Something About A Soldier

Charles Willeford

1986

For John Stephen Hooker

The authors work, no matter how intelligent,

elaborate (Proust) or rich and vigorous in imagination,

always turns out to constitute a justification for some

particular set of values, a making out a case against

something or other in favor of something else, a

melodrama in which, even if the hero is actually l

defeated, he is morally triumphant-and the hero may

not be a person or persons but merely certain qualities

or tendencies.

—Edmund Wilson, The Twenties

Many of the true names, places, and incidents in this book have been altered. The names of such well known public figures as Manuel Quezon, Bobby Jones, Jane Wyatt, et al., as well as most locations, have not been changed. —-C.W.

Chapter:  1  2  3  4  5 6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  26  27  28  29

ONE

The trooper died,

And by his side

They placed a wreath,

He tried to get the button

In the sheath.

--CW

IF YOU ARE LIKE ME, PROBABLY EITHER YOU SKIP THE epigraph above a chapter, or else you read it and forget

about it once you get into the narrative. This time, however, if you haven't read the epigraph, please do so now.

Okay? You have read it and now you have one or two questions, right? What is a sheath? What is a button? That is the purpose of this book, to answer questions like these, but I'm not writing as a mature individual looking back at his youth. My intention here is to recapture past events as they happened, and to report how I reacted to and felt about these incidents at the time.

This little poem, or epigraph, just came to me one day in March or April 1939. I was standing outside the horseshoeing shack at the Machine Gun Troop stables (11th U.S. Cavalry), rolling a cigarette and watching a wedge of little white fishing boats spreading out gradually as they left Monterey Bay on their way out to sea to net some sardines.

It was a clear, crisp, beautiful day. The wind was blowing up the hill  way, and the smell of the canneries was stronger than usual. When the wind was right, and it was almost always right, the salty, iodine-laced odor made a man's nose tingle.

Somehow, high on the Presidio of Monterey, the fishy odor that came from the canneries seemed to be stronger than when you were down on Cannery Row itself. When the canneries were all working, as they were that month, about the only place you could escape the smell of these little dead fishes was on the other side of Pacific Grove, or else well out into the Dunes, east of Monterey. Some guys got used to the smell, or so they claimed, but I never did. I also associated the odor with the whores on Cannery Row. I thought about women a good deal, so I don't suppose it was unnatural for me to think of whores, sardines, the women packing them in, and the canneries all at the same time.

I lit my cigarette and untied Old Raz from the line. Sergeant Bellows, the stable sergeant, had tied the horse on the line that morning. I assumed that Old Raz was to be shod next, because he was the next horse on our short picket line behind the horseshoeing shack.

Old Raz was nineteen years old, the same age as me. His real name was just plain Raz, and his Preston brand was 136E, but he was called Old Raz because his entire head had turned white. A horse's color is determined by his muzzle, and Old Raz was really a bay, but his head, including his muzzle, was white now with age. Old Raz was also an incorrigible cribber. He was cribbing now, as I untied him from the line, biting down on the knot of the halter shank with his long yellow teeth and forcing big round batches of sour air up from his lungs in long groaning belches. His eyes were filmed over, too. If the vet had removed these scummy films with a scalpel, Old Raz would have been able to see better. But that operation was unlikely because there was a great big I.C. painted on the horse's near side in red paint. The I.C. meant that the animal had been inspected and condemned. So if Old Raz had been I.C.'d, why were we putting new shoes on him?

As I untied Old Raz, he spread his back legs a little, extended his sheath about two feet, and urinated for about a minute. I waited for him, of course, which gave me time to finish my cigarette and to think up my little poem about the button and the sheath. No one would ever get another button from Old Raz's sheath. Once the vet has condemned him, a horse won't be around much longer. All of these things in common——death, sheath, button, fishy smell, white boats going out to kill more sardines, and a vague remembrance of a whore at La Ida's on Cannery Row—all clicked together, and the little poem came to me.

Just like that.

If you have ever read Edgar Allan Poe's explanation about how he came to write "The Raven," you probably shook your head in disbelief as I did when I read it, Poe was a bullshit artist, and his long-winded exposition simply doesn't ring true, but my explanation will, as I get into it a little deeper.

I led Old Raz into the shed, and Socky looked up from the forge and scowled. The scowl was no clue as to how he felt because Socky—short for Sokoloski—was always scowling about something or other. He was chief horseshoer for Machine Gun Troop, with a rating of private first class, third class specialist, and I was more than a little afraid of him. He was bigger than me, much bigger, with the sloping shoulders of a professional fighter. His arms were almost too long in proportion to the rest of his body, and when he made a muscle, his biceps was twenty-one inches in circumference. I wasn't physically afraid of Socky, because if he ever came after me I knew I could outrun him, but I dreaded his scorn, his disgust, and his surly silences. Under Socky's inept tutelage I was having a hell of a hard time leaming how to shoe horses. He couldn't explain things verbally; he could only show you what to do, and then, if you didn't do it exactly as he had shown you, he shook his head in disgust, pushed you away, and finished it himself.

"What're you doing with Old Raz‘?" Socky said.

"He's next on the line."

"Can't you read?" Socky pointed to the red letters on Old Raz's barrel,

I shrugged. "Sergeant Bellows tied him on our line this morning."

"Jesus, Willeford, nobody's ridden Old Raz for at least two years."

Wild Horse Halkins, the second horseshoer, who was using the rasp on Party Crasher's left rear hoof, turned his head then. "I think the stable sergeant's hiding him out from the knackers. There's supposed to be a semi-load of sick horses going out to Giglin this aftemoon, and Sergeant Bellows is gonna sneak him on the truck."

I nodded and retied Old Raz on the outside line, feeling good for the first time that month. There was an enormous pasturage out at the Giglin Military Reservation, where Camp Ord was located, and sick horses, run—down horses, or horses with a bad cannon or something that needed time to rest and heal were taken out there and left. They ate brown grass and ran around loose in the hills. Once a day a truckload of hay was taken out there, dumped, and

broken open. The horses would come crowding around and would fill up on hay. They didn't get any oats, of course, because they weren't working. But a month or so out on the range brought most of them up to snuff again, and they could be rounded up and trucked back to the Presidio for duty. If Sergeant Bellows could smuggle Old Raz out there, the condemned horse would be safe from the knackers, and he could run around—or stumble around—in the hills for months before he was discovered again.

There were five I.C.'d horses already tied on the troop picket line west of the stables, as they had been tied every day for almost a week now, and today was the day the knackers were supposed to come for them. The knackers were civilians, and they had a truck with an A—frame mounted on the back. One of them would take a piece of blue chalk, draw an X from a horse's ears to his eyes, and shoot him in the head where the X met in the middle. Then they winched the dead horse onto the truck. I had watched them once before when they had killed three horses and took them away. None of the horses moved as the man went along the line shooting them in the head. The horses made no association with the report of the pistol and their own deaths. They didn't even jerk in surprise as the .45 was fired into the head of the horse standing next to them. That was because cavalry horses were conditioned

to the sound of gunfire.

It didn't seem right to me to kill for dog food a horse that had served honorably fourteen or fifteen years, but the knackers had to pay the government something for the I.C.'d animals, and that money went toward buying new horses for the cavalry.

The remount system worked very well. The government gave-—or lent—a Thoroughbred stud free to a civilian horse breeder, and the breeder bred the Thoroughbred stud to one of his cold-blooded mares. Then the government men came around and had first choice of all the colts that were thrown. They paid the breeder a flat $145 per horse and shipped the colts to remount stations in either Montana or Oklahoma. The horses spent three years at the remount station and were halter-broken. Any horse the government didn't buy, the breeder got to keep for himself. The remount buyers were looking for good all-around troopers' mounts, and the best cavalry horse is half Thoroughbred and half cold-blooded. I don't know whether the breeder gelded the colts or whether it was done later at the remount stations, but we didn't have any stallions. We had mares, but not as many mares as plain horses (as geldings were called) because mares have bad tempers and cause fights in the corral, especially when they are in heat.

I untied Misplace, the smallest horse in our troop (we had 160 altogether), and took him into the shed. Misplace only weighed 750 pounds and was much too small for a machine gun troop. He would have been better used in a line troop. He was also a miserable ride. He jigged all the time instead of walking, and the platoon sergeant would growl at the unfortunate rider for letting him jig, even though it was impossible to make him walk. But he was too small to use as a pack horse, so someone usually had I to ride him.

I pulled off his shoes and threw them into the used shoe barrel.

Mike Brasely, our first sergeant, came into the horseshoeing shed. The troop was still out at horse exercise, so he had ridden back early.

"Where's Sergeant Bellows?" he asked Socky.

Sergeant Brasely was barely five four, and he didn't weigh more than I25 pounds. His five stripes, with the diamond in the middle, took up almost all of the space on the upper arms of his tailor-made gabardine sleeves, but he was a hard man, as small men often are when they get some authority, and he ran the troop in every respect. We all feared him, and some men hated him, but we respected him. He didn't let anything get by him, from a major goof-off to an unbuttoned shirt button. He lashed out at every single discrepancy. He was so unlike the first sergeants I had known in the Air Corps, I couldn't get used to him, but then, the cavalry was nothing like the Air Corps.

"He went home," Socky said. "His kid was sick, he said."

"That's the trouble with married men," Sergeant Brasely said. "They've always got a sick kid at home. He tell you what to do with Old Raz?"

"I've got him tied on our line. I know he's supposed to go out to Giglin, but that's all."

When Sergeant Bellows wasn't around, Socky, as the next highest ranking member of the stable gang, was in charge, but it was obvious that Sergeant Bellows hadn't told him what to do with Old Raz.

Brasely looked at me with his tiny black eyes and lifted his chin, but spoke to Socky as if I weren't there. "How's Willeford coming along?"

"All right." Socky didn't commit himself.

"Have Willeford take Old Raz down to the Headquarters Troop stables. We don't have any sick horses going to Giglin, but headquarters has two. Then tell the semi driver to load Old Raz first so no one'll spot the I.C."

"You get all that, Will?" Socky said to me.

I nodded and started to leave the shed.

"Where you going?" Brasely said, stopping me.

"To take Old Raz down to Headquarters' stables."

"Like that?"

I didn't know what he was talking about. I shuffled my feet in the doorway.

"Take off your apron and put on your fatigue jacket and hat."

"Right." I unbuckled my apron and put it on the peg.

I took off my leather gloves before I put on my jacket and campaign hat, making sure that the chin strap was precisely on the point of my chin. The first sergeant was a fanatic on chin straps, and anytime he caught a man with the strap behind his head, instead of under his chin, the culprit was given extra duty.

"What else you gonna do, Willeford, after you deliver Old Raz to the truck driver?"

I thought for a moment, knowing that the first soldier was testing me in some way, but if there was a trick to the question I couldn't figure it out.

"Come back and go to work?"

"Before that." `

My hands began to perspire. "I tell the driver to load Old Raz on the truck first?"

"And then?"

I shrugged.

Sergeant Brasely shook his head in disgust. "Remove the halter and halter shank, and bring 'em back with you. We aren't giving Headquarters Troop free halters and shanks. Old Raz won't need a halter out on the range, and we need our shanks. Think, man." He turned to Socky.

"Why didn't you tell him to bring back the halter and shank?" `

"I thought he knew," Socky said sullenly.

"Never take anything for granted, Socky. When Sergeant Bellows retires someday, you're liable to be the next stable sergeant, you know, so you'd better start thinking like one."

"That'll be the fucking day," Socky said. "My job's right here, shoeing horses. I've got enough problems without adding two more stripes on my arm."

"I've heard that shit before, Socky. But when the time comes, a responsible man always takes the stripes. Don't just stand there, Willeford. Move out!"

I took Old Raz down the hill to Headquarters' stables, found the truck driver, and stuck around to help him load Old Raz into the covered semitrailer. I remembered to get the halter, and I brought the halter and the shank back with me when I returned to the horseshoeing shack. The first sergeant had gone to the orderly room by then, and Socky and Halkins had finished putting new shoes on Misplace.

"Get another horse off the line," Socky told me. "We can finish one more before early chow."

I led Misplace out of the shed. He was stepping high, as they all do when they first get new shoes, and until they get used to the new weight. Then I turned him loose in the corral before I brought Chesty into the shed. Chesty was my assigned horse, and I wondered when I would .get another chance to ride him. It was also the first time for me to put new shoes on him, and I was going to give him special attention. Chesty was not a problem, being a quiet animal, and we finished shoeing him in plenty of time for early chow.

As we walked across the gully to the mess hall, after washing up at the faucet by the water trough, I asked Halkins if it was really possible to sneak Old Raz out to the range at Giglin without our troop commander or the post vet finding out about it.

He looked at me in surprise.

"Find out?" He spat out a stream of Copenhagen juice and shook his head. "Hell, it was their idea."

When Halkins told me that, I realized that it was something I should have been able to figure out for myself, but it hadn't occurred to me because the cavalry was still all too new to me. I was on my second enlistment, with nearly six months in Machine Gun Troop, but I had spent my first enlistment in the Army Air Corps-—one year at March Field, in Riverside, California, and then the next two years in the Philippines.

The reason I didn't like the Air Corps was because I didn't feel like a soldier and I didn't like the menial work they gave me.

During the three years and twelve days I spent in the Air Corps I only had one personal conversation with an officer. That brief conversation was with Major Bums, my squadron commander in the Philippines.

I had been on guard duty the night before, and I shot Major Bums's dog, a boxer named Skippy. I was on post number one, the midnight to six A.M. shift, and I had to patrol the alley behind the homes on officers' row. I then circled the barracks and called in to the corporal of the guard every twenty minutes from either the squadron day-room or the phone in the garage at the last house on the officers' row. I patrolled back and forth, making my call every twenty minutes, and there was plenty of time to walk the post. One of the special orders on post number one was to shoot any dogs that were running loose. This order was in effect because a lot of the dogs that came over to the post from the barrios were diseased, with big red patches

instead of hair on their bodies.

The squadron commander's dog Skippy was always tied in the backyard of the major's house, but he had gotten loose. I was carrying a riot gun, armed with five double-aught shotgun shells, and when the dog came bounding up to me out of the dark in the alley I shot him and took half of his head off. When I took a closer look after switching on my flashlight, I recognized Skippy. I called in right away, reporting the shot to Corporal Haas, who was corporal of the guard that night. When I told Haas that I had shot Skippy he got hysterical, told me to stay there, and came up to take a look for himself. We dragged Skippy's body back to the major's yard, and Haas made his report to the officer of the day.

The next morning the first sergeant told me to report to Major Burns, the squadron commander. I was still in uniform, having just been relieved from duty at eight A.M. I was blinking to stay awake and trying not to yawn. All I wanted was a late breakfast and a nap.

"Why," the major asked me, "did you shoot my dog?"

"I didn't know it was the major's dog, sir. The dog was running loose, and I was just following my special orders to shoot stray dogs."

"Skippy wouldn't hurt a flea. Were you afraid of him, or what?"

"No, sir, I wasn't afraid of him. I had the riot gun so when he came running up the alley I shot him."

"He couldn't've been more than six feet from you. Didn't you recognize him?"

"I just recognized that it was a dog, sir, that's all."

"Never mind," he said, shaking his head. Then he began to cry and took his handkerchief out of his pocket. "You can go." .

I saluted, did an about face, and went out into the orderly room. The first sergeant, a burly man who had been in the Philippines for ten years and who was married to a Filipino woman, said, "I hope you're proud of yourself, Willeford." .

By that time I was angry, and I said something I shouldn't have. "If you don't want loose dogs shot, change the special orders."

"Get the hell out of here," the first sergeant said.

What the major wanted, and what the first sergeant wanted, I supposed, was an apology, but I wasn't going to apologize for following their orders. The upshot of this incident was that I did not make private first class, which was the rating the Table of Organization called for as a gas truck driver, even though I still had to drive the truck for the next fourteen months.

To retum to my original point: Here was Old Raz, a decent but useless horse, but still worth $145 to the government on paper. Someone, somewhere, on paper, had to account for Old Raz, so there was no way that he could be shipped out to the Giglin open range without his whereabouts being noted. So his execution was avoided by a conspiracy of the troop commander, the first sergeant, the stable sergeant, and, of course, the veterinarian, who was a major in the Vet Corps. I should have realized all that, but I just hadn't accepted the idea that there could ever be any kind of cooperation between officers and enlisted men. I think my change in attitude toward the Army began the day we saved Old Raz from the knackers. Old Raz died about three months later, and they buried him where he fell, out on the Giglin range. But three months is three months, and no one ever turned Old Raz into dog food.

But a life—and—death problem like Old Raz's would never have occurred in the Air Corps, and my story goes back to how I happened to join the Army Air Corps in the first place.

TWO

WHEN I JOINED THE ARMY IN 1935 I WAS SIXTEEN years old, and I had to add two years to my age. My parents had both died of tuberculosis when I was small, and my grandmother had taken me in and raised me since I was eight. As my guardian, my grandmother had to give her written permission, but she didn't have to lie for me because I joined the National Guard first—the 160th Infantry Regiment in Los Angeles.

A friend of mine who was already in the National Guard told me they were going to summer camp in San Luis Obispo, and that guardsmen were paid a dollar a day for the two weeks they were in camp. Fourteen dollars seemed like a large sum to me, just for spending two weeks in summer camp, so I went down to the armory in Exposition Park with my friend and enlisted in Company E. Of course, I had to sign up for three years, not for just two weeks, but all a man had to do in the National Guard was attend drill one night a week, on Monday nights. The drill periods paid a dollar each, or were supposed to, but they made you wait for it. They paid every three months in a lump sum of twelve dollars. I saw through this slick trick right away: it was the same way slum landlords cheat their Negro tenants, only in reverse. Instead of letting Negroes pay their rent monthly as white people do, landlords make them pay every week. There are thirteen weeks in three months, not twelve, so slum landlords squeeze out an extra week's rent that way. The National Guard was also cheating us out of a week's drill pay by paying us twelve dollars every three months. The lower down on the social scale a man is, and a private in the National  Guard has a lower standing than a Civilian Conservation  Corps boy, the more apt he is to get fucked over by the people in power.

The sergeant of the platoon I was assigned to in Company E was seventeen. He was also a lieutenant colonel   in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps at Manual Arts High School. As a consequence he thought he knew everything there was to know about being a soldier, but when I asked him why I was being treated like a Negro on the pay situation and explained how we were being cheated, he was shocked by the analogy. As a sergeant, he was being screwed out of more money than I was. Still, the idea that I would question the right of the National Guard to beat me out of a dollar every ninety days was repugnant to him.

"It's done that way," he said, "for the convenience of the government. Our oflicers are all honorable men, not slum landlords. And you'd better not repeat any of that shit to the other men in the platoon. If you do, I'll make your life miserable when we get to camp."

"I know where you go to school," I said, "and if I'm not treated the same as everyone else at camp, I'll catch you after school and kick the living shit out of you."

That was the trouble with the National Guard. You can't be a real soldier for only two or three hours on a Monday night, then be a civilian the rest of the time. The captain of our company pumped gas at a Standard station down on Slauson and Figueroa. When I learned about his job I found it difficult to call him "sir." I know that it's the uniform and the rank you salute, not the man, but all the same, once you know what a man's actual social background is, it becomes very difficult to overlook the man.

Besides, no matter how hard he scrubbed his hands, I could always spot the grease beneath the captain's fingernails. I did, however, keep the pay analogy to myself after our talk, and my platoon sergeant turned out to be a decent guy after we got to camp. I enjoyed the camp, the little war games we played, and most of the classes we had. Every morning the regimental band (a lot of the band members were also in the L.A. Philharmonic Orchestra, as civilians) played stirring marches at reveille, waking us up, and the food was excellent and plentiful.

We returned by troop train from San Luis Obispo. The train took us right down Exposition Boulevard, and we had only a short march to the armory. We were paid off and I had a ten-dollar bill and four silver dollars in my pocket, the most money I had ever had in my whole life. I gave my grandmother the ten-dollar bill and kept the four silver dollars.

I didn't have anything to do until the following Monday night, and during the week I thought about the way my life was going; and the idea of joining the Regular Army, after my few drill nights and the summer camp, seemed attractive. In 1935 things were pretty much as they are now, in 1939, and there were few options open to me as a junior high dropout. Even our captain, who had a B.A. in English from the University of Southern California, was pumping gas, so there were no jobs available for a sixteen-year-old boy with an ambition to be a poet.

At least a third of the members of the 160th Infantry were under eighteen, either high school students or drop-outs like me. Most of them, also like me, were attending the weekly drills for the dollar, not for the love of playing soldier. There were a few exceptions, however. Some men had been professional soldiers, and they still liked to wear a uniform—part-time. I am talking about the enlisted men, not the officers; the officers were a breed apart. It was possible, through politics, to buy a commission in the National Guard with campaign contributions. I wasn't aware of all the other ways to get a commission, but after I had talked with some of the older men who had put a hitch or two in the Regulars, it seemed like a good deal to me.

The Regulars offered travel, adventure, and a way out. And I wanted a way out of a situation that was becoming more untenable every passing day. I was living with my grandmother, and money was so tight I could no longer ask her for a dime, or even five cents to ride the streetcar downtown. After almost fifteen years with the May Company, selling millinery in the French Room, she had lost her position. My uncle, an executive with Southern Bell, paid her rent and gave her a small weekly allowance. I slept and usually ate dinner at home, but the rest of the time I was either out on the streets or playing softball in Exposition Park.

On Sunday momings I used to go over to the Coliseum  after football games and search the uncleaned rows of seats. With luck I would find a dime, or a quarter, or a half pack of cigarettes. Sometimes I would find an umbrella or a pair of sunglasses I could sell for a quarter. But there were no football games now, during the summer. On Saturday nights I hustled the L.A. Times on the corner of Santa Barbara and Figueroa. The Sunday Times was a dime, and I got to keep a nickel of it, but I rarely sold more than eight or nine papers. The guy who sold the Examiner sold anywhere from sixty to seventy Sunday papers, but the Times was a conservative paper, so those who read it usually had enough money for a home subscription—which meant very few street sales.

Before making the jump into the R.A., however, I decided to make one more all-out attempt to get a job. I had a good white oxford-cloth shirt and a tie my uncle had given me. I scrubbed my brown bell-bottom corduroy pants and ironed them. I shined my shoes, some beautiful Walk-Overs that my uncle had given me. (They were too small for him, and much too small for me.) On a Monday morning I set out. I walked over to Main Street, at Forty-first Street, and started downtown. I asked for a job at every place of business on the east side of Main Street, every grocery store, café, gas station, clothing store, whatever.

The manager at the Coca—Cola plant gave me a free Coke, but there were no jobs. No one snarled or tried to run me off, but no one had any available jobs. In fact, many people apologized for not having any work to give me, feeling, no doubt, that they had somehow failed me as well as themselves. But I was determined not to skip anyone, even though, as the morning passed and I was rejected again and again, I realized my all-out effort was hopeless.

My last stop was a half-empty office building on Main between Ninth and Tenth streets. I wandered through the echoing building, starting with the second door, trying to find open offices. Most of the offices were connected in some way with the petroleum industry, but no one needed an office boy. A secretary on the fifth floor gave me a hard-boiled egg, saying that she couldn't eat it and that if I didn't take it she would just throw it away, so I took it and thanked her. There were a few collection agencies and some lawyers in the building, too, but the lawyers, mostly Mexicans in tiny one-man firms, didn't even have secretaries.

When I came down to the lobby again, I decided that my final try had been a noble effort, but that it would be futile to hit the rest of the office buildings on Main Street. I peeled the egg, borrowed some salt from a café (I can't eat a hard-boiled egg without salt), and continued down Main Street to the Pacific Electric Building to talk to the recruiting corporal at Sixth and Main.

