Ralph Berrier

by War;Bluegrass If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood

  Clayton punctuated the song with a little Western-style guitar run, a musical benediction for folks to remember him by when he was gone. He probably wouldn’t be singing any songs about boys and their old dogs for quite a while.

  “I like that little ending you got there,” Irving Sharp told Clayton.

  “It’s a killer, ain’t it?” Clayton said.

  “It’s a killer, all right,” Irving said.

  I don’t know how they said good-bye. I can’t tell you if Roy shook Clayton’s hand, wished him well, and told him to keep his head low. I don’t know if he promised his ace banjo picker that his spot in the band was safe and they’d all pick up right where they left off, making music and playing over the radio, once this awful war was over. I wish I knew if Clayton thanked Roy for all he had done for him and Saford. I wonder if he told him how much he appreciated that Roy had come to Bassett that day and rescued them from the furniture factory’s killing fumes, or if he thanked him for leading such a great band and for making them semi-celebrities, not to mention semi-rich. I wonder if Clayton found the words to tell Roy that he had been as good a brother—or a father, even—as he and Saford would ever know, and that his friendship would be forever cherished and never forgotten. I hope he did, because life is short and you never know if you’ll get another chance to tell people how much you appreciate them and care about them.

  All I know is that Clayton got on a train and headed for Camp Lee on December 31, 1942. Happy New Year. At Camp Lee, his fifteen gallons of hair were shorn and he was dunked face-first into army lingo and rules. Soon after that, he would be on a train to Fort McClellan, Alabama, for basic training before heading west to join his outfit and leave the life he had known two thousand miles behind.

  • • •

  Camp Lee swarmed with a commotion that left Clayton discombobulated. Short-haired men in drab uniforms barked at him incessantly. Get in this line, that line. It was like the first day of school at the world’s largest schoolhouse, where every teacher was the meanest of all time.

  In one line, they shaved off Clayton’s hair. In another line, doctors measured him and stuck him with needles in both arms. He learned how to get into formation and endure profanity-laden speeches from fire-breathing sergeants. One sergeant didn’t like something about Clayton’s looks—maybe it was before his pile of hair had been cut—and he jumped right in Clayton’s face.

  “Where are you from, boy?”

  “The Hollow, Virginia, sir!”

  “The Hollow … the what?” the sergeant stammered.

  Clayton learned that it wasn’t a good idea to make a sergeant stammer. He was ordered to drop to the ground and perform fifty pushups.

  Clayton got his barracks assignment and was handed a duffel bag of clothes and gear. When he got to his quarters, his arms hurt so bad from the shots and pushups that he couldn’t raise them to toss his duffel on his bed, the top bunk. Clayton asked the nearest soldier if he’d help him out.

  “Oh, so you’re too weak to get in your own bunk,” the boy sneered at Clayton.

  “Listen, I just need help lifting my bag,” Clayton said. “I can’t raise my arms right now.”

  “You lift your own damn bag,” the boy barked. Real tough guy. He looked about eighteen. He was as skinny as a hairless rat, and Clayton figured it would take about two seconds to pound him into dust, if his arms weren’t sore.

  Clayton looked good in his fatigues. After three years of dressing to the nines in jackets and ties, he was dapper in anything. He looked like he belonged in this man’s army. That is, until he walked past a lieutenant without saluting him.

  “You there,” the lieutenant hollered.

  Clayton spun around on his heel.

  “Private, don’t you know how to salute an officer when you meet him?”

  Clayton allowed that he did not.

  “I could have you on guard duty for a month,” the lieutenant boasted.

  Clayton tried to reason with the guy.

  “Listen, I’m just a country boy. I don’t know any of these army rules.”

  Reason just seemed to make the lieutenant madder. He jumped in Clayton’s face.

  “The next time I see you not saluting an officer, Private, I will bust your rear!”

  Clayton saluted as best he knew how and barked, “Yes, sir!”

  Everybody in the army was such a smartass.

