Pig Alley had sidewalk cafes all along there. It was one of the world’s largest black market areas. I saw a boy from the Third Army who was by himself arguing with some Frenchmen. Well, two GIs can whip a whole street full of those Frogs. So I moved over near him. When he saw me move in, boy he grabbed that Frog he was messing with and busted him down and stomped and kicked him around. I just walked around the fight slowly and if anyone stepped out I would drop them. That Frog got up and the other boy hit him and knocked him back up into this wall of people that circled us. That soldier stepped up in there, grabbed the Frog and yanked him back out of that circle. When he did, one of them hit him with a bottle of wine and dropped him right then and there. I grabbed the guy who hit him with a wine bottle and busted him down, just started stomping him and kicking him around. When I did they came at me from all sides.
That Third Army GI got out of there someway fast. He left me fighting that whole street full of them. Of course I could not keep all of them off. They cut my head across the temple and back down my neck and ear. I was losing a lot of blood but they still did not have me down. Three of those Free French soldiers came along and saw what was happening. They jumped in with me and boy we went to work on those Frenchmen, sure enough. Then the MPs came along. They gathered me up and took me back down to an American aid station.
They had aid stations set up all over Pig Alley. They had “blood buckets” driving those streets picking up bodies all day long. So they moved me down to an aid station and worked on me for a while and then they found an ambulance that could take me over to a general hospital right there in Paris. I went in there first thing the next morning. Of course I missed my ship. So my company carried me as AWOL. I eventually went through three hospitals in France.
Scar tissue will rise above the surface and those holes down in the ear drum are not that big. My ear was cut up so bad that after they got through packing and bandaging it, it had grown back together. So I finally told them, “Well, ship me back to the United States. I’ve got a quarter-inch drill and I can do a better job than you all.”
BACK IN THE STATES
Well, they shipped me back on a hospital ship. We arrived at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, on the twentieth of December. The transportation corps people, who wore a big steering gear patch on their shoulders, loaded us onto hospital trains bound for different destinations. They had hospitals set up to accommodate different types of wounds and injuries and sickness. I needed some plastic surgery on my ear so they loaded me on a train that was heading down to Camp Chaffee, Arkansas.
We took off and headed north. The first thing I knew we were in Canada. Then they cut back west and headed south again to Chicago. We were a low priority. Every time another train would be on the same track as us, they would park us to the side and let the civilians pass. So I was not in too good of a mood. We were on that train for four days and nights going from Camp Kilmer to Camp Chaffee.
My mother had died the previous January. After I had seen what the point system was, I had called Dad from France and told him, “Dad I’ll spend Christmas with you.” I intended to keep my promise. We were scheduled to arrive at Camp Chaffee on Christmas Eve. Most of the officers, of course, would be on leave. I figured my records would be all goofed up. I did not know at that time that they did not even have records on me. I thought, “You’ll get in there and you will not even see daylight.” I decided that I would bail off of that train and hitchhike home.
The hospital train was an old type of train. It had an observation platform between each car. I had moved my duffel bag out on this platform and had my musset bag on. The area had had a terrible storm the night before and snow was hip deep to a tall Indian all along the right of way. I was kind of standing there looking for a drift that was big enough to break my fall. This “Wagon Wheel” captain and his sergeant came along. They counted me one-twenty-three or something.
I asked, “What are you doing?”
He said, “We are counting heads so we will know how many people we are responsible for when we get to Chaffee.”
I said, “You better subtract one off of your total because I won’t be there.”
He said, “Yeah, you will.”
I repeated, “I won’t be there.”
He said, “We’re only about twenty miles from Chaffee. We don’t stop between here and Chaffee.”
I said, “You watch this.”
I kicked my duffel bag and away it went with me right after it rolling and tumbling in that snow. That captain watched the whole time.
I got up and started walking. I had whiskey and different things in that big duffel bag. It was tough to carry but there was a little old country store right there close to where I jumped off. I walked in there and they asked, “Can we do something for you?”
I said, “Yeah, you sure can. I’ve got my world’s possessions in this duffel bag. There is a Swastika flag that will cover any wall you’ve got in here and it is in good condition. I’m trying to hitchhike to Ponca City, Oklahoma, and I don’t want to fool with this. If you will store this here for me, I will pay you whatever the charges are when I come back and pick it up. If I don’t make it back to pick it up, it is yours stock free.”
They said, “We can store it under here for you. We will hold it for a long, long time. It is not any trouble.”
So they stored my duffel bag there. I got out and all I had was my musset bag. I hitchhiked and got home the evening of December the twenty-fourth. I stayed for about ten days.
My brother and father decided they would just drive me over to Camp Chaffee. That way we could get in a little more visiting. When we arrived at Camp Chaffee we stopped right there at the main gate and I told this MP, “I’m reporting in.”
He asked, “Who are you?”
I said, “I’m James McNiece, 18131236.”
He read the list and said, “We don’t have a record of you.”
I said, “I jumped off a hospital train about ten days ago. I’ve been AWOL ever since. I think I’ll report back in.”
