by Leo Litwak
Harry was nineteen, a few months older than me, a big-shouldered, brown-haired, blue-eyed Pole. In Detroit he hung out at the Paradise and other black-and-tan show clubs. He was crazy about Count Basie and Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday and didn’t moderate his opinions though we were in a Jim Crow army in the Jim Crow South. In Columbia Negroes stepped off sidewalks into the street when a white man approached, and “nigger lover” was as virulent a curse as a man could make. Harry liked what he liked, said what he wanted to say, and—as far as he could get away with it—did what he wanted to do.
We went together on a pass to Columbia. There were no bars or liquor stores in town—South Carolina was a dry state. Harry introduced me to bootleg whiskey. I took one throat-clenching swig from an unlabeled bottle and that was enough. I was probably too tame for Harry. We liked each other, traveled together for a time, then drifted apart.
I KNEW WITTY disliked me. In the barracks he gave me the cold shoulder. I said, “Hello, Joe,” and he shrugged. When we met in town he greeted everyone in our group but refused to look at me. I asked Harry, “Am I right? Does he mean to insult me?”
Harry said, “The guy doesn’t like you.”
“It’s stupid, a kid’s game.”
Harry said, “Forget it. He’s an asshole.”
I tried to accept Witty’s dislike as a fact of barracks life but it hurt when he erased me, and one day he went too far, and I was humiliated. We had just finished a speed march, nine miles in two hours, up a dusty road, a hundred degrees, every man lobster red, first striding in cadence, then jogging, beginning to gasp early in the game, wobbling under the burden of full packs, trailed by an ambulance that inched up on stragglers and accumulated the fallen. Afterward we lined up naked in the latrine, waiting to get into the shower room, yelling to those already showering to hurry it up. Witty was in the shower and heard only my voice.
“Step in here and I’ll kick the shit out of you.”
I couldn’t believe he was serious and stepped into the shower with all the showers going. He pushed me and I stumbled along duckboards. He pressed me against the wall, cocked his fist, almost hit, then shoved me away.
“Why get in trouble over you?”
I soaked for a minute, then followed him into the latrine where he was toweling off. “Let’s go back of the barracks.”
“I’m not getting in trouble over you.” He put a stress of contempt into the “you.” “If you want to fight, meet me in the gym, with gloves.”
I was bowled over by his dislike. If we’d have gone in back of the barracks I could only have pawed him.
I said, “In the gym, then,” unable to keep my voice steady. “Whenever you want.”
He was leaving for Charleston on a three-day pass. When he got back he was headed for surgical technician training. He would return in two weeks. “Two weeks from Monday, before retreat, we’ll meet in the gym. That satisfy you?” It was said easily, as if he were transacting ordinary business, but there was the same stress of contempt when he said “you.”
“Two weeks from Monday. I’ll be there.”
I was ashamed and didn’t tell Harry what had happened in the shower room. I didn’t want to lose his respect. I went instead to a friend in Headquarters Company.
I had met Jason Diedrich in the music room of the post USO. He was a Harvard undergraduate, majoring in classics. He introduced me to his three Harvard buddies, also with Headquarters. The four of them had a room of their own in the Headquarters barracks.
Jason was very bright. He made sense of everything. I wanted him to make sense of my encounter with Joe Witty. I told him I’d stood there as if I couldn’t be insulted. I’d been humiliated.
It was a battle, he said, that I couldn’t win. “Get out of it, Leo.”
Jason had a monkish appearance, a narrow, severe face perched on a long throat, a wide thin mouth. He wore plain GI spectacles. His model was a Frère Lupus Servatus who preserved Ovid despite a shortage of parchment for more pious work. Servatus faked allegiance to his superiors in order to save what he loved, and Jason said that was also his intention. During the working day he was a Headquarters clerk. After hours he attended to the Greeks and Romans.
I asked Jason how I could get out of it.
He had pull and Headquarters needed another clerk. If I was interested he’d see about getting me transferred.
I had dreamed of combat, and dropping out would have left me weak and defeated. I said, “No, thanks,” to Jason.
Harry Roman came up with a better proposal. The air force needed pilots and navigators and bombardiers and advertised a training program for qualified infantry personnel. Why not apply for a transfer to the air force?