  • • •

  After a couple of months of basic training in Alabama, Clayton joined the Ninety-sixth Infantry Division and arrived at Camp Adair, Oregon—about as far from Roanoke as you could go and still be considered part of the United States. The division was led by General James “Smiling Jim” Bradley, who told his recruits, “We kill or we get killed.”

  By the time Clayton joined the Ninety-sixth, the division was full of Midwestern boys, whose funny accents and propensity for profanity shocked the dumbfounded new hillbilly. At twenty-three, he was older than many of the young bucks who had been drafted out of high school or had skipped college in hopes of killing Germans or Japanese. Clayton’s maturity impressed his superiors and allowed him to rise quickly through the ranks. He even got a bottom bunk. In a regiment blooming with hot-blooded boys itching to shoot at any shadow that moved, Clayton stood out for his calmness and common sense. The fact that he was good with a rifle didn’t hurt, either—a country boy knows his way around a gun the way a city boy knows the bus schedule. By the end of winter, Clayton had been promoted to corporal and made assistant squad leader.

  The Midwestern boys treated their new assistant leader exactly how you’d expect them to. They decided to test this Virginia hillbilly and see what he was made of.

  One day when the gray Oregon winter had finally melted into spring, Corporal Hall was given the plum assignment of cleaning the barracks, a task he assigned to a group of ten or twelve guys. He sent three men to each of the barracks, ordering them to sweep the floors and wash the windows. But when he checked the first building, all the guys were just sitting around, not lifting a finger.

  “Boys, why aren’t you working?” he asked. “You’ve got a lot of work to get done.”

  One of the fellows chirped something about not taking orders from any dirty old hillbilly. Another piped in with the news that not only was he not going to sweep the floor, he had no plans to do anything he didn’t want to do.

  Clayton went to the next building and found a scene similar to the first. The guys assigned to clean up the barracks were lying around, reading magazines. Clayton knew then that this wasn’t a coincidence. He was being set up by his own men. They wanted to make sure this hillbilly didn’t get above his raising. If the barracks didn’t get cleaned, they had reasoned, Corporal Hall’s superiors would be really hacked off and they’d bust his ass.

  Clayton, though, wasn’t the type to back off. He figured if he was going to get busted, it might as well be for something that would at least provide him with some pleasure. He went back to the first barracks and grabbed the nearest mutineer by the short collar. Ironically, it wasn’t one of the Midwesterners—it was a boy from Tennessee! A kindred mountain man. He shook that boy and he unleashed some of the new vocabulary he had picked up.

  “If you don’t blankety-blank work I’ll blankety your blank and I’ll whup every blankety-blank one of you!”

  The other privates scattered. One slipped out to find a sergeant. Corporal Hall’s gone mad!

  Within minutes, a sergeant arrived and demanded to know just what the hell was going on here. Corporal Hall explained that the men had refused to work. The men whined that Corporal Hall had been too tough on them.

  The sergeant had no choice but to demote Clayton. You can get away with a lot in the service, but grabbing an enlisted man by the neck and shaking him is going too far, even by the army’s standards.

  The boy from Tennessee rubbed his neck and croaked, “I believe you were really going to kill me.”

  “That’s some pretty good thinking on your part,�
� the newly anointed Private Hall said. “Where I come from, you’d’ve ate those words.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “I come from The Hollow, Virginia,” Clayton said proudly.

  • • •

  One evening, Clayton climbed into his bottom bunk and thumbed through a magazine. Occasionally, a cheap guitar would show up in the barracks, and Clayton would strum it and sing a verse of “Hung Down My Head and Cried” or some other slow number, but he hadn’t played in so long, he had lost the calluses on his fingertips.

  As he read the magazine, he unconsciously hummed the yodel part to “Way Out There.” Just a little “Mmmm, hmmmm, hm, hm, hm …” to prime the pump. Then, the yodel just came natural.

  “Weeeeee-oooooooooh, teedle-di-oh-ti-doo …”

  He heard a rustling in the bunk over his head followed by, “Hey, them’s the Sons of the Pioneers.”

  The guy’s name was Smith, a Canadian-born soldier who loved Western songs, too. He was surprised to learn that the little hillbilly picker from Virginia liked the Sons of the Pioneers and their songs about tumbleweeds, cowhands, and punching doggies.