The corporal, a coast artilleryman assigned to L.A. recruiting duty, was a short, stocky man in his early forties with a neat, perfectly trimmed gray moustache. There was an unwritten rule in the Army, which I learned about later, that didn't allow men on their first enlistment to grow a moustache. So men on their second hitch, usually after completing their fourth year, which gave them five percent more a month in longevity pay ("fogy" pay, it was called), almost always wore a moustache. It distinguished them visibly, and as a rule they did not talk to the younger soldiers who were not as yet drawing fogy pay. The unwritten rule was not always enforced. A large man who was willing to fight could keep his moustache, and if a man had a harelip the first sergeant made him wear a moustache to disguise it. But in general, the rule was respected.

The corporal stood downstairs by the entrance to the P.E. Building, and he was an outstanding example of what a soldier should look like. His gabardine O.D. uniform was tailor-made, and he wore a starched white shirt with  a black tie. His black shoes had been polished and varnished and they reflected light like dark mirrors. His soft fox wraparound leggings were wrapped precisely, and the bill of his garrison cap and his black garrison belt were patent leather. I stopped about ten feet away, admiring him, and watched him roll a match-thin Bull Durham cigarette. He put the cigarette in his mouth, returned the sack of Bull Durham to his breeches pocket, and lit the cigarette with a brass punk lighter. He cupped the cigarette in his hand, half-concealing it when he wasn't taking a drag. This action was out of habit, and not because he was forbidden to smoke. He knew that a man in uniform looks peculiar when he's puffing on a cigarette, so he was avoiding attracting attention to the fact of his cigarette. He had four hash marks on his left arm, indicating more than twelve years of service, and his corporal's stripes had been cross-stitched on with red thread.

Standing there beneath the huge blue U.S. Army Recruiting flag that hung listlessly above the street from a third-floor window, he was the best advertisement for the Army I have ever seen. I finally got up enough nerve to approach him, and he grinned.

"Any openings?" I said.

He shook his head. "Just for P.S. men."

"What's that?"

"Previous service. We're only taking re-enlistees this month. No original enlistments."

I knew that I looked old enough to pass for eighteen, but not for a man with three years' service.

"I thought the Army could always use some men."

"It can, and it always will, but L.A.'s quota is only two new men a month. We've got a waiting list . . ." He shrugged. "I'm against waiting lists. By the time a few months go by and we try to contact the guy on the list he's either long gone or changed his mind anyway. With only two openings a month, why run a waiting list?"

"I'm in the National Guard now," I said. "I'm a rifleman with the One—sixtieth Infantry."

He frowned. "I don't know whether the National Guard counts as P.S. or not. Let's go upstairs and I'll check it out."

We took the elevator up to his recruiting office, and he checked through his Army Regulations.

"How long you been in the National Guard?"

"About seven weeks."

"That ain't enough, kid. Look, I got an opening for a P.S. man, preferably a rifleman, in the Thirty-third Infantry down in Panama, but they want a man with at least one year's service. In only seven weeks you haven't even finished basic training."

"I went to summer camp for two weeks."

"In the Boy Scouts?"

"No, with the One-sixtieth. We were on maneuvers up in Camp San Luis Obispo."

"How old are you?"

"Eighteen." .

"That's too young for Panama. Panama, you see, ain't for everybody. In the Army, Panama's more like an old soldiers' home. Down there you can buy marijuana by the mattress-cover-full, and once a guy gets stationed down there he extends as long as he can. Last time I was in Panama I was in a bar where I could drink a glass of rum, smoke a cigarette, get a shoeshine and a blow job, all at the same time—and for only four bits."

"No shit?"

"In Colon." He nodded. "Besides, those twenty-five-mile hikes in the jungle heat are rough on a man. There's a lot of suicides down there, too. As I said, Panama ain't for everybody. So I wouldn't send you down to Panama at your age, even if I could. You hungry?"

"I had a hard-boiled egg for lunch."

"Here." He handed me a red cardboard meal ticket.

"Take this ticket down to the U.S. Café on East Fifth. It'll get you an Okie steak, French fries, two pieces of bread, and a side dish of cole slaw. Have a second lunch on the Army."

"Thanks."

"I wish there was something I could do for you, but I can't." He rolled a cigarette and handed me the sack of Bull Durham and the brown wheat papers. I rolled a fat one and put the sack on his desk. He let me use his punk lighter. It was tricky. You flicked the wheel to light the punk, and then when the punk ignited you lit your cigarette.

"You got a high school education?"

"Not quite."

"Can you read and write?" .

I laughed. "I write poetry," I said, "and I read four or five books a week."

"You don't want the infantry, then. The infantry don't need poets. What you should do is get into the Air Corps. Want to know how?"

"Tell me."

"Hitchhike out to March Field, the other side of Riverside, and talk to the post recruiting sergeant. He may not have any immediate openings, but he'll put you up in the barracks for a few days till he gets one. Before you go out there, get a letter from your mother giving you permission to enlist, and another letter from your commanding officer in the National Guard, saying you're a member in good standing. That'll help you get in. Then, when an opening comes up and you're enlisted, you'll be discharged from the Guard. I shouldn't tell you all this, but you look like the kind of young man the Army wants. Your shoes are shined, your shirt is clean, and you're wearing a necktie."

I thanked him, went down to the U.S. Café for my free hamburger steak, and the next day I hitchhiked out to March Field. Three days later I was enlisted in the Air Corps. I went through six weeks of basic training and then was assigned to the post motor pool, where Sergeant Golden, the motor pool sergeant, taught me how to drive a two-and-a-half-ton truck. But if I hadn't joined the National Guard first, I doubt I would have been able to get into the Arrny—not then, anyway, not in the middle of Depression year 1935. In 1935 there were only 45,000 men in the standing army, including the Air Corps, and I was lucky to get in.

THREE

WHEN I FIRST STARTED T0 WRITE THIS ACCOUNT I thought it would be fairly short, but I can see as I get into it that I remember much more than I thought I would. One incident keys another, and long conversations come back to me in their entirety. There's no trick to this ability to recall things, and anyone can do it. If you pick up an item you had in childhood, a teddy bear, for example, and stare at it hard enough, concentrating, you'll be able to remember events that happened when you were only three years old, little things you didn't even know you knew. So that's always the problem when a man's trying to write something: what to put in and what to leave out. Although everything that ever happens to a person is

important in one way or another, what that person remembers might bore the hell out of a reader. And I don't want to bore readers—not intentionally, anyway.

It is embarrassing to me now that I told the recruiting corporal in L.A. that I was a poet. I wanted to be a poet, true, but I actually wanted to be a novelist, like Dostoevsky. When I was thirteen I read Crime and Punishment, and what I wanted to be someday was a novelist like him.

But I knew that I had neither the skill nor the experience to become a novelist, so I started writing poetry instead. Poetry was much easier to write, I thought. After I had read a few poetry anthologies available in the Junipero Serra branch library, I thought I could do as well as some of these poets if I worked at it. But once I got into writing poetry, I discovered that it wasn't as easy as it looked. There was a lot to learn, and a good many technical aspects to pick up besides—things like assonance, half-rhymes, enjambments, and so on. But the library had books on prosody, and I could learn what this stuff meant by reading about it. All the same, I threw away most of the poems I wrote, seeing how clumsy and awkward they were. But I got a poem published in the John Adams Junior High School newspaper, and another poem I wrote, about what a person could see in the stands at the Coliseum after a football game, came out fairly well. I showed the Coliseum poem to the branch librarian, and she typed it for me and put it on the bulletin board by the library entrance. I hung around the bulletin board periodically, hoping to see someone read the poem and comment on it, but no one ever did, at least not while I was there. But I also counted that poem as a publication, and that's why I had told the corporal I was a poet. Perhaps if I had told the corporal that I was a professional manual laborer he might have signed me up for the 33rd Infantry in Panama, and my Army experiences would have been different.

But here I am writing about the road I took.

After a dull year at March Field, driving a truck, I asked for a transfer to the Philippines. To my surprise, it came through. I was given a short discharge and re-enlisted for three more years. I wouldn't have to stay for three full years; I would be discharged again when my two-year tour in P.I. was over, but they signed me up for three more years to make certain that I would have two full years in the Philippines. I then sailed for the Philippines on the U.S.S. Ulysses S. Grant, an army transport, which left from San Francisco.

In the Army, just like in civilian life, friendships are formed by chance and propinquity. I shared a tier of bunks with a coast artilleryman named Tullio Micaloni and an older soldier named Henderson who was assigned to the 31st Infantry in Manila. Micaloni and I spent more time together because we were both detailed to clean the forward head each morning after breakfast, and we usually spent our mornings and afternoons on the forward deck shooting the breeze and playing Monopoly. But I learned much more about how the Army worked from Henderson than I learned from Tullio, even though he was on his second hitch.

Henderson was on his third enlistment and he had served in Panama as well as in the 30th Infantry at the Presidio of San Francisco. (He also confirmed for me that a man could indeed get a blow job and a shoeshine at the same time in Colon.) I was in the bunk below Henderson's, and when I got seasick, the first night out from San Francisco, he bought me a box of soda crackers at the ship's canteen. I ate the crackers and got over being seasick. And because Henderson had been on army transports before, I listened to him and followed his advice.

On the third day out, two days before Honolulu, my name appeared on the bulletin board for K.P. the next morning. K.P. aboard ship was a miserable twelve-hour shift below decks, where it was hot and steamy, and a brutal day's work washing pots and pans and utensils in steam boilers.

"You don't want to pull K.P., Will," Henderson said.

"I know I don't," I said, "but there's no way to get out of it."

"You're wrong. There is a way. How many men are on the ship?"

"The ship's paper said eight hundred."

"Use your head, then. If there are eight hundred aboard, and you don't count the N.C.O.'s and the other guys who're excused from K.P., there still must be at least seven hundred eligible. And out of seven hundred men, there are bound to be three or four with the name of Williams. Right?"

"Smith and Jones, too. There're a lot of them."

"Too many. So they'll watch the roster pretty close.

Chances are, all the Smiths'll be on the same day. Williams is much better. What you do after lights out at ten P.M. is cross your name off the list and then write in Williams."

"I can't do that."

"Why not? Do you want to pull K.P.?"

"No, but I might get caught."

"Not a chance. No one knows anyone else aboard. The noncoms are all acting, so there'll be no problem."

The acting sergeant we had was in charge of about three hundred men, so I decided to take the chance. That night I crossed out my name and wrote "Williams" above it.

The next morning, at five A.M., the charge of quarters woke Williams for K.P. Williams complained, saying he hadn't noticed the roster change, but went ahead and pulled the K.P. The next day when Williams' regular turn came, and his name was put up on the bulletin board, he protested that he had already pulled K.P., but it wasn't on the acting sergeant's duty roster so he sent him to the kitchen.

That was the first thing I ever did that I didn't know I was capable of doing. The second thing was worse. After we left Guam, my name appeared on the K.P. roster again.

"This time," I told Henderson, "I guess I'll have to pull the fucking K.P."

"Why?" he said. "Just wait till tonight, and then write in Williams again."

"Jesus, that's an awful thing to do to the guy."

"So? It was just as awful the first time. But do you want to pull K.P. now that we're in the tropics? It was hot before we hit Honolulu, but how hot do you think it'll be down there now? If you don't want to pull it, write in Williams. It worked before, and it'll work again."

So once again that night I wrote in Williams. The next morning Williams protested like a crazy man when he was awakened for K.P. And when his regular turn came up, he screamed with genuine anguish. But the upshot of all this is that Williams pulled four K.P.'s on the boat, and I didn't do any at all.

Henderson, incidentally, didn't pull any K.P.'s either. The first day aboard ship he had gone to the chaplain's office and volunteered his services as a runner. They gave him an arm band, and he delivered messages for the chaplain. When he went upstairs to first class, where thé officers and their families were quartered, he bought chocolate milkshakes at the officers' canteen. The enlisted men's canteen did not, of course, serve milkshakes. But Henderson, with his official arm band, had the run of the ship. One night he brought me a wonderful sandwich, with thick slices of ham, tomatoes, mayonnaise, and lettuce, that he had made in the crew's mess.

I learned a great deal from Henderson. I resolved, when I ate that sandwich, that I would be the first man in the chaplain's office when the ship left Manila two years later for the retum voyage.

I also avoided Private Williams. He was a big, lumbering coast artilleryman who was going to Corregidor, out in the middle of Manila Bay. If he had known that I was responsible for the two extra K.P.'s, he would have crushed me into a pulpy ball and thrown me overboard. I overheard Williams complain bitterly a few times about the great injustice that had been done to him, but no one gave him any sympathy. There were a few recruits aboard, and some romantic young men who were assigned to the 15th Infantry in China, but the majority of the soldiers aboard had at least a year of service. And any man who has spent at least one year in the service knows that injustice is the norm, not the exception. In the Army date of rank, not ability, always determines who will be in charge. If the men are all privates, then the man with the most service is put in charge. So these rules ensure that the best man will not always be in charge of any particular division, regiment, battalion, squadron, company, platoon, squad, or casual two-man detail. The acting sergeants aboard ship were all privates, but because they had been privates longer than any of the other privates aboard they were appointed as acting non-coms. A man who has been a private for fifteen or twenty years is not necessarily the right man to be placed in charge of two or three hundred men. If an experienced first sergeant had been in charge, instead of a buck private acting as a sergeant, I wouldn't have gotten away with my deception. There were a few sergeants aboard, staff, technical, and master sergeants, but they had their own private quarters and were excused from duty for the entire voyage.

There's one more thing to tell you about Henderson, and then I'll move on. Henderson was the only man in the Army who had an official "Charming" character rating on his honorable discharge certificate. If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it.

On the line on the discharge that says Character the commanding officer must write in a rating. Usually the rating is "Excellent," but he can write in "Very Good," "Good," "Satisfactory," or "Unsatisfactory." Those are the only ratings he is allowed to use. If a _man gets a "Satisfactory" or an "Unsatisfactory" character rating when he's discharged, he will have a difficult time re-enlisting. Even "Good" will give him some trouble, and the chances are that he'll need a waiver of some kind before he's allowed to re-enlist. But Henderson had "Charming" written in after Character on his honorable discharge.

He had been the house orderly, or the house dog robber, for the colonel's wife in the 30th Infantry at the Presidio of San Francisco. Ordinarily a full colonel has two enlisted servants: one man looks after his personal needs—a kind of valet—and the other man takes care of his house—a houseboy, or male "maid." The house orderly's job was Henderson's assignment. He had to cook breakfast for the colonel and his wife, do the shopping (with the colonel's lady), clean the house, and sometimes, if the colonel threw a cocktail party, serve as a bartender. He was relieved of all other company duties, and the colonel paid him fifteen dollars a month out of his own pocket. Fifteen dollars a month added to a private's twenty-one dollars is a tidy sum, and for some men, a house orderly's job is desired highly.

When Henderson was offered the job he took it because he thought it would be a good deal, but after a few weeks he wanted out. The job was much too confining, and he only got one day off a week. The work was simple enough, but it takes a special kind of man to hang around a house all day, washing and ironing, moving furniture around at a woman's whim, hanging curtains, and going shopping every day to the commissary with the same woman.

Enlisted men are required to talk to officers in the third person; The rule is a good one, and the Army also thinks so or it wouldn't have the rule. It keeps officers and enlisted men well separated socially, and the more distance between them the better it is for both of them. But when the courtesy of the third person must be extended to the colonel's wife, as Henderson was required to address this woman, he resented it, Henderson said he carried this indirect form of address to ridiculous lengths, but the woman was too dense to catch on. He didn't re-enlist in the 30th Infantry, as he had wanted to, because the colonel's lady would have kept him as a house orderly indefinitely. But when he was discharged, and re-enlisted for the Philippines, the colonel's wife made the colonel write "Charming" for Henderson's character on his discharge.

I accepted Henderson's explanation for the "characterization," but I marveled at the discharge, with the unique reference that guaranteed that as long as Henderson remained in the Army no other officer would ever want him assigned to his home where Henderson would be alone with his wife.

We had a good time in Honolulu, but we were searched when we came back so that no one would smuggle any liquor aboard ship. They let Henderson keep his green coconut, however, and the next morning Henderson brought out his coconut, which he had filled with rum, and sold eye-openers to the men on deck with hangovers at fifty cents a shot. Henderson was truly a soldier's soldier.

***

THERE WAS AN OVERNIGHT LAYOVER IN GUAM, WHERE we stopped after ten days at sea, and although we were. allowed four hours' shore leave, I returned to the ship within an hour. The place was just too depressing to stay any longer.

Guam was primarily a naval station for sailors and marines, but four Signal Corps soldiers disembarked for a two-year tour on Guam. I never felt sorrier for anyone in my life than I did for those poor bastards, because Guam was the armpit of the Pacific Ocean. Although beautiful as viewed from the ship, an island like Guam was a depressing port, and the natives were uglier than home-made sin. The men who were stationed there felt as though they were assigned to Devil's Island. The naval commanding oflicer's primary job was to reduce the suicide rate. To accomplish this he had to run a highly disciplined command, rigidly enforcing minor infractions, which made life there even more miserable.

I remember talking with Tullio Micaloni on the afterdeck about the horrors of Guam. I am bringing this up now because Tullio and I became good buddies on board the Grant. When we got our turn at the Monopoly game, we always played partners. Tullio was a good strategist at Monopoly, and I liked to play with him because the winners of the game got to play again.  Ordinarily Monopoly isn't played with partners, but because there were only a few of the board games available, that's the way we played it on the afterwell deck. We also played the fast game, not the long game, by shufhing all the street cards and dealing them out, and every time I played as Tullio's partner we managed to get Park Place dealt to us.

Tullio had spent his first enlistment in the coast artillery at San Pedro, California. He had then re-enlisted for the Philippines, where he would be assigned to Corregidor, the tall rocky island in the middle of Manila Bay. For coast I artillerymen Corregidor was considered as a good duty station. There are three parts to Corregidor: Topside, Middleside, and Bottomside. There are P.X.'s, beer parlors, and theaters for all three "sides,"and many other recreational facilities, including a beach for enlisted men and a beach for officers.

Tullio was a happy young guy who liked to laugh and I kid around. He had white sidewalls, but his curly black hair was in coin curls in front, in little coils on his forehead. Tullio Micaloni was a guy I would have liked to pal around with in P.I., but I didn't see him again until the return voyage. When we sat on the afterwell deck with our jackets off, soaking up the sun while we waited our turn at the Monopoly game, Tullio told me some funny stories about moving back and forth between the barracks and the house of a sailor in San Pedro. When the Navy sailed out of San Pedro for a few weeks, enlisted men from the coast artillery moved in with the sailors' wives, and returned to the barracks when the fleet returned. Tullio had had some narrow escapes, and he related them in a humorous way.

Although I didn't expect to see much of Tullio in P.I., I knew that I'd see him again on the boat coming back. But at the time I didn't look that far ahead. After we left Guam, we only had four more days to go before we docked in Manila.

FOUR

I REMEMBER EVERY DETAIL ABOUT MY FIRST DAY IN I the Philippines. Manila was exotic enough to excite any seventeen-year-old. Hundreds of melancholy Filipinos met the ship at the dock, many of them women looking for soldiers who had promised them that they "would be back on the next boat." Several of these anxious young women were holding up mestizo babies. But they looked in vain for the fathers.

We were separated on deck according to branches of service. Then noncoms from the various outfits to which we were to be assigned came aboard and called out our names. We disembarked with all our gear, in batches by branches. All of this activity took some time, but there was a system to it and no one got lost.

There were thirty—some-odd Air Corps men. Most of these men were assigned to Nichols Field, but I was put into a truck, together with seven other men, for Clark Field. I knew two of these men slightly, having seen them around at March Field. There was another young guy, about twenty, I didn't know. He sat across from me in the  truck, and I took an instant dislike to him for no reason at all. He had spiky blond hair, a rat face, and a bad case of acne. Yellow pustules, almost ready to burst, polluted his cheeks and forehead. He was truly repulsive, and I resented riding in the same truck with him. His name was Owens, and by chance, when we got to Clark Field he was assigned to the bunk next to mine. Owens, for similiar unknown reasons, disliked me as much as I disliked him. For the full two years we spent together in the Philippines, we never said a single word to each other. He had a few friends, and I had some of the same friends, and we were drunk at the same party together on a couple of occasions, but even then we didn't talk to each other. Owens was ambitious, and had enlisted in the Air Corps because he thought it would be easier to get into West Point from the Army than it would be to get an appointment from his congressman in Pennsylvania. Twice during the two-year tour he took written exams for West Point, and he failed abysmally both times. I rejoiced at his failure, although I had hoped, in a way, that he would pass his exam and then be rejected for being too ugly. But that was one of the good points about being in the Army. You had to live with a man in close quarters, but you didn't have to like or speak with him. No one invaded the small space to which you were assigned, either. A man's bunk and footlocker and wall locker were sacred. No one ever sat on your bunk or footlocker without first asking for permission. Even a close buddy wouldn't sit on your bunk unless he was invited to do so. Despite our proximity, Owens never bothered me. He was a clerk in the parts department in the morning work periods, and he spent his afternoons studying various books from the library in his futile efforts to get into the U.S. Military Academy. I noticed some of the texts he was reading. They were at the junior high school level. I suspected before he took the test the first time that he wouldn't pass it. I had disliked, and even hated, a few people before, but always for definite reasons. Owens, however, is the only man I ever detested for no reason at all. I have often wondered about this, but even now, when I think about Owens, I can feel myself getting angry. There are some questions in life that have no answers.

When we passed over the Jones Bridge in Manila, crossing the Pasig River, I noticed the giant circular temperature gauge on the office building on the other side of the river. It read one hundred degrees. I found out later that the temperature rarely dropped below a hundred degrees in downtown Manila in the daytime. At Clark Field, however, it was slightly cooler. Most of the time it was in the low nineties, with matching humidity, just hot and humid enough to maintain. a chronic case of prickly heat.

The city streets teemed with little people, most of them wearing ragged clothes but all of them moving swiftly, almost scurrying, like little brown insects.

Traflic moved on the left side of the street, but like all American vehicles our truck had the steering wheel on the left, making it difficult to pass other vehicles. Later, when I was assigned to a truck, I had to leam how to drive on the left side, too. But the only diflicult thing about it was making a right turn at an intersection.

Clark Field was about sixty-five miles from Manila by highway, and our sergeant in charge, who rode up front with the driver, called for a piss call when we got to San Fernando. Gin was purchased immediately at a Chinaman's store, and by the time we reached Clark Field most of us were fairly drunk on San Miguel gin. When the truck pulled up in front of the barracks the first sergeant met us, and he had some trouble in quieting us down. Our mattresses were spread out on the lawn in front of the barracks to air, and we were told to go upstairs and find our bunks, which had our name tags on them already. We were then told to come back down for a talk by the squadron commander. We staggered into the barracks, carrying our mattresses and barracks bags, and came downstairs again. Irby, one of the guys I had known slightly at March Field, had passed out on his mattress, and the first sergeant couldn't wake him. He snored away, under the hot sun. I wasn't surprised by Irby's immobility. I had only taken two short pulls from the bottle when it was passed around, and my head was buzzing. San Miguel Ginebra, A1—1A, is powerful stuff.

The first sergeant-lined us up, except for Irby, and called us to attention. The major came out of the orderly rooms to give us his welcoming speech.

The barracks was two stories, with screened sliding windows dotted with small, square seashell panes, and a corrugated iron roof. (During the rainy season, when the torrents hit the roof, you had to shout to make yourself heard by the guy in the next bunk.) 'The mess hall was on the first Hoor, together with the orderly room, showers and commodes, and small four-man rooms for sergeants. Corporals slept upstairs in the open, barracks with the other lower ranks. The day-room, a One-story building, was separated from the barracks, and the building contained four rooms. There was the day-room itself, with rattan furniture and padded cushions, a radio, and magazines (the squadron subscribed to Time, Life, Scribner's, Atlantic, Harper's, The American Mercury, The Saturday Evening Post, Army Life, and an English-language Manila newspaper that usually arrived one day late). The screened porch off the day-room was reserved for poker games on paydays. The porch was well lighted with strong unshaded bulbs dangling from the ceiling. There was a pool table, which was reserved for crap games on paydays. A door from the day-room led to a much larger room with a bar and a half dozen tables. This was Charlie Com's bar and restaurant. The screened porch that flanked Charlie Com's beer bar was dimly lighted, and much cooler than his main room.