I said, “Absolutely!”
We met with First Sergeant Murphy, a career army man. Harry told him we wanted to apply for the air force program.
“What makes you think you’re qualified?”
“That’s what we want to find out.”
“I hear you’re a couple of fuckups.”
Harry said, “Then you’re better off without us, Sarge.”
Murphy reached to the shelves behind his desk and brought out blank forms.
“Fill these out and get them back to me. Nothing’s going to happen till you finish basic training and that’s no sure thing for you smart-asses.”
I HOPED WHEN Witty returned he would see our differences as stupid—unworthy of someone headed for OCS—and call off the fight. After two weeks he showed up in the barracks in his tie and overseas cap and summer tans. He was among a crowd of buddies gathered around his bed and footlocker. He spotted me at my end of the barracks. He shouted genially—no one would have guessed what he was proposing—“Next Monday, before retreat.”
The prospect of the fight had preoccupied me for two weeks. It didn’t seem to have troubled him at all.
IT WAS THE WORST possible time for my mother to choose to visit. She wrote that they were disturbed by my letters. I had revealed nothing, but the tone seemed depressed. They feared something was wrong and she was delegated to find out since Dad was tied up with strike preparations and couldn’t come himself. She already had a railroad ticket and a hotel reservation. She would arrive on Friday morning and stay till Monday. She wrote, “I do not expect you to meet me at the station. I will wait for you in the hotel.”
The last thing I wanted was for her to visit. I called home, caught her as she was about to leave, told her flatly not to come, that this was the worst possible time.
“Are you in trouble?”
I was too busy. We were going out in the field. There would be weeklong bivouacs. I didn’t know whether I could get passes to Columbia. Anyhow, basic training was over and I’d soon be home on furlough. It was crazy for her to suffer a miserable two-day trip in a crowded train.
She’d see me whenever I was available.
“Please, Mom, don’t come.”
“I’ll see you on Friday.”
I considered going to Witty and telling him my family was coming and that I’d have to delay the fight, but it would have been too shameful.
I took his measure across the barracks. He was several inches taller, not as broad across the chest and shoulders, probably the same weight, and with an air of confidence I lacked. I didn’t want to fight him.
Fort Jackson, with thirty thousand GIs, had overwhelmed the city of Columbia. Columbia still had charming neighborhoods but the main street had been reduced to honky-tonk quality. Schlock shops peddled army insignia and identification bracelets and uniform upgrades. The hotels were old and seedy. The two or three movie houses offered war films almost exclusively. Groups of horny GIs followed unaccompanied women, and I feared my petite, friendly mom would be harassed.
I met her after retreat. We talked about my training and Dad’s approaching strike. She said he was developing a strike fund, organizing a picket line, responding to flyers that the bosses had sent to union brothers pleading with them not to strike; that a strike
would jeopardize the war effort. Dad answered with his flyers. He reminded them that he had raised thousands of dollars for war bonds and had a son in the army and would do anything in his power to defeat Hitler. In boldface at the end of the flyer, Do not be misled. Fight to preserve your rights.
Our conversations were strained and edgy. She knew I was hiding something, and when she probed, I came close to exploding.
We ate junk food; there was no other kind. We suffered through a John Wayne movie that seemed pointless and untrue.
I apologized for not spending more time with her.
She said, “It’s enough being with you even for a little while.”
I felt guilty about leaving her alone in town. I didn’t know how she would get along when I wasn’t around.
“My dear boy, most of my life you weren’t around and yet somehow I managed. I am not a frail person.”
We sat in the small lounge of the hotel on her last evening, jammed together on a mildewed sofa. It was the day before I was to meet Joe Witty in the gym.
She said, “I speak to the soldiers on the street. They are nice boys.”
I told her she was too trusting. “You have no sense of danger. This isn’t your hometown, remember.”
“My hometown was Zhitomir. In Zhitomir I had good reason to be careful. I learned very early to have a sense of danger. Columbia, South Carolina, is not Zhitomir. Did I ever tell you about how I went to school when I was nine years old? It’s maybe a story I haven’t told you.”
