He had just turned into his twenty-second year, healthy, fast food for the slavering Army. Seventy-three days after Japanese airplanes had dismembered the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Draft Board Number 9 of Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, USA, called upon this specimen to go redeem the National Honor. It was simple. Send him a piece of paper in curt summons; the postman enjoys delivering it: 1235 Addison Street, the two-story grey stone house, the one with the not always amiable black dog.
The day was February 19, 1942, downcast skies, the temperature freezing. On the same day, a tentacle of the giant Japanese octopus was reaching in to partially destroy Darwin, Australia; another tentacle even touched India. He arose before dawn, leaving the warm body of his girl Jill slumbering upon their jouncy bed in the little room in back. (It was a sign of the times that unmarried young lovers might sleep together in a respectable family setting.) He bent down to kiss her one last time. The black dog by the bed wagged his tail limply; no low whistle to get him up. The two young brothers were sleeping in the front bedroom; their call to arms would come one day, unlikely as it appeared just now.
His mother, more dutiful than his consort, fried him bacon and eggs, made toast, poured him juice and coffee; they had agreed that she would not provide anything so special as waffles or hash. His father had preceded him to the washroom, where the son, soon to become EM #3631-9558, now shaved. It was considered that seeing the soldier off to war was a man's job, said with a smile; the Dad wouldn't have it otherwise. Little else was spoken.
The draftee was in a decent mood. Maybe no time was a good time to join the Army, but for him it was high time. He felt he had been procrastinating, considering how strongly he supported the President's provocations of the Axis. Himself, he had been inclined toward a Holy War against Fascism since 1936, even as a boy.
A private in the Army? He didn't mind that either, though people with lots of education were supposed to be officers somehow. Leaving Jill did give him pain. They had been spit-fire lovers for nearly two years, splitting sometimes, then clanging together like hitching freight cars. He had lots of ideas about winning the war and could imagine that he should have been put in charge, directly under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Commander-in-Chief, say. Next best thing was to be a private, and rise from the ranks, for promotions came fast and there seemed to be little enough to be done to win the war at any rank below General. He was a dreamer, our lad.
His father walked alongside him up the cold pavements, north on Herndon, then over toward Clark Street. The ragged City was looming up, shaping itself out of the dark, about to lurch heavily into the War Effort. A clutch of types slouched disconsolate about the premises of the Draft Board. Soon they had to pile into a trolley car. Then off they went, past Wrigley Field: "Home of the Chicago Cubs," with an electric hiss and metallic clanking. Dad was left standing.
The Dad felt things strongly, didn't say them, especially not now, but practically never anyhow. (The Recruit didn't want him to come: it would be a lonely walk back.) A son is a son, each was as the Only One -- so he would say when he erred and called him by the others' names, Bussie, Ed, Vic. He didn't like to lose them and he felt that this was the kind of son who would get to shouting "Banzai!" or "Geronimo!" or whatever the guys are shouting who are up ahead and get shot first. So the Dad didn't feel too good about it all, and would not sense his usual elation at going out in the morning, first in the neighborhood, never because he had to leave the house, but because he wished to see life at dawn.
Whereas the Recruit, now riding the streetcar, was pulling himself together as a soldier, getting into the mood, the role, the act. How do you behave? -- unsurprised, uneager, unashamed, not too sympathetic, unaggressive, not too much of a groupie, not snappishly for or against orders, not ideological, not up front, not a laggard -- exhibiting little of your education, loves, travels, workaday life, or any military experience.
Military experience! Last year his 106th Cavalry Regiment had gone South -- old friends, their horses had just been taken away, someone told him, the large black big-bellied steeds, from their riders, from Johnny Dearham, Jim Cowhey, Frenchy Duvall, Bassdrum Beck, hey, guys, how're the shit-kickers in the hot swamps? Hadn't learned much, ridden some, gentleman's outfit, but not gentlemen, just nice guys with a plain spacious club at the Armory off Chicago Avenue near the Lake. He had been too busy with his rag-bag of jobs and getting into Jill's pants and playing around with her to spend much time drinking and card-playing or even riding with the gang; then he went off to Columbia University Law School and had to quit, so the Black Horse Troop had gone South without him.