Charlie Corn had the concession for beer and food at all of the military bases in the Philippines, and he was a rich Chinaman whom no one, apparently, had ever seen in person. Com's overhead was very low because he imported his employees from Canton, and these Chinamen had to work for him without any money until they had paid off their passage from China. He also charged them for their food and sleeping quarters, so it took them about three years of work to pay off and earn their freedom. 'Then, if they decided to quit working for him, Charlie Com usually managed to get them deported back to China without a dime. All the same, the Chinese employees were always cheerful, and most of them stayed with him after paying off their debts because they were still better off in P.I. than they would be back in Canton, China.

There was a wide, well-manicured lawn, shaded with giant mahogany trees, in front of the barracks. A dirt road led down to the two hangars, the landing field, the headquarters building, the garage, the utility shacks, the combination guardhouse and fire station, and two long, low buildings that warehoused supplies for the airplanes and the squadron.

Directly across the dirt road from the barracks there were a swimming pool, a tennis court, a bowling alley with two lanes, an Indian store, the medical dispensary, and the backstop and bleachers of the baseball diamond. The road beyond the swimming pool led to the row of houses, or cottages as they were called, occupied by the squadron officers and their families. There was also a nine-hole golf course, with sand greens, and the first tee was directly behind the swimming pool. Golf clubs could be checked out free, but players had to buy their own golf balls. The nine holes went down to the end of the officers' row and back, and the squadron employed a Negrito from the Baluga tribe as greens-keeper.

As the major outlined the amenities for us, pointing out the pool and the golf course and so on, I could see the little Baluga, an old black man not much more than three feet tall, carrying a bow and two arrows and dragging a weighted piece of burlap over the hole three green. The rest of the space at Clark Field was taken up by an enormous flat grassy landing field which had to be mown more or less constantly with a tractor grass-cutter. There were no concrete runways, and the planes had to land on the grass.

Clark Field was supported in other respects by Fort Stotsenburg, about two miles away. Fort Stotsenburg was the s base of the 26th Cavalry (Philippine Scouts), all enlisted Filipinos with U.S. Army cavalry officers. The fort also contained the hospital, the post exchange, and the chapel, and a truck took the troops from Clark Field up to the theater and back. The movies changed every night, but during the first two months I was there I had already seen most of them at March Field. The theater was segregated.

Officers and their families sat downstairs in the front half; Filipino Scouts and their families sat downstairs in the back half; and the balcony was reserved for Clark Field soldiers, who were, of course, white. In 1936 there were no Negroes in the Air Corps.

The major finished his talk, slapped his right boot with his riding crop twice, and turned to the first sergeant.

"Have I forgotten anything, Sergeant?"

"No, sir."

"Are there any questions, then?"

Kossowski raised his hand. He was a tall, rangy Texan in his early thirties, and he wore a battered campaign hat with a pale blue infantry hat cord. The major pointed to him with his crop.

"How can a man get a transfer out of this hell-hole?" Kossowski said in a raspy voice. "I want a transfer to the  Thirsty-first Infantry in Manila."

"Tell him, Sergeant, how to apply for a transfer." The major pointed to the snoring Irby. "And when that man arouses from his slumbers, tell him the procedure as well."

"Yes, sir."

After the major stalked out of earshot down the road, the first sergeant spent about fifteen minutes chewing our ass out for our behavior. He told us that we were the worst bunch of replacements he had seen during his ten years as first sergeant of the 3rd Pursuit Squadron. Despite his many years in the tropics, the first sergeant had a pale face, with short blond hair. His blue eyes were faded, however, as though the sun had bleached them. His expression was bland, and didn't change at all, even when his voice deepened with anger. After he calmed down, he got to practical matters. He would interview each man the next morning and assign jobs. We would also be issued khaki cloth and findings, and be measured by the tailor for tailor-made uniforms. (A Filipino tailor had the concession, and he was the first sergeant's brother-in-law, but he didn't tell us that.)

The money for our uniforms would be taken out of our pay at five dollars a month. The blouse was six dollars, shirts and pants were three dollars apiece, and we could also get khaki shorts made for only two dollars a pair. We would only need one blouse, but each man was required to order two shirts and two pairs of pants. Khaki shorts, for off-duty wear, were almost mandatory. If we were interested, the tailor made tropical suits for only twelve dollars, and did beautiful work. We didn't need more than two tailor-made uniforms because, except for those men who worked at headquarters and in the orderly room, we wore coveralls all of the time. Coveralls were issued and charged against our clothing allowances. But by issuing us cloth and findings instead of regulation ready-made uniforms, the squadron commander made certain we all had tailor-made uniforms.

I don't know whether he requested one or not, but the next day Irby was transferred to Nichols Field, outside Manila. Kossowski, the ex-infantryman, was not transferred. He was assigned to mow the landing field with the tractor mower, and this he did for two years. Kossowski had been an infantry sergeant back in the States, but all ranks below staff sergeant belonged to the organization and not to the man. So when he had transferred to the Philippines he had to give up his three stripes and come over as a private. If he had been allowed to transfer to the 31st Infantry he would have had his three stripes back in no time, but he never received a promotion at Clark Field-C not even to P.F.C.

***

BY THE TIME THE FIRST SERGEANT GOT AROUND TO dismissing us, our bunks had been made by the Filipino houseboys. After we unpacked our barracks bags and stored our things away in our foot- and wall lockers, the houseboys started to shine our extra pairs of shoes, both civilian and G.I., that we kept lined up under our beds. Our beds would be made daily and our shoes shined by these houseboys. They also turned back the covers in the evening and tucked in the mosquito bars. They were paid $1.50 a month, which was deducted from our pay. Another $1.50 a month was deducted to pay Filipino K.P.'s, which meant that I wouldn't have to pull any K.P.'s-for the next two years, either. I was a little alarmed by the way the money was suddenly being deducted from my twenty-one-dollars-a-month pay. We were paid in pesos, and pesos were two for a dollar. I had thought that I was going to be fairly well off because my salary was doubled to 42 pesos a month. But after I worked it out, I was no better off than I had been in the States.

Tailor-made clothes      10 pesos

Laundry I                        3 pesos

Houseboy                        3 pesos

K.P.                                 3 pesos

P.X. checks                   14 pesos

Show tickets                    3 pesos

Cigarettes, three cartons 3 pesos

Miscellaneous               10 pesos

Total    49 pesos

After I went over my figures again, I decided I would be unable to get fourteen pesos a month in P.X. checks, as I had at March Field. Otherwise I would have no money left to get laid on payday at the whorehouse in nearby Angeles. There was some advantage here. The girls in Angeles were only two pesos, whereas the whores on D Street in San Bemardino charged two dollars, but that seemed to be the only difference. On the other hand, I would be living well. No K.P., no cleaning of barracks. I didn't have to shine my shoes or make my bunk, and the food in the mess hall, if the first night's dinner was any indication, was excellent. There were mangoes on the table, and I had tried one after eating my roast beef and mashed potatoes. It had been delicious, and one of the guys at my table told me there were mangoes and bananas on the table every day. Lights in the barracks were turned out at nine P.M. The houseboys had already turned back our covers and put down the mosquito nets. A warm breeze came through the screened windows, but there were still enough mosquitdes around after the sun went down for us to need mosquito bars. `

I didn't feel like going to bed at nine, so I wandered over to the day-room. I looked into Charlie Com's (the bar and day-room stayed open until eleven), but I didn't have any money. I had spent my last dime on two Hershey bars after the ship left Guam.

I left the bar and went into the day-room. There was an old guy listening to the radio. He had it tuned so low I couldn't hear it. He had to sit with his head right next to the speaker to hear it himself. There was no point in asking him to turn up the volume because there was an unwritten rule that the man sitting in the chair next to the radio was in charge of the dial and the volume. I had learned about this rule at March Field. The old fart was keeping it low because he didn't want anyone else to hear it. There are always a few bitter old soldiers, professional privates, like that in every outfit. Some of these guys have been in the Army since the World War, and their only distinction is that they won a medal or two in France. They sneak their watch out of their watch pocket, look at it guardedly, and put it back. If you ask for the time, they say, "Get your own goddamned watch!" If you ask for a light, they say, "Support your own goddamned habit!" The old fuck, with his ear pressed against the radio, was looking at me out of the corner of his eye. I knew he wanted me to ask him to turn up the volume so he could refuse in a nasty way. I denied him that satisfaction and went out on the porch instead.

There was a hollow-chested guy sitting at one of the tables under the bright overhead dangling light. He was smoking and staring through the screen at the black night. Small fuck-you lizards clung to the outside of the screen, repeating again and again in soprano chirps, "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you . . ."

I rolled a cigarette. The guy looked at me with a lopsided smile. There was dime-sized skin cancer on his left cheek. He had shaved around it carefully, leaving a quarter-inch

circle of stiff black hairs to form a hedge around the cancer.

"You got in today," he said, making a statement out of it.

"Yeah." I lit my cigarette.

"I'm leaving tomorrow morning. Two years exactly. And two years from now, unless you extend for a year, you'll be leaving too."

Although I already knew this, it hit me hard. This was . October 30, 1936, and the boat left the next day, October 31—two years exactly for this guy. And it would be two years exactly for me. In the morning he would get on the truck, ride down to Manila, and get on the U.S.S. Ulysses S. Grant. Then, after the boat dumped off the men in China, he would return to San Francisco.

"Your two years," I asked him, "did it go fast or slow?"

"It seemed like an eternity." His lopsided smile made him look as if he had some secret knowledge.

"What did you do?"

"I don't know. But whatever it was, I've been punished enough for it by now. I made it. But I won't feel safe till the whistle blows and the Grant leaves the dock."

"I don't mean that. I mean, what did you do to pass the time?"

He made a sweeping movement with his right arm, taking in the porch and the black night.

"This is it." He shook his head. "I know now I didn't work it right. I sat around and brooded too much. Don't get into that. Go to the barrio and get drunk. If you can, get yourself a girl. But I got even with the bastards the last three months. It was worth getting busted for."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm an armorer. When the chief armorer left on the last boat, three months ago, they promoted me to corporal. He was the man who'd always synchronized the machine guns, to fire through the propellers, you know."

"On the P-twelves."

"That's right. A week after he left the old man wanted to do some firing, and I told him I didn't know how to synchronize the machine guns. So after being a corporal for only a week, I lost my two stripes."

"The other armorer, before he left, should've taught you how to do it."

"He did, and I do know how. But I told the line chief and the old man that I didn't. I figured they'd bust me, but I also knew they wouldn't be able to shoot any machine guns for three months, or until they got a new armorer. Did an armorer come in today with you guys?"

"I don't know."

He shrugged. "It don't make a hell of a lot of difference now, because the squadron'll be getting P-twenty-sixes pretty soon, and they don't shoot through the props. But I got

even, didn't I?"

"I don't know whether you did or not. A corporal makes eighty-four pesos a month. You lost the extra money, and you still had to be the armorer."

"A man's soul's worth more than an extra forty-two pesos a month."

"I can understand that. I'm a poet."

He pointed to the cancer on his cheek. "You've got fair skin, kid, like mine. And in a few months, when you get a nice sun cancer like this one, maybe you can write a poem about it. I can't write poetry, but I knew how to tell a lie about not being able to synchronize the machine guns. It's a pretty tricky business, you see, and if it isn't done right you shoot off the propeller, I thought about doing it wrong, on purpose, so that the old man would shoot off   his prop about five hundred feet up as he dived at the target. But if l had, I wouldn't be going home tomorrow."

He got to his feet. "Fast or slow, it's still only two years. Don't brood, kid, or you might do something crazy. Just write your poems, and maybe"—he tapped the copy of Scribner's on the table—"I'll read a lovely ode to skin cancer in Scribners someday."

He laughed and left the porch.

I didn't know whether he had told me the truth or not. After all, there were technical manuals that explained how to synchronize the machine guns with the propeller. If a man could read, he could do it. On the other hand, officers didn't know much of anything about the technical aspects of the airplanes they flew. They had to depend upon the know-how of their mechanics and armorers. If the major wasn't sure that everything would work, he would hesitate to fire his weapons. The nose-heavy all-fabric P-I2, without a propeller, would take him abruptly into the ground.

But all this didn't bother me at the moment. I found out later that the armorer had told the truth, and that he had been busted from corporal after only having his stripes for one week. What bothered me was the realization that I would be stuck at Clark Field with no way out for two full years. Of course, I had known that when I re-enlisted to come here, but that was not the same as the reality of it. The jungle surrounded the field on three sides, and the open plain on the remaining side led to a range of mountains in the distance. Here I was in the middle of nowhere, and here I would remain for two years. A wave of nostalgia overwhelmed me. I felt a loss for something I couldn't name, because I had no place to go back to, anyway,

I rolled another cigarette and looked on the bright side. Tomorrow was payday, and for the next two years, with tailor-mades at only fifty cents a carton, I wouldn't have to smoke Bull Durham; I could smoke Chesterfields.

I picked up the Scribners and read a short story by Thomas Wolfe. It wasn't a regular story, it was an excerpt from a new novel he was working on. Again and again, throughout the story, he repeated, "Ah, April, sweet April," but nothing much happened. ·

Then at eleven the C.O. turned out the lights, and I had to go to bed.

FIVE

WHAT I LIKED MOST ABOUT THE AIRR CORPS WAS the huge blocks of leisure time, which allowed me to read three or four books a week from the Fort Stotsenburg library. What I disliked most was that I was a flunky in coveralls. We were not soldiers in the Air Corps; we were all, in one way or another, manual laborers, peons. Most of the enlisted men's jobs could just as easily have been performed by civilians, and the appearance of being military men was bogus. We had mechanics, armorers, fabric technicians, oil reclamation and supply specialists, meteorologists, parachute riggers, and clerk-typists. When they told me to drive the fire truck, I became an instant fireman. A guy Hamed Reynolds was my nozzleman, and our fire chief was Corporal Gutweiler. There was another driver and another nozzleman assigned to the fire department, too, and we altemated duty periods every twenty-four hours. Corporal Gutweiler was on duty every day.

On the day Reynolds and I were on duty, I drove the fire truck from its garage behind the barracks down to the firehouse behind the hangar. I sat there, reading until eleven-thirty A.M., and then I drove the truck back to the barracks. I didn't have to clean or polish the truck. That task was taken care of by one of the prisoners in the guardhouse jail next to the Firehouse. The firehouse office served as the guardhouse office at night. There were always one or two prisoners in the lockup. Usually the prisoner was Red Thompson, who was in and out of the guardhouse frequently, coming down from an extended, raging drunk.

While he was drunk he was incoherent and quick to destroy people and things, and there was no point in talking to him until he had sobered up. Red usually spent three or four days in the lockup; then he was given either squadron punishment or a summary court—martial—fined, and released to get drunk again.

Sometimes I had to put gas and oil in the truck, but I arranged things with the other driver, Burnley Johnson, to take turns on this chore. Once a month there was a fire drill, and we alternated on the drills, so I only drove the truck on the fire drill every other month. For the fire drill, I drove the truck to the hydrant in front of the barracks. Corporal Gutweiler and Reynolds attached the hose to the fire hydrant and the pump hose on the truck. I switched on the pump, and I could control the flow of water from the driver's seat. They held the nozzle as the water came and that was that. After I turned off the pump we put the hose back on the truck, and I drove back to the firehouse again.

During my twenty—four-hour tour of duty I had to hang around the barracks on call, which made me miss the movie on the nights I was on duty, but otherwise my time was my own. None of us, including Corporal Gutweiler, had ever had any training in fire fighting. Gutweiler worried a lot about whether we would be able to put out a fire if one of the airplanes ever caught.

I told him not to worry. If the plane caught fire, the all-fabric P-12's we still had would be twisted black skeletons before I could get the engine cranked and drive over to the hangar. He was relieved when we finally got the P-26's. With their metal bodies and streamlined pants over the tires, they wouldn't burn as fast as the P-12s. But there were never any fires. The only difficult job we had to perform was to check out the fire extinguishers every month. This job was a little scary. There were about twenty extinguishers to check, in the hangars and in the barracks and in the headquarters building. Each extinguisher had a small bottle of sulfuric acid in the lid. When the extinguisher was turned upside down, the soda water and the

acid mixed and sent out a stream of foam to blanket the fire. We had to unscrew the top and fill the bottom of the extinguisher with more soda water if some had evaporated. Then we made sure the bottle of sulfuric acid was full. I didn't like to pour the sulfuric acid from the big jug into the little bottle. A spilled drop would smolder and smoke when it hit the pavement, and I was always afraid I might spill a drop on my foot and burn myself.

On weekends, of course, we didn't have to drive down to the little firehouse across from the hangars. The truck, a big red F.W.D., stayed parked behind the barracks. Sometimes I could make a deal with Burnley Johnson, the other driver, to hang around for me if I wanted to go somewhere, and I did the same for him when he was on weekend duty. As firemen, we didn't have to stand any Saturday morning inspections, which were held infrequently anyway, and we didn't have to pull guard duty either. Technically, Corporal Gutweiler was on duty  twenty-four hours a day every day, but as long as he told the charge of quarters where he would be in case of a fire, he could go where he liked. When he wasn't in the firehouse,

he was usually in the bowling alley, trying to improve his 185 average.

I have gone on at some length about the fire department because I want to point out the waste of manpower, the sheer incompetence of the setup, and the feeling of worthlessness it engendered in those of us who were assigned to these meaningless jobs. My uncle Roy, who worked for the Southern Bell telephone company in Los Angeles, told me once that Southern Bell had saved thousands of dollars a year by eliminating fire extinguishers from their company vehicles. Not enough trucks burned to the ground during a given year to justify putting an extinguisher into each truck. Once they are there, they have to be maintained and inspected, and that calls for hiring men to do it. The company had also discovered, when they made a survey, that when a vehicle did catch fire, the driver leaped out and ran like hell to get away from the burning vehicle. — And when he ran, he invariably left the extinguisher in the cab.

The difference here is that Southern Bell was a profit-making organization, whereas the Air Corps, as a branch of the Army, is not. And yet if a fire department is required, it would be difficult to find a cheaper department than our five-man group, with only one corporal and four buck privates and an old F.W.D. truck that had been chugging along for more than a dozen years.

Everything in the Air Corps has been planned to make the enlisted men feel inferior, whether they are or not. Every soldier was supposed to be a skilled man, and many of them were, but they had all learned their skills on the job in a hit-or-miss fashion. Our line chief, a master sergeant who was also maintenance chief, couldn't read or write. Nevertheless, he had his six stripes because he had been in the Air Corps ever since it was still a part of the Signal Corps back during the Great War. He had a P.F.C. assistant who read the technical orders to him as they came in. He then explained the tech orders to the crew chiefs, when they required new procedures and new methods of fixing engines and so on. The system worked all right, because after he finished explaining them the crew chiefs had a chance to read the orders themselves. And yet, because the ancient line chief was an enlisted man, his inability to read and write was concealed from our officers. None of them knew that he was illiterate. The crew chiefs covered for the old man all the time, which added to their burdens. But he was a nice old guy. If a crew chief wanted a three-day pass to Manila, the line chief would red-line the crew chief's airplane and tell the officer-pilot that it wasn't ready to fly for a few days.

On the other hand, our maintenance crews didn't work hard, and they seemed happy enough. A four-hour day is not a heavy load. Their work consisted of, for most part, inspections of their aircraft—a daily, a twenty-five-hour, and a fifty-hour inspection. The daily only took five minutes, but a lot of parts were taken off and washed in gasoline and put back on during the twenty-five-hour inspection. After the plane flew for fifty hours, it was practically disassembled before being put back together again. When the planes were flying, as they did almost every morning, the crew chiefs sat under a thatched shelter in front of the hangar, talking and smoking until the planes landed again.

The Air Corps also has two enlisted ratings that other branches of the service do not: air mechanic, first class, and air mechanic, second class. These ratings pay almost as much money as staff sergeant and technical sergeant, but they don't have the responsibilities that go with sergeant's stripes. To become an A.M. 1 or an A.M. 2 the mechanic had to pass a written test and then get on the waiting list. There were only a few of these ratings available in each squadron, but with two year tours, and with the rating belonging to the squadron, a good many mechanics got a crack at these ratings during their tours.

There were, however, some highly skilled men in the squadron, especially "Rip Cord" Collins, our operations sergeant, and Gamer, our chief telegraph operator, who could send or receive Morse code at fifty words a minute. Collins had to be efficient because he held everything together. He kept track of all the planes, those ready to fly and those on red-line, and he made out the flight schedules and kept track of flying pay for both the officers and the enlisted men. His job was made doubly difficult because many officers only wanted to fly the minimum time requirement. To get flight pay, which was a sum equal to half their base salary, they had to fly four hours a month.

A few enlisted men were also entitled to flight pay, although no enlisted man could draw flight pay for more than twelve months in each enlistment. In a pursuit squaron, with one-man airplanes, four hours a month in the air were hard to get for an enlisted man. We had one two seated observation plane, an O-19, and the squadron commander was the only pilot who had checked out on it. 'Rip Cord' had to make sure there was a passenger in it every time it went up. It was this same O-19 that had given 'Rip Cord' his nickname.

Collins had a hangover one morning, and he assigned himself to fly in the back seat of the O-19 when the major took off that morning. (One or two hours in cool, thin air at three or four thousand feet will cure a hangover quicker than almost anything.) But after they were aloft, Collins fell asleep. When the major landed and taxied up to the concrete ramp in front of the hangars, he noticed that Collins was still sleeping. The prop was still turning over, and the major stood up in his seat, leaned over, and punched Collins on the shoulder. Collins awoke, and the major gestured with his thumb for him to get out. Startled, Collins unbuckled his belt, leaped out, and pulled the rip cord on his parachute, thinking in his half-awake way that the major wanted him to jump from an endangered airplane. When he landed on the ramp he broke his leg. Then the propwash caught his 'chute and carried his screaming body for about fifty feet or so out onto the grassy landing field.

His broken leg became about an inch shorter than the other one when an inept surgeon reset it at the hospital, and Collins developed a curious rolling walk when he returned to duty. Collins did not appreciate the nickname he acquired, but his limp reinforced his disciplined image, and he never lost the nickname. The story was told to new arrivals, and Collins' nickname was spread gradually throughout the Air Corps. We speculated about it down in the fire department, as we speculated about everything else, and we concluded that he would probably keep that name as long as he remained in the service.

There were 120 men in the squadron, not counting officers. About twelve of them were entitled to flight pay, including the ancient line chief. The O-19 couldn't handle all of them every month, so once a month a captain from Nichols Field flew up to Clark in an old Keystone bomber that had been left over from the World War. All twelve of the men piled into the Keystone, and the captain would circle the field for a few hours until they all got their required time.

There was another rule that could be substituted for the four hours-in-the-air rule, and that was to make ten landings instead. Many pursuit pilots liked this rule because they could make ten touch and-go landings in no time, but the enlisted men who flew in the old Keystone bomber begged the pilot to stay in the air instead. No wonder. Each landing of this cumbersome old airplane that only flew about ninety miles an hour at full throttle was liable to be its last. They earned their extra money, I thought, because nothing in the world could have induced me to fly in that old Keystone bomber.