There was a quota on Jewish schoolchildren and she couldn’t get into elementary school until she was nine years old. Her father, an estate manager, used his influence and she finally was allowed into a parochial school. Each morning she walked along a river path that took her through a peasant neighborhood. The men sat on their porch steps and when she passed shouted, “Little kike, where do you think you’re going?” They cursed her parents and all the other Jews of Zhitomir. When she started hurrying they turned their dogs loose. Each morning she was hounded into the river and arrived at school drenched. It happened for almost three weeks. She didn’t tell her father. She feared he would pull her out of school. Her teachers asked how come she was soaked. She refused to say and they threatened to suspend her but she pleaded, and since she was the best student in class, they let her stay, warning her to behave properly. She started earlier in the morning, before the peasants were out, and finally her tormentors lost interest and she was able to pass through their neighborhood without incident.
“We knew these people,” she said. “They lived hard lives. Drunk, they were terrible. Sober, they were altogether different. The same ones who cursed me and turned their dogs on me later invited me into their homes for tea. Someone put them up to being so cruel.”
I asked who put them up to it and she told me thugs called the Black Hundreds, enlisted by the czar to persecute Jews. My father, she said, had fought the Black Hundreds.
She knew his life as if it were a legend. I’d heard her tell his story often. He started as a pious boy, aimed for the rabbinate. When the Black Hundreds came to Zhitomir and afflicted the Jews, his faith was useless as a guide to action. The pious huddled like sheep, waiting to be slaughtered and it wasn’t in him to be a sheep. He threw off his faith, renounced the Bible as a fairy-tale account of origins, and took on as a more practical guide to action a man from Lithuania he knew only as Josef who brought weapons to the Zhitomir Jews and led recruits into the woods and taught them to shoot.
My dad was fourteen years old when he joined skirmishes against the Black Hundreds. He fought for two years. One night a dozen police came to his home, searched it, found his kinzov—a double-edged blade—evidence enough to charge him with revolutionary activity.
He was jailed first in Zhitomir, then sent to a prison in Kiev, and from there to a prison in Moscow. He was transported by train with other convicts to Yarensk on the edge of Siberia. He was exiled for a year, the sentence perhaps mitigated because he was only sixteen years old.
My mother had watched as they marched him in chains to the Zhitomir jail. She was eight years old and stood curbside with her mother and father as the political prisoners were hauled away.
She knew I had problems. She could see how tense and unhappy I was. “We are strong people,” she said. “We stand together. We have overcome great troubles.”
I told her I had problems, who didn’t, but nothing I couldn’t handle.
“Fine,” she said. “I am relieved.” She told me how strong and handsome I looked. She was confident I would overcome my troubles just as she and my father had. She said, “I love you, my boy,” and I said, “I love you, Mom.” I almost told her what I faced the next day with Joe Witty, but it could only have made her miserable. We said good-bye that night. I didn’t tell anyone she was visiting. Everyone in my outfit belonged to a different world and would fall out of my life. She would always be with me.
I was miserable during her visit. I couldn’t release myself from the date with Witty. I couldn’t stop the scenarios of defeat and humiliation rolling through my mind.
On my way back to the base after our last visit, I missed her intensely.
WHEN A MAN’S in shock, his face is gray, he’s in a cold sweat, his pulse is fluttery. The blood leaves the brain and collects in the solar plexus and elsewhere. Blood vessels collapse. The brain brooks no starving and will perish from the insult. Lift the legs, lower the head. Give plasma to raise the pressure in the veins.
There was cold sweat on my face, blood in my belly. The gym was a great shed with naked steel beams, sun dazzling through clerestories. We were beneath an elevated running track. In an opposite corner were mats for wrestlers and tumblers. Basketball games occupied the center of the gym. Balls pounded, shoes thudded, players called for passes. I heard rims vibrate from missed shots.
We faced each other in our corner of the gym, wearing sixteen-ounce gloves, stripped down to GI shorts. Once it started fear was gone. We circled each other. I launched punches. He jabbed. Wild swings. We clinched, pounded backs. This went on for several minutes, neither of us much hurt, both of us breathing hard, holding on in clinches. Just before the whistle that summoned us to retreat, he hit me in the eye with the lacings of his glove and I swung with purpose, but couldn’t hurt him. The fight ended in a clinch.
