Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  At SCPC I befriended, and hung out with, army and nonarmy types just like me. A soupçon of daytime soldiering was only part of the job: “policing” the area, circling our Steinway Street barracks from the civilian-street side, picking up cigarette butts. Primarily I was trained in the craft of adding subtitles to army training films instructing rookies in the dos and don’ts of weapon maintenance and sexual cleanliness.

  I had spare time to raid the files in my sergeant’s office for samples of earlier residents of this country club, World War II-vintage cartoonists who had been stationed there as I now was, Charles Addams and Sam Cobean, two New Yorker giants, Cobean now sadly forgotten, except in my files, where he and Addams now reside, liberated from the unknowing, uncaring Signal Corps. Given a home, safe and sound, in the file cabinet of one who appreciated their worth. Of course, I can’t remember where I filed them. They have been missing for years.

  The talent I met at SCPC, the connections I made. Alex Singer and Jim Harris, who were later to work with Stanley Kubrick on his early films, and introduced me to Stanley, paving the way for me to write screenplays for Stanley if only I hadn’t blown it. Also stationed at SCPC were “the Juniors,” the sons and nephews of the Hollywood moguls: Samuel Goldwyn Jr., Erich von Stroheim Jr., Stuart Millar, whose father was some kind of movie honcho and who had been drafted out of a production assistant job with William Wyler, director of such classic pictures as The Best Years of Our Lives and The Little Foxes.

  I was on my way, until I was transferred—for no reason other than that my commanding officers couldn’t figure out what I was doing there in the first place. I had no film business experience, I had never seen a Moviola or an animation camera or an editing room, I had no Hollywood patron, I wasn’t a junior—who cast me in this picture?

  No matter. The mistake was corrected after a giddy five months. The party over, I was shipped out to Augusta, Georgia, in the summer of 1951, a candidate in training to lay down lines of communication in advance of our troops in enemy territory. Like some comic book adventure hero that I might have created, I was being prepared for duty that included crawling through the South Korean muck and grime and grit—alone. The United States Army was behind me, some distance behind me. I was to lead them.

  I saw no good reason to accept this assignment. As Vice President Dick Cheney, our fiercest Iraq war hawk, explained when asked by the press why he hadn’t fought in the Vietnam War, “I had other priorities.” Yes! Yes! Me too!

  My desperation put me on a bus to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. I had learned through scuttlebutt of the existence of a publications unit, the Signal Corps Publications Agency, that might just be interested in sparing a boy cartoonist from becoming a dead radio operator. Scuttlebutt was the Internet of its day, circulating rumors and useful information by phone, written notes, conversation. It was the GIs’ back channel, informing us of what the army didn’t want us to know.

  Truth and half-truth and outright falsehood flew back and forth among GIs who wanted in on this or out of that and needed to know where to go, whom to see, how to circumvent official channels, because one learned by the end of the first week in the army that going through the chain of command to get what you wanted got you nowhere. This was the ultimate purpose of the chain of command. Appeals, petitions, letters, phone calls were stopped dead in their tracks, before they could reach the desk of an officer who might actually help you. And divert him with the inconsequential matter of your life and death.

  Fort Monmouth was sandwiched between Red Bank, New Jersey, and Asbury Park, not nearly as drab-looking as Fort Dix but clearly no country club. The head of the publications unit was a man named Percy Couse, who must have been in his late forties but looked older. He was a civilian, but that didn’t do me much good. He was a civilian who believed in going by the book. His presence was intimidating: thick eyebrows over squinting ice blue eyes magnified scarily through thick-lensed glasses, a deep, gravelly voice, and trimmed snow white hair that added years and gravitas. Not exactly an image to suggest hope. His manner was cordial if not helpful. Yes, he said, they could use someone of my talent on his staff, which was half civilian, half military, but no, he could not accede to my request and ask for me outright. That was not how it was done. But if my new commander at Camp Gordon was amenable to a transfer, then Mr. Couse might consider finding a place for me in his unit.