Even so, when you look at it, there was no reason to give any of these enlisted men flight pay (not in a pursuit squadron), so they were beating the Air Corps out of extra money every month and being humiliated in the process. A man in a bomber without bombs, riding around in a circle for four hours (and most of them got sick and vomited through the square hole that was supposed to be for the dropping of bombs) had to feel some kind of guilt for taking money under false pretenses. But I never heard any of these guys express any feelings of guilt, so maybe I'm making more out of this than it deserves.

I tried once to discuss the ethics of enlisted men's flight pay with Reynolds, the nozzleman, but his standard answer was, as always, "Who gives a shit?"

Reynolds was only interested in one thing, and that was in getting a fireman's hat. We wore coveralls and campaign hats, just like every other grease monkey, but Reynolds wanted to wear a fire hat to set himself off from the other enlisted men. There was no fire-fighter's equipment of any kind, not even rubber boots. Reynolds bugged Corporal Gutweiler about this and finally Gutweiler made out a requisition for two fireman's hats, but he never received an answer.

When it became obvious that there would be no response to the requisition, Reynolds said, "If there's a fire, I ain't going into no burning building to rescue some woman or child without a fireman's hat."

"You're the nozzleman," Gutweiler reminded him, "and you'll be outside holding the nozzle if there's a fire. Willeford'll be sitting in the truck with the pump to look after, and I have to help you hold the nozzle. So none of us'l1 ever have to go into a burning building."

"Ah, who gives a shit?" Reynolds said, although in this case he did.

If the Air Corps had provided us with fireman's hats it would have been a small measure of distinction, a sign that we represented something worthwhile. A nozzleman, on the scale of things, is way down there on the totem pole, and Reynolds shouldn't have been a nozzleman in the first place. He was a slight, undersized man, and he had to have help from Gutweiler to hold the nozzle during drills because he wasn't strong enough to handle it alone. The force of the water going through the hose lifted him off the ground. Nor was he strong enough to crank the fire truck, like the nozzleman on the other shift. I had to crank the F.W.D. myself, which meant the risk of a broken arm every time I had to drive the vehicle. And if an arm was to be broken, I would have preferred it to be Reynolds' instead of mine.

As little as I did, there were other men at Clark Field who did less. Much less. These were the old guys, the professional privates, men who had been in the Army since the World War. These men had never been promoted, had always been privates, and had never developed skills of any kind. In the States they could be assigned to clean latrines or to sweep porches, but in the Philippines, where all of the menial tasks were performed by Filipino houseboys, there was nothing at all for them to do.

The old guy I mentioned earlier who always managed to get the "pilot's" seat next to the radio was officially assigned to the supply room, as a helper for the supply sergeant. But he was such a crusty old man, the supply sergeant would not let him come inside the supply room. He had to sit outside on a chair all morning, moving the chair periodically to stay in the shade of the building.

There was another old guy we called "Patty." He had served in the "Princess Pats" regiment during the war. This was a Canadian infantry regiment, as I understood it, which had lost almost all of its complement in the Argonne Forest. Patty was one of the few survivors. He had a Victoria Cross and a raft of other campaign medals on his blouse. He was assigned to be a runner for the first sergeant at headquarters, even though he could barely walk. His legs and hands were crippled by arthritis, and he was a little senile on occasions. Sometimes, for example, he thought Clark Field was in Alberta, Canada. The first sergeant didn't need a runner, anyway. If he wanted someone, he would call him on the telephone. In a one-squadron post like Clark Field, the first sergeant had the job of sergeant-major as well. So Patty had a useless assignment. He was unable to march down to the headquarters building each morning at seven-thirty, but he made his own hobbling way down there, getting to headquarters by eight or eight-thirty.

When he reported to the first sergeant he was always told, "Nothing for you today, Patty. Go back to the barracks, and I'll call you if I need you."

He was never needed later, and he had to go back to bed after this morning walk. Of course, the fact that he had to walk a half mile each way, from the barracks to headquarters and then back, probably kept the old man alive.

There was also Red Thompson, the drunk I mentioned earlier, who had been at one time a first-rate parachute rigger. But he was now too drunk or too sick to do much of anything, so he wasn't assigned to any job. He usually spent his time in the barrio of Sapang Bato (which we called Sloppy Bottom) drinking gin, when he wasn't sleeping in the barracks or in the guardhouse jail. No one ever bothered him because he was a belligerent drunk, a dangerous man, to be avoided. Because of his many summary court lines he had no money, nor was he likely to have any on paydays; and he had sold off all of his clothing, civilian and military, as well as his sheets and blankets, to buy gin; Knowing he would sell them again, the supply

sergeant wouldn't issue him any more sheets and blankets; and the mess sergeant, Sergeant Travigliante, wouldn't let him eat in the mess hall because he smelled so bad. He reeked of gin and sweat and no one wanted to sit by him in the mess. He didn't eat much anyway, but when he got hungry he had to go to the back door of the kitchen and one of the cooks would fill a plate for him and let him eat outside with a spoon under the mahogany tree.

Months later, Red Thompson was sent back to the States early, without completing his tour and with a recommendation of "Unsatisfactory" character on his discharge. I doubt if Red was able to re-enlist. But the other old guys, who were no trouble to anyone, all they had to do was hang around until they got in their thirty years. Then they could retire at three quarters of their private's salary. Three fourths of twenty-one dollars a month was not a hell of a lot of pension money to live on. How the Air Corps expected them to survive on the outside, I don't know. Most of them, however, went to,the Soldiers' Home, in Arlington, Virginia, after they retired. There they had custodial care, free room and board, and hospital privileges. Every month a quarter was deducted from my salary for the Soldiers' Home, a forced donation, and I resented the deduction. I had no intention of ever ending up in a place where my associates would all be men like Patty, the radio jockey, and the Man in the Black Robe.

The Man in the Black Robe, as we called him, was another old drunk in his late forties. He got this nickname because he had a habit of waking people up in the middle of the night and telling them that the Man in the Black Robe was after him. What he really wanted was for you to give him a drink, or reassure him-—I don't know. One night he woke me. I hadn't heard about him at the time, and when he offered to show me the Man in the Black Robe, I got out of bed. I slept in my underwear, so all I did was slip into my skivvy slippers and follow him downstairs. We went down to the end of the barracks, and he pointed out the big mahogany tree behind the kitchen. The moon was out and the wind was blowing. I could see

the shadow of the tree waver a little, but I sure as hell didn't see any Man in a Black Robe.

"See?" he whispered, pointing to the tree. "There he is, and he's after me!"

"There's no one there now, Pop," I whispered back. "Why don't you go on up to bed. I'll stay down here, and if he comes toward the barracks I'll scare him off so you can sleep."

"Will you?"

"Sure."

He went upstairs. I smoked a cigarette, waiting to see if the old man would come back, but he didn't so I went back to bed myself.

Later that year the old drunk hanged himself in the barracks boiler room, one of three suicides we had during my tour. When we discussed the suicide in the barracks later, some superstitious assholes in the squadron actually believed that there was a Man in the Black Robe, and that he finally got to the old rummy.

"It's just a metaphor," I tried to tell them. "Every man's got a Man in a Black Robe after him."

But very few soldiers will accept a metaphor of any kind. These guys were realists, if nothing else, and I had already learned on my first night at Clark Field not to tell anyone else I was a poet.

SIX

I WAS NOT A DISCIPLINED POET, HOWEVER, AND I DIDN'T write poems on a regular basis. Instead of sitting down writing a poem or two every day, I waited for inspiration to hit me. But there was little to inspire poetry at Clark Field. Not only did I have problems in finding a subject to write about, but when I did I had even more difficulty discovering rhymes. There was a rhyming dictionary at the Stotsenburg library, but I thought to use rhyming dictionary would be cheating. Coming from another source, the words wouldn't be mine. It was fair enough to use a regular dictionary to get the correct spelling of a word, but it would be dishonest to use a dictionary to find a rhyme.

An officer's wife who had returned to the States sent a boxful of old Saturday Review of Literature magazines over to the day-room before she left. I read them all, keeping them in order, to see what the critics had to say about poetry. At first I couldn't fully appreciate the reviews of the new books of poetry, either what the reviewer was saying or what the poet himself was saying, because only a few truncated lines of each poem were quoted in the review—not the entire poem. There were also complete, original poems printed in the magazine, and in most instances I could follow these fairly well. Some of the poems, however, made no sense whatsoever.

What opened my eyes to the possibilities of writing poetry was a review of e. e. cummings' book entitled 1+1. From this review I learned that rhymes were not essential and that assonance was close enough.

The only subject a poet actually needed was the way he happened to see things. Nothing was excluded from poetry.

If I wanted to I could even write about the praying mantis that had taken up residence on my mosquito bar. This insect was about six inches long, a brilliant emerald green, and he stayed on my mosquito bar, praying, for more than a month. When I first noticed him I was going to kill him, but my bunkie, Elmer Thomas Canavin (not Owens), told me to leave him alone. Mantises, Canavin told me, eat mosquitoes, and the fact that this particular mantis had sought me out was a blessing.

Canavin was an infantryman, and not a member of the squadron. The colonel who commanded the 26th Filipino Scouts at Fort Stotsenburg couldn't find a Filipino trooper who could take dictation and type. Canavin had been transferred up from headquarters, 31st Infantry Regiment, to be the colonel's secretary. Since Canavin was a white man and couldn't be placed in barracks with Filipino Scouts, he was assigned to a bunk at Clark Field. Because I was lucky, his bunk was next to mine, and in Canavin I had a constant source of infomiation about almost every subject.

Canavin was a private first class, third class specialist, and made almost as much money as a buck sergeant. He had three years of college at the University of Pennsylvania, and he had joined the Army when he realized that when he graduated he would have to support his mother and three older sisters for the rest of his life. He didn't want to take some dead-end job he would detest. His mother and sisters had worked at menial jobs to keep him in college, and Canavin knew he would owe them his life when he got his degree. He. had left college without a degree and enlisted in the infantry. All Canavin wanted from life was to carry a rifle, remain a buck private, and have no responsibilities at all. But the Army doesn't work that way.

When the Army discovers a rare man like Canavin who is capable of doing many things, it makes him do them, regardless of his desires. Canavin was clean-cut, didn't drink or smoke, and had such a strong sense of honor one had to be careful not to insult him, either on purpose or inadvertently. He was sensitive to nuances, and it didn't help that he was the only infantryman in a barracks full of Air Corps men. Most of these men, in Canavin's opinion, were unprincipled louts. He was always trying to teach one or more of them a lesson. Several incidents come to mind, but I can give one typical example.

Canavin and another man, an assistant crew chief named Luchessi, got into an argument one morning about who had reached the latrine sink first. Losing his temper, Luchessi had pushed Canavin. Canavin immediately challenged him to a duel.

Canavin asked me to be his second, and that afternoon during quiet hours I went to see Luchessi and asked him who his second was so we could make arrangements for the duel. Canavin was the challenger, and he told me that Luchessi could choose the weapons.

"You crazy?" Luchessi said to me. "I ain't fighting no duel. If he wants to fight, I'll fight him behind the barracks anytime, but not with no weapons."

I was prepared for this; Canavin had warned me that Luchessi would try to weasel out of the duel.

"Look, ,Luchessi," I said, "I really don't want to talk to you about the arrangements. I'm not a participant, I'm just Canavin's second. I want to talk to your second, to someone who isn't emotional, so we can make the arrangements in a fair and businesslike manner."

"I don't have no second."

"No friends at all?"

"Sure, I've got friends. I've got lots of friends."

"Then pick one so I can get on with it."

"I'm not picking no one, and I'm not fighting no duel!"

"In that case I'll get a second for you."

Corporal Canfield had been sitting on his bunk, next to Luchessi's, and he had listened to the conversation. Canfield had been in the Army for a good many years and had stayed with the Army of Occupation in Germany until I922. He liked to say that he was the "last American soldier out of Germany."

"What about you, Corporal Canfield?" I said. "You're Luchessi's bunkie."

"Not me," he said. "Duels are against the Articles of War, as you should know, Willeford. The squadron commander read them to us just two weeks ago."

This was true. Every six months an officer had to read and explain the Articles of War to us, and we had to sign a sheet of paper stating that we understood them. This semiannual reading reinforced our knowledge about how few rights we had, including the right to fight a duel. It was a court-martial offense, for example, to curse a senator or a congressman, let alone fight a duel. Enlisted men are not allowed by law to have their feelings hurt or their honor impugned—at least they're not allowed to avenge it.

"In Germany they fought duels all the time, didn't they?"

"German students, yes, and some French soldiers, but not Americans."

"We'll keep it quiet, Corporal. There'll just be you and me, Luchespi and Canavin."

"And a medic," Canfield said, rubbing his chin. "You gotta have a medic, and then when one of them's killed or- hurt bad—it'1l all come out. No thanks, Willeford. I'd like to keep my two stripes. Find someone else."

"Okay," I said, "but you know something about duels. So even if you won't be Luchessi's second, maybe you can suggest the kinds of weapons they should use. I don't think Canavin wants to kill Luchessi. A flesh wound would probably satisfy him."

"Pocketknives are all right," Corporal Canfield said.

"You got a pocketknife, Luchessi‘?"

"Yeah."

"How long's the blade'?"

"Two and a half inches. But I'm not going to use it. You guys are crazy if you think I'm gonna fight Canavin or anyone else with a knife!"

"Okay, Luchessi," I said, "pocketknives it is, with two-and-a-half-inch blades. I'll get back to you later about the time and place."

"Wait a minute," he said, and his dark skin faded at least two tints."

Of course there was no duel.

The more Luchessi thought about it, the more frightened he became. He went to see the first sergeant about the matter, and the solution was that Luchessi, at roll call in the morning, had to make a public apology to Canavin in front of the entire squadron.

Canavin accepted the reluctant, public apology, and the duel was averted.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't write a decent poem about the praying mantis. Eventually he left my mosquito bar, and I never saw him (her?) again. I did write a fairly good poem about the army ants, but I was unable to write about the birth of a Baluga baby,

although the latter should have been the better subject of the two.

Balugas are unique. We had the one old Baluga as a grounds-keeper for our nine—hole golf course, but he was the only Baluga who had a government job. He was paid ten pesos a month out of squadron funds. The first sergeant would give him his check on payday, and then the charge of quarters would take him over to Charlie Corn's to cash it. After the Baluga made an X on the check and the C.Q. witnessed it, the Chinaman would give the old man ten one-peso bills. By Baluga standards he was a wealthy man. I doubt if all the other Balugas in the Pampanga province or those who lived on Mount Pinatuba had ten pesos among them. No one knew what he did with his ten pesos each month. With his dirty loincloth, no shoes, and his bow and two arrows clutched in his hand, he certainly didn't spend any money on soap. None of the Balugas bathed in the river. The only time they got wet was when they got caught in the rain. Their black bodies were often covered with grayish scales of dried mud.

There was a Baluga village on the plain between Clark Field and the barrio of Sapang Bato., and when I went over to the Enlisted Men's Club I always took the shortcut through the Baluga village. There was a single row of huts on stilts, and a huge black pot in the middle of the village trail. Old Baluga men and women foraged for sticks of wood and kept a fire going under the pot at all times. The younger men ranged far afield, snaring lizards, snakes, or rabbits, and they would skin and put these animals into the pot when they returned to the village. The younger women grew some scraggly rows of corn, planted yams, and dug up other roots and wild vegetables they found along the river. The river was a narrow stream; if it had a name I never found out what it was, and most of the year it was a trickle. But during the rainy season it became a wide, if shallow, stream, meandering down from Mount Pinatuba and across the Pampanga plains. There were mango trees on the plain as well, so the Balugas always had something to eat. Baluga men were quite small, about three and a half feet tall at most, but their women were incredibly tiny. Their bodies were not distorted, like dwarfs; they were just tiny black people with well-proportioned bodies.

One afternoon, when I was on my way to Sloppy Bottom, I stopped in the village and watched one of these little women deliver a baby. The baby wasn't much bigger than a Norway rat. The mother was alone. She just sat on the edge of her porch, with its bamboo floor, grunted a few times, and delivered the baby. She cut the umbilical cord with a piece of coconut shell, and then tied it with some coconut fiber, She didn't wash the baby, but put it to her breast immediately (all of these women ran around with exposed dugs) and let it feed. What made this interesting to me is that none of the other members of the tribe, men or women, stopped to help this woman. The old crones still gathered sticks for the fire, a young man continued to peel a snake, and a few kids chased one another around in a circle, squealing and giggling. I was the only one who took an interest. I had wondered whether to stop and watch, feeling that I was intruding on her privacy, but if she had wanted privacy she could have stayed inside her hut. And inasmuch as I had never seen a baby born before, I didn't want to deny myself the experience.

I walked over to the club afterwards, and tried later to write about it, but I couldn't. Nothing could have been more joyless or depressing than this unassisted birth. The mother was resigned, but responsible, I supposed, yet I didn't see any future for the kid, whether it was a boy or , a girl. I don't know what the sex was; the kid was so wet and slimy I couldn't tell from where I was standing, maybe fifteen feet away from the hut. I knew it didn't make any difference. The chances were not all that great that it would ever become an adult Baluga anyway. I should have been able to write something about the birth, and yet I could not.

These Balugas were not a happy tribe, with one notable exception. When a cavalry horse died up at Fort Stotsenburg, the Army gave the dead horse to the Balugas. With concentrated team effort the Balugas would haul the dead horse on a wooden sled the three or four miles from Stotsenburg to their village. Then they would cook and eat it.

That was the only time they ever laughed or appeared to be happy—when they were full of roasted horse meat. A lot of horses died of tuberculosis in the Philippines, and I didn't think it was a good idea to let these Balugas eat tubercular horses, but it solved a problem for the 26th Cavalry. By giving the Balugas the dead horse, they didn't have to dig a deep square hole and bury the animal. In ninety- and ninety-five-degree weather, a dead horse ripens very quickly.

If you have ever watched twenty or more scrambling, meat-crazed little black men hack up a dead horse with bolo knives, while their gibbering women pile brush and twigs and palm fronds under a pot for a raging fire, you will not want to see the ceremony repeated. It was an ugly scene. They would pause from time to time to drink a long draft of horse blood from a coconut shell, and then back they would go, hacking and grinning and jabbering. The smell was overpowering, not only from the dead horse that had been out in the sun for a day or two but from the escaping gases.

I knew nothing about horses then, and I wondered what they fed the horse to make the gas from his hacked—open belly smell so rotten. Of course, as I know now, it was merely partially digested hay and oats, with perhaps a few forkfuls of alfalfa.

I stored my impressions away, thinking that I would be able to write about them eventually. What I learned from the Balugas was that no matter what happened to me, I would be better off than they would ever be. Once a man has witnessed life in a Baluga village, and I used to walk through there two or three times a week, he will never be able to feel sorry for himself again. He knows how awful life can truly become. I continue to gripe about things, and I probably always will, but I also know, deep inside of me, that my life is good. .

The Filipinos in the barrio were several cuts above the Balugas, but their poverty was almost as bad. They were taller than the Balugas by six inches or so, and they were very clean. If they wore rags, the rags were spotless. Filipino women spent their days washing clothes down by the river, or carrying five-gallon Standard Oil tins full of water to their huts in Sloppy Bottom. Their rows of corn and yams were planted in straight lines. They ate a lot of rice, but it came from somewhere else in the islands, not from the Pampanga plains. They raised goats, pigs, and chickens, including gamecocks. They swept the hard ground clean beneath their huts. And unlike the Balugas, Filipino children had to stay in school until they had finished the sixth grade. Their textbooks were all in English, and we could converse with them.

They spoke Tagalog and English, but no Spanish. Canavin was amazed that no one spoke Spanish, and he had no one to practice his Spanish with. Canavin was fluent in Spanish, but except for one old man he met in Angeles, who claimed to remember "Spanish Time," the language had virtually disappeared. Street and town names were still in Spanish, but the spoken language was gone, even though Spaniards had ruled the islands for three hundred years or more. Because there were at least six thousand islands in the Philippines, there were hundreds of dialects, but Tagalog seemed to be the universal one. Although Canavin studied Tagalog I considered it a waste of time, even though I had plenty of time to waste. All I needed was one sentence, and I asked Canavin to write that one out for me phonetically. Then I memorized it, using the proper inflections: "Ahko mall-ah-guy-ah eenie eebig gee tah"—I'm happy because I love you.

I figured this line would come in handy in the Philippines, and it did. Filipino women were always delighted when I rattled it off. They laughed and clapped their hands with glee, and I am positive that some of the pieces of ass I got in P.I. were directly attributable to that lone sentence. I learned a few other words, too, like Lalaki and Babai, because they stood for Men and Women and were painted on restroom doors. But I couldn't carry on a conversation in Tagalog, and I didn't have to. The Filipinos were quite formal in their use of English. I remember a cab driver in Manila telling me once, when I asked him to drive me to the Santa Ana Cabaret from downtown, "I am sorry, sir, but I do not have sufficient petrol to convey you to your destination. "

The cab driver was probably a lawyer. Almost every Filipino who went to the University of Manila studied law, and there were as many unemployed lawyers in Manila as unemployed stevedores.

There were a lot of caribaos in the Philippines, and they indicated the owner's wealth. Owning a water buffalo in P.I. was about the equivalent of owning a Chevy in Los Angeles. They were supposedly docile beasts, but they didn't like white men. They could smell us, I supposed, arrd they would charge for no reason at all. I was chased once, on my way to the barrio, and I had to climb a tree to save myself. A few minutes later a little Filipino kid with a stick came along and chased him away, rescuing me. Perhaps the caribao wouldn't have harmed me, but when a big black wet water buffalo comes lunging toward you through the pampas grass it gives you a panicky feeling, and I scrambled into the tree. He also hung around beneath the tree, snorting and pawing the mud, so I stayed there until the kid came along.

One day I spotted one and stopped, thinking that if I didn't move he wouldn't come after me. He didn't see me—or smell me—because he kept on going. But I had stopped right next to an anthill. As I stood there watching the water buffalo about two thousand ants crept up my leg (I was wearing khaki shorts), and when they were all in a tight cluster on my right calf one of them gave a signal and all two thousand ants bit me simultaneously. The pain was excruciating; it was like being branded with a red-hot iron. I screamed in agony and beat them off with my campaign hat, running at the same time. I finally got them all off, but my leg swelled to twice the size of the other one. I felt sick and vomited. Then I went back to the barracks and showered, washing the burned patch on my leg with strong, brown G.I. soap. Even so I ran a fever, and I was too sick to eat any supper that evening. I was all right by the next morning. Jesus, those big red ants, all climbing my leg so quietly I couldn't feel them, and then all of them biting I my leg at the same moment. It was eerie, and I couldn't stop thinking about it.

I was able to write about the ants, all right. I learned that when the subject has something to do with the poet the lines come tumbling out without any trouble at all. When it comes to the self, the poet can always find the right words, and he doesn't need a thesaurus or a rhyming

dictionary.

DASANT

Simultaneously, eyeless,

The ants climb, guileless,

With indifferent stealth,

Then: Is it a signal or

Is it an undiuined sign?

Their pincers close,

Releasing formic acid,

Inviting mass insecticide,

Introducing a new and mad

Jerky dance of insane pain.

For this sudden pain

There should be a plan,

A purpose, or, perhaps

A purge of some kind,

In order to dance, a

A man needs this pain,

Without his measure of poison,

Any man will flatly refuse

His invitation to dance.

SEVEN

THE EAST INDIAN WHO HAD THE CONCESSION TO RUN a shop in the small room next to the bowling alley was a Sikh. He wore a braided beard, a white turban with his white linen suit, a white shirt, and a brocaded necktie. He slept in the back of the shop behind a curtain, and ate his meals at Charlie Com's. According to Canavin, Sikhs were a warrior class in India, not shopkeepers, but this skinny Indian didn't look like he could fight off a sick Baluga. I don't know how he survived with his small exotic store. The stuff he carried in his shop was not the sort of merchandise that many white people would want, but he must have sold enough items to officers' wives to get by. He sold a few Filipino wood carvings and some wrinkled cotton dresses and blouses to those soldiers who had families in the States. But he never sold any of the expensive copper and ivory items he had on display. Incense was always burning in the shop, and it smelled like a mixture of charcoal and cheap perfume."

