'Tis

by Frank McCourt

  He tells me stand easy and wants to know why I disobeyed a direct order and who the hell do I think I am defying a superior noncom even if he is training cadre, eh?

  I don’t know what to say because he knows everything and I’m afraid if I open my mouth I might be shipped to Korea tomorrow. He says Corporal Sneed or whatever the hell his Polish name is had every right to discipline me but he went too far especially when it was a three-day pass for the colonel’s orderly. I’m entitled to that pass and if I still want it he’ll arrange it for the coming weekend.

  Thanks, Sergeant.

  Okay. Dismissed.

  Sergeant?

  Yeah?

  I read Crime and Punishment.

  Oh, yeah? Well, I could have guessed you’re not as dumb as you look. Dismissed.

  In our fourteenth week of basic training there are rumors we’re being shipped to Europe. In the fifteenth week the rumors say we’re going to Korea. In the sixteenth week we’re told we’re definitely going to Europe.

  14

  We’re shipped to Hamburg and from there to Sonthofen, a replacement depot in Bavaria. My outfit from Fort Dix is broken up and sent all over the European Command. I’m hoping they’ll send me to England so that I can travel easily to Ireland. Instead they send me to a caserne in Lenggries, a small Bavarian village, where I’m assigned to dog training, the canine corps. I tell the captain I don’t like dogs, they chewed my ankles to bits when I delivered telegrams in Limerick, but the captain says, Who asked you? He turns me over to a corporal chopping up great slabs of bloody red meat who tells me, Stop whining, fill that goddam tin plate with meat, get in that cage and feed your animal. Put the plate down and get your hand outa the way case your animal thinks it’s his dinner.

  I have to stay in the cage and watch my dog eating. The corporal calls this familiarization. He says, This animal will be your wife while you’re on this base, well, not your wife exactly, because it’s not a bitch, you know what I mean. Your M1 rifle and your animal will be all you’ll have for a family.

  My dog is a black German shepherd and I don’t like him. His name is Ivan and he’s not like the other dogs, the shepherds and Dobermans, who howl at anything that moves. When he’s finished eating he looks at me, licks his lips and backs away, baring his teeth. The corporal is outside the cage telling me that’s a hell of a goddam dog I have there, doesn’t howl and make a lotta bullshit noise, the kinda dog you want in combat when one bark will get you killed. He tells me bend slowly, pick up the plate, tell my dog he’s a good dog, good Ivan, nice Ivan, see you in the morning, honey, back out nice and easy, close the gate, drop that lock, get your hand outa the way. He tells me I did okay. He can see Ivan and I are already asshole buddies.

  Every morning at eight I turn out with a platoon of dog handlers from all over Europe. We march in a circle with the corporal in the middle calling hup ho hup ho hup hup hup ho heel, and when we yank on the dogs’ leashes we’re glad they’re growling behind muzzles.

  For six weeks we march and run with the dogs. We climb the mountains behind Lenggries and race along the banks of rivers. We feed and groom them till we’re ready to remove their muzzles. We’re told this is the big day, like graduation or marriage.

  And then the company commander sends for me. His company clerk, Corporal George Shemanski, is going stateside on furlough in three months and they’re sending me to company clerk school for six weeks so that I can replace him. Dismissed.

  I don’t want to go to company clerk school. I want to stay with Ivan. Six weeks together and we’re pals. I know when he growls at me he’s just telling me he loves me though he still has a head of teeth in case I displease him. I love Ivan and I’m ready to remove his muzzle. No one else can remove his muzzle without losing a hand. I want to take him on maneuvers with the Seventh Army in Stuttgart where I’ll dig a hole in the snow and we’ll be warm and comfortable. I want to see what it would be like to turn him loose on a soldier pretending to be Russian and watch Ivan tear his protective clothing to bits before I bring him to heel. Or watch him lunge for the crotch and not the throat when I swing a dummy Russian at him. They can’t send me to company clerk school for six weeks and let someone else handle Ivan. Everyone knows it’s one man, one dog, and it takes months to break in another handler.

  I don’t know why they have to pick me for company clerk school when I never even went to high school and the base is filled with high school graduates. It makes me wonder if company clerk school is punishment for never going to high school.

  My head is filled with dark clouds and I wish I could bang it against the wall. The only word in my head is fuck and that’s a word I hate because it means hate. I’d like to kill the company commander, and now here’s this second lieutenant barking at me because I passed him without saluting.

  Soldier, get over here. What do you do when you see an officer?

  Salute him, sir.

  And?

  I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t see you.

  Didn’t see me? Didn’t see me? You’d go to Korea and claim you didn’t see the gooks coming over the hill? Right, soldier?

  I don’t know what to say to this lieutenant who’s my age and trying to grow a mustache with sad ginger hair. I want to tell him they’re sending me to company clerk school and isn’t that enough punishment for not saluting a thousand second lieutenants? I want to tell him about my six weeks with Ivan and my troubles back in Fort Dix when I had to bury my pass but there are dark clouds and I know I should be quiet, tell ’em nothing but your name, rank, serial number. I know I should be quiet but I’d like to tell this second lieutenant fuck off, kiss my ass with your miserable ginger mustache.

