When I ran out of money, she paid for the hotel room, and I walked back to camp instead of taking a cab. Usually at the Mecca I would get something to eat and a drink or two on the house, because Maria would always tear up my check. We never talked much, but then we didn't have much in common. I wasn't interested in her Mecca Café gossip about the help there, and she wasn't interested in how much my golf game had improved. I was now breaking 70—on nine holes, not on eighteen.
If it hadn't been for High Commissioner Paul V. McNutt, our romance would have continued for the full duration of my leave, but because of McNutt I got kicked out of Camp John Hay a week early, and I never saw Maria again.
SIXTEEN
WHEN I READ TIME AND LIFE EACH WEEK, AS THE new magazines appeared in the day-room, I always looked first for news about the Philippines. At least once a month there was an item in Time about how Manuel Quezon, the canny little president, had managed to squeeze more money out of Uncle Sam. I never saw any evidence of this money being spent on the people in the islands, however. I had also read the Time story about the appointment of Paul V. McNutt to the position of high commissioner of the Philippines. According to Time he was "tall, tan, terriiic." The accompanying picture showed a tall, stooped man who had lost most of his white hair. But I guess he was handsome enough.
He was not, however, a terrific golfer.
When we found out that Paul V. McNutt and Bobby Jones, the world's greatest golfer, were going to play the course at Camp John Hay in the morning, everyone in camp wanted to get a look at Bobby Jones. A big group of people was at the first tee down by Charlie Corn's when the game began, but they weren't allowed to follow the golfers onto the course. No one else was allowed to play the course until they had finished, either. It was a matter of security, and the two V.I.P. golfers were accompanied by an M.P. major, a buck sergeant M.P. , and three Philippine Constabulary policemen in dark suits, white shirts, and striped rep neckties.
The best place to get a close look at Bobby Jones was from the front porch of the signal corps-men's little house. I took advantage of my acquaintanceship with these guys to join them. Our view of the ninth hole and green was perfect, and we could look straight down the steep hill and watch them tee off as well. It was almost ten-thirty before they reached the number nine tee, and by that time we had polished off at least half of a grande of A1—1A gin.
Fellows, the senior corpsman, a P.F.C., third class specialist, was singing verses to "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," and the rest of us (five guys altogether), who didn't know the words, chimed in on "big rock candy mountain" at the end of each verse.
The three plainclothes constabulary men came up the hill first and checked the nearby bushes and trees for lurking assassins. Then one of them came over to the porch and put his finger to his lips. He told us we must be silent when the golfers teed off below.
"Don't shush me, you gook motherfucker," Fellows said.
The plainclothesman let that go. The three of them took up positions on three sides of the green with their backs to it. The two Filipino caddies, carrying the clubs, also came up the hill and took positions on both sides of the green. They didn't take out the flag, because the golfers needed to see the tip of the flag from the tee below. Bobby Jones, wearing voluminous plus fours and checkered argyle socks with his golf shoes, and a V-necked sleeveless sweater, teed off first. His ball landed in the sand trap in front of the green. For Jones, it would be a simple shot to the green, and with his putting ability he had almost a cinch for a par three. McNutt, however, blasted off three times in a row, and each time his ball would hesitate a dozen yards below the sand trap, and then, slowly at first, start rolling back down the hill until it stopped a few yards in front of the tee. On his fourth try he hit the ball too hard, and it bounced on the green and continued into the rough on the other side of the green, finally ending up in the road in front of the barracks across the street.
All of this was pretty damned funny, especially after a few gulps of hot gin on a bright and sunny morning. The two golfers, trailed by the major and the sergeant, both in uniform, panted up the hill. When they reached the green, McNutt saw his caddy standing by his ball out in the road about forty yards away. He walked over and joined him.
Bobby Jones was a good-looking, chunky man, and not nearly as big as I had expected him to be. But at least I got a close look at him, and now I would always be able to say that I had seen the world's greatest golfer, in person, in action.
He clipped out of the sand trap, and his ball stopped about three feet away from the cup.