He always opened his Store at six A.M., just as we came downstairs to stand on the front porch for roll call every I morning. He must have thought, in his strange Indian way, that someone would rush over after roll call to buy a hammered brass plate or a carved mahogany Moro head. I never saw anyone enter his shop before ten A.M., ever, but that's the way he operated. His margin of profit must have been very low, and he also gave jawbone. Jawbone is what soldiers call credit. The term dates back to the Indian wars in the West, when soldiers who could not pay had their names and the amount due at trading posts written on the jawbone of a buffalo. Those of us who had jawbone with him had our names on a private list, and if someone didn't pay him after a month or two, he told the first sergeant and the topkick would take the sum from the man's pay and give it to the Indian.

The first sergeant was married to a Filipino woman, and he had six children. He had been at Clark Field for more than ten years, and he could never go back to the States because of this mixed marriage. He came from Sacramento originally, and it is against the state law for a white man to be married to a nonwhite in California. Also, the Asian Exclusion Act doesn't allow Filipino women to emigrate to the U.S.A. Asian men can emigrate, but not Asian women. So as much as I disliked the first sergeant, a dour,  unhappy man, I felt pity for him. He was doomed by his marriage to stay in the Philippines until he died. There were two retired soldiers married to Filipino women, who lived like natives in Sloppy Bottom, and the first sergeant would end up like them someday, scrounging cigarettes or a glass of gin from soldiers when they came over to the barrio. If I hadn't felt sorry for the first sergeant, knowing that, my heart would have been made of stone.

But thanks to the Indian and his little shop, I discovered Honeymoon Lotion.

Honeymoon Lotion came in a green one-liter bottle. There was a cork in the neck that had to be removed with a corkscrew. The label was red, yellow, and green, printed with runny garish ink, and there was a drawing of a naked Filipino couple hugging and kissing between two palm trees. In the background of this crude picture a yellow moon above a green sea drifted in a red sky. The predominant ingredient in Honeymoon Lotion was coconut oil, but when you opened the bottle not only could you smell coconuts, you were also overwhelmed with what seemed like a mixture of a half dozen sweet perfumes that could only be found in a Woolworth's back in the States.

Filipino women loved Honeymoon Lotion. When they had a bottle they would rub the oil all over their bodies after bathing (or instead of bathing), and their brown skins would glisten like highly polished coconut shells. Of course, they gave off a pungent odor of coconuts and a heady combination of cheap perfumes, and they were a little slippery to the touch, but a young man with a hard-on can get used to damned near anything. Once a man got used to the smell, it wasn't too bad; in fact, it probably covered up body odors that would have been much more unpleasant.

Best of all, Honeymoon Lotion only cost one peso—or fifty cents—and I had established jawbone with the Indian.

This was the beauty of being a fire truck driver. I was off every other day, and in the mornings when I was off duty, everyone else except for cooks and bakers or men who had been on guard duty the night before was working. After the men marched down to the hangars, I would charge a bottle of Honeymoon Lotion to my account and head for the barrio and the Air Corps settlement, as it was called, which was a stretch of huts a couple of hundred yards away from Sloppy Bottom. There were nine, all in a single row, and this is where men with money in the squadron shacked up with their Filipino girlfriends. The men who had this kind of money were either sergeants or men with air mechanic ratings, because it was quite expensive to maintain a woman for your own personal use.

The huts rented for fifteen pesos a month, and the average woman earned from twenty-five to thirty pesos a month in salary. In addition, there was an electricity bill and a rice allowance for each girl. Each woman had her own little house, completely free of relatives and children, The guys who shacked up didn't want any relatives around, naturally, and they saved some money by buying gin by the demijohn instead of getting it a grande at a time. The shack rats, as they were called, kept snacks around the hut, but they usually slept in the barracks from one to four P.M., during quiet hours, and then ate their supper in the mess hall before coming over to the settlement to spend the night. These guys became very fond of their women in time, and when they went back to the States they usually made an arrangement with another sergeant or rated A.M. to take over their woman and shack when they left. But this was only a short-term solution; none of these guys ever thought about what would become of these girls in another ten or fifteen years. Filipino women age quickly; a woman of thirty-five looks fifty-live, and very few of them live to become fifty-five.

If a woman got pregnant she was kicked out immediately, and the shack rat got another girl. The man who was paying her knew that he wasn't the father, because he mostly practiced anal intercourse to avoid becoming a father. Unlike white whores in the States, Filipino women were not inventive. They didn't give blow jobs, and the only sexual position they tolerated was the missionary position. They just sprawled on their backs, completely motionless, and waited patiently for it to be over. They were all Catholics, of course, and I think this had something to do with their attitude toward sex, but they didn't object to anal intercourse because they didn't consider it a sin. Perhaps when the priests gave them instructions as little girls, nothing about anal intercourse was mentioned. The professional whores in Angeles were all strictly missionary position girls in the ordinary way, but not the women the shack rats kept in the Air Corps settlement.

At any rate, after I walked across the plains to the Air Corps settlement, about three miles, I would be dripping sweat. The shacks were all on stilts, with bamboo ladders leading up to split-bamboo porches. I would stroll casually down the dusty street, wiping my forehead with a handkerchief. The bottle of Honeymoon Lotion, in a brown piece of wrapping paper, was in plain view. Either the girls would be sitting in the shade of their porches, or else two or three of them would be sitting on a neighbor's porch, giggling and talking. They all knew me, and finally one of them would say, "Hey, Wirrafold, come up and have some lemonada."

I would climb the ladder and accept a glass of lemonada, an acrid and overly sweet bottle of soda pop.

"Hasn't your old man got a demijohn of gin?" I would ask.

"You want too much, Wirrafold. I give you lemonada, you want gin in it. If I give you beer, you want egg in it;"

They picked up this banter from their old men, I guessed, because I never saw a Filipino crack an egg into his beer, but the women almost always brought out the gin, unless the demijohn was too low or the label was marked with a pen. I would add two ounces of gin to my lemonada and finish my drink. After we talked a little, we would go inside the shack and I would get in some anal intercourse. I was seventeen, so the entire procedure, from the time I climbed the ladder until I left, rarely took more than fifteen minutes.

When I departed, I left the bottle of Honeymoon Lotion. These women knew that I wouldn't say anything, and they were loyal to one another. The men who were paying the freight would have beaten me to a pulp if they ever found out that I was screwing their women while they were working on the line. But no one ever found out, and the only reason the system worked for me was because these guys hated the smell of Honeymoon Lotion. They wouldn't buy it for their women, and the women loved it.

The main problem I had was avoiding bamboo "chancres." The woven rush floor mats, or sometimes just plain split bamboo, could cause big blisters on your knees as you slid back and forth. So you had to learn how to screw without touching your knees to the floor. You got up on your toes and held your knees and legs straight. It was awkward. Sores of any kind take a long time to heal in the tropics and they have a tendency to get infected. So a man had to be very careful about scraping his knees on the floor. Also, because you had to accomplish this anal intercourse with the woman in a supine position, not in a prone position, it was not a particularly satisfying sex act. But it was better than nothing, and a bottle of Honeymoon

Lotion was only one peso, whereas the whores in Angeles charged two. I used to wonder sometimes how these girls explained the Honeymoon Lotion on their bodies, and where they got it, when their men came home at night.

That was their problem, not mine. But these shack rats were fools. No matter how much money a man pays a woman, he cannot expect her to remain faithful if he denies her the one thing she truly wants. And these women wanted Honeymoon Lotion. I learned a few things about women in the Philippines. Women are very simple creatures. If you want a woman, any woman, probe around until you find out the one thing in life she truly wants. Then, when you give it to her, she's yours.

It's that simple.

EIGHT

CORPORAL GUTWEILER, 0UR FIRE CHIEF, HAD BEEN a bank teller in York, Pennsylvania, but when the bank he worked for failed in 1934 he couldn't find another job. He was then thirty-four, and still under the age limit to enlist in the Army. With his banking experience he should have enlisted in the Finance Corps, not in the Air Corps. The Air Corps had no valid jobs for former bank tellers. He was promoted to corporal anyway, when he arrived at Clark Field, simply because he was thirty-six. The Air Corps had this practice of promoting older men to leadership positions rather than younger men with ability. Of course, not very much leadership was needed to draft a weekly schedule for four firemen who were on a day and off a day. After I mentioned a few times that a moron could do it, Corporal Gutweiler somehow got it into his head that I was calling him, Corporal Gutweiler, a moron. I never said that, nor did I imply it. All I ever said was that a moron could be a fire chief, that was all. But he began to resent me, and then, when one of the second cooks went crazy and had to be shipped back to Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco in a straitjacket, Corporal Gutweiler told the first sergeant that I would be a good man for the cook's job, even though he would have to drive the tire truck himself until they could find a replacement.

As a consequence, the first sergeant sent me to the mess sergeant, SergeantTravig1iante, for an interview. Sergeant Travigliante was a greasy-haired Italian in his early forties, with a massive paunch that overlapped his belt for fully six inches or more. He had been a cook and baker for at least Hfteen years before he became a mess sergeant, and he fed us very well. There was little he didn't know about food and food service, or how to handle cooks. The first thing he did, for example, when he came to Clark Field was to build a cabinet and lock up the vanilla and lemon extract so the cooks couldn't drink it.

When I reported to Sergeant Travigliante at ten A.M., he was sitting at his private table in the mess hall having a late breakfast. He was eating a butterflied tenderloin, three fried eggs, and a side dish of hash browns well laced with fried onions. As I sat across from him, it occurred to me that if I became a cook I could fix breakfasts like this for myself. That morning we had had cheese omelets, but a cheese omelet is not as satisfying as a fried steak with fried eggs.

Sergeant Travigliante outlined the second cook's duties for me, explaining that I would be on one day and then off two. On my second day off I would sometimes have to come in that night and help Potter, the first cook, bake bread for the next day, but otherwise the schedule called for one day on and two days off.

"I don't know how to bake bread," I said.

"That can be learned. Can you read and write?"

"I read and write very well." .

"Then you'll have no problems. We have recipes for everything I put on the menu."

There were huge wood-burning stoves in the kitchen. The Filipino K.P.'s kept the woodbox filled, but keeping the stoves going was the responsibility of the second cook. I would have to get to the kitchen at four A.M. It would be at least seven at night before I would be finished, but because the day was such a long one, cooks then got two days of rest.

"Okay," I said, "I'll try it."

"When do you want to start?" `

"I'd like my two days off first, so I can get used to the new schedule." .

He looked at me a little funny then. "Second cook carries a specialist four rating, which means an extra thirty pesos a month. Did you know that?"

"No, I didn't."

"Well, you don't sound like you're too eager to be a cook, wanting your two days off first, so you won't get the promotion until you've proved to my satisfaction that you're very enthusiastic about becoming a second cook."

"Oh, I'm eager enough," I said, "but I need a little time to prepare myself mentally to change over from being a fireman to a cook. That's all."

I didn't worry too much about the work because I would be second cook to Potter, and all I would have to do is what he told me. On my two days off I spent the mornings in the Air Corps settlement, disposing of two bottles of Honeymoon Lotion.

I was awakened by the charge of quarters at four the next morning.

When I got to the kitchen, wearing my new stiffly starched white pants and a clean white undershirt, the stoves were cold, and Potter, who had baked the bread the night before, was stretched out on the concrete floor behind the steam table, dead drunk, passed out, and groaning. Every now and then he would mutter something and kick out viciously in his sleep with his left leg, but I couldn't arouse him. I dragged his body over by the storeroom to get it out of the way and took a look at the menu. I knew that breakfast would be up to me.

The menu called for cold cereals, and 50-to-1. (50-to-1 was what we called the condensed milk and water mixture that was used for cereal, although the mixture was actually 4-to-1), bacon omelets, toast, hominy grits, and fresh fruit. The K.P.'s would take care of the dry cereals and 50-to-1 , and put the fruit out on the tables, so all I had to prepare were the omelets, grits, toast, and coffee. I found the kerosene to get the fires started. I put the big pot of water on, dumped in five pounds of coffee, and then made the toast. The fresh bread Potter had baked the night before was ready, but I had to slice it before I could toast it, and it took considerable time because the bread was still soft and tended to bunch up under the knife. But I slashed my way through the bread and put it into shallow trays and then into the oven. I opened the doors to the oven from time to time to catch it before it burned. But the raggedy sliced pieces of bread didn't toast evenly, and sometimes the outer edges would char. By the time I had 250 slices of toast ready, a few shack rats started to drift into the kitchen from the barrio.

Apparently this was a common practice. They had to walk from the barrio to the barracks, and they had to arrive in time for roll call at six A.M. Because the day-room was closed and locked, there was no place else for them to go. So when they got to the barracks early, they came into the mess hall and helped themselves to coffee. An A.M. 2, Salter I think his name was, had a grande of gin. He shared his girl with the others, and they made coffee royales with the gin and my coffee. They complained that the coffee was too weak and needed the doctoring. I got angry and ran them out of the kitchen, about eight of them, telling them to stay in the mess hall and out of my way.

I started breaking eggs for omelets, cracking them into an aluminum pitcher, and got the huge roasting pan, about three feet square and four inches deep, from under the table. I greased the pan with some olive oil I found in the refrigerator and poured in the eggs. I used about four pitchers of beaten eggs, pouring the mixture into the pan on top of the stove and stirring it from time to time. I didn't know that the bacon was supposed to be fried before putting it into the egg mixture; So I just dumped bacon chunks, as I sliced them, into the cooking eggs. The heat from the stove was tremendous, and the outside temperature was already in the high eighties. I wasn't used to working at such a swift pace, especially performing unfamiliar tasks. I was soon drenched with sweat. Potter came to, started to get up, and Salter, out of kindness, brought him a cup of coffee laced with two fingers of gin. Potter drank it down and promptly passed out again. I told Salter that if he came into the kitchen again I would cut his throat with the knife I was using to slice bacon., This time he believed me. I had wanted to ask Potter a few questions but he had slipped back into his alcoholic coma and it was too late.

The three Filipino K.P.'s came in just before six A.M. and started to set the tables in the mess hall. I had one of them bring in more wood for the fire and started another panful of omelets, not knowing for sure how much 120 men would eat. I had forgotten all about the grits, so I now put on a boiler of water and poured five pounds of grits into the cold water while I waited for it to boil. The cooling toast had been ready for more than an hour, and I told the K.P.'s to put it out one the tables. There were huge serving bowls for the omelets as well (we ate family style), and I started to dish them up. The bacon, unhappily, was still raw in the omelets, but I couldn't cook the eggs any longer because they would burn.

At six A.M. the shack rats left the mess hall for roll call on the porch outside, which gave me almost a half hour before I had to ring the bell for breakfast. Except for the grits, everything else was ready. The water had finally begun to boil with the grits, but I hadn't put in enough water in the first place, and had to pour in more. I stood on a stool and stirred the grits with a wooden spoon. The unsalted grits weren't truly done, and were lumpy as well, by the time the men came in to breakfast.

There was a lot of grumbling about the omelets and the grits. I told the K.P.]s to drag Potter outside because the men, as they glared angrily toward the kitchen, seemed to be uncomfortable looking at Potter's prone, outstretched body. In fact, Potter looked dead as the K.P.'s dragged his limp body through the kitchen and out the screen door.

Because the toast was cold and the omelets were filled with cold, uncooked bacon and the grits were lumpy, not many men ate their breakfasts. One of them, I don't know who, phoned Sergeant Travigliante, who was married and lived in the sergeants' married quarters up at Fort Stotsenburg. He arrived at seven-thirty, more than a little upset by the phone call. After checking things out, he merely shook his head and told me that it was good that I had used my initiative under the circumstances, but that I should have called him when I found Potter passed out.

"Where's Potter now?" he asked.

"I had the K.P.'s drag him outside, out by the garbage cans."

We went outside but Potter was gone. The fresh air had revived him and he had left the barracks area, staggering across the plain to the barrio, under the impression that he was on his two—days-off cycle. So Potter didn't get back to the kitchen for two days. No one could find him in the barrio, and he said later that he didn't remember where he spent the time.

At any rate, the mess sergeant didn't think that I would be capable of preparing the noon meal. The menu called for fresh pork roast, candied sweet potatoes, string beans, and canned corn, so he told me to make chocolate pies for the dessert.

He got an off-duty cook to come in and prepare dinner, an Indian called Pete Whiteleather. Pete took an instant dislike to me because he had to work on his day off. Pete was a dangerous enemy; when he got drunk he was a terror. He was also, in everybody's opinion, a little crazy. He had one joke, and he pulled this one gag on everyone. If you didn't laugh, he would scowl darkly and sometimes take a swing at you.

"Do you smoke?" he would ask.

"Yes."

"So does a hot turd!" He would laugh crazily, and you had to laugh with him.

If you said "No" when he asked, he would say, "Neither does a cold turd!" He would laugh either way, and if you were smart, so would you. This single joke became old indeed after the sixth or seventh time he pulled it on someone. As a consequence, people avoided Pete as much as possible. He developed a grudge against me, however, and I made certain after he came into the kitchen that morning that I would never be alone with him.

I got out the recipe book and I made the chocolate pies, twenty-four pies altogether, enough for two pies at each table. But I must have gotten mixed up on the amount of sugar I put into the filling mixture, because all the pies came out as hard fudge.

I heard one old guy in the mess hall say, "I been in the Army eighteen years, but this is the first time I ever ate fudge-on-a-crust."

At noon Sergeant Travigliante told me that as of one P.M. that day I was a truck driver again.

As it worked out, I was wise to ask for my two days off first. Cooking for 120 men is not as simple as one thinks it is, and I developed a lot of respect for Army cooks, even though most of them are rummies.

NINE

CORPORAL GUTWEILER WASN'T HAPPY TO SEE ME when I returned to the fire department. He didn't say anything, nor did I, about the way he had gone behind my back to get me into the kitchen. But his little plot against me had backflred. The first sergeant held him responsible for recommending me as a cook, so what we had now was a sort of truce, and we were very polite to each other. I knew that I wasn't wanted, however, and I also knew that I should, if I could, get out of the fire department.

My opportunity came when a guy named Baxter, who drove the gas truck on the line, drank a canteen cup full of leaded gasoline, laced with Eagle Brand condensed, sweetened milk.

Baxter was a disturbed man who hated the Army and the Philippines, and longed for his mountain home in Boone, North Carolina. From the things he had said about Boone, one would have thought that almost any town in the world would be a better place to live than this snowbound, isolated, ingrown, bigoted, poverty-stricken little village up in the Carolina mountains. But Baxter didn't feel that way now that he had to stay put in P.I. for two full years. Being unable to return home for two years weighed heavily on many of the younger soldiers; homesickness was a problem, in varying degrees, for almost everyone.

It wasn't unusual for some homesick soldier to go down to headquarters and talk to the first sergeant about it. But the first sergeant, who was stuck forever in the Philippines, gave these supplicants little sympathy and no hope. If he liked the man, he might advise him to talk to the chaplain up at Fort Stotsenburg, a Methodist major, or he would say, "Tough shit. If you thought you'd miss your momma, you shouldn't have joined the Army."

Word got around that there was nothing to be done, and most homesick soldiers, after a month or so, got over it. Others did not. They brooded, and then they became sulky and withdrawn.

As Corporal Canfield told me, you could always tell when one of these guys was on the narrow edge. These were the men who couldn't, or didn't, sleep at night. If you came back from the barrio at one or two A.M., all you had to do was look around and see some homesick bastard sitting on the edge of his bed in the dark, his feet on the floor, his head and upper body behind his mosquito bar, smoking a cigarette. And when you got up again at four A.M. to take a leak, the guy would still be sitting there, still awake, smoking and brooding. A man who had already gone through the homesick stage would merely tell you to forget about it and put in your time. After all, time passes; two years is not forever.

Perhaps if mail service had been better, homesickness could have been alleviated somewhat. It took about a month each way for a letter, and sometimes when a man received an answer to a question, he had forgotten his question and was puzzled by the answer he received.

I wrote to my grandmother every two weeks, whether I had anything interesting to report or not, and her letters usually came in batches of three, although they were sometimes dated a week apart. Her condition at home had improved. She got a job in a cleaning establishment on Forty-third Street, just two blocks away from her apartment house, and all she had to do was take in the clothes people brought in and tag them. Her salary was small, but my uncle didn't know that she had a new job, so he continued to pay her rent and send her the same small allowance every week.

During my first year at March Field I had often hitchhiked home to Los Angeles for weekends, but even then we corresponded during the month. Usually she would enclose a dollar bill, and I would immediately spend it. But now, when she enclosed a dollar in her first letter to me in the Philippines, I returned it when I answered her letter. I told her we weren't allowed to have any American money in the Philippines. That wasn't true, but I knew she needed a dollar bill a lot worse than I did, and it was the only sure way I could think of to stop her from sending me any more.

Not many men received mail. Most soldiers didn't have families. Those who did, for the most part, had broken with them many years before. But there were still a few young guys with mothers and fathers, and even girlfriends, to make homesickness a problem. I think if a man had been able to talk to our squadron commander, the old man would have been able to do something or other for hopeless cases like Baxter's. But in order to talk to the commanding officer, a man had to have permission from the first sergeant. To my knowledge, the first sergeant never gave anyone permission to talk to Major Bums. Ever. It was impossible to bypass the first sergeant and talk to the major anyway, because the first question the old man would ask was whether you had permission to talk to him. If the answer was "No," you could end up with some kind of squadron punishment--an Article 104. And you still  wouldn't have been able to talk to him. On the other hand, this was the first sergeant's job—to prevent people from bothering the C.O. with problems he could take care of himself. That was the Army way, and it's a good system in almost every case. But there will always be a few like Baxter, the guy from North Carolina.

Baxter didn't die easily. It took about eight hours while the lead particles in the gasoline penetrated his intestines. We discussed his suicide at some length in the barracks, and we concluded that it was a very painful way to die, although it was a foolproof method and had obtained the desired result.

At any rate, I asked the first sergeant for the job of gas truck driver, and I was reassigned immediately. The gas truck, like the fire truck, was an F.W.D. tanker, and the first soldier knew that I was qualified to drive it.

The gas tank held five hundred gallons, and all I had to do was to gas the planes after they landed each day so that they were full at all times and ready to fly. The job also called for a promotion to private first class, which I expected but didn't get because I shot the major's dog about a week after I got the new assignment. I now had to pull my share of guard duty and work five days a week on the line. And sometimes if a plane came in from Nichols Field

in the afternoon or on a Saturday morning I had to be there to refuel it. But I didn't mind.

Time passed a little quicker with a five-day work week, and once I got on to the dodge of keeping a fifty-gallon drum full of fuel to sell to those few guys who owned cars, my income increased slightly even without the deserved promotion.

Every six weeks I would allow the gas to get down to 250 gallons in the tank. Then I added 250 gallons of water. The water, being heavier than the gasoline, would swoosh to the bottom half of the tank. I drained the 250 gallons of water until I got back to the gasoline. This was called "flushing the tank," and it was a way of keeping impurities out of the fuel. It also enabled me to pick up about fifteen gallons of extra gas for my drum. I managed to get two or three gallons more by padding out the amount of gas I put into each airplane. So it was no problem to keep my fifty-gallon drum filled. The officer pilots always signed the sheet on the clipboard without question. I kept careful gas records, and unless someone discovered my full drum, well hidden in a cluster of banana trees on the far side of the hangar, I couldn't get caught. If someone wanted gas he drove down there himself, filled his tank, and later he would come up to me in the day-room and hand me one or two pesos. It was gas on the honor system and I was never cheated. I only charged twenty centavos a gallon, which was a lot cheaper than the peso a gallon the commercial stations in P.I. charged. Back in the States gas sold for about eight gallons for a dollar, and new arrivals with cars were shocked when they discovered that gas was fifty cents a gallon in the Philippines. I had no shortage of enlisted men customers. What I had going for me was an open secret. If.you look at soldiers as workers, we were being exploited insofar as our pay was concerned. Any employer who shortchanges his help gets the kind of worker he pays for. If a restaurant owner pays a cashier fifteen dollars a week and he, or she, sees that the owner is raking, in two or three hundred a day, that cashier is certainly going to supplement his income from the cash register. One is merely correcting the moral deficiency of the employer.

