Something About a Soldier - Charles Willeford

by Charles Willeford

  The sysem prevented the Air Corps from getting the best West Point officers, but it wasn't until I got into the cavalry myself that I found out how truly superior cavalry officers were to these Air Corps pilots. The difference in every respect, from military bearing to decent treatment for enlisted men, was amazing. The pilots knew this themselves, I'm positive; otherwise they would not have been so eager to wear spurs on their boots when they were off duty. But no one ever mistook a pilot for one of the cavalry officers who was assigned to the 26th Filipino Scouts. Even when we went to the post movies and sat in our white E.M. section up in the balcony, we could tell the difference when the officers were seated below. Cavalry officers sat erect in their seats; the pilots lolled in theirs.

  ***

  IT LOOKS AS IF I AM TAKING CREDIT FOR A I.OT OF IMPORTANT insights. But I want to correct that impression. These ideas are not all mine, although I worked out some of them. These conclusions and ideas were usually arrived at after extended discussions with my bunkie, Canavin, or by listening to Corporal Canfield, who knew from experience how the system worked. After all, Canfield had been in the Army since 1917, and he had seen the same situations and problems come up again and again.

  "Everything," Corporal Canfield explained, "is always done as it was done before. When a man makes corporal for the first time he wonders whether he'll be able to handle the job and the responsibility. It happened to me, the first time I was promoted, and I was so concerned I almost turned the promotion down. Then my first sergeant told me the secret. Every time I ran into a problem, all I had to do was to handle it the way I'd seen other corporals handle the same problem before. That's why they don't like to make young guys noncoms until they've been in for a couple of hitches. They haven't been in long enough to see and remember how other noncoms handled the same situations and problems that come up again and again." What Canfield said was true enough, as applied to the Army in general, but it didn't explain what to do about a man like Wheeler.

  Wheeler was a fabric technician. But now, except for our lone O-19, which was an all-fabric biplane, our new airplanes were made of aluminum. There was no longer a need for a fabric technician. The O-19 wasn't on our Table of Organization and Equipment; it just happened to be an airplane we had, and we kept it in the hangar only because the major knew how to fly it. The O-19 crew chief was careful with it, and the only time Wheeler would ever be needed now was if the fabric in the O-19 got a tear in it somewhere. Then he would be called over to sew up the ripped place, or to put on a patch, maybe, and re-dope the patch. But that was unlikely to happen to one airplane. When we had a dozen all-fabric P-12's, there had always been enough work to keep him busy. But a fabric technician in a squadron with all-metal airplanes was as useless as the teats on a bull water buffalo.

  Wheeler sewed beautifully. Perhaps if he had been graduated from a college instead of just sixth grade he could have been a surgeon. He had a delicate touch with a needle, and when he had sewn up a small rip in the fuselage of a plane and then re-doped it, it was almost impossible to tell where the rip had been.

  But the man was lost now. When we marched down to the hangars and the line chief dismissed us with his command "Go to work!" Wheeler would just stand there while we departed to our various tasks. No one knew what to do with him, and he didn't know what to do with himself for the next four hours until we marched back to the barracks again. It also seemed unlikely that the Air Corps would ever get any more all-fabric airplanes, and that meant Wheeler was obsolete. So here was a guy with twelve years of service, all of it devoted to the care of fabric, with eighteen more years to go before he could retire. Some guys thought Wheeler was lucky. He was a P.F.C. and drawing down thirty dollars a month for doing absolutely nothing. But these men didn't understand that Wheeler was a man who loved his work. No provisions had been made to retrain him for another kind of work because our Table of Organization still called for a fabric technician. Who knew? Maybe the P-26's might not work out, and we would get P-12's again.

  One afternoon, during quiet hours, I saw Wheeler sitting on the edge of his bunk. He was looking at his long slender fingers and twirling his thumbs. I felt sorry for him, so I took a shirt out of my wall locker, one that I had ripped climbing out of the window in a shack in the barrio, and took it over to him.

  "Wheeler," I said, "I don't sew very well. And I wondered if you would do me a favor and sew up this tear in my shirt."

  He reached for the shirt, eagerly, I thought, examined the tear, and then he wadded the shirt into a loose ball and threw it back at me.