He had closeted his own trumpet for "the Duration" (a good word that, it meant for so long as the War might last). The day before, he had packed it in with a few final tunes. Did they..did Bassdrum Beck ever go anymore on parade pounding away on his kettle drums, and Johnny, too, rolling his snares, and Jim blasting his trumpet over the laid-back ears of his mean black horse: damn, how it hurt when the animal's skull tossed back and bumped the horn and drove the brass mouthpiece against your lips,leaving them bleeding and swollen. There had been the days of fooling around with a machine-gun, and ammunition belts, loading his horse with the antiquated military gear of cavalry -- he loved horses but believed in the superiority of infantry. The Romans won on foot. Discipline did it. Even more, the machine-gun -- it was amazing how fast and hard it exploded lead -- and, of course, the tank, as an iron horse: these finished off the battlehorse. And now the infantry rode to battle in trucks, quarter-ton, half-ton, one-and-a-half tons, two-ton -- some armored -- that's about all he knew. Ridiculous that he knew more about horses than about trucks. What explained the Black Horse Troop? -- mossback generals, romance, politicians, playboys, fun, parades. Why did the Battleship persist, the Dreadnaught, a sitting duck for warplanes, hadn't the Japanese just knocked out two British capital ships?
By the time the trolley car was clanging across the Chicago River bridge, he was back to marching bands, at high school and in college, drill, uniforms, khaki, olive drab (he had worn it), the bugle calls -- "Come to think of it, I can play them all." He would have scorned to recall his longest military experience, which I would remind him of, the years on the parlor floor with the lead soldiers. His parlor held no place for the braggadocio of militarists of Bolivia and China and Germany, captured by the newsreel cameras and the chocolate-colored rotogravure section of the newspapers, but he distilled and acted out their fury of riot and battle. His dear old friend, Mrs. Villiers, conducted for him a tiny tots' tour of the Civil War battlefields via her great heavy picture book and her father's memories transmitted over sixty years. And "Give a Big H for Hollywood" -- "Over the Top," "All's Quiet on the Western Front." Harken, also, to the jeering child singing:
You're in the Army now,
you're not behind a plow,
you'll never get rich,
you son of a bitch..
He knew all about it.
What of the drunken soldiers quarreling with him and Bob King when the two students were sauntering along the whorehouse strip of Madison Street one night; he knew the low prestige of the peacetime army, The theory of warfare, yes, even that, in his writing an honors paper on the Italian aggression in Ethiopia, arguing over the Spanish civil war, sorting out the ideas of war and peace conveyed by the lower schools and at University, playing the cold Machiavellian, who portrayed violence conquering virtue, admiring the Clausewitz dictum that war is "the conduct of politics by other means.
Surprisingly, a pacifist current was still running strong beneath this: war is hell, butchery, un-Christian, stupid, unnecessary; all men are equal and brothers. But there was a time for peace and a time for war, said Ecclesiastes,and so argued he. Seven years of indignation without action were ending. His war against the Axis began in 1931 at the age of eleven when the Japanese invaded Manchuria and 1933, at thirteen, when Hitler became Der Fuhrer of Germany.
THE PATH OF WAR and RESPONSES OF OUR CITIZEN
1. Hitler becomes Full Dictator while He, in High School, debates vs.Fascism. (1934-35)
2. Japan resumes China Aggression, which He denounces. Enters University. (1935)
3. Mussolini invades Ethiopia, against which Aggression He writes Thesis. (1935-36, 1938)
4. Spanish engage in Civil War; He opposes Spanish Falangists. (1936-39)
5. Austrian Anschluss occurs, which He opposes. He visits Europe. (1938-39)
6. Munich Pact appeases Hitler and He denounces Czech Dissolution. (1938-9; A.B. 1939.Joins 106 Cav.Res.)
7. Nazi-Soviet Treaty signed and makes Him intensely hostile to Stalinism. (August 21, 1939; He is Grad. Res. Asst., 1939-40)
8. World War II begins, whereupon He voices strong Support for Allies. (September 3, 1939)
9. Soviets Invade Finland, and once more He denounces Communists. (November 30, 1939) 10. Destruction of Allied Armies impels Him to join Help-Britain Committee. (May-June, 1940; He falls in love; goes to Columbia in November.)
