Shifty's War

by Marcus Brotherton

  Wish it could’ve been that way in other parts of the world. A week later the calendar showed December 7, 1941. A bunch of fellas gathered around Popeye’s radio that Sunday morning, shocked to hear that Hawaii had been bombed by the Japanese. Pearl Harbor, they called it. The attack came out of the blue. A bunch of our ships were sunk. A bunch of American boys were dead. Nobody could believe the news. A few of the fellows wondered aloud where Japan even was. Shoot, if Japan wanted a fight, America would take it to them, and take it hard. We figured it wouldn’t take much to whip a little country like that.

  After Pearl Harbor, nothing felt the same. Lots of fellas straightaway quit whatever they were doing and enlisted. Seemed a man never felt more patriotic than just then. Wherever you looked, wherever you went, folks was flying the American flag. This was our country, and if we weren’t going to defend it, who would?

  December went up and I went home for Christmas break. Even in Clinchco, there was new talk going around town. Boys were signing up, draft or no draft, boys as young as me, and when I returned to the vocational school in January 1942 an uncomfortable feeling traveled up my spine. You’d walk along the sidewalk, and if you were an able-bodied young man and weren’t wearing a uniform, people would look at you strange. In the bigger picture of things, that prompted a good feeling. Americans were all in this together, come whatever evil came our way, and nobody questioned what we needed to do. Our freedom was at stake, our ability to make something of our lives. I couldn’t quite understand why Germany and Japan wanted to mess things up like they were doing all over the world, but when I got to studying how the situation was playing out, I knew exactly what was required of me. Just didn’t know when.

  Come next month, I found out. They shipped us all in the vocational school over to the Navy Shipyard across the river at Portsmouth. A big shop was down there, and they wanted us to start working on the ships. Real work, not just schooling work, and we started in on battleships, worked on the USS Alabama and made parts for the carriers. The word they used was “essential.” We’d never get called up to fight. Working on those battleships was needed for the war effort, they said, and word came that we were all getting frozen to our jobs. It meant that we couldn’t enlist, even if we wanted to.

  When I found out this job-freezing was coming, I grabbed Popeye by the arm and said, “Now, we don’t want to get left out of this war. If we’re going to get into it, we’d better do it right now.” So we both went over and signed up for the Army that same day. Later that afternoon, when we came back to the shipyards and quit, the guy in charge really jumped on us. He called the recruiter who signed us up and raised a fuss, but the recruiter said, “There ain’t nothing you can do about it. Those boys signed the papers. They’re in the Army now.” I guess we were the last two people that came out of that Navy yard who joined the service, because they froze it up real tight after that.

  Life magazine ran this article about a new branch of the service starting up. Paratroopers, it was called. Some other countries had tried it, and it was met with a lot of success. The paratroopers were like infantrymen except they jumped out of airplanes with their rifles in their hands. Instead of coming at the enemy head-on, they jumped behind enemy lines and created their own battlefronts with whatever enemy they found there. Always ready to fight, the paratroopers were considered elite, like the Rangers or Green Berets are today, and if a fella wanted to be the best, why, he signed up for the paratroopers. It was an all-volunteer outfit. Nobody was bending your arm to make you come in. Why, plenty of fellows wanted to join the paratroopers but weren’t tough enough to make the cut. A fellow had to be the best of the best.

  Popeye and I got to studying that, and decided that if we was gonna fight, then we’d want to fight with the paratroopers. It took some nerve though, so he and I struck up a little wager. Each of us said that if one of us was gonna back out, then he’d have to pay the other fella ten dollars. Well, that sounded fair. We did a little more studying and found out that the paratroopers made fifty dollars more per month than a regular soldier. Fifty dollars was a lot of money, so that sealed the deal for us, right then and there.

  One of my parents needed to sign for me to join the paratroopers because of my age. I had just turned nineteen and you needed to be twenty-one without your parents’ permission. I suspected neither Daddy nor Mama would be real happy to sign since the paratroopers was considered dangerous duty. I went home to Clinchco and explained things, and sure enough they weren’t happy. But Daddy knew the military and what a young man sets his sights on doing. So he signed my papers anyway, and I was set.

