure, and a way out. And I wanted a way out of a situation that was becoming more untenable every passing day. I was living with my grandmother, and money was so tight I could no longer ask her for a dime, or even five cents to ride the streetcar downtown. After almost fifteen years with the May Company, selling millinery in the French Room, she had lost her position. My uncle, an executive with Southern Bell, paid her rent and gave her a small weekly allowance. I slept and usually ate dinner at home, but the rest of the time I was either out on the
streets or playing softball in Exposition Park.

  On Sunday momings I used to go over to the Coliseum after football games and search the uncleaned rows of seats. With luck I would find a dime, or a quarter, or a half pack of cigarettes. Sometimes I would find an umbrella or a pair of sunglasses I could sell for a quarter. But there were no football games now, during the summer. On Saturday nights I hustled the L.A. Times on the corner of Santa Barbara and Figueroa. The Sunday Times was a dime, and I got to keep a nickel of it, but I rarely sold more than eight or nine papers. The guy who sold the Examiner sold anywhere from sixty to seventy Sunday papers, but the Times was a conservative paper, so those who read it usually had enough money for a home subscription—which meant very few street sales.

  Before making the jump into the R.A., however, I decided to make one more all-out attempt to get a job. I had a good white oxford-cloth shirt and a tie my uncle had given me. I scrubbed my brown bell-bottom corduroy pants and ironed them. I shined my shoes, some beautiful Walk-Overs that my uncle had given me. (They were too small for him, and much too small for me.) On a Monday morning I set out. I walked over to Main Street, at Forty-first Street, and started downtown. I asked for a job at every place of business on the east side of Main Street, every grocery store, café, gas station, clothing store, whatever.

  The manager at the Coca—Cola plant gave me a free Coke, but there were no jobs. No one snarled or tried to run me off, but no one had any available jobs. In fact, many people apologized for not having any work to give me, feeling, no doubt, that they had somehow failed me as well as themselves. But I was determined not to skip anyone, even though, as the morning passed and I was rejected again and again, I realized my all-out effort was hopeless.

  My last stop was a half-empty office building on Main between Ninth and Tenth streets. I wandered through the echoing building, starting with the second door, trying to find open offices. Most of the offices were connected in some way with the petroleum industry, but no one needed an office boy. A secretary on the fifth floor gave me a hard-boiled egg, saying that she couldn't eat it and that if I didn't take it she would just throw it away, so I took it and thanked her. There were a few collection agencies and some lawyers in the building, too, but the lawyers, mostly Mexicans in tiny one-man firms, didn't even have secretaries.

  When I came down to the lobby again, I decided that my final try had been a noble effort, but that it would be futile to hit the rest of the office buildings on Main Street. I peeled the egg, borrowed some salt from a café (I can't eat a hard-boiled egg without salt), and continued down Main Street to the Pacific Electric Building to talk to the recruiting corporal at Sixth and Main.

  The corporal, a coast artilleryman assigned to L.A. recruiting duty, was a short, stocky man in his early forties with a neat, perfectly trimmed gray moustache. There was an unwritten rule in the Army, which I learned about later, that didn't allow men on their first enlistment to grow a moustache. So men on their second hitch, usually after completing their fourth year, which gave them five percent more a month in longevity pay ("fogy" pay, it was called), almost always wore a moustache. It distinguished them visibly, and as a rule they did not talk to the younger soldiers who were not as yet drawing fogy pay. The unwritten rule was not always enforced. A large man who was willing to fight could keep his moustache, and if a man had a harelip the first sergeant made him wear a moustache to disguise it. But in general, the rule was respected.

  The corporal stood downstairs by the entrance to the P.E. Building, and he was an outstanding example of what a soldier should look like. His gabardine O.D. uniform was tailor-made, and he wore a starched white shirt with a black tie. His black shoes had been polished and varnished and they reflected light like dark mirrors. His soft fox wraparound leggings were wrapped precisely, and the bill of his garrison cap and his black garrison belt were patent leather. I stopped about ten feet away, admiring him, and watched him roll a match-thin Bull Durham cigarette. He put the cigarette in his mouth, returned the sack of Bull Durham to his breeches pocket, and lit the cigarette with a brass punk lighter. He cupped the cigarette in his hand, half-concealing it when he wasn't taking a drag. This action was out of habit, and not because he was forbidden to smoke. He knew that a man in uniform looks peculiar when he's puffing on a cigarette, so he was avoiding attracting attention to the fact of his cigarette. He had four hash marks on his left arm, indicating more than twelve years of service, and his corporal's stripes had been cross-stitched on with red thread.

  Standing there beneath the huge blue U.S. Army Recruiting flag that hung listlessly above the street from a third-floor window, he was the best advertisement for the Army I have ever seen. I finally got up enough nerve to approach him, and he grinned.