  Hardly an overwhelming endorsement. Mr. Couse, at my pleading, dashed off a letter on official stationery saying that if Private Feiffer was available for transfer, the Signal Corps Publications Agency would consider him. It was the best I could do.

  CAMP GORGON

  My first glimpse of Camp Gordon: barren, sun-sodden grounds, so damp with humidity it made foolish my complaints of New York summers. New York was never like this. Hell was never like this. Fort Dix stood out as a vacation paradise. I realized on my arrival exactly where I was. I was in the army, God help me. Finally they had done it.

  Jules was not going to take this lying down. Let others adjust, let others accept, I was in a rage. From my first moment of arrival, I plotted my getaway. I fondled my letter from Mr. Couse, hid it in a secret place no one would find. I thought it was my death house reprieve.

  Radio repair, if that’s what it was, was indecipherable to me. Talk about code—everything said to me by the sergeant instructor, laconic, soft-spoken, hard-assed, and contemptuous, sounded as if he were translating from a foreign tongue. He knew he was speaking to a room full of idiots. He didn’t try to hide that. His deadpan delivery didn’t help.

  I was the main idiot. The other recruits, after a day or two, appeared to catch on. For these kids just a couple of years out of high school, learning how to repair a radio could be a good career opportunity. If they survived those North Koreans shooting bullets at them.

  We students sat on stools, stooped over radio parts and loose wires, tinkering with tools that were meant to help but didn’t. Arranged in three rows, ten repairmen trainees cubbyholed at long, wooden, scarred tables. My fellow students, generally working class and, like me, with only a high school education, seemed to master the process after a couple of days. But it eluded me. Something about “olms,” which was, I think, a term of measurement, not a mantra. And then there was voltage. But isn’t “voltage” also a term of measurement? So what are olms?

  Everyone in the class, none of whom were a quarter as bright as I, whizzed through radio repair. This began to bother me. Everyone likes to excel, and even though I planned to flunk in the hope of not being sent to Korea, I preferred to feel clever about it, that it was my choice.

  Choice or not, I was not going to be permitted the freedom to flunk. Camp Gordon had a quota of trained radio repairmen to turn out, and just as on induction day, when I was recorded to weigh 190 pounds when the scale read 130, I was going to be graduated from radio school, it didn’t matter how unqualified. “No, Feiffer, them two wires, you let them touch, you’re gonna fuckin’ short the fuckin’ system and start a fuckin’ fire. Then you’re gonna be fucked.”

  This made no sense. The Signal Corps shouldn’t waste its money on the likes of me, who was bound to screw up in the field and endanger the lives of men, especially myself. I could do them so much more good if they’d only let me sit behind a drawing board.

  This argument was convincing to me as I listened to it play back in my head. As I mentioned earlier, I was crazy—but the sort of crazy that led me to believe that I was the only sane person in the asylum. Which might have been fine if I hadn’t acted on it and made the stupidest move of all: I went through the chain of command.

  I had not been around Camp Gordon long enough to ferret out the right connection. Every post had a connection, the man behind the scenes who had the authority to cut through the red tape. The connection was an unacknowledged, ephemeral figure whom you could not get to through the chain of command, which existed solely to protect officers like him from privates like me. But once I located his hideaway, this anonymous,
oh-so-protected officer—who lacked the hands-on daily contact that fostered callousness and indifference—might actually listen to me, might even be persuadable.

  I understood all that, but nonetheless I panicked. I lacked the patience to search out this mysterious figure. I was crazy, going crazier by the minute. The logic of my insanity insisted that I make a request to go before our company commander.

  He was Captain Something or Major Something. He cut through what I thought was my well-reasoned analysis of why I would be of more use in our nation’s struggle against Communism if I fought the Korean War in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. It took him half a second to conclude that I was a goldbricking, lying piece of New York shit.

  Okay, he had his position. I had mine. Perhaps we could meet halfway … Apparently not. He yelled, he shouted, I was sent back to my barracks in shame and disgrace.