***

ONE FRIDAY MORNING THE PILOTS FLEW ALL OF THE P-12's down to Nichols Field. On Monday morning they flew back in new P-26's, cute little all-metal monoplanes, painted blue and yellow, with pants over the wheels. There were nine of these little planes, and the crew chiefs were excited about them. P-12's, apparently, were tunable to keep up with the new Martin B-10 bombers the Air Corps was getting, and they needed faster pursuit planes to protect them. As it turned out later, the P—26's couldn't fly fast enough either, but I don't think anyone knew that would happen at the time. The crew chiefs and the other maintenance people didn't know anything about these new pursuit planes. Instead of sleeping away the quiet hours in the afternoons, crew chiefs studied their new manuals. The crew chiefs also had to wax and polish these airplanes to pick up an extra ten miles per hour in the air. If they hadn't painted the airplanes, the weight they would have saved might have given them the extra speed they needed without the polishing, but apparently they Air Corps generals who had ordered the planes weren't aware of the extra weight of the paint. Every enlisted mechanic in the Air Corps knew it, but no one had enough nerve to mention it to our commanding officer, even if the first sergeant would give the man permission to speak to him about it. Air Corps planes had always been painted, and once a tradition in the service has been established it's almost impossible to break it.

Our officer pilots, for example, wore breeches and hightopped cavalry boots, and up until 1933 they had also worn spurs with their boots. On the line, crew chiefs still had I written instructions to ask pilots for their spurs before they got into the cockpit of an airplane. This order was no longer needed, but many officers still wore spurs when they were off duty, even though they had never been on a horse in their lives.

West Point officers knew how to ride, but the Air Corps didn't get many West Point officers from the top of the list of academy graduates. New graduates high on the honors list went into the army engineers automatically, whether they wanted to or not. The next ranked chose the cavalry or the infantry, where their chances of getting a command and fast promotions would be better in case of war. So the Air Corps, as a choice for academy graduates, was well

down on the list.

One of the main reasons, however, for not choosing the Air Corps was a fear of failure. West Point graduates, even though they were Regular Army second lieutenants, still had to spend a year or so learning how to fly. They usually wanted to be pursuit pilots—desiring one-on-one single combat someday with an enemy pilot. But not everyone has the reflexes needed to be a pursuit pilot, and those who flunked out either were reassigned to fly bombers or transports, or were reassigned to another branch of the service. Very few academy graduates volunteered to be bomber pilots. They knew that bombs would be dropped indiscriminately on innocent people someday, and a choice like that was antithetical to everything they had been taught at West Point. And if a man was unable to fly a bomber or a transport plane, and was reassigned to another branch of the Army, his failure would be on his permanent record and he would be doomed to some ignominious post for the next thirty years.

The sysem prevented the Air Corps from getting the best West Point officers, but it wasn't until I got into the cavalry myself that I found out how truly superior cavalry officers were to these Air Corps pilots. The difference in every respect, from military bearing to decent treatment for enlisted men, was amazing. The pilots knew this themselves, I'm positive; otherwise they would not have been so eager to wear spurs on their boots when they were off duty. But no one ever mistook a pilot for one of the cavalry officers who was assigned to the 26th Filipino Scouts. Even when we went to the post movies and sat in our white E.M. section up in the balcony, we could tell the difference when the officers were seated below. Cavalry officers sat erect in their seats; the pilots lolled in theirs.

***

IT LOOKS AS IF I AM TAKING CREDIT FOR A I.OT OF IMPORTANT  insights. But I want to correct that impression. These ideas are not all mine, although I worked out some of them. These conclusions and ideas were usually arrived at after extended discussions with my bunkie, Canavin, or by listening to Corporal Canfield, who knew from experience how the system worked. After all, Canfield had been in the Army since 1917, and he had seen the same situations and problems come up again and again.

"Everything," Corporal Canfield explained, "is always done as it was done before. When a man makes corporal for the first time he wonders whether he'll be able to handle the job and the responsibility. It happened to me, the first time I was promoted, and I was so concerned I almost turned the promotion down. Then my first sergeant told me the secret. Every time I ran into a problem, all I had to do was to handle it the way I'd seen other corporals handle the same problem before. That's why they don't like to make young guys noncoms until they've been in for a couple of hitches. They haven't been in long enough to see and remember how other noncoms handled the same situations and problems that come up again and again." What Canfield said was true enough, as applied to the Army in general, but it didn't explain what to do about a man like Wheeler.

Wheeler was a fabric technician. But now, except for our lone O-19, which was an all-fabric biplane, our new airplanes were made of aluminum. There was no longer a need for a fabric technician. The O-19 wasn't on our Table of Organization and Equipment; it just happened to be an airplane we had, and we kept it in the hangar only because the major knew how to fly it. The O-19 crew chief was careful with it, and the only time Wheeler would ever be needed now was if the fabric in the O-19 got a tear in it somewhere. Then he would be called over to sew up the ripped place, or to put on a patch, maybe, and re-dope the patch. But that was unlikely to happen to one airplane. When we had a dozen all-fabric P-12's, there had always been enough work to keep him busy. But a fabric technician in a squadron with all-metal airplanes was as useless as the teats on a bull water buffalo.

Wheeler sewed beautifully. Perhaps if he had been graduated from a college instead of just sixth grade he could have been a surgeon. He had a delicate touch with a needle, and when he had sewn up a small rip in the fuselage of a plane and then re-doped it, it was almost impossible to tell where the rip had been.

But the man was lost now. When we marched down to the hangars and the line chief dismissed us with his command "Go to work!" Wheeler would just stand there while we departed to our various tasks. No one knew what to do with him, and he didn't know what to do with himself for the next four hours until we marched back to the barracks again. It also seemed unlikely that the Air Corps would ever get any more all-fabric airplanes, and that meant Wheeler was obsolete. So here was a guy with twelve years of service, all of it devoted to the care of fabric, with eighteen more years to go before he could retire. Some guys thought Wheeler was lucky. He was a P.F.C. and drawing down thirty dollars a month for doing absolutely nothing. But these men didn't understand that Wheeler was a man who loved his work. No provisions had been made to retrain him for another kind of work because our Table of Organization still called for a fabric technician. Who knew? Maybe the P-26's might not work out, and we would get P-12's again.

One afternoon, during quiet hours, I saw Wheeler sitting on the edge of his bunk. He was looking at his long slender fingers and twirling his thumbs. I felt sorry for him, so I took a shirt out of my wall locker, one that I had ripped  climbing out of the window in a shack in the barrio, and took it over to him.

"Wheeler," I said, "I don't sew very well. And I wondered if you would do me a favor and sew up this tear in my shirt."

He reached for the shirt, eagerly, I thought, examined the tear, and then he wadded the shirt into a loose ball and threw it back at me.

"Fuck you, Willeford!" he said. "I don't need your goddamned pity!"

I put the shirt back in my wall locker. For a moment I wondered what I had done wrong. Then I realized that I had exacerbated his problem, and I was embarrassed. Wheeler was obsolete and he knew it. Wheeler had become one with the Man in the Black Robe, the radio "pilot" in the day-room, and Old Patty of the "Princess K Pats."

When I told Canavin about the incident, he just grinned. "If you want to be a professional soldier and a poet, Will, you're going to have to learn the difference between sentiment and sentimentality."

The next time I went to the library I looked up these words in the dictionary, and I did learn the difference. But from then on I avoided Wheeler, and he avoided me.

After a couple of months the crews and the pilots got used to the P-26's and their tendency to ground-loop on the wet grass of the field. One uneventful day blurred into the next. My tum on the waiting list at the library finally came, and I read Margaret Mitchell's best seller, Gone with the Wind. I also read the three or four Thome Smith novels that were being passed around the barracks. But nothing truly important happened at Clark Field until the Japs sank the Panay.

TEN

I CAN'T SAY THAT I WAS BORED, OR EVEN THAT MY life was dull at Clark Field. Driving the gas truck gave me just enough busywork to fill the morning, and the occasional stint of guard duty made a break in that routine. During quiet hours I read and slept on my bunk. If I didn't feel like sleeping, and Canavin didn't either, we would play a set of tennis and then swim for a half hour or so in the pool. It was too humid to play more than one set, and the water was so hot that it wasn't refreshing to stay in the A pool much longer than a half hour.

There was hot water in the showers, but we seldom used it because the cold water was warm enough. But an hour of tennis and swimming and a shower would tire me out enough to sleep until four. The quiet hours were enforced rigidly, and one had to tiptoe in the barracks. Anyone who wanted to make noise had to go over to either the day-room or Charlie Corn's. Mosquito bars weren't necessary in the afternoon because the lancing mosquitoes didn't come out until sundown. So we would all lie there, naked on our bunks, our loins covered with a modesty towel (it was forbidden to sleep without covering your genitals), and read, or sleep, or stare into nothingness, as a tiery breeze wafted across our sweating bodies. After the heavy noon meal, most people were able to sleep without much trouble. At four P.M. the charge of quarters would blow a whistle, and we would stir about again, making plans for

the evening.

There were two movies, one at six and the second at eight P.M. , and the man who drove the show truck got into the movies free. Sometimes, when there was a good movie scheduled at the theater, I would volunteer to drive the show truck. The driver had to sit through the movie twice because of the two trips back and forth to the barracks. Not many were worth seeing twice in one night. Two exceptions were Flirtation Walk and Winterset. I saw Winterset twice, and I liked it, but I still didn't understand it until Canavin explained the Sacco-Vanzetti case to me and told me that the dialogue was in blank verse. I liked the scenes at West Point in Flirtation Walk, but the movie was spoiled for me because it never explained how an infantry private (Dick Powell), who was a dog robber at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, managed to get into West Point in the first place.

Canavin, as usual, had a cryptic explanation. "It's a mathematical fact," he said, "that there are as many even numbers as there are even and odd numbers combined."

"What's that got to do with the movie?"

"All it means, Will, is that sometimes you've got to accept the given. If you can accept the fact that Powell got through West Point okay, you have to accept that he some. how got into the academy in the first place. And he did get through it, didn't he?"

"But look at Owens," I said. "He studies all the time, , but you and I both know that he'll never get into West Point. Powell .didn't study at all. He was a house dog robber for a colonel, and he even ended up, after he graduated, marrying the same colonel's daughter. I suppose that's a given, too?"

"No." Canavin shook his head. "That's censorship. They can't show it in the movies, but the reason he got to West Point was obviously because he was fucking the colonel's daughter. The colonel probably pulled some strings to get him into West Point as a way of getting him the hell out of Schofield and away from his daughter."

"It still would've been a better movie if they'd explained it."

"That's true. But you aren't going to see any honest movies until they get rid of the Hays Office?

Dumb discussions like this one never led anywhere, but they helped to pass the time. Besides, almost every time I talked to Canavin I learned something new. Mostly, though, it seemed to be a long time between paydays. I was trying to save enough money to take a three-day pass to Manila, and that possibility seemed beyond my grasp. After paying my bills on payday, I rarely had more than eight pesos left.

In some respects eight pesos is a fairly good sum, although it didn't go as far as eight dollars would go back in the States. First, there was the cost of a taxi into Angeles, to the Iron Star and the Bullpen. The fare was four pesos. If you shared it with three other guys it could be cut down to one peso, but that still meant two pesos, because I had to come back from Angeles later that night.

Payday was a holiday, of course, but we didn't line up for our pay until about nine-thirty. It took that long for the major and the first sergeant to go up to Fort Stotsenburg, get the money, and count it out into small piles for each man in the squadron. The first sergeant also had to make sure he had deducted everything a man owed for P.X. checks, laundry, Charlie Corn chits, K.P.'s, the Indian, Old Soldiers' Home, bowling charges, and, if any, summary court-martial fines. Sometimes it was ten or ten-thirty before we got our money.

Hershey, or Padre as we called him, was the day-room orderly, and he ran a crap game on the pool table in the day-room and a ten-peso takeout game on the screened porch. The reason we called him Padre was because he had once been a Franciscan monk at a New England monastery. When he got angry at his cards he would mutter imprecations in Latin, and he got angry a lot-every time he lost a hand of poker. No one knew what his Latin phrases meant, but they sounded like terrible oaths when they rattled out of his phlegmy throat. It was common knowledge that Padre had paid the first sergeant for the day-room orderly's job, because this was a standard practice throughout the Army. The day-room orderly automatically owned the gambling concession. He also, or so it was believed, paid a  percentage of his take each month to the first sergeant. But it was worth it, because Padre made a lot of money from the poker game, which he cut five percent. In the crap game he took ten percent from every seven or eleven that was thrown on the first cast.

Padre didn't bankroll either game, and his overhead consisted of furnishing chips, cards, dice, and a midnight meal for the surviving gamblers. The midnight meal was always pansit and was prepared by the cook at Charlie Corn's.

Pansit is the Filipino national dish, a combination of something like beef chop suey topped with soft noodles and drowned in a pungent soy sauce. There is nothing tastier than a large bowl of pansit at midnight.

I never had enough money to get into the ten-peso takeout poker game, but sometimes I would lose one or two pesos at the crap table. I invariably lost, because if I won the first throw I doubled up. My plan, if I ever got hot, was to double up for eight passes and then quit. But I never won eight passes, and I never knew anybody else who did, either.Then I would go to the Iron Star in Angeles, a small bar that formed the hub of the Bullpen. The Army sanctioned the Iron Star and the four two-story whorehouses that surrounded the little plaza in Angeles. In the middle of the plaza there was an official Army prophylactic station with a Filipino Scout medic on duty. After getting a piece of ass, you had to go into the prophylactic station, fill your penis with ptargyrol, hold it in for five minutes, and let it out. The medic then gave you a tube of white ointment, and you had to smear this ointment over your genitals and rub it in well. You filled in a form, signed it as to date and time, and it was witnessed by the medic. He kept a copy and gave you one, which was proof that you had had a prophylactic. You also had to state, on the form, that you had used a condom during intercourse. If, later on, you developed a venereal disease, the fact that you had taken a prophylactic saved you from getting court-martialed.

The whores, and there were eight of them, were inspected monthly by a doctor from the Fort Stotsenburg Hospital. He drove to Angeles, inspected each girl inside the little prophylactic station, and gave her a signed certificate for the month. They kept the certificates posted in their rooms.

One girl, a Moro, had tar-colored skin and was so bow-legged she couldn't have caught a pig in a trench. Her flat face was incredibly ugly, but she was the most popular whore in the Bullpen because it was a well-known fact that Moros are immune from venereal diseases. I was a little skeptical about this "fact," but no one ever caught any e' V.D. from the Moro.

Despite the precautions, men still caught V.D. from time to time, although if a man did everything he was supposed to do it would be impossible. It would be almost  impossible to enjoy a piece of ass, either, so that's why men often managed to get the clap or, more infrequently, chancres. There were about eight men in the squadron with syphilis and every Thursday morning they had to march up to the hospital and get shots—a Salvarsan shot one

week and a mercury shot the next. It took more than a year of these shots to get rid of syphilis, so I never left the iield without at least three condoms in my hip pocket.

The Iron Star, so called because there was an iron star nailed above the front double doors, which were never closed, was a bar and restaurant. You could sit at a table and drink beer and eat sally goupons, or order a bowl of pansit, or pancakes served with shredded coconut, powdered sugar, and goat butter.

Sally goupons were black bugs, about the size and shape of June bugs, that were fried in vegetable oil and then salted. They were a little crunchy, like Spanish peanuts, and once you got used to the exotic taste, they complemented San Miguel beer wonderfully. Some soldiers wouldn't eat them, but I became very fond of them and always asked for a small bowlful to go with my beer.

The girls drifted in and out of the Iron Star, between and looking for tricks, and sometimes they wheedled a ten-centavo lemonada from you. There was a flat single-time rate of two pesos, or six pesos for an all-night stand.

There was no haggling or deviation from this set price. Filipino girls are not pretty, but they are not ugly either. They are different, that's all, and it takes a few months to get used to the fact that they look different from American white women. Because they have tiny noses, almost no noses at all, their faces seem flatter and rounder than they should be. They have short legs, slightly bowed, thick torsos, and small breasts. Their bare feet are much too large for their height and weight, and because their diet is so starchy—mostly rice—thin Filipino girls (at least those who ate as well as the whores in Angeles) are a rarity. In color they range from a deep chocolate brown, like the Moros, to a light—brown basketball color. Mestizos, who were half white and half Filipino, didn't work as whores. They usually went to Manila, where they could get good office jobs by passing themselves off as being of Spanish descent. Mestizo males were prized as houseboys by officers' wives, and after ingratiating themselves with an officer's family during a two- or three-year period were often taken back to the States by the family after the tour ended.

As you see, eight pesos didn't go very far on payday. One piece of ass, or sometimes two, a bowl of pansit, a couple of beers, and a taxi ride, and I would be broke until the seventh of the month when, once again, I could get jawbone at Charlie Corn's. There was no way, it seemed to me, that I could ever save enough money to go into Manila on a three-day pass.

***

EVEN SO, I WAS MUCH BETTER OFF THAN THE POOR BASTARDS in the new Philippine Army. This new army was pitiful. Manuel Quezon, the first president of P.I., was ashrewd little man, and when General Douglas MacArthur retired to the Philippines, Quezon offered him the title of field marshal if he would start and command a Philippine army. MacArthur had four stars, and that was as high as he could go in the U.S. Army, so he leaped at this opportunity to become a field marshal because he would outrank every other American general. The Philippine Army was started by drafting peons for six months of military training. They were then discharged. In that way, over an extended period, there would be a reservoir of men trained in basic infantry practices in case they were ever needed. The training they received was poor, however, and they had an inadequate supply of weapons and equipment, and instructors who didn't know much more than the men they were training.

But MacArthur didn't give a shit. He had his field marshal's baton, and a young U.S. Army major to organize and run the new army for him, while he lived in luxury in the penthouse of the Manila Hotel on his retirement pay and vast investments. No one knew for sure, but we all thought, and so it was rumored, that it was a toss-up between MacArthur and the Catholic Church about who owned more of the Philippines. I never found out who owned the Philippine Railroad, which ran from Manila to Dagupan on the Lingayen Gulf. Some said MacArthur; others said it was the church. But most of us figured it was MacArthur. His father, General Arthur MacArthur, who took the Philippines with Admiral Dewey in the first place, had bought up all of the land in sight at bargain prices while the country was still in turmoil. Whether all of this was truth or rumor I neither know nor care, but we believed it because only a very rich man could live as high on the hog as MacArthur lived in the Philippines. Part of the reason for these rumors was, no doubt, the low pay we received, plus a certain amount of jealousy, and MacArthur's imperious manner.

The Philippine Army recruits were paid one and a half pesos a month, and they were issued U.S. Army uniforms of World War vintage with breeches and wrap leggings. One payday while I was in the Iron Star, drinking a beer and eating pansit with Corporal Ratilinsky, a Filipino soldier came in from the camp outside Angeles. He was an M.P., assigned to keep his eye on things in Angeles. He had a holstered .45 semiautomatic pistol on his webbed

belt.

"Do you know how to take that pistol apart?" Ratilinsky asked him.

"No, sir."

"Let me have it. I'll show you."

Trustingly, the soldier handed Corporal Ratilinsky the weapon, something no soldier should ever do. Ratilinsky detail-stripped the pistol on the table, scattering the parts on the greasy, pansit-smeared surface. After it was down to the last part (and Ratilinsky even unscrewed the wooden handles with his pocketknife), he told the M.P. that was as far down as he could get it.

The kid was nervous by this time, and he asked Corporal Ratilinsky to please put it back together again.

"No." Ratilinsky shook his head. "If I put it back together, you won't learn anything."

Unhappily, the M.P. took off his campaign hat, scraped all of the parts into it, and left. Although Ratilinsky was drunk, I couldn't see any excuse for doing that to the young M.P. He would get into a lot of trouble when he got back to camp, and the chances were that his superior, or platoon sergeant, wouldn't know how to reassemble the weapon either.

"That was a lousy thing to do," I said.

"Not at all. The first thing a soldier should learn is never to surrender his weapon. You know that, Willeford, and now that young M.P. knows it too. In my small way, I just made me a contribution to the new Philippine Army." He then laughed that raucous laugh of his and lit a cigarette to control the coughing tit his laughter engendered.

Later on, when another P.I. soldier edged shyly into the Iron Star, I tried to become friendly with him, just because of Ratilinsky's behavior.

"First time in town?"

"Yes, sir."

"I suppose you're going to get a piece of ass?"

"No, sir," he said, shaking his head. "Even when I am paid, sir, I cannot get a piece of ass."

This was true. He was only being paid one-fifty a month, and he needed two pesos for a single short time with one of the Bullpen whores! His face was so woebegone when he said this, however, I had to laugh. But because I had laughed I bought the kid a twenty-centavo gin-and-lemonada highball, even though I was almost broke myself.

Some fucking army they're going to have, I thought, but then I realized that ours wasn't much better. We still had the P—12's at that time, but they weren't available for fighting because we didn't have an armorer who knew how to synchronize the machine guns so that they could fire through the propellers.

But I didn't worry about that. My main concern was to get enough money saved so I could take a three-day pass to Manila. And to that end I decided to cultivate Padre Hershey, the day-room orderly.

ELEVEN

PRIVATE PADRE HERSHEY WAS ABOUT FIFTY POUNDS overweight most of the time, but periodically he would go on a fast and lose twenty pounds or so. He liked to eat, however, so he would soon regain the weight he lost.

"Food," he said often, "is my weakness, not women, and I also like to drink. So if I eat while I drink I don't get too drunk, and then I can eat more. When a man isn't interested in women, looks don't matter."

This much, I think, was true about Hershey. Padre wasn't remotely interested in women, nor was he a homosexual. The five years he had spent in the monastery, practicing celibacy, had weaned him off women, I supposed, but his years there gave him an intense desire for steaks and chops, or for food with more spices than the plain fare he had eaten in the monastery. Padre was no longer a religious man. He had lost his faith altogether, and he didn't attend  Mass or go to confession, but because of his tonsured baldness he still looked like a fat monk wearing an army uniform—that is, once you knew he had been a monk.

Padre's duties as a day-room orderly were so light one could say they were hardly duties at all. A Filipino house-boy swept, mopped, and dusted the day-room every day. All Padre had to do was to check the boy's work. That done, he got the new magazines from the charge of quarters when the mail came in, and stamped each magazine with the stamp:

day-room a

3rd Pur. Sqdn

Clark Field, P.I.

He put the new magazines into their brown leather covers, after removing the previous issues, and he was through for the day. Except for weekly magazines like Time and Life, most of the magazines were monthlies, so he didn't have much to do on a daily basis. He also got to read all the new magazines first. He read them all, too; he had nothing better to do. I got to know Padre fairly well when I was in the fire department; I also hung around the day-room reading the new magazines on the mornings I was off duty.

Padre didn't have a blackjack game, and I volunteered to run one for him on paydays. The idea wasn't original with me. There had been a payday blackjack game at March Field, and I proposed running one for Padre along the same lines. No house bank, but a passing deal. Whoever got the blackjack got the deal, and if he didn't want to deal he could sell it to someone else in the game who wanted to be the banker-dealer. But every man who got a blackjack, even if there were two or more in the same round, which was paid double by the dealer, had to give fifty centavos to the man running the game. In return the gamblers got free cards, a table on the porch, and a free pansit dinner at midnight, just like the poker-players and the crap-shooters.

