Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

  Eisenhower was always calling home to the USA for bigger drafts.

  * * *

  I was on my way back to company to report to the captain that I’d been busted, when it began to snow.

  The next day I didn’t think I had the authority to order three repos not to sneak down to a big farmhouse to do some looting, and a German machine gun ripped them up, and ripped up my leg when I tried to drag Ernie Flores out. A Sherman tank came up to blast the farmhouse and the machine-gun nest to gravel.

  Consequent to my session with the major and my million-dollar wound, I missed the first and worst part of the Battle of the Bulge.

  I was taken out in a jeep and back to Paris to the American Hospital.

  7

  I sat outside a café in Montmartre, watching the rain slashing along the sidewalk four feet from my boots, and considered the depth of the shit I was in. My father had come home from World War I a horseman rather than a foot soldier, as he had repetitively put it, and his son was an AWOL jerk-off on the verge of desertion.

  After three weeks the doctor had certified me as fit for combat, with orders back to my outfit. My million-dollar wound was not worth much on the present market. At the time Hemingway’s “separate peace” sounded pretty good to me.

  I had decided that my wound separated the men from the boys. Boys were those who were sure none of the 88 shells coming over had their names on them even when their buddies were getting blown apart. You were no longer a boy when you realized the truth of the situation, which was that your name was on a whole lot of different kinds of shells and bullets, and what you had instead of the courage of invulnerability was a pounding heart and shortness of breath, with a target affixed to your back and a terrific reluctance to expose yourself.

  Except that as a man, “full-fledge” as Calvin had said once, I couldn’t even go down on the Left Bank and sit around in the cafés where Hemingway had hung out because MPs would be there checking paper.

  I sipped sour red wine with two saucers before me. The mustachioed waiter eyed me with a squint of anxiety. Rain blew in squalls along the street and among the bare black limbs of the trees in the little parc across the way. There were a few passersby between the showers, women in short black skirts (short, I was told, because of the lack of fabric), showing good legs. Whores gave me the questioning eye. Their rates were up because of the numbers of American soldiers in Paris, some on legitimate or medical leave, some AWOLs like me, some flat-out deserters, which I was sticking one toe into.

  And here was my Company K pal Tallboy hustling up the sidewalk toward me, the shoulders of his GI overcoat and his cap dark with wet. He slammed into the chair beside me with a screech of jarred legs. “Pat!” he said.

  “Tallboy!”

  He fumbled in his pocket. His face was pale and long with a petulant lower lip. He was a better soldier than I was. He slapped on the table a packet of letters fastened together with string.

  “Mail call,” Tallboy said.

  “Thanks.” I beckoned to the waiter to bring wine.

  Tallboy sneezed. “Fucken rain,” he said. “We are moving back into the line Tuesday, Pat.”

  “Listen,” I said. “I am a blessé de guerre. I am not recovered yet, whatever the doc says. I am not ready to go back there and get blesséd again, or dead. They are so fucking stupid I don’t have to go along with their stupidity.”

  “Somebody has got to run the thing, Pat! They have got to have the authority to tell the soldiers what to do. They can see the big picture, we can’t. You can’t just have every sergeant deciding he would run the war a different way.”

  “This ex-sergeant has so decided,” I said. I squinted at the packet of letters.

  “At the Battle of Gettysburg,” I went on, “Robert E. Lee sent I forget how many men of Pickett’s Division up the hill in a stupid charge, and most of them got killed or blessé’d, and lost the war right then. They should not have gone up that hill into the Union guns. Just the way I’m not going back into direct frontal shit when we should be hitting flanks. You know why they are doing it this stupid way? They are just trying to impress Montgomery with Yankee guts. Doesn’t matter if they get a few thousand GIs dead.”

  The waiter brought two more glasses of red on their little saucers.

  “Pat, listen, with AWOL you’ll have to take some shit, but if you desert you get the whole machinery after you. They’ll put you in prison. They’ll shoot you!” He stuck his lower lip out. “How’s your leg?” he wanted to know.