11. Germans invade Soviet Union and He echoes Churchill on giving Soviets Aid. (June 22, 1941; back in Chicago, researches & teaches at Indiana U.)
12. Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and He begins personal Steps to War. (December 7, 1941, whereupon he moves and stores Belongings.)
13. Japanese reach Australia & India, on which Date He enters Army.
So, surprisingly, a full mental and physical war-kit had been provided this peaceable citizen -- myths, skills, information, and attitudes -- and then these thirteen steps had carried him straight into the great conflict. A typical peaceable-bellicose American he was, for actually America was not a peaceful nation; it just pretended to be pacific while it continually carried on warfare, on both a large and a small scale; hardly ever was it truly at peace. On December 7, 1941, the crisis had finally climaxed, while the lovers were reading newspapers, listening to a concert of classical music on the radio, and brunching in the large old kitchen of the first floor at 5479 South University Avenue. This was next to the University of Chicago, an apartment of two large rooms and bath, premises handed along to them by his brother Sebastian and Miriam, his wife. Bro Bus had entered the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, and was working at the analysis of radio broadcasts from Berlin and Rome, along with Fred Schuman, John Gardiner, Goodwin Watson, Ed Shils, Nathan Leites, Hans Speier, and other high-brows. The attack was still going on. Alfred was incredulous. He felt that he should leap to the roof, swoop off into the blue and counterattack. He put his crazed imagination onto the enemy:"The Japanese are crazy!" he shouted, "I can't believe it!" After hearing another hour of the bad news, the consorts betook themselves to the apartment of their friends Jay and Ruth Hall, down the street, there to expostulate noisily and thence to Steinway's Drug Store on 57th Street, where they would be sure to find people like themselves, disgorging novel expressions, like "The Japanese must be crazy. I can't believe it!" They waited upon fresh newspapers, which, arriving finally upon breathless headlines, added nothing to the instant flow of information and directives emitting from everyone's turned-up radio.
He had been paying attention to Europe, had expected to be drawn in there. Just two days before, the Chicago Tribune had exposed a secret top government plan, envisioning an army of five million men to be landed in Europe to fight the Germans, and the Italians if they were still around. He discounted the isolationist newspaper as a reliable source, but was nonetheless pleased with the forward thinking of the White House and Pentagon. Then the attack came instead from Japan, what a shock! Nor could he grasp how serious was the defeat at Pearl Harbor.
Nor could he dream that a Japanese army might cross to Southeast Asia so swiftly, and even take the Philippines, and invest, indeed, the whole of the Chinese and Malayan Worlds and venture towards India and Australia, even while he was squaring away to join the Army. The Japanese were plaguing the Dutch East Indies, attacking on the Road to Mandalay, and closing in upon Manila. Hardly had he left home when President Roosevelt ordered General Douglas MacArthur to escape from the Philippines, where a mostly Filipino Army still vigorously but hopelessly resisted the invaders. The first great credit of one billion dollars had just this moment, finally, been granted the Soviet Union to cover purchases of whatever was needed wherever it could be found. The Red Army had stopped the Germans for the Winter, within sight of the Kremlin's towers, and was counterattacking with amazing success. In North Africa, within the space of several weeks, the British forces had swept the Axis army through Libya and had been just as untidily brushed back. The Western Front, somnolent after the destruction of the Allied Armies there in 1940, awaited our hero. The seed of the greatest armada in history was just now being planted: the U.S. War Plans Group was issuing (in secrecy, of course, and absurdly, it happened) a "Plan for Operations in Northwest Europe," foreseeing a small-scale invasion, to be termed "Sledgehammer," by Fall of the year 1942, if the Soviets showed signs of collapse, and a main invasion termed "Roundup" to be launched in the Spring of 1943. If this was far from reality, even farther out was the Declaration of the United Nations that was signed on the first day of the year. Still, he agreed 100% with all of this, as he had with the Four Freedoms, which Roosevelt had proposed to Congress for the World on January 6, 1941, two years earlier.