  "Fuck you, Willeford!" he said. "I don't need your goddamned pity!"

  I put the shirt back in my wall locker. For a moment I wondered what I had done wrong. Then I realized that I had exacerbated his problem, and I was embarrassed. Wheeler was obsolete and he knew it. Wheeler had become one with the Man in the Black Robe, the radio "pilot" in the day-room, and Old Patty of the "Princess K Pats."

  When I told Canavin about the incident, he just grinned. "If you want to be a professional soldier and a poet, Will, you're going to have to learn the difference between sentiment and sentimentality."

  The next time I went to the library I looked up these words in the dictionary, and I did learn the difference. But from then on I avoided Wheeler, and he avoided me.

  After a couple of months the crews and the pilots got used to the P-26's and their tendency to ground-loop on the wet grass of the field. One uneventful day blurred into the next. My tum on the waiting list at the library finally came, and I read Margaret Mitchell's best seller, Gone with the Wind. I also read the three or four Thome Smith novels that were being passed around the barracks. But nothing truly important happened at Clark Field until the Japs sank the Panay.

  TEN

  I CAN'T SAY THAT I WAS BORED, OR EVEN THAT MY life was dull at Clark Field. Driving the gas truck gave me just enough busywork to fill the morning, and the occasional stint of guard duty made a break in that routine. During quiet hours I read and slept on my bunk. If I didn't feel like sleeping, and Canavin didn't either, we would play a set of tennis and then swim for a half hour or so in the pool. It was too humid to play more than one set, and the water was so hot that it wasn't refreshing to stay in the A pool much longer than a half hour.

  There was hot water in the showers, but we seldom used it because the cold water was warm enough. But an hour of tennis and swimming and a shower would tire me out enough to sleep until four. The quiet hours were enforced rigidly, and one had to tiptoe in the barracks. Anyone who wanted to make noise had to go over to either the day-room or Charlie Corn's. Mosquito bars weren't necessary in the afternoon because the lancing mosquitoes didn't come out until sundown. So we would all lie there, naked on our bunks, our loins covered with a modesty towel (it was forbidden to sleep without covering your genitals), and read, or sleep, or stare into nothingness, as a tiery breeze wafted across our sweating bodies. After the heavy noon meal, most people were able to sleep without much trouble. At four P.M. the charge of quarters would blow a whistle, and we would stir about again, making plans for

  the evening.

  There were two movies, one at six and the second at eight P.M. , and the man who drove the show truck got into the movies free. Sometimes, when there was a good movie scheduled at the theater, I would volunteer to drive the show truck. The driver had to sit through the movie twice because of the two trips back and forth to the barracks. Not many were worth seeing twice in one night. Two exceptions were Flirtation Walk and Winterset. I saw Winterset twice, and I liked it, but I still didn't understand it until Canavin explained the Sacco-Vanzetti case to me and told me that the dialogue was in blank verse. I liked the scenes at West Point in Flirtation Walk, but the movie was spoiled for me because it never explained how an infantry private (Dick Powell), who was a dog robber at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, managed to get into West Point in the first place.

  Canavin, as usual, had a cryptic explanation. "It's a mathematical fact,
" he said, "that there are as many even numbers as there are even and odd numbers combined."

  "What's that got to do with the movie?"

  "All it means, Will, is that sometimes you've got to accept the given. If you can accept the fact that Powell got through West Point okay, you have to accept that he some. how got into the academy in the first place. And he did get through it, didn't he?"

  "But look at Owens," I said. "He studies all the time, , but you and I both know that he'll never get into West Point. Powell .didn't study at all. He was a house dog robber for a colonel, and he even ended up, after he graduated, marrying the same colonel's daughter. I suppose that's a given, too?"

  "No." Canavin shook his head. "That's censorship. They can't show it in the movies, but the reason he got to West Point was obviously because he was fucking the colonel's daughter. The colonel probably pulled some strings to get him into West Point as a way of getting him the hell out of Schofield and away from his daughter."

  "It still would've been a better movie if they'd explained it."

  "That's true. But you aren't going to see any honest movies until they get rid of the Hays Office?