  The Army sent us over to Camp Pickett in Virginia for a week where they gave us uniforms and physicals and a heap of shots. They checked us all real close. You couldn’t be too tall. You couldn’t be too heavy. You couldn’t wear glasses. You had to be able to hear well. You had to have so many good teeth. If you had any records of broken bones, they wouldn’t take you. I always wondered about that teeth business. I wasn’t gonna bite them Germans. But that was that.

  I was the first to enlist in our family. A while later my younger brother Jimmy quit school and joined the Navy. My older brother Barney was married by then with a kid on the way, but he wanted to do his duty, too, so he signed up for the Marines. Our youngest brother, Frankie, was too young to join, but I suspected he’d enlist as soon as he was old enough.

  Popeye and me passed all our tests just fine. We didn’t feel any fear at first, none that we talked of anyway. Course, we weren’t paratroopers yet, just volunteering to give it a try. Soon enough they’d ship us out for Camp Toccoa down in Georgia to begin our paratrooper training. That’s where the real fun would start.

  4

  BULLETPROOF

  Come nightfall, our train screeched to a stop at the depot. We climbed out and smoke billowed, or maybe dust, except it was too rainy to be dusty. A coffin factory sat alongside the tracks, making a spooky greeting to the town of Toccoa, and Popeye and me were now three states away from home.

  Other boys climbed off the train with us, all trying to find our gear, all not knowing where to go. Trucks had stood by earlier, somebody said, but they were gone already. Together we discussed what direction to head and we set out to walk the six miles from the depot to camp. The rain felt warm since it was July already, 1942, but it curled around the collar of my jacket and shivered down my back. The camp was dark when we showed up. Toombs, it was called. I reckoned it wasn’t a very good name for a camp for soldiers who are going off to war. But somebody said no, that wasn’t right—Camp Toombs had been renamed Camp Toccoa, in honor of the town where the depot was. So Camp Toccoa was what we were to call it from then on. All around me, guys yelled and shouted in the night, and fellas were saying baRbwire with that hard R sound, not bobwire like I called it. I didn’t know what to make of all this Yankee talk particularly because we were in the Deep South of Georgia.

  Popeye and me found some tents and laid out our gear so it might dry. The rain kept falling and we stretched ourselves on some cots and soon were dreaming, I think, although water splashed through that tent like it was coming through a colander in Mama’s kitchen. Soon the light was gray and Popeye mucked his boots through the water on the floor and said, “C’mon, Shifty, get up,” and we pushed ourselves through the canvas flaps into our first morning at Camp Toccoa.

  Nothing looked like much. Just row after row of tents. A bunch of tarpaper shacks huddled along a hillside. Someone said Camp Toccoa had once served as a summer camp for the Georgia National Guard units, but that was before the war had started, and it was getting rebuilt as the new training grounds for the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which was going to be us, if we proved lucky.

  Popeye had done some studying about the Army and he brought me up to speed. The 506th Regiment would be about three thousand men in due course, so that’s why so many fellas were milling about this morning. We was all coming there to get in. It’s also why nobody seemed to know what to do yet
. See, the Army was trying something brand-new. Up until then, fellas enlisted in the Army and went to boot camp first, then were all sent to mix with other units. But the Army decided to train a bunch of fellas together at Camp Toccoa as a group. We were going to start at Toccoa together, then go through the war together. And at the end, if any of us came through, well, we’d be together still. That experimenting was maybe why the Army sent us to such a new and faraway place in Georgia. We could’ve been training at other established bases, maybe Fort Benning, Georgia, for one, I’d heard of that. But maybe the Army wanted us out of the way a spell. If we fell flat on our faces, see, nobody would know the difference.

