Shrapnel

by William Wharton

  ‘Now that bastard’s really got something to work with. Birnbaum’s revenge. I’m almost tempted to include a package of steel wool.’

  I decide that would be too much, they might stand me up before a firing squad.

  I deliver the rifle, with Williams pushing behind me, to the orderly room. We dash back to the barracks. Next morning the rifle is delivered by the mail clerk, it’s like new. I check the serial number and it’s mine all right. I don’t know who cleaned out that mess, or how. Not a word is said. I hope it’s Muller, I’m sure it isn’t Perkins – I suspect it’s the mail clerk.

  We ship out three days later. I’m sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, to an infantry division. I’m hoping I’ll never see Lieutenant Perkins again and I don’t look very hard.

  CORBEIL

  During basic I got to know Corbeil, the fellow who sleeps in the bunk below me. He’s one of the few in our group who has much education beyond high school. He’d been in the Master’s programme at Columbia when they drafted him and he hates the army even more than I do. He’d been a philosophy major with a special interest in existentialism, and considers the whole war an uncalled for, unjustified, interruption of his life. His name is Max and he reads books, half of them are in French, which he had sent from home. He considers the post library a literary garbage pit. I’ll admit I don’t even know where the post library is. One weekend he comes back from town with an alarm clock. Now the last thing in the world you need in the army is an alarm clock.

  Regularly, before light, about fivethirty, the Corporal of the Guard comes through yelling. He makes sure everyone’s rolled out of bed, he’s kicking the beds as he goes along, yelling and hollering. If you pull your covers over your head he’ll rip them off the bed and dump them on the floor. This means starting the bed from scratch.

  Most of us make the bed for Saturday inspection, and then slip ourselves under those blankets like letters into envelopes the rest of the week. We slide out the same way. These blankets are virtually glued to the frames. That way we can snatch a few minutes in the latrine before the thundering herd descends upon us.

  By six we need to be lined up in the company street, dressed, shaved, clean, with our rifles and helmet liners. There’ll be roll call, the orders of the day, a few kindly words from Muller or Perkins about what rotten soldiers we are, then we go to mess hall for breakfast. The KP have already been rousted out at four.

  I ask Corbeil, incredulously, ‘Why the alarm clock?’

  Corbeil holds the clock next to his ear and smiles. ‘This little ticker’s going to get me out of the army.’

  I figure all the reading has pushed him over the edge. My mother always insisted reading softens the brain.

  That night I hear him wind his clock. I hang over the edge of my bunk and watch as he tucks it under his pillow. In the dark of night I hear it go off. I’m a relatively light sleeper. He lies still for a few minutes, then carefully slides out of his bed onto his knees. He pulls his top blanket off the bed onto the floor. Then, still kneeling, he starts peeing on the bed, spraying back and forth. Using a penlight, he resets his clock, pulls his still dry pillow off the bed and wraps himself in the blanket on the floor.

  I again hear the alarm go off just before the Corporal of the Guard comes at five thirty. He jumps up, hides his clock on one of the rafters to the barracks, then curls up in his blanket again.

  After roll call, he takes all his wet bedding to the supply sergeant and gets new ones. This happens every morning for a week. Muller becomes a raving maniac. He puts Corbeil on sick call. They give him some pills he doesn’t take. He offers them to me. After a week, the supply sergeant won’t give him any more clean bedding and they take his stinking mattress away.

  Corbeil starts sleeping with just a blanket over the metal slats of his bunk. But the alarm keeps going off and, in the dark, I can hear the splash as he pees on his sheet. It begins to get awfully smelly around our bunk.

  As far as I know, besides Corbeil, I’m the only one who knows what’s happening. After two weeks they send Corbeil to a doctor, then a psychiatrist. When he’s around with the rest of us, not on sick call or in the hospital, he does his work like everybody else.

  Muller is all over Corbeil, calls him ‘piss head’ and even more vulgar names. Corbeil is very modest, sorry about everything. He even gets a bucket of hot soapy water and scrubs the saturated floorboards under his bed. He apologises to everybody, claims this had been a problem for him all his life. Far as I know, he didn’t have any trouble until he bought that damned alarm clock.