  He tells me report to him in fatigues at twenty-one hundred hours sharp and he makes me pull weeds on the parade ground while other dog handlers pass by on their way to a beer in Lenggries.

  When I’m finished I go to Ivan’s cage and remove his muzzle. I sit on the ground and talk to him and if he chews me to pieces I won’t have to go to company clerk school. But he growls a bit and licks my face and I’m glad there’s no one here to see how I feel.

  Company clerk school is in the Lenggries caserne. We sit at desks while instructors come and go. We’re told the company clerk is the single most important soldier in an outfit. Officers get killed or move on, noncoms too, but an outfit without a clerk is doomed. The company clerk is the one in combat who knows when the outfit is under strength, who’s dead, who’s wounded, who’s missing, the one who takes over when the supply clerk gets his fuckin’ head blown off. The company clerk, men, is the one who delivers your mail when the mail clerk gets a bullet up his ass, the one who keeps you in touch with the folks back home.

  After we’ve learned how important we are we learn to type. We have to type up a model of a daily attendance report with five carbon copies and if one mistake is made, one little stroke too much, an error in addition, a strikeover, the whole thing is to be retyped.

  No erasures, goddammit. This is the United States Army and we don’t allow erasures. Allow erasures on a report and you invite sloppiness all along the front. We’re holding the line against the goddam Reds here, men. Can’t have sloppiness. Perfection, men, perfection. Now type, goddammit.

  The clatter and rattle of thirty typewriters make the room sound like a combat zone with howls from soldier/typists hitting wrong keys and having to tear reports from machines and start all over. We punch our heads and shake our fists at heaven and tell the instructors we were almost finished, couldn’t we please, please erase this one little goddam mark.

  No erasures, soldier, and watch your language. I have my mother’s picture in my pocket.

  At the end of the course they give me a certificate with a rating of Excellent. The captain handing out the certificates says he’s proud of us and they’re proud of us all the way up to the Supreme Commander in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower himself. The captain is proud to say that only nine men washed out in the course and the twenty-one of us
who passed are a credit to the folks back home. He hands us our certificates and chocolate chip cookies baked by his wife and two small daughters and we have permission to eat our cookies right here and now this being a special occasion. Behind me men are cursing and mumbling these cookies taste like cat shit and the captain smiles and gets ready to make another speech till a major whispers to him and what I hear later is that the major told him, Shaddap, you been drinking, and that’s true because the captain has the kind of face that never turned away from a whiskey bottle.

  If Shemanski hadn’t been granted a furlough I’d still be up in the kennels with Ivan or down in a bierstube in Lenggries with the other dog handlers. Now I have to spend a week watching him by his desk in the orderly room typing reports and letters and telling me I should be thanking him for getting me away from dogs and into a good job that might be useful in civilian life. He says I should be happy I learned to type, I might write another Gone With the Wind some day, ha ha ha.

  The night before his furlough there’s a party in a Lenggries beer hall. It’s Friday night and I have a weekend pass. Shemanski has to return to the caserne because his furlough doesn’t start till tomorrow and when he leaves his girlfriend, Ruth, asks me where I’m staying on my weekend pass. She tells me come to her place for a beer, Shemanski won’t be there, but the minute we’re in the door we’re in the bed going wild with ourselves. Oh, Mac, she says, oh, Mac, you’re so young. She’s old herself, thirty-one, but you’d never know it the way she carries on depriving me of any sleep and if this is the way she is with Shemanski all the time it’s no wonder he needs a long furlough in the U.S.A. Then it’s dawn and there’s a knock on the door downstairs and when she peeks out the window she lets out a little squeal, Oh, mein Gott, it’s Shemanski, go, go, go. I jump up and dress as fast as I can but there’s a problem when I put on my boots and then try to pull my pants over them and the legs are stuck and entangled and Ruth is hissing and squealing, Out ze window, oh, pliss, oh, pliss. I can’t leave by the front door with Shemanski standing there banging away, he’d surely kill me, so it’s out the window into three feet of snow which saves my life and I know Ruth is up there shutting the window and pulling the curtain so that Shemanski won’t see me trying to get my boots off so that I can slip on my pants, then boots again, so cold my dong is the size of a button, with snow everywhere, halfway up my belly, in my pants, filling my boots.

  Now I have to sneak away from Ruth’s house and into Lenggries looking for hot coffee in a café where I can dry out but nothing is open yet and I wander back up to the caserne wondering, Did God put Shemanski on this earth to destroy me entirely?

  Now that I’m company clerk I sit at Shemanski’s desk and the worst part of the day is typing up the attendance report every morning. Master Sergeant Burdick sits at the other desk drinking coffee and telling me how important this report is, that they’re waiting for it over at HQ so that they can add it to the other company reports that go to Stuttgart to Frankfurt to Eisenhower to Washington so that President Truman himself will know the strength of the United States Army in Europe in case of sudden attack by those goddam Russians who wouldn’t hesitate if we were short a man, one man, McCourt. They’re waiting, McCourt, so get that report done.

