Before Their Time: A Memoir

by Robert Kotlowitz

  Between Antonovich and Gallagher stood the bandylegged figure of Rene Archambault, the company’s master sergeant. Archambault, who was from Presque Isle, Maine, and claimed partial Indian ancestry, was one of those men who are always dissatisfied with the world: a chronic complainer. He was also one of those who insist on trying to fix it: a chronic meddler. Maybe that’s the nature of master sergeants, for whom everything exists to be corrected. For example, he was not happy with the name Rene. It was too sissy for him; and sissy marked the depths of contempt in Rene Archambault’s Army, as everywhere else. How well the smart ASTP kids knew it, and how often our master sergeant liked to remind us of it. I think he probably also disliked his family name, which he pronounced as they would in France: “Arr-chahm-bow.” Spoken with the merest suggestion of self-mockery, as though he expected us to laugh at it. He wanted everyone to call him Arch, insisting on it, in fact, in what we all perceived as an attempt at false intimacy. We were uncomfortable with that, always.

  Arch was a steady, compulsive worker—also part of the nature of master sergeants—issuing orders in a surprisingly reedy voice that was not unlike Lieutenant Gallagher’s, scurrying around on his bandy legs, glaring at us over his scimitar nose, which in profile made a perfect half-moon arc. Such perfection in noses is not given to most men. Perhaps it was part of his Penobscot heritage.

  I think of poor self-conscious Arch, going through life having to pronounce his name slowly, syllable by syllable, then spell it out for everyone he was meeting for the first time: the tedium of it, the resentment. I could sympathize with that. I had been spelling my name for strangers for years. I even had to do it for Rene Archambault, twice.

  We all belonged to the three of them, Antonovich, Gallagher, and Archambault, and on their own terms. Company C and the third platoon was their common property. For better or worse. To make or break. Life and death, in fact. And few questions, of any kind, were ever allowed us, even by Francis Gallagher. As Rene Archambault used to say, standing over us with his hands on his hips, as though his words would explain everything, “There’s a war to be won out there, you dumb fucks.” Spoken with a cheerless smile, too.

  Such were our leaders.

  AND the first squad and its leader?

  I find that I have to struggle to get the names right after all these years. I have to reach deep down for them, digging into the marshy pit of memory. When the names surface, if they surface at all, they must then be tested against the accumulation of a half-century of other names, and I don’t feel especially confident about the process.

  Doug Kelleher, then (ASTP), Bern Keaton (also ASTP), and the others, Roger Johnson, Paul Willis, Barney Barnato, and Rocky Hubbell (actually and unforgettably, J. Rutherford Hubbell, Jr.), who was our squad leader.

  No one in the first squad ever called Rocky Hubbell “Rutherford.” There were too many comic overtones to the name, too many possible easy shots. He himself tended to joke about it. “I’m saving Rutherford for my old age,” Rocky used to say. “Like capital,” he would add, raising a laugh.

  But all those names covered a nice range, Kelleher, Keaton, Kotlowitz, Willis, Barnato, and the others, somehow wholly appropriate for an army of draftees. If I have them right, that is. If I didn’t invent some of them in the passion to remember. Also, I’ve discovered that I get a little heated when I write the names out like this. A small tremor of nervous agitation seems to go through me, and I shiver a little.

  AS SOON as we arrived in the hills of Tennessee from the University of Maine, Rene Archambault co-opted us. That was his right as master sergeant of C Company but not necessarily his duty. (Master sergeants can do anything they want.) What Arch did was to make Doug Kelleher, Bern Keaton, and me the squad’s BAR team, the three-man Browning Automatic Rifle unit. This happened almost as soon as we detrained, just minutes after we had been assigned to the third platoon; and it did not thrill us.

  To begin with, the life expectancy of the BAR team in combat, we had learned at Fort Benning, was about eleven seconds. (That is not hyperbole, it is scientific fact.) Then the BAR itself was an unusually clumsy weapon, which everyone rightly tried to avoid, halfway between a machine gun and a rifle, a deadweight all the way. Among the three of us, we would be carrying one BAR, two M-1 rifles, ammo for all three, and a cluster of hand grenades. That was Arch’s welcoming gift to us. Doug was made team leader, Bern and I were the assistants; on marches we would share the weapon, rotating it among us every couple of miles.