  One day he doesn’t come back from sick call. He’s gone for almost a week. I borrow a few books from his footlocker. Even with the ones in English, I can’t understand them.

  I begin to sleep through the night and things smell better under the bunks.

  He comes back smiling. They’ve issued him a mattress, mattress cover, blankets. That night I hear the alarm go off again. I listen as he goes through his full routine. I need to hold my mouth to keep from laughing, and the whole double bunk shakes. Corbeil looks over the edge of my bunk.

  ‘Take it easy, Wharton, it won’t be long now. Wait till tomorrow.’

  He resets his alarm and goes to sleep. Corporal Muller screams, hollers and curses Corbeil. Non-coms aren’t allowed to touch enlisted men, but he comes close, nose to nose, spittle flying. This is an insult to the whole US Army, he claims. He rants and raves, makes Corbeil wash the blankets, the mattress cover, air out the mattress.

  But nothing is going to stop Corbeil. He’s removed from the barracks again. The alarm clock is still in its hiding place. I wait. About three days later, we come in from field exercises and there’s Corbeil. He’s emptying his footlocker into his duffel bag. He’s wearing his dress uniform, not fatigues. He smiles at me. I wait until nobody is close by. Everybody’s in the latrine washing up. We’d just spent the day in a dusty field learning the difference between creep and crawl. You creep like a baby and crawl like a snake. I think, or it could be the other way round.

  I put my rifle in the rack. I’m covered with mud, a combination of dust and sweat.

  ‘So, what happened.’

  ‘I did it. I’m out. I’ve got a medical discharge, honourable. In three days I’ll be home. I’ll just have enough time to enrol in school on a late registration. I’ve got “enuresis”. The US Army can’t use me. Isn’t that too bad?’

  He smiles and jumps up to where he keeps his clock. ‘Here, take this. It’s a gift for keeping quiet and not giving me away. I’m sorry to have wakened you, and for the stink, but I don’t want to be dead. Bodies smell worse.’

  So, he gets out of the army. In a few days we have a replacement from another company named Gettinger. Gettinger goes down with us to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and we go through a lot together. He’s killed outside Metz. One thing I learn is it pays to have a university education.

  LOGAN

  About two weeks after the alarm clock business, we’re hanging around the bulletin board outside the orderly room. I’m with a fellow named Logan. He’s from Steubenville, Ohio, and is the only one of us who receives money from home in addition to his monthly pay.

  Logan receives one hundred and fifty dollars monthly. Logan has good reason to hate the army.

  He’d been an air cadet. He’d become battalion commander of his cadet class. They were preparing for graduation, after which they would all become Second Lieutenants. Logan was drilling his battalion in close order drill, marching, high stepping smartly, backward down the company street when he was hit by a jeep from the rear. He spent three weeks in the hospital with broken ribs and a cracked collarbone. When he came out, he was classified as unfit to be an air cadet and was transferred to the infantry.

  He still, illegally, has a complete Second Lieutenant’s uniform, tailor made, down to the gold bars. He’d had them ordered before he was clobbered. Officers, because they are officially gentlemen, need to buy their own uniforms. Even now, as an enl
isted man, he still has his shirts and fatigues tailored. He has them dry cleaned and pressed, off post. Except for the missing bars he looks more like an officer than most of our real, so called, officers and gentlemen.

  One day there’s an announcement on the bulletin board telling about two openings as ‘cook’s helpers’ and asking for volunteers. ‘Cook’s helper’ is the army’s way of saying KP pusher. We’ve just had a miserable day in the field making a march wearing gas masks, through waves of tear gas. Anything looks better.

  Logan stuffs the notice in his tailored pocket. We go up the steps to the orderly room and officially volunteer our services to Reilly, the company clerk. He tells us we’re the first to volunteer; we know we’ll be the last. The next day, at roll call, we’re told to report to the orderly room.