When, on June 22 of the year just passed, the Soviet Union had been attacked, and Jill and he gaped at the headline-bespattered papers of the newsstand in front of Steinway's, where they had gone to breakfast, he had been heartened, and wondered at the temerity of Hitler in opening up a Second Front, a "No-No!" to all strategists since Napoleon. Yet when he then spoke with that awesome authority on things European, Professor Nathan Leites, he found him most pessimistic: the German armies, Leites predicted, would knock out the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the several months before the onset of winter, so weakened were the Soviets by Stalin's mass purges of the nation's leaders, and by the population's general incompetence and backwardness. Leites had been barely wrong. Fallen in love and distracted by this worldwide conflict, our guy could hardly have been expected to stay on at the Law School of Columbia University or persist at philosophical researches or count off a day-by-day routine on a civilian job. In the two years just passed, he had done a lot of creative work, but it could not last. He was teetering; it was only a question of who would make the first move to tip him over.
But why didn't he enlist earlier? Perhaps because it would seem like the act of a farm©boy or hill©billy: they were forever enlisting. Or a romantic; he would not play the hero; it embarrassed him. He asked about direct commissions, not avidly but diffidently; he made a mild attempt at a job under his former Professor, Harold Gosnell, that would fit him into the War Effort at Washington, because that was the way most of the University was going; intellectuals were not soldiers. In sum, he couldn't think what to do, so shilly-shallyed. The fact that he was inextricably in love did not help matters; though he did not speak of it, the thought of breaking up bothered him continuously. But, hell and ye gods, in fact he was a soldier, a warrior, and it was with relief that he got the Call: he knew what the War was all about and he felt at home in the Army even as he boarded the trolley car. He looked with a maternal air upon the civilian lads around him. Naive, quite unconvinced about the War, except for a simplistic, readily stimulated anger; knowing that their sentiments were shared by all, they might assuredly curse the "treacherous Japs."
The media, the government, the elite of the Great Republic generally saw to it that the impression of unanimity over the Yellow Peril had logically to take in the Nazi Germans, the Italian Fascists and all their minor allies, so that, if anybody doubted himself or the unanimity of public opinion, he would think himself an odd exception who had better shut up. This despite public opinion polls that showed an isolationist sentiment prevailing among half the citizenry.
There were a dozen or so recruits in the trolley car, and shortly they paused to pick up another gang. All were ordered off at the southern end of the Loop and led over to a dilapidated building. It was an area where small loft businesses and marginal enterprises might hold a losing grip on the Chicago economy. He had actually worked only a few steps away for a couple of months just recently, with Franklin Meine and Harold Hitchens and the rest of the crew that was revising Nelson's Encyclopedia, and these characters would in a few minutes be arriving at work unknowing of his fate. He felt a pang of nostalgia, one of his weaknesses.
As the rookies entered and approached the decrepit elevator shaft, a sign greeted them with: "Civilians only! All others walk up." He tried sarcasm: "Now you guys know what you're in for!" and they laughed; they knew, alright. So up the iron stairs they trudged to where a lot of men congregated, and they turned over their identity slips to some clerks who were continually hollering out names, and he met one of his students, from East Chicago, that's where he had been teaching American Government, at Indiana University there, last semester. The teacher had disappeared from the scene, but not before the Dean had given him a little tea party, sending him off as a hero; the faculty and staff felt just fine at making this sacrifice on behalf of the War Effort. He said ironically to his former student, "Well, now you can see the practical side of American Government." He had left this guy in the classroom: "Poor chap," the ex-teacher was thinking, "he is feeling very low; I have left a lot of living behind me, but he feels worse, probably, than do I, because what he left behind him, it took a lot for him to get -- you can see it in his Slavic working class features, in his toughened hands, in the tired expression on his face, and he knows he hasn't much on the ball and he is several years older than I".