"Go ahead, Mr. Jones," McNutt called out. The caddy removed the flag, and Bobby Jones sunk the putt with a slight tap. Tap. Just like that. The ball zipped into the cup as if it had eyes. The world's greatest golfer!
Then McNutt hit his ball. It cleared the green, the sand trap, sailed down the hill again, and made it almost all of the way back to the tee. All of us on the porch laughed. Fellows' piercing, whinnying laugh was louder than the laughs of the rest of us. We wouldn't have been human if we hadn't laughed, even if we were enlisted men.
McNutt was game, though, and he would have gone back down the hill to address his ball if Jones hadn't stopped him.
"Take another one," Jones suggested, "and hit it from the trap."
McNutt's caddy handed him a ball, and McNutt tossed it into the sand trap. He managed to get out of the sand trap, just barely, and his ball landed on the rim of the green. He got his putter and tapped the ball. It went about three feet because he had topped it, and he was still twenty feet from the cup.
"Too bad, McNutt," Fellows yelled out. "A little more oomph and you woulda had that!"
I slipped through the door, went into the bathroom, and locked the door. I tried to open the window but it had been painted shut. Perhaps, I thought, they won't search the house. But I was wrong. A minute or so later the door handle was tried, and then someone rapped savagely on the door.
"I'll be out in a minute," I said.
"Open that door right now!"
I unbuckled my pants, dropped them, pulled down my shorts, and flushed the toilet. With my shorts and pants around my ankles, I hopped over to the door and opened it.
"What's the matter, sir?" I said, widening my eyes.
The M.P. major, his face red, was so angry he could hardly keep his hands off me.
"You're under arrest," he said. "Report to your orderly room immediately!" `
In the orderly room a second lieutenant who was the commandant of the casuals at Camp John Hay terminated my furlough, and I was given orders to return to Clark Field. A letter would follow, recommending squadron punishment. Major Burns, my squadron commander, was also directed to screen his personnel more carefully in the future before approving leaves to Camp John Hay. I protested my innocence to the lieutenant, saying that I had been in the bathroom and didn't even know that the High Commissioner and Bobby Jones were playing that day, but he didn't believe me. Fellows and another signal corpsman, being permanent party, received thirty-day restrictions to Camp John Hay. The other two guys, both on leave like me, were sent back to the 31st Infantry, also with recommendations for company punishment.
I didn't have a chance to say good-bye to Maria, and I felt bad about that. I had never kissed her, because a white man doesn't kiss a Filipino, but I regretted not being able to kiss her at least once. After all, the endearing way she pronounced my name entitled her to one good-bye kiss.
On my way back to Angeles on the train, when I considered the incident, I concluded that the M.P. major was the sensitive one, not the High Commissioner. McNutt had to know what a lousy duffer he was, and I doubt if he was ever told about our punishment. If he hadn't had a
keen sense of humor, he wouldn't have accepted the appointment as U.S. High Commissioner to the Philippines in the first place.
But Major Burns didn't have a sense of humor. When the letter from Camp John Hay arrived, a few days after I got back, I, too, received a thirty-day restric
tion to the post. I knew then, if I hadn't known it already, that I would remain firmly on the shit list for the rest of my tour in the Philippines.
***
OCTOBER 31, 1937, MARKED THE HALFWAY POINT IN MY tour. From now on I would be going downhill, starting on my final year, but I did not, like some guys, start counting the days: "Three hundred and sixty-four days and a meat ball!" A year is still a year, and each day, with the same hot sun, the same routine, was almost exactly alike.
Then, on December 12, the Japs sank the Panay, a U.S. Navy gunboat, on the Yangtze River. We listened to the news on the radio in the day-room. Everyone became excited and elated. Now we would get a chance to fight the Japs. The 31st Infantry was alerted, put into battle gear, and a naval transport was radioed at sea and told to steam into Manila and pick up these troops for China. Though the Sino-Japanese War had been going on for some time, no one had paid much attention to it before—but this was different; the stupid Japs had brought us into it.