He said, “Well, we don’t even have any record of you. Let me call up ahead.”
He called somewhere and they did not know anything about me either. They told him to put me in some transportation and bring me up to such and such section of the hospital.
When he turned me loose, I reported to a lieutenant. I told her what had happened. She also said, “We do not even have a record of you anyway.”
I said, “I should have stayed home is what I should have done.”
I needed plastic surgery on my head and ear and neck. The nearest plastic surgery center was Springfield, Missouri, and boy, it was really crowded. There were guys they had been working on for a little over a year. They just took people by necessity. I waited at Chaffee until a bed opened up at Springfield. So I hung around there for about another ten days.
I went in and asked for a midnight pass into Fort Smith just as quick as I could get straightened out there and learn the ropes.
This little ole nurse said, “Okay, fine and dandy.”
There was really nothing physically wrong with me. She gave me a seventy-two-hour pass and I went back and started getting ready to do the town up right. I had really not been in an American city except Ponca City since the war. Just in a little while she called me up to the phone. My brother Jack was up in Philadelphia. He was a major in the air corps who had flown the Hump in the China-Burma-India theater.
Jack said, “Sidney is home in Ponca City this weekend and he does not have much time.” Sid was my other brother who had been an underwater demolitions man with the Seabees down in the South Pacific. He was getting ready to enroll in college. Jack said, “If you want, I’ll pull in there in the morning about nine o’clock. I’ve got a C-47 at my command. How about I pick you up in the morning and let’s fly over to Ponca City and the three of us get together and shoot the breeze.” We had not seen one another in years.
I said, “Okay, fine and dandy.”
&nbs
p; He asked, “You can go can’t you?”
I said, “Oh yeah, I can go. No problem.”
I talked to the nurse, “Now listen. I have two brothers whom I have not seen in two and a half or three years. One would like to pick me up in the morning at nine o’clock. We’ll fly to Ponca City and spend a day or two and then he’ll bring me right back.”
She said, “That’ll be all right. You can go if you’re back here tonight at midnight.”
I said, “I’ll be back.”
I went into town and got all drunked up. A couple of MPs told me to get out of town. I do not remember any of this. I just remember what they said at the court martial. Evidently, I whipped those two MPs in this bar and told them, “You all go get you some reinforcements. That’s what your problem is. There’s not enough of you. I’ll be right here.”
Well, they came back with a captain, a sergeant, and another private. The captain said, “When we entered the bar, paratrooper McNiece was sitting at the bar like he said. When he looked around and saw us enter, he charged us and started putting the ugly all over us.”
They filed charges against me. I went in and was listening to all this. If I had been the captain, I would have never said this. I would have thought up another charge of some kind but he said, “He called me a draft-dodging, slacking, noncombatant son-of-a-bitch. Boy, and it went to the dirt. We finally controlled him and took him back and put him in the stockade.”
This MP officer asked me, “If you held a certain opinion of someone or something, you might be quiet about it. But if you got drunk, you would likely be able to make that remark.”
I said, “Oh yeah. Let me tell you something. I would not have to be drunk to tell you that. In the soberest moment of my life my evaluation of you would be the same.”
He asked, “Do you remember calling me that?”
I said, “I don’t remember it but I’m not denying it. I don’t know if it would do me much good to deny it when you have four witnesses plus your own story.”
He said, “This is a real peculiar thing. You’ve got about twenty decorations issued in combat. There is no record of you ever having problems with officers, but with an attitude like yours, we don’t know how you got through with this kind of a service record.”
I said, “Why, it’s very simple. I can give you an answer real quick. The officers that we had in airborne units were some of the finest soldiers that ever lived. They took every chance that we did. They were as susceptible to that enemy fire as we were and they stood there and looked it right in the eye. We had good officers. I did not have any problems with them. It’s just people like you that I have problems with.”
He said, “Well, we’ve reviewed your record. You’ve been in the stockade half the time that you’ve been in but you’ve never been court-martialed. We can’t understand it really. Nonetheless, we’re going to court-martial you. Then you had better watch your step. We have found out that they are going to ship you up to O’Reilly because of plastic surgery. If you ever set foot in this town again, it is the first step towards Leavenworth.”12
I said, “Well, I want to tell you something. I’m going to do a little leveling with you. If I come back here to Chaffee, there will be a piece of paper that will declare me a civilian. Buddy, you had better give me a big wide berth. Because I will be out from under your jurisdiction and I’m going to beat you to death.”
He said, “Okay.”
They court-martialed me right there. I did not get to see my brothers as planned. I then went up to O’Reilly and had the plastic surgery. The medical people were very good. It was just like clockwork to them. They made a hole down in my ear. It is not shaped like the other but it’s straight in and I have lost very little hearing in that ear.
They shipped me back to Camp Chaffee. There was a captain who interviewed us as we were being separated. He tried to figure out our Military Occupational Skill (MOS) from talking with us. We were supposed to have some preference for employment if that field came open. This guy was talking to me and I said, “The main thing I am in here for is that separation money. Let’s see some green laying up out there on this table.”