  No, we were not thrilled.

  Then, as soon as Arch finished with us, he swept through the rest of the company, repeating the first squad’s shuffle, getting the old National Guardsmen and aging draftees off the hook, freeing them of the terrible burden of the Browning Automatic Rifle. (He had made Roger Johnson and Paul Willis, who were a two-man BAR team before we got there, happy GIs with a single order.) It was a pretty slick operation. Eventually most of the BARs in the Yankee Division ended up in the hands of the smart new arrivals from ASTP.

  It was easy to read the future in that. We would be the division’s stooges, heirs to every unwanted job, the BAR to begin with, and KP, guard, and latrine duty as well. It would be a kind of stupid hazing with no recourse, and we would be its victims. Of course, we had to accept it, cursing among ourselves like big shots, and sounding like children.

  But part of me, at eighteen, was eager to suffer the hazards and humiliations of war. In fact, I thought I had it coming to me. I was burning with a young man’s need to please and with a secret touch of patriotic fervor, two strong motives for performing without complaint. Also, as I’ve said, I really hated the Germans. It was a deeply personal loathing, not abstract at all, with powerful political impulses that had been inflamed by reports of concentration camps, Kristallnacht, and venomous anti-Semitism. And I was a Jew. In terms of motive, that went a long way in those days.

  FOR THE moment, after arriving in Tennessee, we were all despondent. We had been wrenched out of a safe environment at the University of Maine. Our names had been neatly arranged in alphabetical order and divvied up among various battalions, thrusting Kelleher, Keaton, and Kotlowitz together for the first time, although we had known each other on the Orono campus by sight. My real pals from basic training and Maine, my old buddies, were also being clustered in alphabetical niches, “A”s with “A”s, “B”s with “B”s, and so on to the very last Zed.

  I soon learned that Kelleher was an Army brat, son of a career officer, a colonel sitting out the war behind a desk at Fort Dix, New Jersey, while Keaton was a parochial-school kid from Hackensack, New Jersey, who was suffering his first religious doubts, mostly in silence. I wasn’t much interested in Kelleher and Keaton, and they weren’t much interested in me—not at first. I wanted my old Orono buddies back, those who understood me and loved me without question, and they were gone now to other squads in other platoons, scattered by the necessities of the alphabet.

  But given time and experience enough, of course, Doug Kelleher and Bern Keaton quickly became my buddies, too, understanding me possibly too well, and the eczema that had flared up on the back of my neck and the insides of my elbows, whenever I remembered where I was, soon cleared up, leaving only a scab or two as reminders of my arrival in Tennessee in the Yankee Division. Nevertheless, there was no doubt about it: I was in the infantry, for real. That knowledge—so bitter, so conclusive—would be like living with a stone in my gut.

  AND the rest of the squad?

  Roger Johnson and Paul Willis, relieved of the BAR by Arch’s masterstroke, became our scouts. They both seemed comfortable in the job; as scouts, they were always up front, a touch away from everybody else—a job that was good for the human-shy, which they both were. Johnson, in fact, was so taciturn that he was often speechless, literally without words, a Green Mountain boy from Vermont who spoke perhaps half a dozen sentences a day, mainly having to do with his personal needs. And Paul Baxter Willis?

  Paul Willis was the company thief, one
with a specific and highly original taste. He stole only our laundry, concentrating on underwear. That is all Willis ever took. Underwear. A weird and feckless act, stealing another man’s underwear—and not easy to understand.

  I have tried for years to imagine how such a kink shapes itself, but without success. I know that there must be psychoanalytic explanations—more than one, probably—but such explanations are not always as humanly satisfying as I might want. So I try to avoid them. And if there was an erotic subtext to Willis’s thievery, I was too naive then to grasp it. Now I wonder what Willis himself thought of it all, something that didn’t occur to me at the time. Did he try to set his thieving apart from his real self, as a temporary aberration that was out of his control? Or did he rationalize his right, in Übermensch style, to steal from his comrades?