  Dumb discussions like this one never led anywhere, but they helped to pass the time. Besides, almost every time I talked to Canavin I learned something new. Mostly, though, it seemed to be a long time between paydays. I was trying to save enough money to take a three-day pass to Manila, and that possibility seemed beyond my grasp. After paying my bills on payday, I rarely had more than eight pesos left.

  In some respects eight pesos is a fairly good sum, although it didn't go as far as eight dollars would go back in the States. First, there was the cost of a taxi into Angeles, to the Iron Star and the Bullpen. The fare was four pesos. If you shared it with three other guys it could be cut down to one peso, but that still meant two pesos, because I had to come back from Angeles later that night.

  Payday was a holiday, of course, but we didn't line up for our pay until about nine-thirty. It took that long for the major and the first sergeant to go up to Fort Stotsenburg, get the money, and count it out into small piles for each man in the squadron. The first sergeant also had to make sure he had deducted everything a man owed for P.X. checks, laundry, Charlie Corn chits, K.P.'s, the Indian, Old Soldiers' Home, bowling charges, and, if any, summary court-martial fines. Sometimes it was ten or ten-thirty before we got our money.

  Hershey, or Padre as we called him, was the day-room orderly, and he ran a crap game on the pool table in the day-room and a ten-peso takeout game on the screened porch. The reason we called him Padre was because he had once been a Franciscan monk at a New England monastery. When he got angry at his cards he would mutter imprecations in Latin, and he got angry a lot-every time he lost a hand of poker. No one knew what his Latin phrases meant, but they sounded like terrible oaths when they rattled out of his phlegmy throat. It was common knowledge that Padre had paid the first sergeant for the day-room orderly's job, because this was a standard practice throughout the Army. The day-room orderly automatically owned the gambling concession. He also, or so it was believed, paid a percentage of his take each month to the first sergeant. But it was worth it, because Padre made a lot of money from the poker game, which he cut five percent. In the crap game he took ten percent from every seven or eleven that was thrown on the first cast.

  Padre didn't bankroll either game, and his overhead consisted of furnishing chips, cards, dice, and a midnight meal for the surviving gamblers. The midnight meal was always pansit and was prepared by the cook at Charlie Corn's.

  Pansit is the Filipino national dish, a combination of something like beef chop suey topped with soft noodles and drowned in a pungent soy sauce. There is nothing tastier than a large bowl of pansit at midnight.

  I never had enough money to get into the ten-peso takeout poker game, but sometimes I would lose one or two pesos at the crap table. I invariably lost, because if I won the first throw I doubled up. My plan, if I ever got hot, was to double up for eight passes and then quit. But I never won eight passes, and I never knew anybody else who did, either.Then I would go to the Iron Star in Angeles, a small bar that formed the hub of the Bullpen. The Army sanctioned the Iron Star and the four two-story whorehouses that surrounded the little plaza in Angeles. In the middle of the plaza there was an official Army prophylactic station with a Filipino Scout medic on duty. After getting a piece of ass, you had to go into the prophylactic station, fill your penis with ptargyrol, hold it in for five minutes, and let it out. The medic then gave you a tube of white ointment, and you had to smear this ointment over your genitals and rub it in well. You filled in a form, signed it as to date and time, and it was witnessed by the medic. He kept a copy and gave you one, which was proof that you had had a prophylactic. You also had to state, on the form, that you had used a condom during intercourse. If, later on, you developed a venereal disease, the fact that you had taken a prophylactic saved you from getting court-martialed.

  The whores, and there were eight of them, were inspected monthly by a doctor from the Fort Stotsenburg Hospital. He drove to Angeles, inspected each girl inside the little prophylactic station, and gave her a signed certificate for the month. They kept the certificates posted in their rooms.

  One girl, a Moro, had tar-colored skin and was so bow-legged she couldn't have caught a pig in a trench. Her flat face was incredibly ugly, but she was the most popular whore in the Bullpen because it was a well-known fact that Moros are immune from venereal diseases. I was a little skeptical about this "fact," but no one ever caught any e' V.D. from the Moro.