They rode out to Camp Grant together, a couple of hours from the City, so the man came to feel better, but that was the last seen of him. The Lake View draftee was used to High Mobility, and would have much more of it -- "the last I saw of him was..": it will match thousands of encounters to come, companies, battalions, boat loads, landing party loads, visiting parties, gangs on leave, detachments, friendlies, allies, enemies, co-belligerents, crowds of faces of all degrees of cognizance, as expendable as ammunition. And now it was the same day and afternoon, and at Camp Grant the Lake View men were diffused among thousands upon thousands going this way and that among scores of wooden barracks, and eventually they lost sight of one another. Medical examinations -- "short arm inspection" included: "drop your shorts and peel back your foreskin," yells the corporal in charge of the group, while the medico comes hurrying past, casting a sharp eye downwards. Meanwhile the recruits glance up into space or down uncomfortably, or compare their own genitals with the run of the mill; this particular recruit estimates himself on the average, whereas he had been less than average on the swim team at college but larger than Mac the Coach who weighed 300 pounds, moved through the water like a flying saucer, and never saw himself piss. What happens to them when they stand stiff; do they rise all proportionately, equally erect? Grubby thoughts. But what else can the men think about, lined up there stupidly?
They spent much of the time with their clothes off, bundled in their arms, and holding an envelope that they were told would be more important than themselves before long, because it would become "Your Record!" and there would be nothing but the Guardhouse for them without that folder. And the dog-tags that soon come their way: what religion? (he answered "Catholic" because he wasn't told he could say "non-sectarian");what blood type? "B" the Army told him after drawing his blood -- the Army thinks ahead: what are the last two things you will ever need? A blood transfusion and a prayer in your cultic jargon. And then the woolen khaki uniform, complete from the overseas cap to the high©laced thick shoes, none of it fitting him well, no stitch of distinction, badge, medal, stripe, unit affiliation, nothing -- just quintessential General Issue, the perfect G.I.
The medical examination caused no trouble; the shots were a pain -- smallpox, typhoid, tetanus vaccinations, blood samples for syphilis and blood-types -- and a couple of guys got sick and vomited; sore in the arms and feverish, nobody was feeling too well. Many of them had been the honored guests of sending-off parties, and had drunk themselves sick the night before. And nearly everybody, of course, was smoking cigarettes by the pack. Not to mention that the stuff dumped upon your metal plate at mealtime was not gourmet cooking or even fast food.
As Our Hero glumly edged through the chow-line, he heard a cheery bellow, "Al de Grazia!" and looked about; it was Tom Stauffer, stalwart and relaxed, a Big Intellectual on Campus camouflaged in fatigue greens, nestling a huge pot between his long legs and peeling potatoes; they laughed, exchanged a few words, and that was the end of him.
Without regard to the misery and stupor of the newcomers, uncaring of their hangovers and agonized heads, their custodians administered to them beautifully designed and pretested examinations, whose scores would affect their placement in the infinite variety of Army jobs, from rifleman to electronic technician, and determine whether they might apply for Officer Candidates School.
The psychiatrist, like the rest, was handling men fast, a couple of questions and then if the guy seemed to be a nervous wreck or claimed to be a creep or a homosexual or congenital criminal, they put him aside, examined him later and maybe sent him away to bother the rest of society. The most obvious cases and some of the subtle ones had surfaced in pre-induction examinations. Yet some draft boards were so crazily patriotic as to believe everyone was normal when it came to defending his country. In the end, at least two kinds of weirdos made it into Service: those who hoped to get all the financial benefits of honorably discharged veterans after the discovery of their symptoms, and those who wanted to get into the military more than anything in the world; it was as much of a problem to keep them out as it was to evaluate the seemingly larger number of guys who wanted to stay out at the slight cost of being deemed lunatic.
When our recruit was beckoned into one of the dozen cubicles, the psychiatrist within asked, is there anything in the way of medical information you have not yet provided, or have you any other kind of problem -- you know, "Problem!" -- that is bothering you? The Recruit ponders for a moment, and said, well, I don't know what's to be done about it, but I worry a little with this trick shoulder of mine; it slips out of joint easily, I might dislocate it while thrusting a bayonet, or maybe in hand-to-hand combat. The medic looks at him as if he had found the prize nut of the day, but then says it would not matter and passes him along hurriedly. He probably had a good story to tell at mess.