At first Padre didn't want to start a blackjack game, thinking that it would cause him to lose crap-shooters and poker—players, but I finally persuaded him that it would undoubtedly attract other gamblers who didn't like craps or those who couldn't afford to get into his ten-peso take-out game of poker. And I was right. The blackjack game became quite popular because the players could bet as little as fifty centavos per hand. The upper limit depended upon the bank established by the dealer, and a man, once he got the deal, could hardly lose, not when there were from eight to ten players.

I split the take with Padre and paid for the cards and for my half of the pansit dinners at midnight. I still cleared from twenty-five to thirty pesos by the time the game ended, sometime after midnight. On payday the eleven o'clock closing of the day-room was extended to the end of the gambling, and sometimes we didn't quit until dawn. Padre's income increased, too. The big winners could now afford to get into his poker game, where Padre, in turn, would win most of their blackjack winnings. Padre played in the poker game as well as cutting it, and he was a masterful player. Three days after payday, when our squadron gambling was all over with for the month, he would take a three-day pass to Manila and sit in on the P.I. poker game, where all of the 3ISt Infantry money wound up, in a supply room basement at the Estado Mayor. This game, with the big winners sitting in from Nichols Field, Corregidor, and Port Area, Manila, had a five-himdred-peso takeout. Padre always held his own in this company, frequently winning large sums. After the game in Manila ended, Padre feasted on down—home southern cooking at Tom's Dixie Kitchen in the Plaza Goiti in downtown Manila and then drove back to Clark Field in his yellow Ford phaeton 1936 convertible.

I took the twenty-five pesos I cleared the first payday to Canavin and told him to hold it for me. I knew that if I kept it I would spend it.

"No matter what I say," I told Canavin, "don't give me any of that money back till It take my three-day pass."

Two days later I was after Canavin to give me just five pesos of it, but he told me to go fuck myself. He was unbudging, as I had suspected he would be, so I gave him another thirty pesos to hold for me the following payday. The next month I added my new winnings to all of my money held by Canavin and, wearing a new blue linen suit, took a three-day pass to Manila, riding down with Padre in his Ford phaeton.  In my starched tailor-made suit, wearing a white-on-white shirt and a navy blue silk tie with yellow polka dots and highly polished black wingtip shoes, I felt like a millionaire.

Padre dropped me off in the Plaza Goiti and left to go to the Estado Mayor poker game. His plans for returning to Clark Field were indefinite, but I told him I would take the train back to Angeles. I checked into the New Washington Hotel, paying for two nights in advance. Then I walked to the Silver Dollar Bar.

The bar-with the words 'SILVER DOLLAR' spelled out with silver dollars in the long mahogany bar top—was famous all over the Far East for its Singapore gin slings. These drinks were served in tall frosted glasses, and they were so strong that if you drank three of them, the house paid for the fourth. Padre had advised me not to drink more than two, and to take a long time between drinks. After all, each drink contained four and a half ounces of booze. I could feel the effects of the first one before I sipped even half of it, but I doubt if there is a better-tasting drink made anywhere else in the world.

In addition to the long polished mahogany bar with its brass rail, there were eight or ten white rattan tables with three or four peacock chairs to each table. There were slow-moving overhead fans, and the dark cool bar was an oasis after coming in from the steamy streets.

The first thing I saw when I pushed through the swinging doors from the street was a Filipino woman sitting on a table with her legs spread wide. Her pudenda were exposed to my startled view like a third unblinking eye. Three privates from Charlie Company, 31st Infantry, were down on their knees with their eyes at table level. They were staring and frowning at this woman's vagina with intense concentration. A Navy chief petty officer, in dress whites, was leaning back against the bar as he disinterestedly watched the scene, and he held a wad of pesos in his left hand. Two sailors were also in the bar, one sitting in a peacock chair and the other one down on his knees with the soldiers.

One of the sailors had claimed that any woman who wasn't a virgin would have at least one full inch of the bottom of her vagina overlap the flat surface of a table if she sat on it and spread her legs. The sailor had gotten an argument from the three soldiers, and bets had been made.

The old chief, aloof from the argument, agreed to hold the money. One of the soldiers had gone out into the plaza and brought back a whore, paying her five pesos for her part in the experiment.

I was too late to get in on the bet because the woman was already in place on the table when I pushed through the swinging doors. But they let me take a look. Sure enough, the lips of that woman's vagina (or poakie, as the Filipinos call it) overlapped at least two inches on the table surface. If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it, and I was certainly glad that I got there too late to place a bet. The other sailor and the three soldiers had bet against the sailor who had made the claim, and the chief had to hand him the money. The soldier who had paid the whore five pesos had lost another fifteen to the sailor, and now he was dead broke for the month. He wasn't a good loser, either.

After the sailor got his money from the chief, he bought a round of Singapore slings for everyone, so I got my first sling free. There was some discussion then, and we asked the sailor how he knew about the twat overlap. He said the rule applied to white women as well as Filipino women, and he had learned about it when he had pumped gas in a station in Toledo, Ohio, long before he joined the Navy.

There was a little hole in the wall between the men's room and the ladies' room, and when a woman went in to use the bathroom he would go into the men's room and take a look. He was just a kid then, he said, and merely curious, but this low, upward view had provided him with a wealth of knowledge about vaginas. He had already won bets on the overlap in Honolulu and San Diego.

"But," he reminded us, "it won't work with a virgin. Only mature non-virgins have the one inch overlap."

The whore, hoping to get a little action, tried to sit at the table with us, but the gray-haired Chinese bartender ran her out. The Silver Dollar, he told her, was a decent place, frequented by important businessmen, and no soliciting was allowed.

I laughed when he said that, but I was the only one who did. The C.P.O. gave me a funny look and told me to take it easy on the slings. I nodded and said I would. I didn't know any of these guys, and I kept quiet as they talked. My sense of humor had gotten me into trouble before. A few minutes later, the soldier who had paid the whore five pesos began to argue with the sailor who had won the money. He felt now that he had been tricked into a sucker bet, and he was getting ugly. I finished my second sling and sidled out as the voices began to get louder..I wasn't about to get mixed up in a fight during my first hour in town.

It was one P.M. , and the sun blazed fiercely. I was feeling my drinks and perspiring through my jacket, not being used to wearing a jacket in hundred-degree heat. But I would have been just as euphoric if I hadn't had two Singapore slings.

I was in a city again, and a head taller than most of the natives. The streets teemed with people, and it was exciting just to be there, walking around and taking everything in. Here were department stores, music stores, bookstores (in the window of a bookstore there was a huge pyramid of Carl Crow's 400 Million Customers), and the Ideal Theater (pronounced Id-de-all) was playing a new Laurel and Hardy movie. The Ideal Theater was air-conditioned, too, one of the few air-conditioned buildings in the city. As I passed by I felt the cold blast of air from the lobby, and I bought a white paper bag of sally goupons from a vendor in front

of the theater.

There were more white businessmen downtown than I had expected to see, but the majority of the people were, of course, Filipinos. There were a good many beggars in rags, and those who weren't beggars didn't dress much better, but there were quite a few well-dressed Filipino men and women as well.

I ate lunch in Tom's Dixie Kitchen, up on the second floor of the building across the plaza, and a twelve-piece dance orchestra played dance music during lunch. I ordered a cold pork chop sandwich and a salad of wilted lettuce dotted with crisp pieces of bacon, and finished with a dish of mango ice cream. Tom's Dixie Kitchen stayed open twenty-four hours a day, as did most of Manila's restaurants and cabarets, because Manila was indeed the Pearl of the Orient, with ships putting into port from every nation in the world. Ten German sailors were sitting at a big round table in Tom's, drinking draft beer and singing.

I caught a carrimetta after lunch and rode through town and across the Pasig River at Jones Bridge. The garishly painted currimetta was pulled by a tiny horse, and the fares were only twenty centavos, much cheaper than the Willys-Knight taxicabs. The cab companies had apparently made a good deal with Willys, because, except for limousines, which were mostly Lincolns, the majority of the cabs were Willys. After we crossed Jones Bridge I climbed down and walked to the Y.M.,C.A., hoping to run into someone I knew. The Y was not far from the cathedral entrance to the old walled city, and if I didn't run into anyone I knew at the Y I planned on going into the walled city to get a piece of ass.

Except for a few soldiers playing Ping-Pong, the Y was deserted in the early afternoon. I can't think of a place more depressing than that Y.M.C.A. Before I left, however, I checked to see if there were any free tickets at the desk and picked up a city map. There were no tickets available, but the odd—looking white man at the desk said that there was a sing-along planned for that evening at the Y, and that the famous Filipino pianist Mario R. Cabingis. would play a concert before the sing-along.

Along the dry moat on the outer side of the walled city the Army had built a golf course. Clubs and golf balls were available in the Port Area recreation room. Port Area was where all of the heavy maintenance was accomplished on military vehicles, and where the soldiers attached to Headquarters, Philippine Department, were quartered. There were warehouses and quartermaster troops in this post beside the Pasig River as well. The Pasig River, as I had been told, ran one way one week and the other way the next. This phenomenon was caused by tides. I looked at the Pasig River, and the wide sluggish river was indeed running upstream. Sometimes in the villages way up the river dead bodies were thrown into the water, and occasionally they had to float in and out of the city for two weeks before making it all of the way out to sea. I saw a dead dog floating in the river, but I didn't see any dead humans.

When I entered the walled city I knew to stay in the middle of the narrow streets and to look up every once in a while. Some balconies overlapped the narrow cobblestoned streets, and residents emptied pisspots and garbage or dumped a pail of dirty water into the street. This was an unsanitary area, all right, and there was an overpowering stench of urine, feces, and garbage in the moist air.

One battalion of the 31st Infantry was stationed in the walled city, and the rest of the regiment was quartered at the Estado Mayor, where Hershey was playing poker. Stemberg General Hospital was over near the Estado Mayor as well, but I thought I might have a better chance of seeing someone I knew in the walled city.

A woman was selling bamboo gin for two centavos a glass from a cart in the street. I bought a glass from her, but I couldn't drink all of it. Bamboo gin was homemade and bottled in miscellaneous bottles. It tasted worse than the bamboo gin I had tried in Sloppy Bottom, but my edge from the Singapore slings had wom off, and I was trying to get it back. The alcoholic content of bamboo gin varied, naturally, but a man could get very drunk on three drinks if he could hold it down. And a six-centavo drunk is about as cheap as they come. But it was foolish to drink bamboo gin when you could buy San Miguel A1—1A for $1.60 a grande. A1—1A San Miguel gin is unquestionably the best gin in the entire world. No other gin even comes close to it in taste, quality, and herbal aroma. But vested interests, Canavinp told me, have managed to keep it out of the United States.

In addition to hole-in-the-wall shops in the walled city, there were guys with carts and wheelbarrows selling miscellaneous junk in the streets, and the crowded streets were like a thieves' market.

I found a small bar where a half dozen soldiers were drinking, ordered a beer, and asked one of the guys in the bar if he knew Henderson, my bunkie on the Grant.

"What outfit's he in?"

"I don't know. I just know he's in the Thirty-first."

"I don't know no Henderson, but you could probably check him out at battalion headquarters. You should've written him a letter, if you're from Clark Field, and he could've told you where to meet him."

"I didn't think of it."

I left the walled city, not wanting to walk around down there by myself when it got dark, and caught a Willys cab back to the New Washington Hotel. I took a shower and cooled off under the overhead fan, lying on top of the bed.

I was used to afternoon naps. Walking around in the heat had made me sleepy, and yet I was much too excited to sleep. I wanted to get a girl, but couldn't summon the energy to go out and find one. I called down to the desk and asked them to send me up two bottles of cold San

Miguel beer.

A few minutes later there was a knock on the door. The bellboy brought in the beer. There was a girl with him.

"You want a girl?" he said.

"How much?"

The girl was young, about nineteen or twenty I thought, but she looked younger because she was wearing a short pleated navy blue skirt and a white middy blouse. It was the same kind of uniform girls had to wear four days a week at John Adams Junior High School in Los Angeles.

She had her hair cut in a Chinese bob, and the back of  her neck had been shaved.

"Five pesos."

"Two."

"Five."

"I'll never pay five pesos for a short time. How much for all night?"

"Twelve pesos."

I thought about it for a moment. I had planned to take a cab later that evening to the Santa Ana Cabaret, and to dance a little before taking out one of the women for the night. The cab would cost three pesos; there was a one-peso admission charge to the cabaret; and I would have to pay the establishment another three pesos to take one of the dance-hall girls out of the place. Then I would have to give her six pesos for the night, plus buying some dance tickets and a few drinks at the bar. The evening would cost a lot more than the twelve pesos this bellboy was asking. Besides, here I was, already showered and naked on the bed.

"All right. Twelve it is."

I gave him twelve pesos and paid for the two beers. I told the girl to take a shower. While she showered, I slipped into my pants and undershirt, my shoes without socks, and left the hotel. I had seen the Chinaman's store across the street from my window. I bought six more bottles of beer, some lemonadas, and a bottle of Honeymoon Lotion. I was back in the room before the girl had finished her shower. I bought the lemonada for the girl and the beer for me. I wasn't too cheap to buy the girl beer, too, but Filipino women are notorious for their inability to tolerate alcohol. One or two beers and they go a little crazy. They throw things, tip over tables, and so on. In this respect, I guess Filipinos are like American Indians. The men can't tolerate much liquor either, but the women are more likely to throw drunken tantrums.

Naked, the girl looked like she was about fourteen, with adolescent chest bumps instead of fully developed breasts. Except for a four-inch scar on her left buttock (where her sister had slashed her with a bolo, she said), she didn't have a blemish on her body. She was delighted with the gift of Honeymoon Lotion, although she was disappointed when I told her not to open it. We talked and drank for a half hour before we did anything, and it was more like I a date than a business deal. She told me her name was Elena Espineda. She was studying to become a barber and would have her license to cut hair within a year.

Elena wasn't a particularly satisfying lay, but I was used to that by now. At least while she was on her back the ugly scar didn't show, and she didn't keep asking "You through? You through?" like most of them did.

Afterward I drank two more beers and sent Elena out to buy two pansit dinners and a deck of playing cards. We ate dinner at the little table by the window, and I tossed the beer bottles, when I finished them, into the street, just to make the passersby jump. (Sometimes, when I drink, I do strange things myself.) She placed the dirty dishes and utensils in the hallway, wiped the table with a trick towel, and I taught her how to play "go fish." She was very serious about this game, and she had a good memory for cards.

"You will give me all your kings," she said solemnly, in an even flat voice, knowing I held three of them. And then, when I handed them over, and she made a book, she broke into squealing peals of delighted laughter.

After drinking so much beer, I had to take a leak. When I got up from the table to go to the bathroom, she said: "I can pee farther than you."

I laughed and shook my head.

"You bet me five pesos‘?"

"Sure." I knew that I could piss farther than she could, and I didn't want to take her money.

"Why not just see for fun. I don't want to take your money."

She went to her black patent-leather purse and took out a five-peso bill. She placed it on the table and weighted it with a beer bottle.

I took a five out of my wallet and put it under the bottle with hers. The floor was covered by a tightly woven rush mat, not a rug, and I backed up against the wall and peed. My bladder was full, and the stream must have been at least four or five feet away as it splashed on the mat.

"You finished?" she said, widening her smile.

"Let me see you beat it."

She got down into the corner of the room, stretched her left leg up against the wall, and kept the other leg straight out on the floor. Then she reached down and pulled open the outer lips of her vagina with two fingers, and shot a stream of urine from that one corner all of the way across the room into the far corner by the opposite wall. If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it. I could feel my jaw drop.

A man is supposed to learn from experience, and I should have learned from the bet in the Silver Dollar Bar that a man is foolish to bet on another person's game. I would have lost money on that one, too. And here, this little snip of a girl had beat me at what every man considers his own special province because of his built-in nozzle. But a woman, if she pulls back on her urethra, and practices, can always piss farther than a man. Of course, it was worth live pesos to learn this information about a woman's capabilities. Not many men know about it, and those who just hear about it won't believe it until they witness it. I doubt if very many women know they can do it, either. Most American women would probably consider it unladylike to practice pissing for distance.

Elena had won money on this trick before, she told me, and she had never had any trouble in getting a man to bet. As a rule, she said, she bet ten pesos, but she liked me because I had given her the present of the bottle of Honeymoon Lotion.

I thanked her for saving me five pesos, and laughed.

"You are happy? You not pissed off?"

"I'm pissed off, all right," I said, laughing again. "But ako malagaya ini ibig gita!"

Saying this in Tagalog pleased her, and when we went to bed the second time I got another surprise. Elena Espineda knew as much, or more, about making love as any American high school girl, and I got the best piece of ass I ever had in the Philippines.

***

I WOULD HAVE HAD MORE FUN IF I HAD HAD A BUDDY with me, but even so, I still enjoyed the city. The next morning I explored the town, using cabs and carrimettas. I visited the Manila Hotel on the bay, where General MacArthur lived in the penthouse, and drank a cold beer in the bar. I lunched at Legaspi Landing, a restaurant-cabaret that was a hangout for sailors on leave.

There were a lot of sailors in town. When the sailors came back to Cavite all of the prices went up temporarily, and there was an enmity between sailors and soldiers because of the price escalation. As a rule, the Asiatic Fleet stayed at sea for two or three months at a time, which enabled sailors to save their money. Then when the fleet returned to Cavite and the sailors were given leave, they had two or three months' pay in their socks (they didn't have any pockets in their uniforms). They never bargained or argued.

There was another serious inequity here. A common sailor (seaman second class), who was the equivalent of a buck private, was paid thirty-six dollars a month, whereas an army private was only paid twenty-one. Although no soldier in his right mind would have traded places with a swabby, this inequity was resented. After three months of charging around in a tin can (that's what sailors called their destroyers) in rough Asian waters, the sailors were all half-crazy when they got back to Manila. But there is a principle to be considered. The work of a common sailor and a buck private is at the same level, so why were sailors paid iifteen dollars a month more than me? What it proved was that admirals are smarter than generals and could get more money from Congress than generals could. And if generals were as intelligent as the admirals, and could get more money for us, but didn't, then it proved that they didn't have our welfare at heart. A general would have to be pretty damned stupid if he didn't realize that a fifteen-dollar-a-month difference in pay would be resented by every private in the Army. Did generals think we were unaware of the pay differential?

But I didn't dislike sailors. After more than six parsimonious months at Clark Field, I was spending my money as recklessly as any sailor on shore leave.

That afternoon I took a long nap at the hotel. Then I had a sirloin steak at Tom's Dixie Kitchen and took a cab out to the Santa Ana Cabaret at eight P.M. The Santa Ana Cabaret was the largest in the world, and it had the world's longest bar. There were two orchestras, one at each end of the cavernous dance hall. When one stopped playing, the other started. Hundreds of Japanese lanterns provided a dim but adequate glow throughout the cabaret. There were dozens of dance-hall girls, but not all of them were women. Many were boys dressed as women, and they were called binny-boys, the P.I. term for homosexuals. The binny-boys wore their own hair long, and with their evening gowns and high heels, it was almost impossible to tell the difference. Dance tickets were ten centavos apiece, and each dance lasted about two minutes. My grandmother had taught me how to waltz, but that was the only dance I knew well. At the Saturday night dances at the Eagles' Hall in Riverside I had learned a kind of two-step that could get me through almost any song, but I was a poor dancer. I waited for slow numbers, and a waltz only came around about every twenty minutes or so. Then the girl I picked out—or the binny-boy—wouldn't know how to waltz anyway. Even with high heels, the girls were too short to dance with comfortably, and they moved as little as possible, too, saving their feet for the long evening's haul. I gave up on dancing and stayed at the bar, hooking my elbows over the edge, watching the action. Four sailors were trying to teach the Big Apple to four dance-hall girls, without noticeable success. The giggling girls thought the sailors were crazy, but the sailors were deadly serious.

I talked to a sailor at the bar who had purchased a pinch bottle of Old Duff Scotch. He offered rne a drink, and I poured a shot into my empty beer glass. Then he asked me to watch his bottle while he danced. I finished my drink and poured another shot into my glass before he came back to the bar with a binny-boy. I could spot this one all right. He had long hair, but he was also wearing a switch, and the color didn't quite match his own hair. Otherwise I wouldn't have been so positive. His arms were smooth, and he had narrow shoulders like a girl, but those narrow, boyish hips of his were not meant for delivering babies.

'The sailor's face was flushed from drinking and dancing, and he was not,as the saying goes, "feeling any pain." But he had bought me a couple of drinks, and he seemed like a nice guy.

"I think," I told him, "you've got yourself a binny-boy there."

"Think?" he said, bristling. "I know damned well I have. That's why I came out to the Santa Ana. What about it?"

"Nothing." I shrugged. "I didn't think you knew, that's all."

"And she's a real sweetie, too," he said. He hugged the binny-boy. It was common knowledge in the Army that sailors, when they were out to sea for a few months, fucked each other. Not all of them, of course, but enough of them did it to get the rumor started. I had assumed, once they got ashore, where women were available, they gave up the practice. The sailor had another shot and asked me to watch his bottle for him again. When he got about a hundred feet away from the bar I took the bottle with me as I left the cabaret.

The next morning I caught the train back to Angeles. The passenger cars were full, and there were chickens and ducks, with their feet tied, under almost every seat. Filipino passengers didn't travel light, either. They all had bundles and baskets and even pots and pans with them. Most of the women had babies, too, but the babies didn't cry. If a baby started to cry the mother would masturbate the child for a minute or so until it stopped. As a consequence, Filipinos have the most tractable and happiest babies in the world.

I had an aisle seat, but then a vendor came through selling baluts, and I had to leave. Baluts are fertilized duck eggs, with the little ducklings half formed inside. The eggs are set out in the sun to cook, or to spoil, in my opinion, and when people break them open the stench is terrible. The contents area combination of embryo, yellow feathers and gooey stuff, and it's disgusting to watch people eat them.

It was only sixty miles to Angeles anyway, and I didn't mind standing on the platform between the cars, watching the greenery and smoking. It had been a memorable three days, and I would have a lot of interesting things to tell my buddy, Canavin, when I got back to Clark Field.

TWELVE

CANAVIN, WH0 HAD TAKEN A COURSE IN ANATOMY at the University of Pennsylvania, claimed that he already knew about the vagina's labial overlap, but he hadn't known that a woman could pee farther than a man. He expressed his doubts about the truth of my story about Elena Espineda and her remarkable ability. But I didn't argue with him. It invariably happens that way. When a man is told something he doesn't know, he almost always thinks it's a lie, simply because he hasn't heard about it before. I know I have the same tendency but I've learned to be a little more open-minded about learning new things than other men. After all, I hadn't believed Elena either, and my skepticism had cost me five pesos. Because he had gone to college for three years, Canavin was an established authority in the barracks, and I think it irked him to learn something he didn't know from a junior high school dropout.

Actually, some of the pronouncements he made were funny. It would happen something like this: Two guys would come up to Canavin, and one would say, "You've been to college, Canavin, and we want you to settle a little argument for us."

"Okay."

"Who's the best fighter of all time? Jack Dempsey or Joe Louis?"

"Jack Dempsey."

"See!" one of the guys would say triumphantly. "What did I tell you?"

The two guys, satisfied, would leave, without any further questioning of Canavin's subjective opinion. No one ever asked him how he had arrived at his decision or how three years of college made him an authority on boxing. But such was the awe of the men in the squadron about the benefits of a college education.