He said, “McNiece, I’m not sure but that you owe us some money. It looks like you’ve got as much bad time as you’ve got good time.”
I said, “That depends upon the definition that you’re using. Everything that you all thought was bad time, to me it was good time and what you all thought was good time to me was bad time.”
He was real nice about it. They separated me from the service on February 26, 1946, as a staff sergeant. I had been in the army for three years, five months, and twenty-six days. I enjoyed every minute of it. I never had so much fun in any three and a half years of my life. I had a lot of hard times and a lot of bad times but it was a great experience. Some say that I may have led a charmed life. Someone asked me after the war why I thought I survived four combat jumps.
I said, “I think I know why I lived through them. I wasn’t any more skilled than anyone else but at that time the Lord had only two places he was putting people—in heaven and in hell. I don’t think he had a place for me. I don’t think he wanted me to goof either place up.”
7
GET-TOGETHER
A PROMISE
My mother and dad had worked like dogs to raise ten kids along with Dad’s two younger half-brothers. They had never traveled a whole lot. They could not afford to. So I had told Mom and Dad that when the war was over I would show them the whole United States, just make a tour of it. My mother died while I was overseas so when I returned home after the war, I picked up Dad and we toured the whole eastern part of the country. We drove by car right straight through to the Carolinas, up to Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia, to Buffalo, New York, and Niagara Falls, and crossed over into Canada. We then started retracing our route but veered off and came back through the Allegheny Mountains and down through the midwest, where there were not a lot of tourist sites. We were gone about three weeks or so on that leg of the journey.
I then told Dad when we got back home, “Now you get rested up and we’ll take off and go to the west coast.” A short time later, we headed out to California. We traveled clear up Highway 101 then came back down through the Redwood National Forest and saw the big dams. We just had a great time. That jaunt lasted about another three weeks.
After that I asked Dad, “Is there any place in this country that you would like to see?” Boy, I was really loaded. I had loot like you would not believe. I had enough to last me a year and we had not spent a lot of money.
Dad had been an orphan kid down in Arkansas since he was three years old. He said that he would love to go back down to Newport, Arkansas, and visit the children of some of the families that had taken care of him. He had just moved from one farmer’s house to another. He lived with them for either six months, a year, or two years, and then they would let another farmer have him. The people were very good to Dad. They did not mistreat him at all. He worked hard but so did the other children. The families treated him like one of their own and Dad loved them.
He remembered several children his same age so we spent two weeks down there just visiting from one house to another. Those people welcomed him just like he was their brother. There still was a lot of admiration and respect between them.
TULARE, CALIFORNIA
When we returned from Arkansas, I took off for California. I knew I could make pretty good money out there. That was the first place where they began to use parachute firefighters. They would pay those firefighters good money to parachute into the wildfires. I think they were paying them two hundred and eighty dollars a month. I went out there and tried to sign up with them.
They asked me, “How old are you?”
I said, “I’m twenty-eight.”
They said, “That exceeds the limit. We cannot employ people that old.”
I asked, “You can’t employ people that old?”
They said, “Yeah.”
I said, “I was not too old a year ago in Europe to be kicked out of every airplane that got off of the ground just to kill Germans for twenty dollars a month. It seems to me like you have a sudden increase in qualifications.”
Of course I was irritated because I felt that I was just as good as them since I had been in the paratroops. But they would not hire me because of my age. I instead went to work for the Southern Pacific Railroad.
I was an alcoholic when I went in the army and when I came out. I pursued it for several years. I was in a brawl nearly every night somewhere. I really was not belligerent. I think a lot of people got the idea that if they could whip an ex-paratrooper, that would put them high up on the stick. A lot of my fighting was due to circumstances that I did not create, but then I did not take “boo” from anybody. When drunk, a person is going to place himself in a position where it will be more convenient to fight than explain.
I had lots of problems. I was in jail a whole lot but I always had a good paying job. I was just saving money to build me a nest egg. But just as soon as I got some money, I would go out and get drunk. While I was in Los Angeles, I owned a twelve-cylinder Lincoln Zepher. I was driving up the street one morning stone cold drunk and passed out. When I woke up I was driving through an underpass. I just missed the concrete pillar by a coat of paint. I could have been killed. I thought for the first time, “I’ve got to change.”
I worked as a fireman on the railroad for about nine months. They had great packing sheds where farmers brought their harvested crops in to freight. We had a big stop at Bakersfield where men would lash down those reefers after they were loaded. Then we would take off from Bakersfield about midnight and would pull a trainload of empty reefers up to Tulare. We would arrive at six o’clock in the morning. There was a hotel and a cafe right beside the depot. We would just pile off of that train, go in and clean up, eat breakfast then go to bed. Of course, we would sleep all day while others were loading those reefers. They would have that done by six o’clock that evening. Then the same train crew—engineer, brakeman, and fireman—would report in, mount that engine and haul those back down to Bakersfield where they would ice them down.
Filthy Thirteen Page 24