  “Almost okay. I can feel it, but it’s okay. I’m not admitting it to anybody but you, though.” I slapped my thigh, harder than I meant to.

  Tallboy winced for me.

  When the doctor told me he was sending me back to my outfit, I said, What do you do, get a bonus for everyone you send back?

  They need you, he said. They’re taking a lot of casualties.

  I spread the letters in a fan. Letters from Bonny, from my stepmother, who wrote for my father, and Pogey in Kansas with an engineer outfit.

  A squall marched down the street, sweeping leaves and a page of newspaper before it. Civilians hustled by, the men in dark ill-fitting suits and cloth caps, the women in their coats, short skirts, and bare white legs.

  “That poule’s kind of giving me the eye,” Tallboy said. The woman was waiting under a metal awning next to the café. She had a dark red mouth. Tallboy wanted to know if I’d be here for a while.

  “I’ll be here.”

  He loped along toward the woman, very American in his overcoat and cap. I saw her put her arm through his with a feminine motion that felt like a crimp in my chest. When they were out of sight I ripped one of Bonny’s letters open.

  More complaints about med school and men in general. I had begun to worry whether she was going to make it. I had come to a slow realization that her distancing from me was not because of any perceived betrayal with Lois Meador she felt, but from a cast-iron determination to make a life she wanted, of which I was not a part. Where had she got that determination to be a doctor? What had caused that huge seachange in her?

  Her aunt Honey had taken her and her friend Gloria to San Francisco to see Shaw’s play Man and Superman, which I’d heard of but knew nothing about. Part of it, called “Don Juan in Hell,” had the characters in Hell, discussing philosophical matters that had impressed Bonny. A week later she and her aunt and a professor couple, friends of her aunt’s, had a play-reading evening reading the third act of Man and Superman. “They let me read the Dona Ana part! Jim was Don Juan and Maria the Devil, and Aunt Honey the Statue. There is an opera where the Statue appears and drags Don Juan off to Hell. We talked about the Life Force! Just ask me about the Life Force. I know the Life Force! It was a wonderful evening!

  “Do you remember when I read Crime and Punishment? It obsessed me so, I could hardly think about anything else. Now it’s like that with this ‘Don Juan in Hell.’ Shaw was so smart! Those lines itch in my head like hot wires. Gloria and I talked a lot about it, but she just doesn’t feel the way I do.”

  Was that an implication that she wished I were there to discuss it with her?

  I reread the Man and Superman paragraph again, feeling sour. I had urged her to read Crime and Punishment. I remembered her excitement, which I had been responsible for. I had been a year older than she was, I’d read a lot of books, I’d been a kind of tutor. Now she was excited about something I knew nothing about.

  In another letter dated later in November, she had gone with her aunt to the opera in San Francisco. Norma. “It was simply divine! Do you know Bellini died when he was thirty-four? Those melodies! Norma and Adalgisa singing those long, sinuous duets!”

  It seemed my education at San Diego State was not going to stand up to hers at Stanford.

  8

  In a sunny patch of sidewalk on the Champs, not far beyond the Arc de Triomphe, a Negro soldier sat at a little table with a blue cup and saucer before him, and the stub of a croissant on a plate
. Calvin King’s cap was tilted over one eye, and he wore a GI overcoat.

  “Well, hiyuh, child!” he said, without apparent surprise. A young woman in a blue blouse and apron appeared. “You want a café au lait, child? Better than milk shakes.”

  “Sure,” I said, but turned down a croissant. I grinned at Calvin. “Here we are in their war,” I said.

  Inside the café a machine was hissing steam. A pair of two-and-a-halfs rolled by on the Champs, followed by one of the Tinkertoy little French cars with corrugated sides, and a black gangster-style Citroën.

  “Not me, bo,” Calvin said. His face was leaner, finer-featured.

  “AWOL?”

  He shook his head. “All the way. They’ve got colored guys just driving trucks and carrying garbage cans for the white boys. Nuffa that.”