  Lieutenant Gross, the executive officer, tells us we are taken off the regular roster and temporarily reassigned to Sergeant Mooney, the cook, as helpers. We are to report right away to the kitchen and Sergeant Mooney. We salute our way out and start to worry. It all seems too easy – generally, volunteering in the army is a dumb idea.

  But it turns out to be really great. Mooney is fat and sloppy. He likes to eat and likes to drink, but he doesn’t like to cook. Whenever I read the comic, Beetle Bailey, I think of Sergeant Mooney.

  Our job is to wake the KPs at four am, get them down to the kitchen, assign duties, and have things ready for breakfast at seven. Theoretically, we aren’t supposed to do anything ourselves, just make sure the KPs get the work done. We stay on at night until the kitchen is clean and the dining hall ready for the next day’s breakfast.

  The thing that makes it great is we’re on a day, and off a day, taking turns. If the company clerk and executive officer agree, we can even have passes to town on our days off. Also, even when we’re on duty, there’ll always be a few hours after lunch and before dinner when we can take turns going back to the barracks and resting. We’re living in luxury. That alarm clock Corbeil gave me in basic comes in handy.

  Now, in general, KP pushers are loved just about as much in the army as trusties are in jail. They’re considered finks. They’ve sold their souls to the devil. Logan and I decide to change this around. One of the prime power plays of KP pushers is the assignment of jobs. Those go all the way from the easiest, that is serving and setting tables, to the worst, ‘pots and pans’. We immediately let it be known that it will be first-come, first-serve from now on. Whoever gets there first gets the first choice of jobs. I even rent out my alarm clock a few times when I’m not on duty.

  Then we begin getting more and more done in the evening before we shut down the kitchen, so we can wake the KPs later in the morning. We have a good breakfast made for the KPs with eggs, scrambled or fried, four or five strips of bacon, orange juice, cereal, milk and coffee. Nobody else is eating like the KPs except us. It turns out that Logan, besides liking fine clothes, likes good food and can cook, a real Epicurean.

  As long as things get done in the kitchen, the cook couldn’t care less. He never comes in till O six hundred anyway. We begin waking KPs at O five hundred instead of O four hundred. Because neither of us is a particularly aggressive or hostile type, we gradually bring the KPs onto our side, or, maybe, we go over to the side of the KPs, whichever way you want to look at it. We’re friends to everybody.

  The cook is satisfied because we’re getting the work done, so he has hardly anything to do. We develop all kinds of short cuts, more efficient ways to do things, not a particularly difficult task.

  Logan and I work out a system to keep the stove burning overnight by feeding it just before lights-out and wrapping the coal in wet newspapers. So now the KPs come into a nice warm kitchen, with the tables set and most of the work already done. We begin to think being cooks would be great. The cook even recommends that we be sent to cook’s school. Also, our company is the only one where everybody is begging to be on KP. Logan figures if we can gain control of the KP lists, we can even charge!

  We gradually find out that the food being served is so terrible because of the way it’s cooked. Nobody in the country is eating the way we’re supposed to be being fed. It’s actually food fit for kings. These great big beautiful pork chops come in, at a time when meat rationing is tough for civilians, and this cook takes those hundreds of pork chops and dumps them in a big pot of boiling water. Then he pulls them out dripping wet and gives them a little frying on the griddle with greasy oil so they’ll look better, as if they’d been fried or roasted. But they taste like cardboard and are as tough as shoe leather. They only look like pork chops. We talk the cook into letting us do more and more of the cooking while he sinks slowly into his private stew, alcohol.

  Logan is teaching me how to cook. We start making things like Beef Stroganoff instead of stew, chipped beef in garlic sauce instead of ‘shit on a shingle’. We even get so we can do a fair job of broiling steaks, giving a choice: rare, medium or well done. That’s quite a trick with two hundred people to be fed in less than an hour. The KPs get into the spirit. The Captain promotes the cook from staff to tech.