  I went back to radio repair school not in the slightest defeated. I had goofed by going through the chain of command, but I had come out of it with a strengthened sense of mission. Here was what I had to do. I understood that I was crazy. I had to find a way for the army to understand my craziness, I had to convince them it wasn’t an act. I had to raise the ante on my insanity level. I was too well behaved a nutcase, too self-effacing, too bourgeois. I had to come up with a performance that would fool the army into believing that I was, in fact, what I knew myself to be.

  But this performance could not take place before I found the man outside the chain of command to go to, the officer who was out there, the fixer, the conduit, the liaison, the mystery man. He who would listen to me. And send me to Fort Monmouth. His name was Warrant Officer Hoover. Warrant officers, a rank that I don’t think exists today, were, in the 1950s, liaison officers who went by the honorific title “Mister.” Warrant officers played the role of shortstops, troubleshooters, problem solvers. The army knew better than anyone that its system often didn’t work. It was never intended to work. Its rules and regulations were designed to keep it rolling smoothly with a deliberate mindlessness. Whether or not it worked was incidental. The important part was that it had to look as if it knew what it was doing even when it didn’t know what it was doing. It couldn’t afford to admit a mistake or publicly change its mind. When it changed tactics, it publicly denied that it was changing tactics. The army could not concede a point. Once you conceded a point, you undermined your credibility, you weakened your authority, or so our commanders believed. Troops would go uncertain and neurotic and resist following the orders that led them to their doom. What kind of army was it if it couldn’t routinely lead men off to die?

  So for a system so rigid not to back up on itself, it needed a second system working clandestinely within the official system. This unacknowledged system could bend the rules, go around the rules, ignore the rules, if it must, to right wrongs, to get things done. Warrant Officer Hoover was secluded away in an office impossible to find. He was the chosen man at Camp Gordon, the only man whose job it was to be rational. It was his job to listen, it was his job to make sense. He was a very lonely man.

  He was hard to find but finally findable. In every army there is a malcontent underground. They know what everyone else knows; and what you’re not supposed to know, they find out. I had come in contact with this malcontent underground. I was making such an exhibition of myself in radio repair school that I was approached as a prospective recruit, a malcontent in waiting. They found me to be ideal material.

  I sat with my fellow malcontents long into the night, tossing back and forth conspiracy theories. We bandied about the names of those we knew or had heard of who had gotten transferred out of Camp Gordon by one ruse or another, who had been slated to go to FECOM (Far East Command) and had ended up in West Germany, who had managed to get a discharge because they were psycho or pseudo-psycho or were psycho on a particular day or had a breakdown or had faked a breakdown. The stories made the rounds as fables for grown-ups (not that we could be called grown-ups, but no one in the army could be called a grown-up, especially the men in charge).

  I kept putting off my crack-up, but I couldn’t put it off much longer. I had rehearsed in my head what was going to happen. I couldn’t go stark raving insane, screaming and hopping about. I knew I couldn’t pull that off. If I was going to commit myself to a crazy act, first it must be convincing to me, otherwise how would I convince my commanding officers?

  My usual approach to get attention was to use self-effacement laced with humor. In keeping with what made me comfortable, it seemed to me that my only feasible move was to concoct a wry, self-effacing nervous breakdown.

  It was essentially a writing and acting job, and although I was faking it, I began to wonder just how much. Was I about to act out a breakdown in order to cover up the very real wry, self-effacing breakdown that I was already in the middle of?

  These two transmitter wires that aren’t supposed to touch, if I put them so close together that they do touch … The results of all that training in radio repair that I didn’t understand indicated that it would cause a short circuit. Sparks would fly, a sizzling sound, the smell of wires burning. By having these two wires, both positive charges (or were they negative?), make contact and start off a small fireworks display—that might be just the boost I needed to get me leaping off my stool and running out of radio repair class, out onto the field crying in anguish (not defiance, never defiance, it must be anguish): “I CAN’T DO THIS! I’VE TRIED! I CAN’T FIX A RADIO! I CAN’T! I CAN’T! I CAN’T! I CAN’T!”