  The thought of the world waiting for my report makes me so nervous I hit wrong keys and have to start all over. Every time I say, Shit, and pull the report from the typewriter. Sergeant Burdick’s eyebrows shoot to his hairline. He drinks his coffee, looks at his watch, loses control of his eyebrows, and I feel so desperate I’m afraid I’ll break down and weep. Burdick takes phone calls from HQ to say the colonel is waiting, the general, the chief of staff, the President. A messenger is sent to pick up the report. He waits by my desk and that makes it even worse and I wish I could be back in the Biltmore Hotel scouring toilets. When the report is finished without error he takes it away and Sergeant Burdick wipes his forehead with a green handkerchief. He tells me forget the other work, that I’m to stay at this desk all day and practice practice practice till I get these goddam reports down right. They’re gonna be talking up at HQ and wondering what kind of asshole he is for taking on a clerk that can’t even type a report. All the other clerks knock off that report in ten minutes and he doesn’t want Company C to be the laughingstock of the caserne.

  So, McCourt, you go nowheres till you type perfect reports. Start typing.

  All day and night he drills me, handing me different numbers, telling me, You’ll thank me for this.

  And I do. In a few days I can type the reports so fast they send a lieutenant from HQ to see if these are made-up numbers done the night before. Sergeant Burdick says, No, no, I’m right on his case, and the lieutenant looks at me and tells him, We got corporal material here, Sergeant.

  The sergeant says, Yes, sir, and when he smiles his eyebrows are lively.

  When Shemanski returns I expect to be reassigned to Ivan but the captain tells me I’m staying on as clerk in charge of supplies. I’ll be responsible for sheets, blankets, pillows and condoms which I’ll distribute to dog handler trainees from all over the European Command making sure everything is returned when they’re leaving, everything but the condoms, ha ha ha.

  How can I tell the captain I don’t want to be a clerk down in the basement where I have to requisition everything in language that is backward, cases, pillow, white, or balls, Pong Ping, counting things and making lists when all I want to do is get back to Ivan and the dog handlers and drink beer and look for girls in Lenggries, Bad Tolz, Munich?

  Sir, is there any chance I could be reassigned to the dogs?

  No, McCourt. You’re a damn fine clerk. Dismissed.

  But, sir . . .

  Dismissed, soldier.

  There are so many dark clouds fluttering in my head I can barely make my way out of his office and when Shemanski laughs and says, He gave you the shaft, eh? Won’t let you back to your bow wow? I tell him fuck off and I’m hauled back into the captain’s office for a reprimand and told if this ever happens again I’ll face a court-martial that will make my army record look like Al Capone’s arrest record. The captain barks that I’m a private first class now and if I behave myself and keep accurate accounts and control the condoms I could rise to corporal within six months and now get outa here, soldier.

  In a week I’m in trouble again and it’s because of my mother. When I came to Lenggries I went to the HQ offices to fill out an application for an allotment for my mother. The army would retain half my pay, match it, and send her a check every month.

  Now I’m having a beer in Bad Tolz and Davis, the allotment clerk, is in the same room drunk on schnapps and when he calls to me, Hey, McCourt, too bad your mother is up shit creek, the dark clouds in my head are so blinding I throw my beer stein and lunge at him with every wish to strangle him till I’m pulled away by two sergeants and held for the MPs.

  I’m locked up for the night in Bad Tolz and taken before a captain in the morning. He wants to know why I’m assaulting corporals who are drinking a beer and minding their own business and when I tell him about the insult to my mother he asks, Who’s the allotment clerk?

  Corporal Davis, sir.

  And you, McCourt, where you from?

  New York, sir.

  No, no. I mean, where you really from?

  Ireland, sir.

  Goddam it. I know that. You’ve got the map on your face. What part?

  Limerick, sir.

  Oh, yeah? My parents are from Kerry and Sligo. It’s a pretty country but it’s poor, right?

  Yes, sir.

  Okay, send in Davis.

  Davis comes in and the captain turns to the man beside him who is taking notes. Jackson, this is off the record. Now, Davis, you said something about this man’s mother in public?

  I . . . only . . .

  You said something of a confidential nature about the lady’s financial problems?

  Well . . . sir . . .

  Davis, you’re a prick and I could send you
for a company court-martial but I’ll just say you had a few beers and your jaw flapped.

  Thank you, sir.

  And if I ever hear of you making comments like that again I’ll ram a cactus up your ass. Dismissed.

  When Davis leaves the captain says, The Irish, McCourt. We gotta stick together. Right?

  Yes, sir.

  In the hallway Davis puts out his hand. Sorry about that, McCourt. I should know better. My mother gets the allotment, too, and she’s Irish. I mean, her parents were Irish so that makes me half Irish.

  This is the first time in my life anyone ever apologized to me and all I can do is mumble and turn red and shake Davis’ hand because I don’t know what to say. And I don’t know what to say to people who smile and tell me their mothers and fathers and grandparents are Irish. One day they’re insulting your mother, the next day they’re bragging their own mothers are Irish. Why is it the minute I open my mouth the whole world is telling me they’re Irish and we should all have a drink? It’s not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you’d wonder how they’d get along if someone hadn’t invented the hyphen.