  We tried to confront Willis once—Kelleher, Keaton, and I—stumbling foolishly through our accusations, losing confidence as we went along. But Willis was ahead of us. He denied the charge without hesitation, without a blink, smiling rigidly the whole time, as though his mouth was trapped in a vise. Dismay and disbelief filled his watery-blue eyes. His body shied from us. Me? Willis mimed, refusing to speak aloud as he held the flat of his hand over his heart as though his heart had been wounded. Slowly then, the concept of pathology, its repulsive reality, which I knew only from the classroom, began to form in my mind. The same thing, I think, was happening to Kelleher and Keaton. There stood skinny Paul Willis in the middle of the barracks floor, dressed only in Bern Keaton’s olive drab shorts, which just happened to be his size. They even had Bern’s laundry mark on them. And still smiling, still theatrically mute, as pale, willowy, and dim as Hamlet’s Ophelia, Willis continued to deny that they were Bern’s.

  This offended us. We became morally indignant. And smug. (Didn’t Willis’s “crime” prove our superiority to the old-timers in the YD?) We began to avoid him, as though he carried something contagious on his person. Rocky Hubbell, to whom we finally complained as our squad leader, advised us to look the other way. It was only underwear, he said blandly. In time, I came to understand that this was excellent counsel, although I disdained it at first. Willis, I began to reason to myself, was one of our scouts. At some moment in a dubious future, some critical moment, we might all have to depend on his judgment and his good will, perhaps for our very lives. That idea made me rethink everything. I decided that I would allow Paul Willis to be a thief. I would have to.

  Besides, Rocky Hubbell did not like confrontations. Not in his squad. Given an option, he always avoided a verbal shoot-out. Steadiness was what Rocky admired. Rocky, who was a tall, bony Texan, the first I had ever known, still had something of the romantic look of the old west about him, something dusty and a little raw. He barely moved his lips when he spoke, so you had to listen hard to hear what he was saying; this, of course, kept everybody at full attention. One of his pleasures was to write sentimental love letters to his girlfriend in Amarillo. Sprawled on his barracks cot in the evening for hours at a time, he composed these notes with meticulous care, chewing on his pencil and staring into space, perhaps looking for the muse. Sometimes he tested a phrase on us, asking for approval from Bern Keaton or me, whom he considered the squad’s arbiters of culture, thereby confirming our own opinions of ourselves. “The beautitudes [sic] of God’s blessings” is one I recall, with gratitude. This unexpected poetic thrust in Rocky made us feel close to him; any sign of softness in our NCOs or officers had the same effect.

  Inevitably, I guess, there had to be an opposing force at work in Rocky, if only for symmetry’s sake. With Rocky it took the form of a chaotic impulse hidden just below the surface. We all felt its power at one time or another, and it could be scary. Rocky’s explosions, when they erupted, generated such heat and electricity that he would later have to pretend that he couldn’t remember what had happened; they were too much to acknowledge for a man who contrived to live in such an aura of sanity most of the time. A report of a crazed gunfight in a Columbia, South Carolina, alley once: nobody hurt. An extended joyride in a stolen car outside the same city just before we went overseas: no charges pressed. And others, later on. They were all forgiven, it seems, in light of Rocky’s military record, which was without flaw. Lieutenant Gallagher intended to keep it that way; squad leaders as competent as Rocky Hubbell were rare. Nevertheless, once we had developed reservations about his behavior, we learned to keep an eye on him. We needed him, as we needed Paul Willis, at his sanest and most effective, when he was feeling fully responsible for us and himself, when there were no distractions.

  Another interesting thing about Rocky: he didn’t like to show himself naked in front of the squad. This forced him into a whole set of embarrassed contortions whenever he dressed or undressed in the barracks with us, something that was comical at times in his efforts to keep from being seen, as though he were a virginal maiden like Susanna, nervous at being spied on by the elders. (We may not have been elders, but we were certainly voyeurs.) It also meant that he was usually the last man in the showers, joining us only when we were almost done, standing with his back to the rest of us, soaping himself slowly, as he pretended to be lost in thought. That too made him unexpectedly vulnerable.