It wasn't an hour later that the draftee, now Private in the Army of the United States, found himself standing at a desk before an Assignment Corporal, who put soldiers onto their Army career path -- headed for extermination, or for a cushy seat in the Quartermaster Corps, and who would it be but Stanley Beves, a student from the correspondence courses in politics that he offered through the University of Chicago this last year, who just now cannot talk politics but is delighted ©© he got a good grade, and, with a glance at the long line waiting behind this recruit, told him that he, Stanley, was assigned permanently to Camp Grant, where life wasn't bad, and, then, remarking the Recruit's proficiency as a musician, with experience in the administration of bands, he said, "I can get you into the Camp Grant Band. Would you like to be assigned to Camp Grant?"
Just imagine, the recruit told himself, fast as lightning, you can be at a great place, near home, living with pussycat, doing some of the things you are best at, terrific!, but then he said, "Well, I'm in the War now. This wouldn't be much of a war. I wouldn't feel right. How can I get a little closer to the action. How can I get to where I can become an officer after a while," and Stanley, instead of berating him for a fool and assigning him forthwith to the Camp Grant Station Band for the Good of the Country, looks at him with a slightly envious regard, yet a friendly look, and says that he could probably get into officer's training soon enough from where he would be sending him; he labelled him as "Branch Immaterial", and put him down for shipment with a gang of other guys, saying, wryly, "It's a secret where."
It was the last time that he would see Stanley. The Recruit knew little about the army or war, yet thought he might control everything -- he had a streak of megalomania. Still, he felt less proud than dismal as he walked away from Stanley's desk and its promise, for he remembered that he was in love, hence, as soon as he could, he called, home, there to learn from his kid brother Vic that Jill had gone off on a skiing trip with some friends to La Crosse, Wisconsin, whereupon he felt jealous and neglected. She had spoken of it longingly. Still, she should have stayed with the folks and worn black for a couple of days anyhow, he wanted to tell the world -- but he never told anybody of such thoughts anyhow, anytime, never. He groused about the barracks grounds, itching and scratching in his new Army uniform; it had been tossed to him piece by piece at the warehouse. His civilian clothes had been sent home; the Army was insistent upon this; the U.S. Mails obliged. Tomorrow, he reflected, will tell me where I'll be and it will be a real army camp where I'll be enjoying the experience of a new gang of guys, and then afterwards I would arrange to see her somehow. So the day and the night passed, and the germs of tetanus, small pox and typhoid made his arms hurt, while a fever disturbed his sleep. The next morning he knew that he was heading toward the Southland: his mimeographed Special Order, tucked in his folder, told him so. A railroad took them there, a clumsy troop train hitched onto a freight train, powered by a steam locomotive. There was track all around the USA in those times, up every alley and byway. Nolonger was so much of it overgrown and rusting. You could still get anywhere and nowhere by train -- with most Army camp sites located in Nowhere -- and every rusty tank-car, flatcar, boxcar, and battered coach was employed, every rail shining pridefully with use. He merged now into a roaring obstructive nuisance such as blocked the roads in those war days when an overpass was rare. As his car banged over the crossings he well remembered waiting inside a bus at one and then another of them, going to and from the classes he taught at Indiana University, those times when he was impatient to get home to the Midway and cursing the hundred-car conglomerates screeching and rattling by. He had changed places, but it was from the frying pan into the fire. Ugly, ugly, too, foul upon all the senses, uglier than battle!
The Nation's self-destruction advanced in stages: there had been the age of the razing of the land in the name of Progressive Agriculture, then the coal and steel holocaust in the name of Industrial Progress, followed, after ten years of catatonic Depression, by the delirious War Effort. Everything that the Hog Butcher of the World could command was bull-horned to out-totalize the totalitarian foe. Himself included. He was a proud piglet of the gross War Effort of the Republic.