“Okay,” Witty gasped, “it’s time.”
I was shaking and exhilarated.
We walked to the locker room without speaking. I looked in the mirror and saw that I had a bruised eye.
“It’s not enough.”
“Time for retreat,” he said.
NO MORE SHORT-SHEETING, no more disrespect. No one troubled me or Harry. We were destined for the air force and were already considered gone. I continued with advanced medical training while waiting for the transfer. We marched into the countryside for war games. I did stints at the division hospital.
I was sent out on rifle-range duty. It was early fall, still hot weather. The rifle range was a lazy job for a medic. I wore full combat gear—red cross brassards pinned to each shoulder, steel helmet marked with red crosses on a white field, two medical kits suspended from a shoulder harness, anchored by a pistol belt. My kits held gauze bandages, ammonia capsules, small compresses, belly compresses, aspirin, bismuth and paregoric, bandage scissors, tape, Merthiolate, sulfa packets, sodium Amytal tablets, a hypodermic needle for blisters, tags for the wounded, and morphine Syrettes for shock.
I took off my kits, lay under a tree, took it easy while GIs fired at targets.
Behind us was Battle Village, dotted with minefields, strung with barbed wire. GIs wiggled beneath the wire. Machine guns fired overhead. Dynamite blasts simulated artillery. Infantrymen charged the mocked-up village and shot at targets in windows. Bazooka teams aimed at immobilized tanks.
With these cozy sounds of battle as background, I sent my dreams ahead to scout the terrain of war. I dreamed of what could happen if someone shouted, Aid Man! I’d hook up my pis
tol belt, run toward the wounded soldier, my hands on my kits to keep them from flapping. Once I reached him, then what? What if it was a chest wound, the cavity penetrated? I’d been instructed to use anything at hand to plug the hole and keep the lungs from collapsing. What if an artery was severed? A tourniquet tied too long meant gangrene. Each move I made risked a man’s life. This wasn’t where I wanted to be. I didn’t want to give aid. I had no particular calling as a medic. Better to enter combat as a warrior with no obligation to help anyone.
I was almost asleep, thinking about Joe Witty—reduced to ordinary size, no longer the villain of my fantasy. I had a clearer view of his strength and weakness, was a fool to have overestimated him.
I heard someone yell, “Aid Man!” Then again, “Aid Man!” I was half-asleep and dreamy and had imagined just this wail. “Aid Man!” I turned on an elbow and looked toward Battle Village. The dynamite blasts had stopped. The machine guns had stopped. There was no sound of firing anywhere. A GI ran across the field waving wildly. I recognized a trim platoon sergeant from C Company, one of the permanent cadre who had been to Ranger school and could jog fifteen miles with a full pack and not show the strain. “Aid Man!” Raging, as though I’d done something terrible. He ran up to me. He shouted in my face, “Aid Man!” He grabbed my shoulders, his mouth agape, heaving air.
“A man got his leg blowed off. Let’s go.”
I woke up the ambulance driver. I secured my kits. The three of us jumped into the ambulance. We slammed across the field toward Battle Village.
A squad leader had tripped into a hole just as a dynamite charge exploded. “His leg’s off,” the sergeant said. “His foot’s still in the shoe.”
The ambulance launched in the air, slammed down on the field, the carriage groaning. The ambulance driver hit every furrow. We bounced high, my kits slamming my thighs.
A group of GIs were clustered at a shell hole. A lieutenant crouched over a man covered by a blanket. They stepped aside for me. I saw a shoe a few yards away. I pulled back the blanket and looked. Gone at the calf, the flesh shredded. A hot, shitty smell, the skin peppered, a tourniquet tied above the knee. I untied the tourniquet; blood spurted onto the blanket. I could see the torn flesh, gristle, the artery gulping, the veins pinched shut. I retied the tourniquet, the flow of blood reduced to a slow welling. The scissors came out and I cut away the pant leg. The Syrette came out. I thrust the plunger into the hollow needle and broke the seal. I jammed the needle into his thigh and squeezed it out like toothpaste. I could feel muscles jumping. My hand was slimy where I touched the blanket.