  I said there’d been a colored tank destroyer team near us in the Ardennes.

  “That’s new, then,” Calvin said. He gazed at me not quite hostilely with his dark pupils in his yellowish eyeballs and sipped his coffee. “You know how many of us all-the-ways there’s here in Paris, child? Some say fifteen thousand. On the loose.”

  “Doing what?” I said. I knew of the deserters, but his numbers were staggering if true.

  “Makin money. Cigarets! You know what you can do with cigarets in this country? A couple of cartons of cigarets can get you blown by a duchess.”

  Calvin went through a complicated process of digging a pack of cigarets from his jacket pocket, English Players, shaking one out of the pack and offering it to me, lipping it himself, lighting it with a gold Zippo, squinting at me through the smoke.

  “Colored guys don’t have any stake in this war, child,” he said. “You have any idea the shit a colored guy goes through in recruit training? That’s just the beginning of the shit. No, sir, you fellows fight your own war.”

  I’d had an idea of the shit he was in for in recruit training.

  “Well, that’s great, Calvin,” I said. “I always knew you’d do well.” In the equation of Man vs. Superman, it seemed that Calvin was always over on the Super side. Maybe with a whiff of the Devil.

  He grinned with a brilliant dental display. One of his front teeth was missing, with a wire remaining that must have been the pivot for a false tooth. It gave him an almost comical look of menace.

  My leg had stiffened, and I stretched it out under the table. “How’s your uncle Red?” I asked.

  “Gone to a better world,” Calvin said. “Heart attack. Damn, if I was there what I could do with his bidness!” He leaned toward me. “What do you hear from your lady friend, child?”

  “Tough times in Stanford Med,” I said.

  When I left him I almost ran into a pair of MPs coming around the Etoile. I managed to head out of their way without breaking into a run, but barely; I was panting and pissed off when I had got a corner of a stone building between me and them. I didn’t want to have to do that anymore. My money was going to run out in about four days anyway.

  9

  Corinne sat on the bed reading Le Monde. Fair cropped hair covered her head like pale flames. When they had shaved her head she had let it grow out this far, and now kept it cut short. Sometimes she wore a wig, but more often she faced down what she had to face down with her sleeping-with-the-Boche cropped head. She hadn’t read The Scarlet Letter, and my little French had failed trying to explain it to her.

  The old Royal portable with its French accents I’d bought at the marché puce rested on the little table.

  “’Allo, Paht.”

  “’Allo, Corinne.” I went over to the window to look out over the raked reefs of roofs, les toits de Paris. The twats of Paris. I said I was going to have to go back.

  “Pourquoi?” she said.

  “No money.”

  She said she could get money.

  It was impossible to explain that I was not suited to a life that had seemed glamorous in theory, in rebellion against the stupidities of war. In fact, being an AWOL hiding out in a hole in the mansard in Montmartre with a girl who would go out and peddle pussy for money for you, like Dessy and Calvin, where every time you passed an MP he would want to check your orders, as would the noncoms at transient messes and transient barracks, was simply too shitty.

  I picked up the splayed-open paperback of Swann’s Way and set it aside, to seat myself in the rickety chair facing Corinne. She had a pasty, sweet face with startlingly black eyebrows below her cropped head. When she got up to come to me, her breasts swung in her white blouse. She sat on my lap and traced a finger down my cheek and pressed her lips there with popping little kisses. She had been in love with a German lieutenant and did not apologize for it.

  “You will leave me, Paht?” she said.

  “Just for a while,” I said.

  I had thought I could be a writer on the outside looking in spectatorly on the bourgeois bullshit of Amurrucun life. But I would have to write about the bullshit from inside Social Reality, condemned to being just what I had hoped to rebel against. Write from Normal Heights, Professor Chapman at San Diego State College had advised me.