  The second lieutenant was called in by my sergeant to handle the mental case he didn’t want any part of. The lieutenant called me a coward and a phony and asked me how I’d like to be transferred to Korea. I, who had broken down so much better than I expected, was now on a roll. I saw this as my moment to go for broke. Since the second lieutenant was not going to be moved by my madness, I dug deep into my movie bag of tricks. I dug up a voice quivering Jimmy Stewart-inspired Every Boy going off to fight the Japanese in World War II patriotism. Speaking from my heart, a symphony orchestra in the back of my head scoring my sincerity and love of country, “Sir,” I said to my superior officer, staring him square in the eye, “I’ve been through basic training. I can shoot a weapon, I know the M–1. If that’s where I can serve my country best, I will be happy to go. But I can’t go as a radio repairman.”

  The lieutenant, who refused to be impressed, ordered me confined to barracks. I had another destination in mind. With legs shaky from my confrontation, I walked across the vast stretch of parade ground. The cropped grass radiated an eerie brilliance, the afterglow of turgid Augusta in August, its humidity and rainfall. A wind had whipped up. Three flagpoles spaced at wide intervals across the field flew outsized American flags in the evening dusk to the recorded blast of a Sousa march. I walked self-consciously, observing myself as an actor performing for the camera, miming a shakiness under my control onto the shakiness that wasn’t.

  This walk that couldn’t have taken more than three minutes felt like an hour. On the other side of the field, right off a dirt path, I found Warrant Officer Hoover’s office. Mr. Hoover was alone, sitting at his desk as I entered, typing out a report. I saluted. I asked if I might speak with him.

  Mr. Hoover had the look of a man who was not going to make it easy for me. In his forties, tired-looking, brittle, with a pencil mustache and a face without lines or expression. He asked me who had given me the authority to approach him without an appointment. I seem to be at my best when I have everything to lose. At this point I saw myself as a CIA agent working underground, interrogated by an enemy army. It didn’t matter what I said to my interrogators, as long as it wasn’t the truth. “Sir, forgive my stupidity. I didn’t know I needed permission, I’ll go back now and see if I can get permission—”

  Mr. Hoover interrupted with half a lecture, half a bawling out: I wasn’t going to get anywhere in this man’s army until I learned the rules and respected them. Who was I to think I was so special that I could just barge i
nto his office without an appointment and expect a busy man like Mr. Hoover to take the time—didn’t I know what the chain of command was? He explained it to me, in case I didn’t know. Then, having explained the chain of command and gone on to explain why he was of a mind to kick me out, he said the magic words: “All right, soldier, as long as you’re here, what’s the problem?”

  He was playing my script! First bawl me out, then hear me out.

  The approach I took was to skip the breakdown in favor of patriotism. How could the Signal Corps waste so much money sending me through radio repair school, where I couldn’t understand even the most basic rudiments, when, up in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, in the Signal Corps Publications Agency, there was a desk waiting for me to work on much-needed training manuals, maps, charts, and graphs that were in short supply. And I could be there, within days, to supply them. Did this make sense?

  Mr. Hoover listened without comment, then made it clear that it was time for me to leave. He called after me as I walked out the door, “You say you have a letter from Fort Monmouth?”

  I said that I did, that I had it in my footlocker.

  “See that you drop it off here tomorrow morning before 8:00 a.m.”

  My heart took a flying leap out of my chest. I started back across the parade ground, aquiver with excitement. I was going to get my transfer!

  Dusk had settled. I was now halfway across the field. An amplified recording of “Taps” began to sound. The American flags were being lowered from their flagpoles. With the continuing sense of cameras rolling, spying on my every step, I came to a halt on my way back to my barracks where I was to be confined. Alone in the middle of the darkening green parade ground, I turned to face the lowering of my country’s flags. I was moved. I was joyous. I had been heard. Was this a great country or what? I saluted the flags. And I said out loud, because no one was within a quarter mile to hear: “I fucked the army! I fucked the army! I fucked the army!”