  A sticky mist rose off the red clay mud, and it felt like the rain had stopped sometime before dawn. Off to our right, the sun struggled to climb past the peak of a pine-covered mountain. It was as big as anything Daddy and me had ever hunted on back in Clinchco, and a kid crawled out of the tent next to me and gave a low whistle. Ed Tipper was his name and he didn’t like the looks of what he saw. “I bet by the time we’re done here they’re going to make us hike to the top of that,” Tipper said.

  All around us, boys were stirring now. All manner of young men had poured into the camp during the night. We was in W Company, somebody said, which stood for Welcome, or maybe Washout, some other kid muttered. Still somebody else said we were in Cow Company, so that confusion proved the general nature of what I felt that morning. Back at the recruiter’s office, they’d told me that at six-foot-one-inch and about 185 pounds, I’d make one of the taller, bigger paratroopers. But I didn’t know about that. All the fellas I saw this morning were beefy sorts, thick necked, built strong and solid as young coal miners. They lit cigarettes, spit on the ground, and ran their fingers through their hair, grousing about the need for shaves and a wash. A tough-looking Northerner squinted at how I said “Morning,” but he shook my hand anyway and said his name was Jim Alley from Washington State. Why, that was clear across America. He introduced me to a friend he had already made, Robert Van Klinken, who lived near the Canadian border in that same region. Van Klinken worked on trucks as a mechanic, he said, and right off I could relate to his working on parts and machinery. He was itching to get married, he mentioned right away, and asked if we had caught sight of any nice-looking young ladies when we stepped off the train. I hadn’t seen nobody except fellas, but Van Klinken had turned away already, and Wayne Sisk hiked over and shook my hand. Sisk was on the lookout for girls, too, he said, and beer, or maybe a fight. We were to call him Skinny, and he wasn’t a churchgoer, he told me right off, and didn’t want nothing to do with their sort of ways.

  Burton Christenson pushed his way out of a tent and came over to where we were standing. He went by the nickname Pat and was from California, built wiry like a boxer. He showed us some little pencil sketches he had drawn in a book he kept with him, and I thought it uncommon for such an athletic kid to be that artistic as well.

  Warren Muck smiled broadly and told us he hailed from a town named Tonawanda, wherever that was. He asked us to call him Skip and said he had once swum clear across the swift-flowing Niagara River. Now, that was a mighty deed no ordinary man would try, but I couldn’t tell outright if he was pulling our legs or not.

  Gordy Carson ambled up and began talking baseball with us. He had lettered in five sports back in high school in New York, a natural expert at everything he tried.

  Two tough-looking fellas from Joliet, Illinois, Hack Hanson and Frank Perconte, smoked cigarettes and said little. They were older guys, early twenties, and Frank muttered something about how he was dating a woman named Evelyn, going to marry her soon.

  Joe Liebgott was tidying up his gear. He was another old man, twenty-five, twenty-six maybe, and tough as a railroad spike. He offered to cut our hair for cheap, seeing as how he worked as a barber back home in San Francisco.

  Don Hoobler, Bill Howell, and Bob Rader were three hometown buddies from Manchester who all talked with hillbilly twangs like me. I felt good about that. Bob Rader was one of six children, and he and his older brothers had enlisted in the National Guard in high school so they could eat while the rest of the food in their family went to the younger children. The Guard kicked Bob out when they found he was underage.

  Walter Gordon was a fine-featured burly fella who’d been to college already. He was chewing tobacco and had three cigars stuck in his shirt pocket. A Southerner from Jackson, Mississippi, he’d pulled strings and enlisted up north in Philadelphia instead, believing they’d send all the Northern guys south and vice versa. Seemed real smart thinking to me.

  About the only guy I didn’t like at first was Bill Kiehn, a muscularlooking guy from Washington State who seemed to have a chip on his shoulder. Nobody was going to tell him what to do, he said. Names and faces and stories soon all blurred together, and fellas wondered about breakfast and milled around in the mud, clueless as to what came next.