The next morning, after we were marched to the hangars and told to go to work, about fifty of us (that's right, fifty out of the 120 enlisted men at Clark Field) ran over to headquarters, all of us wanting to transfer to the 31st Infantry so we could go to China and fight the Japanese. There were too many of us to go inside the building. The first sergeant told us to wait on the lawn, and that Major Burns would be with us in a few minutes.
At first, when the major arrived, he didn't know what to say. He said that it would be impossible to make out transfer papers for that many men. He did promise us that if the U.S. declared war on Japan we would all get our chance at killing Japs by sticking with the squadron. In a war, any war, pursuit planes would be required, and he needed us to keep the planes flying. And inasmuch as the 3rd Pursuit Squadron was the closest to China, we would
undoubtedly be going to China as soon as the 31st Infantry landed and secured an airfield.
Kossowski, the old infantryman who had been mowing the landing field for more than a year now, wasn't satisfied with this answer. He had never exchanged his light blue infantry hat cord for the darker blue one, with gold acoms, worn by the Air Corps.
"I can see why the major won't let his skilled mechanics go, sir," he said, "but some of us are trained infantrymen, and the Thirty-first will need us during the first days of fighting. Would the major consider letting ex-infantrymen put in for a transfer? Some of us, me for example, didn't join the Army to cut grass."
The major ignored Kossowski's legitimate request and went into a long speech. He told us that the chances of our going to war against Japan were negligible because we, as a nation, were not ready to fight a war. We had the smallest standing army per capita of any nation in the world. There were only a few soldiers for every million citizens. However, the sinking of the Panay would turn out to be a blessing. Now the Army, and the Air Corps, would have to expand. The Air Corps would double, nay, triple within five years, and we were all in on the ground floor. If we stayed in the Air Corps, he claimed, within five years all of us who were now privates would be sergeants. And he predicted that the crew chiefs, instead of being corporals, would have the grade of staff sergeants.
"Now go back to work," he said. "And if we, as a squadron, are alerted, I promise that you'll get plenty of action."
None of us believed the bullshit he had handed out, but he had had to say something. He couldn't let almost half of his squadron transfer to the infantry. What impressed me was that so many had shown up to ask for a transfer to an infantry regiment. It gave me another way of looking at these guys. I knew why I was there. I didn't join the Army to drive a gas truck, just like Kossowski, the former infantryman, hadn't joined the Army to cut grass, or Canavin to pound a typewriter. There were some highly skilled crew chiefs among the volunteers, and every man with any rank at all would lose his stripes and have to start over again if he was transferred to the infantry.
Even Old Patty was there, the World War hero from the Princess Pats. He was bragging in his squeaky old man's voice about what he would do tothe Japs once he got his bayonet sharpened. A strong wind would have knocked Old Patty over. Red Thompson, drunk and weaving, wearing his dirty undershirt and filthy khaki shorts, was also a volunteer. His gin-soaked breath alone would have done a lot of damage to the Japs. Red Thompson was the only man there the major would have been happy to transfer to the 31st Infantry, but he knew he couldn't get away with it.
But nothing ever came of the Panay incident. A few days later President Roosevelt accepted a million dollars in reparations for the killing of the sailors and the loss of the gunboat, and the 31st Infantry never left Manila. Roosevelt was in his second term, the Depression was still in full force, and he needed the money more than he needed revenge. To prevent any future incidents, even the 15th Infantry (the "Can Do" regiment) was brought home from China and stationed in Fort Lewis, Washington. Our squadron wasn't even put on combat alert.
For a few days, however, the possibility of a war gave us a topic of conversation. As we sat around in the thatched huts on the line talking while the planes flew in the morning, I realized that being an enlisted man in the Air Corps was the worst place for a man to be if there was ever a war. In a war our airfield would be bombed and strafed (after all, that's what our pilots practiced doing to enemy airtields). Any enlisted man running around on the field would be killed. He would have no way to defend himself or to shoot back. I didn't know whether I would stay in the Army or not. I was going to wait and see how things were going back in the States before making the fateful decision. But I wasn't a fool. If I did re-enlist, I certainly wouldn't re-enlist in the Air Corps and become a defenseless sitting duck for some hot-shot Jap pilot.