  Despite the precautions, men still caught V.D. from time to time, although if a man did everything he was supposed to do it would be impossible. It would be almost impossible to enjoy a piece of ass, either, so that's why men often managed to get the clap or, more infrequently, chancres. There were about eight men in the squadron with syphilis and every Thursday morning they had to march up to the hospital and get shots—a Salvarsan shot one

  week and a mercury shot the next. It took more than a year of these shots to get rid of syphilis, so I never left the iield without at least three condoms in my hip pocket.

  The Iron Star, so called because there was an iron star nailed above the front double doors, which were never closed, was a bar and restaurant. You could sit at a table and drink beer and eat sally goupons, or order a bowl of pansit, or pancakes served with shredded coconut, powdered sugar, and goat butter.

  Sally goupons were black bugs, about the size and shape of June bugs, that were fried in vegetable oil and then salted. They were a little crunchy, like Spanish peanuts, and once you got used to the exotic taste, they complemented San Miguel beer wonderfully. Some soldiers wouldn't eat them, but I became very fond of them and always asked for a small bowlful to go with my beer.

  The girls drifted in and out of the Iron Star, between and looking for tricks, and sometimes they wheedled a ten-centavo lemonada from you. There was a flat single-time rate of two pesos, or six pesos for an all-night stand.

  There was no haggling or deviation from this set price. Filipino girls are not pretty, but they are not ugly either. They are different, that's all, and it takes a few months to get used to the fact that they look different from American white women. Because they have tiny noses, almost no noses at all, their faces seem flatter and rounder than they should be. They have short legs, slightly bowed, thick torsos, and small breasts. Their bare feet are much too large for their height and weight, and because their diet is so starchy—mostly rice—thin Filipino girls (at least those who ate as well as the whores in Angeles) are a rarity. In color they range from a deep chocolate brown, like the Moros, to a light—brown basketball color. Mestizos, who were half white and half Filipino, didn't work as whores. They usually went to Manila, where they could get good office jobs by passing themselves off as being of Spanish descent. Mestizo males were prized as houseboys by officers' wives, and after ingratiating themselves with an officer's family during a t
wo- or three-year period were often taken back to the States by the family after the tour ended.

  As you see, eight pesos didn't go very far on payday. One piece of ass, or sometimes two, a bowl of pansit, a couple of beers, and a taxi ride, and I would be broke until the seventh of the month when, once again, I could get jawbone at Charlie Corn's. There was no way, it seemed to me, that I could ever save enough money to go into Manila on a three-day pass.

  ***

  EVEN SO, I WAS MUCH BETTER OFF THAN THE POOR BASTARDS in the new Philippine Army. This new army was pitiful. Manuel Quezon, the first president of P.I., was ashrewd little man, and when General Douglas MacArthur retired to the Philippines, Quezon offered him the title of field marshal if he would start and command a Philippine army. MacArthur had four stars, and that was as high as he could go in the U.S. Army, so he leaped at this opportunity to become a field marshal because he would outrank every other American general. The Philippine Army was started by drafting peons for six months of military training. They were then discharged. In that way, over an extended period, there would be a reservoir of men trained in basic infantry practices in case they were ever needed. The training they received was poor, however, and they had an inadequate supply of weapons and equipment, and instructors who didn't know much more than the men they were training.

  But MacArthur didn't give a shit. He had his field marshal's baton, and a young U.S. Army major to organize and run the new army for him, while he lived in luxury in the penthouse of the Manila Hotel on his retirement pay and vast investments. No one knew for sure, but we all thought, and so it was rumored, that it was a toss-up between MacArthur and the Catholic Church about who owned more of the Philippines. I never found out who owned the Philippine Railroad, which ran from Manila to Dagupan on the Lingayen Gulf. Some said MacArthur; others said it was the church. But most of us figured it was MacArthur. His father, General Arthur MacArthur, who took the Philippines with Admiral Dewey in the first place, had bought up all of the land in sight at bargain prices while the country was still in turmoil. Whether all of this was truth or rumor I neither know nor care, but we believed it because only a very rich man could live as high on the hog as MacArthur lived in the Philippines. Part of the reason for these rumors was, no doubt, the low pay we received, plus a certain amount of jealousy, and MacArthur's imperious manner.