  “Small penis,” Doug Kelleher decided.

  “No penis,” Bern Keaton said.

  And we all laughed, perhaps too loudly, in the traditional way of slaves who think they’re smarter than their master.

  As for Barney Barnato, he never did make it back to the division in time for Tennessee maneuvers. He was still on emergency leave in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where his mother had been dying for three weeks. That was the story at the time. Poor Barney Barnato, we thought, remembering our own mothers; it was sad. That left just six of us in the first squad for maneuvers, something more than half strength, if my count is right and if I can forget Ira Fedderman and the others who only joined us after maneuvers were over.

  TWO

  Crossing the Cumberland

  WE WERE encamped east of Nashville. Once we had been swallowed up by the first squad and handed the hated BAR, three days of a steady, chilled rain made life even more miserable for us and kept the Yankee Division from moving out into the sodden Tennessee hills that surrounded the camp. In those hills, we were to search out and destroy an unknown “enemy” division that had already arrived on the scene somewhere and was waiting for us in hiding. That at least was the rumor that spread through C Company. The scenario, which made room for a certain amount of improvisation, was simple enough. The encounter between us, the fake battle that had been planned for so long between the two divisions, was to be to the finish, theirs or ours. It was serious business, in Army terms, and one of the final steps in our training before heading overseas.

  The decision was made at Division Headquarters to bivouac where we were until the rains lifted. Meanwhile we soaked in our wet uniforms, the coarse wool of socks and sweaters sticking to our skins and stinking. It was late April in Tennessee and felt like mid-winter, and the fact that it was already spring by the calendar turned our mood even more sour. We hung around the cooking fires making grim jokes, sipping coffee so hot that we could hardly hold the scalding canteens in our bare hands, watching our clothes steam in the heat of the flames. Shivering like animals, we felt sorry for ourselves and swore at the world for being imperfect, forgetting why we were in Tennessee in the first place; ideology was suddenly no match for bodily comforts.

  During that time, Bern Keaton and I shared a pup tent, a logical pairing on the surface, you would think, ordered by Rocky in good faith, but it turned out to be a match made in hell. The problem was that I was not entirely competent at meeting certain basic military demands, a curse that followed me everywhere I served in the Army. For example, I never learned how to dig an efficient drainage ditch around our tent—an ordinary job for almost anyone else—so that rainwater, instead of innocently running off from our quarters as it should have, poured through the tent itself, soaking blankets,
clothes, rifles, ammo, and us. When this happened, Bern and I stared at the fierce little streams that swept through our shelter, then turned to each other, stricken. Was he blaming me? Should he blame me? Could I defend myself? These terrible questions hovered silently in the air while guilt riddled my eyes and Bern looked away in disgust.

  By the second night, the tent itself was leaking through its overhead seams (not my fault, not anybody’s), and soon, as the dismal wet hours slowly passed, Bern Keaton and I awoke to the discovery that we could not bear the other’s presence. By mid-morning we had begun to hate each other. It was the kind of smoldering loathing that flares up when misery is not only shared but created by two people bound to each other by necessity (the sad story of many marriages). Bern’s flatulence turned out to be another problem, although, to be absolutely fair, he was later to make the same charge against me, with some accuracy.

  We also watched anxiously as the others, the National Guardsmen and the old draftees—Paul Willis and Rocky Hubbell, as well as Roger Johnson, who turned out to be superbly skilled in the art of living in the wild—stayed reasonably dry, ate well, and actually seemed to be enjoying themselves at moments. Of course, it was a class thing. I—and Bern, too—was soft from birth and from training. Neither of us had been exactly used to receiving hard knocks in our other lives, although we were fast developing a stoic mode to help us face them in the Army. And while we were learning, our wounds were being rubbed sore by the fact that Doug Kelleher, who was also soft, was sharing Roger Johnson’s tent, a model of basic engineering achievement that stood high and dry only a couple of yards from ours.