***
AFTER CHRISTMAS THE 3RD PURSUIT SQUADRON WAS transferred down to Nichols Field, in Paranaque, right outside Manila. There we became just one squadron among several others, including an attack squadron, a bomber squadron with Martin B-10's, and a transport and service squadron. Not every man in the squadron went along, however. A few guys, like those men in Utilities, including Kossowski, the grass cutter, and the men in the fire department, stayed behind. Our squadron commander lost his second hat, as post commander, and became just another squadron commander at Nichols Field.
But I went, being the gas truck driver, although there were other gas trucks at Nichols. I was happy now that I drove the gas truck, and I got to drive it to Nichols from Clark, carrying all my stuff in the front seat with me. I would have hated to stay behind at Clark Field.
Paranaque was a suburb of Manila, and being in a city again would, I hoped, provide a little more excitement. The peculiar thing is that we were never told why our squadron was transferred to Nichols Field. This seemed strange to me, if not to anyone else. The Army never gave enlisted men a reason for any of the decisions it made. If a soldier knew why he was doing something or other, he would probably do a better job.
I never saw Canavin again. A few months later I got a postcard from him from Philadelphia. He had a job in a hardware store, and he was taking care of his mother and sisters again. I wrote back, telling him how things were going with me at Nichols Field, but he never answered my letter. The Army lost a hell of a good soldier when they lost Canavin. If they had let him be a soldier, instead of making him pound a typewriter, they could have held on to him forever.
SEVENTEEN
THE BIGGEST ADVANTAGE IN BEING AT NICHOLS FIELD, compared with Clark Field, was that time passed faster. The biggest disadvantage was that more money was needed, and there was no way to make more. I had gotten used to living on very little at Clark Field, but there were a great many things to do in Manila, or even in Paranaque, right outside the main gate, and I was broke all the time.
I was no longer the only gas truck driver selling a little gas on the side, either. All of the other gas truck drivers had customers, and I ran into competition. Luckily, the mess sergeant in the attack squadron owned a Model A Ford convertible, and he preferred to lend the car to me one
night a month instead of paying for the gas. All I had to do was to keep his gas tank filled at all times, and on paydays he would give me the keys. With the car I got to know Manila very well, from Dewey Boulevard, where all the rich people lived, to the outskirts of town, where the cabarets were. With the car it was no trick to pick up a woman. Except for an occasional taxi ride, a good many Filipino women had never ridden in a car before, and they were happy to give you a free piece of pookie just for the chance to ride around the city with their hair blowing in the wind. It was exciting for them to ride in a car. There is something about a convertible that attracts young women. All you have to do is stop and ask the girl if she wants a ride, and in she hops. It's the uniform, too. Perhaps it's the combination of the uniform and the convertible that attracts them.
Outside the main gate in Paranaque there were dozens of small bars, and seven whorehouses, all within walking distance of the gate. Some of the freelance prostitutes who hung around outside the gate were only twelve and thirteen years old. I never took one of these young ones home because they invariably lived with their parents in one room. A man would have to screw them in the room while the father smoked a cigarette and the mother cooked something or other over a charcoal fire, both of them watching. There would also be two or three smaller children crawling around on the floor. Most of the guys in the Army claimed that there was no line, but I maintained that there had to be a line somewhere, and one of the lines I drew was in not screwing children. I also drew the line at accepting free blow jobs from binny-boys. There were literally thousands of homosexual Filipinos in Manila. At night when you walked around downtown, especially if you were in uniform, a binny-boy would proposition you in almost every block. Many of them were well-dressed, too, men you would never suspect of being homosexual. In Los Angeles you could always tell a homosexual because they all wore red neckties. But you couldn't tell with Filipinos because there's a touch of effeminacy in all Filipino men. It's a kind of gentleness, really, a reluctant passivity, but this quality makes them seem effeminate.
Something About a Soldier - Charles Willeford Page 15