  "Any openings?" I said.

  He shook his head. "Just for P.S. men."

  "What's that?"

  "Previous service. We're only taking re-enlistees this month. No original enlistments."

  I knew that I looked old enough to pass for eighteen, but not for a man with three years' service.

  "I thought the Army could always use some men."

  "It can, and it always will, but L.A.'s quota is only two new men a month. We've got a waiting list . . ." He shrugged. "I'm against waiting lists. By the time a few months go by and we try to contact the guy on the list he's either long gone or changed his mind anyway. With only two openings a month, why run a waiting list?"

  "I'm in the National Guard now," I said. "I'm a rifleman with the One—sixtieth Infantry."

  He frowned. "I don't know whether the National Guard counts as P.S. or not. Let's go upstairs and I'll check it out."

  We took the elevator up to his recruiting office, and he checked through his Army Regulations.

  "How long you been in the National Guard?"

  "About seven weeks."

  "That ain't enough, kid. Look, I got an opening for a P.S. man, preferably a rifleman, in the Thirty-third Infantry down in Panama, but they want a man with at least one year's service. In only seven weeks you haven't even finished basic training."

  "I went to summer camp for two weeks."

  "In the Boy Scouts?"

  "No, with the One-sixtieth. We were on maneuvers up in Camp San Luis Obispo."

  "How old are you?"

  "Eighteen." .

  "That's too young for Panama. Panama, you see, ain't for everybody. In the Army, Panama's more like an old soldiers' home. Down there you can buy marijuana by the mattress-cover-full, and once a guy gets stationed down there he extends as long as he can. Last time I was in Panama I was in a bar where I could drink a glass of rum, smoke a cigarette, get a shoeshine and a blow job, all at the same time—and for only four bits."

  "No shit?"

  "In Colon." He nodded. "Besides, those twenty-five-mile hikes in the jungle heat are rough on a man. There's a lot of suicides down there, too. As I said, Panama ain't for everybody. So I wouldn't send you down to Panama at your age, even if I could. You hungry?"

  "I had a hard-boiled egg for lunch."

  "Here." He handed me a red cardboard meal ticket.

  "Take this ticket down to the U.S. Café on East Fifth. It'll get you an Okie steak, French fries, two pieces of bread, and a side dish of cole slaw. Have a second lunch on the Army."

  "Thanks."

  "I wish there was something I could do for you, but I can't." He rolled a cigarette and handed me the sack of Bull Durham and the brown wheat papers. I rolled a fat one and put the sack on his desk. He let me use his punk lighter. It was tricky. You flicked the wheel to light the punk, and then when the punk ignited you lit your cigarette.

  "You got a high school education?"

  "Not quite."

  "Can you read and write?" .

  I laughed. "I write poetry," I said, "and I read four or five books a week."

  "You don't want the infantry, then. The infantry don't need poets. What you should do is get into the Air Corps. Want to know how?"

  "Tel
l me."

  "Hitchhike out to March Field, the other side of Riverside, and talk to the post recruiting sergeant. He may not have any immediate openings, but he'll put you up in the barracks for a few days till he gets one. Before you go out there, get a letter from your mother giving you permission to enlist, and another letter from your commanding officer in the National Guard, saying you're a member in good standing. That'll help you get in. Then, when an opening comes up and you're enlisted, you'll be discharged from the Guard. I shouldn't tell you all this, but you look like the kind of young man the Army wants. Your shoes are shined, your shirt is clean, and you're wearing a necktie."

  I thanked him, went down to the U.S. Café for my free hamburger steak, and the next day I hitchhiked out to March Field. Three days later I was enlisted in the Air Corps. I went through six weeks of basic training and then was assigned to the post motor pool, where Sergeant Golden, the motor pool sergeant, taught me how to drive a two-and-a-half-ton truck. But if I hadn't joined the National Guard first, I doubt I would have been able to get into the Arrny—not then, anyway, not in the middle of Depression year 1935. In 1935 there were only 45,000 men in the standing army, including the Air Corps, and I was lucky to get in.

  THREE

  WHEN I FIRST STARTED T0 WRITE THIS ACCOUNT I thought it would be fairly short, but I can see as I get into it that I remember much more than I thought I would. One incident keys another, and long conversations come back to me in their entirety. There's no trick to this ability to recall things, and anyone can do it. If you pick up an item you had in childhood, a teddy bear, for example, and stare at it hard enough, concentrating, you'll be able to remember events that happened when you were only three years old, little things you didn't even know you knew. So that's always the problem when a man's trying to write something: what to put in and what to leave out. Although everything that ever happens to a person is

  important in one way or another, what that person remembers might bore the hell out of a reader. And I don't want to bore readers—not intentionally, anyway.