  We didn’t need to wait long. Somebody blew a whistle. Popeye gave me a nudge and we formed up. The man up front was part of the old Army cadre, a tough-sounding old bird, and explained that the First Battalion of the 506th Regiment was already filled, so we sorry sacks of dog droppings were all going into the Second Battalion. I guess a battalion was about seven hundred men, and each battalion was made up of one Headquarters Company and three other “alphabet” companies, and we were now in E Company, or Easy, as he called it. Dog and Fox Companies were also in our battalion, and each company was about a hundred and forty men. We were further told to shut up and look sharp; we were sorry excuses for men and our mamas weren’t married to our daddies when we were born.

  With that, we were off and running. The first half mile proved fine, since it was all flat ground. The sky was cloudless and I reckoned the day was going to be real hot. We veered off the flats and I noticed an ambulance parked by the side of the trail. “Double time,” the old bird yelled, and started sprinting straight up the side of Mount Currahee. Now, that was a surprise. The trail was rocky and steep. Loose stones grabbed at our ankles like the potholes back in Low Gap. About ten minutes passed, then twenty, and on we ran. The fellas groaned now, sweating and puffing, and a kid next to me doubled over and collapsed by the side of the trail. I didn’t know if I was supposed to stop and help him or not, but the man up front yelled, “Do not help that man!” so we kept running, always running, and another fellow stumbled and fell in a ball, cussing his turned ankle. The last twenty-five yards to the top were a sheer scramble up shale. I didn’t bother to look round at the view, for they turned us around at the top and sprinted us straight down to the bottom. Not quite an hour had passed since we first started running, and when the ground leveled out near the main area they hollered for us to stop. We gasped and held our sides and I glanced around. The ambulance must have been doing some good business because it looked like nearly a fifth of the fellas had quit the program, right from the get go.

  The training didn’t let up. That first day passed and the next and the day after that. They gave us coveralls to wear at first. When they had roughed out the camp, trees and brush had been bulldozed all over the grounds. They hollered for fifty pushups, and jagged slivers of wood poked up and burrowed into our hands and chests. Mosquitoes chewed our arms and faces. Our instructor yelled to be on the lookout for ticks. Sweat dripped from us, prompted from a thick blanket of heat I wasn’t used to back in Virginia. We’d come in at the end of a day, aching, and flop on our bunks, our stomachs hollow, our throats dry. That’s when things came clear to me. The Army only wanted the best of the best for this new program. They wanted you to quit Toccoa. Some 5,800 men had piled into the camp, all hoping for the chance at becoming paratroopers. Some 3,000 men would need to fail. That’s the way they wanted it at Toccoa. If you were a quitting sort, then the paratroopers weren’t for you. I talked to Popeye about this and we both vowed we’d make it to the end.

  A West Pointer named Colonel Robert Sink led the regiment at Toccoa, the whole group of several thousand men.
I never met the colonel myself, but understood that he wanted his boys in tiptop shape. He made up an obstacle course for us. Every once in a while you’d see him swing by the course, studying the pipe ladder, dreaming up little improvements to make things harder. The course was a real killer. We sprinted the whole way, hand-over-hand at first across a ladder over a ravine. We shimmied up slick plywood platforms, scratching and slivering up our hands and knees. We sprinted across mud pits and climbed like monkeys up huge knotted ropes.

  The obstacle course was just one part of the training. A big athletic field sat in the middle of camp, and we duckwalked the length of the field, squatting as low as our knees would take us, hands behind our backs, thigh muscles burning. We lined up flat on our backs, eight men in a row, and held logs above our heads and brought them down to chest level, over and over again, push-up style. They stood us up and had us heave those logs from line to line, throwing through the air and catching them again.

  Come evenings they sent us out on hikes—ten milers, twenty-five milers. We carried equipment soon enough, and the gear lugged in our field packs, our water jiggled in our canteens. A fella couldn’t drink any, mind you. They wanted us knowing how to push past thirst.

  One afternoon we each fixed a bayonet to the end of our rifle and were taught how to thrust it through a man. I had shot plenty of rifles before, but never carried one with a long blade on the end. The thought of what it was there for unsettled me a spell.