  “My sweet boy,” Corinne said. She smelled of soap and lavender. She propped my chin up to kiss me on the mouth, her narrow bottom squirming on my lap. She found the furrow of scar in my thigh beneath my pants and traced a finger along it; my wound fascinated her. It was her conviction that most sorrows could be solved in bed, and so we tried that.

  10

  So I went back to Company K in the town of X, and found myself curiously glad to be there, although there were not many comrades I even knew anymore. Because I was an old-timer I got my stripes back pretty quick.

  The Battle of the Bulge ran from December 16, 1944, to mid-January 1945. There was no specific moment when it was over, as far as we were concerned, just one day an engineer outfit appeared with water trucks and showers, and we showered and were furnished with new uniforms to climb into, long johns, pants and blouses and overcoats, even caps. When I finally took my old clothes off I found that my hair had grown into the knit cap worn inside my helmet liner, it had not been taken off for so long.

  We moved out of that sector west, through snow so deep the halftracks couldn’t operate, so we were foot soldiers mushing through knee-deep snow, pushing and pushed, pushing bone tired toward a front where we could hear aircraft and firing of an intensity we’d never heard before, and P-51s banking low over us and cutting down over the ridge.

  From the top of a ridge the river bottom spread out below us. It was a German river crossing in their retreat, four pontoon bridges across the river that snaked in broad curves down the valley where the snow was torn up with great muddy splashes, and what looked like the whole Kraut army milling, soldiers and machines and artillery, a lot of it horse drawn, and dead horses spotted in the snow, and the P-51s coming down along the river with all their guns firing at the poor bastards on the pontoon bridges, plane after plane, with a flourish of wings slanting up once almost lazily and then down-slanting and faster and totally intent on the strafing. One of them smoked and the wings flashed over and it crashed in a spurt of flame, but the flights of Mustangs and later Lightnings kept coming and coming. The Krauts died and you could feel sorry for them although you knew better, the planes coming and firing and you could see them shudder when their cannons went off, and bombs shot up water and men and pontoon planking, and still the Krauts would fix it up, and keep going across the river, so slowly, so intent and hopeless, and the bodies that you could not see floating down the river.

  The order came for us to move on down the ridge toward where the Kraut killing was going on, but there was that terrific slowdown when every soldier was reluctant to move down that ridge, the noncoms like me as reluctant as anyone else, and the lieutenant ordering us on down reluctant, too, so the movement was so slow as to be hardly a movement at all, down toward where the Krauts were being slaughtered.

  11

  On July 23, 1944, the Russians freed the first German death camp
at Majdanek. Although Western journalists and photographers were brought in, few accounts or photographs appeared in the Western press. Majdanek was dismissed as Soviet propaganda.

  On January 27, 1945, the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz.

  On April 4, 1945, the American XX Corps liberated Ohrdruf. On April 11, the notorious Dora slave labor camp at Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains was overrun, and on the same day Americans liberated Buchenwald. On April 15, a British armored division entered Belsen.

  On April 21, 1945, Americans freed the Frigga work camp, near Linz, in Austria, Sergeant Payton Daltrey among them.

  Chapter 13

  1

  We knew the war was over. Rumor had it that a white airplane would fly over the lines to notify us of Victory in Europe. We were on the Danube then, with Russian troops on the other side of the river. Sometimes Russians came over by boat, unkempt, enthusiastic guys in partial uniforms and their Munchkin-looking caps. They kissed any Americans they could catch and stole the company radio. When Captain Shitface complained to a Russian colonel, the colonel assured him that the culprits would be found out and shot. After that there was not much commerce between the Russians on the east bank and us on the west. We moved on up the river in our halftracks, watching for the white airplane, beautiful cool and warm days with the fruit trees in flower and puffs of cloud, as though this were a part of the world where nothing bad could ever happen.

  Advance elements ran into a firefight, and we moved with glacial reluctance up into position. No one wanted to get killed in the last days of the war. Tanks came up and fired some rounds, and we shut down for two days, with a convoy of supply trucks coming up with food for the prisoners who would be liberated, before we started on.