  Around this time, some of us are given a chance to take our first furlough. I go home to California where my folks have moved from Philadelphia while I’ve been gone. Logan will take his furlough when I come back. He’ll double up and handle both ends of the job, do all the cooking. I have twelve days travel time. This plus the ten-day furlough comes to twenty-two days. With a little manoeuvring on the weekends at each end, I have twenty-four days altogether. I feel paroled. I’m going to be out of the army, on my own, after almost six months as a prisoner. It seems like a dream come true.

  For the first time I visit my parents in California. I meet the woman who becomes my wife six years later. We dance a lot. There are great bands, big swing bands in Southern California then. We dance at the Casa Manana and the Casino Ballroom. Jimmy Dorsey, Harry James, all the big ones play. Most of the men dancing are in uniform. It’s a great furlough. When I come back, I find I’ve been put onto the duty roster again! I can’t believe it.

  Logan is at cook’s school and the cook had been broken to private. There’s another cook who doesn’t want cook’s helpers, KP pushers. I’m back on the line in a line outfit. I feel I’ve been rooked. I have been!

  Much later, I learn that in the battle of the Ardennes when everybody, truck drivers, clerks, cooks, even the regimental band are put up on the line, Logan shoots himself in the arm with a carbine. If you do a thing like that you’re supposed to hold your hand over the rifle and shoot through a cloth, between the bones. I thought he’d have done a better job of it. Or maybe it really was an accident.

  2. FORT JACKSON, SOUTH CAROLINA

  SERGEANT HUNT

  Before we’re shipped overseas, I’ve been reassigned to Regimental Intelligence and Reconnaissance, called I&R. Somebody scanned my records and found my AGCT score. I move from K Company to Regimental Headquarters company.

  It’s even better than being a KP pusher. We’re given special training in patrolling, using high tech (for the army that is) phones and radios, we get to drive jeeps, trucks and weasels. Weasels are a kind of personnel carrier that has tracks and can go through water. We’re even sent back to Benning for parachute jump training. In two weeks we make five jumps. They won’t let us make the sixth because then we’d be eligible for paratrooper jumping wings, which would have given us fifteen dollars extra a month.

  The Master Sergeant of Regimental Headquarters is a special kind of person. He could well be one of the meanest people I will ever know, but he is always smiling and laughing. He has small eyes and a big stomach. He’s ‘regular army’ and a southerner. I don’t know how smart he actually is, but when it comes to running an infantry company he’s a genius. He runs a company as if it’s his own private army, set up for his personal profit. We privates, and everyone else, are his serfs.

  The Company Commander and other officers love him because they don’t have to do anything. The Company Commander is just d
ecoration in this company. Twice Sergeant Hunt is offered a commission and refuses. He lives better, eats better, and makes more money with all his schemes, than the Regimental Commander.

  But he makes one mistake. He gets too greedy; and somebody, somewhere along the line, discovers that Hunt’s been having marital allotment cheques sent to three different women in three different states. He’s a trigamist. He could get away with this because he signs the allotments himself. He has one wife in Alabama, one in South Carolina and another in Mississippi. There’s a court martial and he’s broken all the way down to Private. He has to make up for the fraudulent allotments and he does. I think he’s a rich man by that time, anyway.

  Anyone else would have wound up in Leavenworth, but he can call in some of his chits, and officers like him. He’s moved into the regular barracks like the rest of us, and we have a new Master Sergeant shipped in.

  Now everyone who’d ever been given a hard time by him jumps on Private Hunt. His life isn’t worth living. Shaving cream is squeezed into his toothpaste tube, he’s short-sheeted every night and has to remake his bed before he climbs into it. There can be anything, spiders, scorpions, snakes, condoms full of water, anything, under those blankets. But he never says anything, he just smiles, crinkling his eyes; throws these things on the floor, and puts everything back together.

  He has all the shit details; latrine duty, KP, and pulls hard guard. Even lousy PFCs try to make his life miserable. He only smiles his fat smile with flesh bunched up around those small eyes. To me he looks more dangerous this way, his shirt sleeves showing where his old master stripes had been when he was top kick. I make a point of staying away from him.