  Turned out Smith was a fine tenor singer. He knew a fellow named Ramirez in another company who was a good singer, too, and soon the Canadian, the Hispanic, and the hillbilly got together to sing Western songs a couple of nights a week.

  The international trio got pretty good. They knew all the Sons of the Pioneers songs—“He’s an Old Cowhand from the Rio Grande,” “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” and Clayton’s favorite, “Cool Water.” Clayton sang lead, a departure for him, because he had been so used to backing up Saford. With Smith and Ramirez harmonizing beautifully on the backup vocals, Clayton strummed a C chord hard and sang:

  All day I faced the barren waste without the taste of water—cool water

  Old Dan and I, with throats burned dry and souls that cry for water,

  Cool, clear water

  Just when things were cooking for the cowboy trio, that pesky war intervened again. The soldiers at Camp Adair knew that the Americans and British had the Germans on the run through the deserts of North Africa. Patton chased Erwin Rommel’s tanks into Tunisia, where the Allies celebrated their first major victory of the young war. Had the twins bothered to write letters, Clayton might’ve known that Saford had made it to Tunisia.

  The Ninety-sixth left Camp Adair for the arid Oregon hills in June. Most people probably think of the Pacific Northwest as perpetually rainy and foggy, which it often is at its most western points. Central Oregon, though, is called the high desert for good reasons. The landscape is beautiful in its harshness. A hot, dry wind makes it feel like a blast furnace, especially in the summer. In short, the high desert was the perfect place to take an army to learn desert warfare.

  The Ninety-sixth and two other divisions met for a series of war games that would test the stamina, readiness, and will of the soldiers. The maneuvers began beneath a blistering late-summer sun as seventy-five thousand men waged pretend war against one another with very real weapons.

  By now, Clayton had regained his rank and had been named a squad leader. He thrived in the field. The desert maneuvers near the lumber town of Bend would make or break the soldiers. The twenty-five-mile hikes were difficult, but Clayton persevered. Men guzzled their water too quickly, but Clayton saved his one canteen until his throat burned dry, just like the guy in “Cool Water.” The platoons were given a series of problems, which could be solved only by killing or capturing the enemy (or pretending to, at least). Many of the missions were carried out at night, which confused the city boys in Clayton’s platoon but hardly fazed a mountain buck who had traipsed mountainsides and walked to house parties on many a moonless night.

  A real test came when Clayton’s squad was told to destroy a pillbox protected by two machine guns. Clayton sent his men to knock out the machine guns with grenades, then attacked the pillbox with a flamethrower. The tactic worked like a charm. Score big points for his squad.

  So it went for two months. The squad climbed hills in the hot sun and huddled in foxholes during the dry, frigid autumn nights. Men moved at night, dug their holes, and slept a few minutes or an hour before getting up to repeat the process. They invaded communities with the names Alfalfa and Wagontire. They wired bridges with explosives and fired thousands of rounds of live ammunition as artillery roared overhead. Combat surely couldn’t be any worse than this pretend fighting in the Oregon desert. The Ninety-sixth Infantry Division was learning to fight, and they were learning fast. They couldn’t wait to kill Germans.

  • • •

  Across a continent and an ocean, on the east coast of Sicily, Saford crouched in a pile of rocks far below the volcanic peak of Mount Etna, an active volcano that could blow any minute for all he knew. He stumbled over the broken molten chunks, failing to find a suitable place to set up his listening post in the dark of night. This time, he was armed to the teeth—his bazooka and his .50-caliber and .30-caliber guns brought him much greater comfort than the grenades and trench knife he had when he landed in Africa. Not even German planes were safe from his firepower.

  Still, he was uneasy. The position on the northern slope was too exposed, too precarious. The fact that he was sitting on an active volcano didn’t make him feel any better.

  “Tell the colonel I can’t do anything in this slate,” Saford barked into his sound-powered telephone, another high-tech accessory. He packed up his personal arsenal and abandoned his position. Saford’s road to Sicily had begun in North Africa. For him, war had not been a game or a concocted series of pretend maneuvers for more than eight months. He had seen the real deal. After the North African landings in November 1942, the Allies marched slowly, but inexorably, eastward, where they met the Germans, were turned back, but advanced again. They were bound for Tunisia, to chase the Germans into the Mediterranean or die trying.

  Saford was assigned to the Headquarters Company of the Ninth Infantry Division’s Sixtieth Infantry Regiment, reading maps and going on scouting missions, for which his orders were simple: Find the Germans.

  There were plenty to be found. Saford went out accompanied by other scouts and Jeep drivers. He crawled on his belly over hills and down sandy embankments, locating Germans and watching their shifting lines through binoculars. It was the perfect job for the sneaky old instigator.

  One day, Saford and his driver stopped along a road on the way to Tunisia, where the two of them climbed a steep slope and crawled along the summit on their bellies and elbows. The driver, a young private, looked through his field glasses and practically gagged at the sight: columns of German armor and infantry idling just a few miles away.

  The private spat and stuttered. “There’s Germans out there!” he nearly shouted.

  Saford grabbed the boy by the throat and pulled his face up close to his own.

  “Of course there’s Germans out there,” he said. “Now you listen to me. We’re gonna see Germans. We’re supposed to see Germans. Why the hell do you think they sent us out here? That’s our job. Now, if you’re too afraid of Germans, you just let me know and I’ll tell the colonel. But you’d better know this—I am not gonna work with a man who’s afraid of Germans.”

  • • •

  Saford saw his fill of Germans in Sicily. Almost every day during late summer 1943, Saford ventured ahead of his fellow soldiers into no-man’s-land, scouting enemy lines and setting up listening posts, which were positions from which he could watch German and Italian movements and communicate intelligence back to his superiors. The job could be deadly dull or just plain deadly. Saford stayed put for hours, spying on enemy movements, scouting locations of minefields, intercepting enemy communications—basically gathering any type of information that he could take back to headquarters. He was the eyes and ears of a giant, violent beast marching toward the European mainland.

  On August 12, 1943, Saford was summoned by a Lieutenant Willoughby. Another green lieutenant, Saford thought. Saford and his bu
ddies at the HQ had taken to calling the never-ending carousel of young lieutenants “cannon fodder”—they were in command one day, gone the next, as if blasted into heaven like mortars. Many times, a green lieutenant found himself in a pitched battle without any clue what to do. Sometimes, one would pull out the army field manual and nervously flip through the pages, only to have somebody knock it from his shaking hands and yell, “The fella who wrote that book ain’t here!”

  “Come with me,” Lieutenant Willoughby said.

  “Mmm, hmmm,” Saford mumbled, all cocky. “Where we going?”

  “We’ve got a report of Germans near Randazzo. We’ve got to check it out.”

  Saford and Willoughby climbed into a Jeep and drove north, back toward the position Saford had left on Mount Etna. Saford was familiar with the terrain, and he suggested to Willoughby that the two of them park and set out on foot.

  Willoughby pulled the Jeep over and he and Saford packed their gear and walked across an undulating grassy field, sweating in the early afternoon sun beneath their packs of weapons and grenades. They crested a short hill and saw a shallow ravine ahead of them. Saford recommended they go no farther.

  “That ravine is full of Germans,” Saford said.

  Willoughby was incredulous. They were miles from Randazzo.

  “There isn’t a German within five or six miles of here,” the lieutenant barked.

  “Well, I believe there are,” Saford countered.

  Willoughby paused a beat and scanned the horizon. “You really think there are Germans down there?”

  “I do.”

  “Why don’t you go down there and check it out, then?”

  Now, it was Saford’s turn to resist.

  “You want me to go down there?” Saford cracked. “You don’t believe there are Germans up ahead, but you want me to go check it out? This is your job, Lieutenant. I’m just along for the ride. I’m just here to tell you where the Germans are. Now, if you’re afraid of Germans, we’ll go back to headquarters and tell the colonel and have him sort out who’s supposed to be doing what.”