Canavin was so smart about so many things, however, it wasn't difficult for most people to accept his expertise on matters that he couldn't possibly know anything about. His reputation as an authority was enhanced even more when he had an article published in Mabuhay magazine, a monthly that dealt with Philippine culture. Canavin's piece was about three thousand words long, and in it he discussed the great loss to the Philippines of its Spanish heritage. He also provided a few sensible suggestions about how to revive some of those forgotten traditions, including mandatory teaching of Spanish in the public schools. It was a well—reasoned article, I thought, and I was impressed by the photo of Canavin in the magazine, in uniform, with his name in italics below the picture.

The editor had also paid Canavin fifty pesos for the article, which was even more impressive. A copy was passed around the barracks, and everyone wondered how Canavin knew so much about Filipino culture. The article caused an old guy named Ramirez, a maintenance man in Utilities, who had a son fighting in Spain, to look Canavin up. He talked to Canavin, in Spanish, about his son's chances for survival.

When Canavin found out that Ramirez's son was a Rebel, he told him that his son's chances were excellent. The Alcazar had fallen recently, and Canavin felt that the death of all those brave young students would provide the exact incentive Franco's troops would need to complete their overthrow of the Loyalists.

Canavin wasn't happy about the Rebels, though, and he tried to talk an air mechanic named Powell out of joining them. A recruiting officer from Franco's air force had talked to some of the men in the squadron in Angeles. He wanted a few skilled airplane mechanics to go to Spain. The majority of the men in the squadron, like Canavin, were against Franco, but the offer was too good for Powell to turn down. The Rebel recruiting officer would buy his discharge from the Army, send him by boat to Spanish Morocco, and then Powell would be paid $200 a month, in addition to his board and room. There was also a bonus involved for traveling money, so Powell took the man up on the offer. If a man had a year's service, he could buy out of the Army for $120. The more time a man had in the service, the cheaper it became to buy out. Powell had more than twelve years' service, so it only cost $35 to buy  his discharge. Powell mailed a postcard from Alexandria, Egypt, addressed to all of us in the squadron, and the first sergeant put the card up on the bulletin board. But after that he was never heard from again.

Powell was the only air mechanic from Clark Field to go to Spain, but the recruiting officer got three more mechanics from Nichols Field. If I had been a skilled airplane mechanic I think I would have signed up, because $200 a month is an enormous sum. But I may be saying that because I didn't have the skills the man needed. Canavin said he tried to talk Powell out of going for two reasons: one, you can never trust outlaws who rebel against their legitimate government; and two, you can't trust Roman Catholics. And the Rebels were all Catholics. Canavin had some other reasons, too. For example, if Powell happened to make a mistake, and an airplane he had worked on had a mechanical failure, he would undoubtedly be shot. But Powell had such confidence in his ability he just laughed. His mind was made up before Canavin talked to him, and he only listened to Canavin out of respect. But at least Powell had provided us with something to talk about for a change.

Old Ramirez, who had been in the United States for twenty years and in the Air Corps for fifteen, was proud of his Rebel son, and he bragged about him every day on the porch as we waited for the chow bell. Finally, to shut him up, Pussgut Morris reminded Ramirez that he had deserted his wife and four children to emigrate to the United States, and that the boy had become a Rebel without any spiritual or financial help from Ramirez. This remark made Ramirez a little huffy, but he had no answer for it, so after that he quit bragging about the fighting blood his son had inherited from him.

Every now and then, however, Canavin and Ramirez would talk together, because he was the only guy around that Canavin could practice his Spanish on. Canavin told me that Ramirez spoke pure Castilian Spanish, including the patrician lisp, which Canavin was trying to perfect himself. Once I asked Canavin what they talked about, because they seemed to have so little in common. Canavin laughed. "We're both lapsed Catholics," he said, "which means we'll never run out of something to talk about. What we do, we reinforce ourselves in our hatred for the church."

He didn't have to elaborate, because I had already noted that phenomenon. All lapsed Catholics talk against the church; it's their main topic of conversation, and as soon as they've had a few drinks they start in on it. When I saw these two together, lisping away in Spanish, I concluded that their disbeliefs were undoubtedly nourished by their uncertainty.

By my third day in the Philippines I had developed a case of prickly heat, and I had it continuously from then on. The unrelieved heat and humidity caused tiny red bumps on your belt-line and belly and between your legs. There was a constant burning and prickling. There is no relief from this prickling, except for the time you are standing under a cold shower. Even then, the water was never cold enough to give a man much more than minimal relief. As soon as you got out of the shower and tried to dry off (it was impossible to get completely dry), the prickles pricked worse than ever as the sweat began to flow freely again. It was best not to scratch, because scratching only aggravated it, and you could get an infection from scraping your skin with your fingernails. We could get free foot powder, and we used that on our dobie itch (or athlete's foot), rubbing the powder between our toes until they were raw and sore, but there was no way to get rid of the dobie itch either. It was always there, just like the prickly heat, and there was nothing a man could do about it. The prickly heat was a constant because we wore coveralls to work every day. The coveralls were thick and heavy, designed for a temperate climate, and the cinched belt in front caused a red line of prickly, burning bumps across your belly.

There was only one way of getting rid of prickly heat, and that was by going to Baguio for a month or so of R. & R. Camp John Hay, in Baguio, was a rest and recreation camp for soldiers in P.I. In Baguio, up in the mountains of Luzon, the temperature was in the low seventies in the daytime and often dropped to forty degrees at night. The cool temperature made prickly heat disappear. I wanted to go to Manila again, because Manila, like San Francisco, is a place where interesting things can happen to a man. All you have to do is be there, just walking around. On the other hand, I wanted some relief from my prickly heat, and I wouldn't get it in Manila. I was fair, and my skin was white. I didn't tan very well, and prickly heat bothered me more than it did people with darker skins. Canavin with his red hair was as fair as I, and his skin was much lighter, but he didn't suffer as much because he worked in an air-conditioned office in the mornings, and he wore a khaki uniform instead of coveralls.

In two months I saved another forty pesos, giving the money to Canavin to hold for me, as I had done before, and then I lost the blackjack game. It came as a nasty surprise. Right after pay call, as soon as I got my money, I headed for the day-room to set up the table. Padre Hershey stopped me at the door. .

"Wi1leford," he said, "I'm taking the game away from you. Pussgut Morris is going to run it for me."

"I don't understand? ‘

"I don't have any choice." He shrugged. "I don't like you very well, but that's got nothing to do with it. I thought you did a good job running the game, and I know you're honest. But a lot of guys don't like you, Will. They think you're an arrogant sonofabitch, and you hang around with Canavin all the time. They resent having you there to cut a game. And more than one guy has mentioned to me that you don't even draw five percent. A lot of the older men won't play blackjack because you're still a recruit, and they don't want to gamble with recruits."

"I've got almost two years in. I'm not exactly a recruit, and I don't play in the game, I just cut it."

"Pussgut's got seven years in. He's a private, and he needs the money worse than you. Anyway, you're out and he's in."

That was all there was to it. There was no appeal from his flimsy reasoning, because the day-room orderly owned the gambling concessions. It was unfair, but then one gets used to unfair treatment in the Army.

My only comeback would be to quit selling cheap gas to Padre for his Ford phaeton, but if I did that, I'd be losing one of my best customers. At any rate, I was out, and I knew that Pussgut Morris could cut the game as well as I.

I went upstairs and stretched out on my bunk to wait for noon chow. Canavin arrived about eleven-thirty, leaving his office early because it was payday. He was surprised to see me.

"I thought you'd be in the day-room."

"Padre gave the game to Pussgut Morris. I'm out. No reason except, he said, a lot of guys don't like me."

"It could be worse, Will. Suppose all of these guys did like you? Think about the kind of asshole you'd be then. You're lucky they don't like you."

"I know what you mean, but that's not going to make me any money. Counting my year at March Field, and my time here at Clark, I've got almost seven weeks of furlough time coming. I'd like to take a furlough to Baguio."

"What's stopping you? I'm holding forty pesos for you, and you just got paid. How much do you need?"

I "I don't know for sure. The railroad fare's about eight pesos round trip, I think, and then there's the bus ride from Dagupan."

"Then that's all you need. You'l1 eat and sleep free at Camp John Hay, and you'll have money left over. And you can get paid up there on furlough?

I saw the first sergeant and put in for a six-week furlough. Five days later I was on the train for Dagupan, on the Lingayen Gulf, where I would transfer to a bus for Baguio.

THIRTEEN

CAMP JOHN HAY, AS A REST AND RECREATION CAMP for enlisted men and officers, was open to all Army personnel serving in the Philippine Department. Almost everything there was free. Golf clubs could be checked out for nothing, but a man had to buy his own golf balls because they were so easily lost on this championship course.

There was even a free ride from the camp into Baguio and back on a two-and-a-half-ton truck, so a man only had to pay bus fare if he preferred to ride the bus. A free bunk, with Filipino houseboys to make your bunk and clean the barracks, three excellent meals a day, and a day-room furnished with checkers, Monopoly games, and a pool table, plus miles of asphalt walkways through the woods and mountains, completed the facilities, with some of the most beautiful scenery in the world to look at and enjoy. Charlie Corn had a restaurant-bar in the camp, too, and there was a four-lane bowling alley right next to Charlie Com's.

When I caught the train in Angeles, I was exhilarated by my sense of freedom. I was traveling light, having packed one uniform and two pairs of khaki shorts in my barracks bag with my underwear and socks. I wore my powder blue suit, but not the jacket, and had stuffed my necktie into  a jacket pocket. After paying for my round—trip ticket I still had fifty-seven pesos left, having borrowed ten pesos from Sergeant Peralta, the squadron twenty-percent man.

There is a twenty-percent man in every outfit, and Peralta lent money at this rate, the amount depending upon the borrower's rank. I was a private, so he would only lend me ten pesos maximum because I would have to pay him back twelve. If I couldn't pay the entire twelve, I would pay him two pesos on payday and still owe twelve pesos the next month. I shouldn't have borrowed the ten pesos, because for the rest of the time I was in the Philippines I had to pay Peralta two pesos every month and never paid off the principal. By the time I left I had paid him twenty-six pesos and still owed him twelve. But on the train that morning, with fifty-seven pesos in my pocket, I felt very secure.

That morning I had lingered at the breakfast table, making four toast and bacon sandwiches to take with me on the train. I bought two lemonadas at the Angeles station. The Philippine Railroad is a narrow-gauge track, but the train seemed to make good time between stops. There were frequent halts at small villages and at places where there seemed to be nothing to stop for, and the farther we traveled, the poorer the villages seemed to get. The farther one got from Manila, in any direction, the poorer the country seemed to be; but I think the peasants in the country ate better than their fellows in Manila, because there were plenty of rice fields and a great many animals and chickens in the country. And every small shack had

a vegetable garden.

Dagupan was a fairly large city, right on Lingayen Gulf, and fishing was apparently the main occupation. I discovered that I would have to wait two more days for the bus to Baguio; I had just missed it because the train came in two hours late. That was all right with me because it gave me a chance to explore the town. I checked into the Dagupan Hotel, a two-story wooden building, and got a room on the second floor with a veranda that overlooked the street. The bathroom, with a headless shower, was downstairs. I had a sagging double bed and a mosquito net that was too tattered and torn to keep any mosquitoes out. But the price was right, only one and a half pesos per night. The manager also had four girls for hire, and the price was six pesos for all night with any one of them.

I left my barracks bag and jacket in my room and walked down to the docks. Men were pulling in fish, and big ones, as fast as they threw in their lines. I bought a grande of A1—1A San Miguel gin at a Chinaman's before I went back to the hotel, and sat on the downstairs veranda, drinking iced gin highballs with lemonada and watching the people go by in the busy street. About four-thirty I tapered off, not wanting to get too drunk, and then the manager, a grinning, gray-haired Filipino, came out of the hotel with his fishing pole.

"You want fish for dinner?"

"Sure."

He walked away, and he was back within a half hour with an enormous red fish he had caught off the dock. Except for abalone steaks and fried shrimp, I don't care much for seafood, but I liked the way this fish tasted, even though I don't know what kind it was. He broiled the fish whole (it was about two feet long) over a charcoal brazier and served it with a mixture of rice and coconut milk, and yams. I liked it even better when I found out that the dinner, and my breakfast, were included in the 1.50 per day tab.

That night I pulled a fast one on the girl I picked out. I opted for a two peso short time instead of an all-night session, because it was too hot to have another body with me in bed all night. I used condoms, of course, and told the girl, who was only sixteen or seventeen, that I hadn't come. I lied, but she didn't know it; a few minutes later, when I said I wanted to try again, I got in a second fuck without her knowing about it. I only paid for one. I think I tricked her, but maybe I didn't. It's possible that she just let me get away with it, but I did get away with it, and that was the important thing at the time. At any rate, the mosquitoes got their revenge on me that night, because even though I covered myself with the sheet, head and all, by morning I was dotted with mosquito bites.

I was the only white man staying at the hotel, but the next morning, after a breakfast of pancakes, goat butter, and shredded coconut, I met another white man when I walked down to the docks to watch the activity. He was an old guy in his sixties, a retired Army buck sergeant. He had been living in Dagupan for almost five years, he told me, and he intended to stay there for the rest of his life. He was married to a Filipino woman, but he didn't have any children, and he said there was no place in the United States where he could live as well on his retirement check as he could in Dagupan. He had a house, a mango tree, and all the fish he wanted, and his income, as small as it was, was at least twice as much as that of the average native resident of the town. He wore a pair of khaki shorts, but no shirt, and skivvy slippers. He was so burnished from the sun you wouldn't have known that he was a white man unless you noticed his height and blue eyes. He had a white beard; the lower part was a streaky red from chewing betel nut. If you chew enough betel nut, you can stay mildly euphoric most of the time, and this old guy thought he had the world by the tail.

I asked him back to the hotel for a drink, and we sat on the veranda and drank gin highballs for about an hour. He told me some stories about shooting Apaches in the last Indian war near Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and how he had got busted from sergeant down to corporal once, by

a candy-assed captain, for scalping one of the Apaches he had killed. He also told me that Edgar Rice Burroughs, the writer who wrote the Tarzan and Mars books, had been in his same troop in the 7th Cavalry, although Burroughs had not, at that time, written any books. I don't know how he expected me to swallow a whopper like that one, but I didn't challenge him on it. He hadn't talked to any white men in a long time, and I think he was lonelier than he was willing to admit. I didn't mind his bullshit; I had nothing else to do, so I let him ramble on.

A Chinaman came along, leading ten dogs. The dogs were separated from each other because he had strung cotton ropes through ten bamboo poles before tying nooses around their necks. The bamboo poles, being straight, made it simpler for him to keep the dogs away from one

another. The dogs were all clean and apparently well fed, although there were no recognizable breeds—just mongrel mixtures.

"Where's he going with all these dogs?" I asked.

"Those are eating dogs," the old sergeant said. "Did you ever eat any dog?"

"Not yet."

"Pick one out. The manager here will be glad to cook it for you."

We went down off the porch and examined the dogs. I picked out a white dog that looked like it was part spitz, as well as something else—beagle, maybe—and listened to the retired sergeant as he bargained with the Chinaman in Tagalog.

"Okay," the sergeant said, "I got him down to three pesos, and that's a fair price."

I paid the Chinaman three pesos, and we turned the dog over to the manager. I told the manager to invite himself and the girls to the feast, and the other hotel guests. I also invited the retired sergeant.

"You can bring your wife, too," I said.

He grinned, exposing his bright betel-red teeth and gums.

"Not her. I'l1 come, but not my wife. She used to be the secretary for the mayor of San Fernando, and she's too civilized to eat dog. But I'll be back."

The manager, with the help of his wife, an old woman who was bent almost double, killed, skinned, and roasted the dog over a charcoal pit fire in the backyard of the hotel. They also roasted yams, and there was rice, mixed with some kind of hot onion sauce, and a huge bowl of noodles to go with the roast dog. I slept most of the afternoon, but when dinner was ready, about five, I told the manager to round up his other two hotel guests. They were both Filipinos, wearing white suits, from Manila. One was a lawyer, and the other was an insurance man who specialized in marine policies. The insurance man ate his share but the prissy lawyer wouldn't eat any dog meat. The expression on his face made me laugh. The retired sergeant

came back, wearing an embroidered camilsa and linen slacks with his skivvy slippers, and the four girls from upstairs came down to the table. The manager and his wife served, but I made them sit with us too, and the old sergeant bought everyone, including the four girls, a bottle of San Miguel beer.

I wasn't particularly eager to eat roasted dog, but I had a generous leg portion which tasted all right, although it was a little sweet and more than a little stringy. But the cooked animal, which looked something like a sheep, had been basted with garlic and lime juice, and was a lot better eating than fish.

Everybody was smiling and chewing away, and I said,

"Damnit, I'm having a good time!"

The old sergeant wiped his greasy mouth and grinned.

"I wonder what the poor people are doing?"

"Working," I said. And we both laughed.

***

SOMETIME DURING THE DAY, PERHAPS THAT MORNING when I was talking to the old sergeant on the porch, the girl I had screwed the night before sewed up the tears in my mosquito bar. I think she did it because she wanted to go to bed with me again, but somehow or other I had picked up a case of dysentery. And when a man has to make frequent trips to the john he isn't interested in sex. I slept fairly well that night in the sagging bed and felt fine again in the morning. I would have liked to spend a few more days in Dagupan, but I had orders to report to Camp John Hay. I had a legitimate excuse for not getting there on the first date, because the train had made me miss the bus. But I didn't want to risk a reprimand by waiting two more days for another.

***

RIDING THE BEAT-UP OLD BUS UP THE MOUNTAIN was a scary experience. There had been some hard rains, and the dirt road that hugged the sides of the mountains, zigging and zagging, was muddy and narrow, and there were some long drops on many of the curves. This was Igorot country. The mountains were terraced, the way they farm rice in Japan, and the pattemed terraces made beautiful interlocking triangles as they formed giant steps up the mountain. It must have taken decades to carve out these mountainside terraces. Eventually we hit the tree line, and the tall pines, mixed with mahogany trees, reminded me of Big Bear, the R. & R. camp that the soldiers from March Field went to above San Bernardino, but these mountains were much more lush with tropical greenery than the San Bernardino mountains because of the much heavier rainfall in the Philippines.

Baguio had gold mines, the city's main industry, and some of the bus riders were miners, but many of the women passengers were returning to Baguiofrom trips to Dagupan or Manila. There were two Igorot women on the bus, with their distinctive horizontally wide-striped skirts, but they wore blouses and didn't have their breasts uncovered the way they did in the mountains. Many of the Igorot women, I noticed later in the downtown Baguio market, still walked around with their breasts exposed. Igorots were much darker than the usual run of Filipinos, and the women wore their black hair in long braids, like Indian women, hanging down their backs.

Baguio wasn't a large city, but it was surprisingly clean, unlike Dagupan, and it seemed to be the most prosperous of any of the places I had seen in the Philippines so far, including Manila. Wealthy people had built homes here, where they could get away from the humid lowlands, and there were several good restaurants in town. The big farmer's market was open every day, with all kinds of produce for sale. Baguio was also the home of the Philippine Military Academy. The military academy, which furnished officers for the Philippine Constabulary as well as the new Philippine Army, was modeled on West Point and was staffed with U.S. Army officers as instructors. The cadets wore the same kind of uniforms as West Point cadets, and I watched a few retreat parades while I was there. They had a beautiful campus, a strict regimen, and you could tell, just by looking at these cadets, that they had been carefully chosen. They even looked a little taller than most Filipinos, but that was probably because of the tall hats they wore on parade. I don't think a class of second lieutenants had graduated as yet, but I had a hunch that when one did the ofticers would be paid a hell of a lot more than the peso-fifty a month the enlisted men received.

I took the bus out to Camp John Hay, about two miles away from the center of town, because I didn't know about the free truck ride at the time. I turned in my orders and was assigned to a bunk and a wall locker. I had missed supper, but after I stowed away my stuff, which didn't take long, I walked down the hill to Charlie Corn's and had a hot dog and a beer. There were no level spots at Camp John Hay. Anywhere you went was up and down steep roads or asphalt walking paths, but the cool air felt wonderful on my skin. After walking back to the barracks from Charlie Corn's I realized that I hadn't scratched my prickly heat once since I got off the bus in the middle of town.

That night I slept under two blankets, and I remember thinking, just as I drifted off to sleep, that a place like Camp John Hay proved that, if the Army wanted to, it could do something right.

THIRTEEN

THERE WERE ABOUT FORTY GUYS ON FURLOUGH AT Camp John Hay. The personnel changed frequently because they had all taken various periods of leave, ranging from a short one-week leave up to one guy, a private from Corregidor, who had taken a ninety-day re-enlistment leave. Because I had a long leave of six weeks I was assigned to a lower bunk, and for the first few days I skipped breakfast and slept until ten or ten-thirty in the morning.

One of the guys I had met on the boat, Isaacs, a Jew, was a member of the permanent party. Isaacs worked as a clerk in the supply room, and he filled me in on some things I wanted to know, including current prices in Baguio. I had met him on the boat through Henderson, because Isaacs typed the stencil for the ship's daily newspaper in the chaplain's office on the Grant. To my knowledge there had been no enlisted Jews at March Field or at Clark Field, and they were apparently even more rare in the combat forces, although once in a while some guy like Isaacs would enlist. He had embezzled money from his father's firm in New York, he told me, and then after he had spent all the money he had been afraid to go back home. He knew his father would prosecute him. So he was hiding out in the Army till his father forgave him. He wrote to his mother through one of his female cousins, and his mother sent him a money order for ten or fifteen dollars every month. He needed this supplement because prices were a little higher in Baguio compared with Manila and Angeles. Everything had to be shipped up there by truck or bus.

There were only six guys in the permanent party for our casual barracks, and they had private quarters at the end of the building, separated from the casuals' side. They had a large stone fireplace with huge logs burning all the time, and there were comfortable leather chairs and couches in front of the fireplace. Because I knew Isaacs, I would visit him there at night sometimes and shoot the breeze by the fire. There was always popcorn available, and sometimes they roasted marshmallows. It goes without saying that I envied these guys in the permanent party, because Camp John Hay was about as close to being a paradise as the Army has ever provided. How these guys, all of them Quartermaster Corps, ever lucked into this lush assignment, I don't know.

When it occurred to me one evening that Isaacs was the only enlisted Jew I had met in the Anny, I asked him about it. Except for a few doctors and dentists, who were all officers, why were there so few Jews in the Army?

"The pay's inadequate," Isaacs explained. "In a Jewish family, everybody works. So if you've got a father working full time, a mother part time, and two boys and a daughter working, you've got five incomes together. After you pay expenses, there's always a lot of money left over, you see. Protestants like you are different. You all go off on your own, and then you have to work four times as hard to have the same amount of money you could have at easier low-paying jobs if you were all living together as a family. The Protestant ethic you guys go by only lets you make it on your own. I was a gang, or a thief, but when all of this blows over I'll be damned happy to go back to work for my old man. The Army stinks, and besides, my mother worries."

"How can you say that, Isaacs? You put in about two hours' work a day in the supply room, and you're living like a king up here in Baguio. You've gained at least twenty-five pounds since you got off the boat."

"You've put on about twenty pounds yourself."

"What does your mother worry about? That you'll fall out of bed, or overeat?"

"She thinks some Filipino might kill me because we're an army of occupation."

"That's crazy. The Filipinos love us, for Christ's sake! When we leave here in 1946, and they get their freedom, they're going to starve to death."

"You and I know that, but my mother thinks that soldiers get killed, sooner or later, and most Jews look at the Army the same way. That's another reason why Jews don't enlist."

In other words, Isaacs really didn't know why Jews didn't enlist in the Army. There was probably some deep-seated ethnic reason, but it couldn't have been merely the low pay or the fear of getting killed. Certainly Isaacs was safer at Camp John Hay than he would have been running around New York City. And if there ever was a war, which seemed unlikely, he still wouldn't have to fight anyone—not as long as he was in the Quartermaster Corps.

I started to run around with the guy who had a bunk next to mine, an Italian named D'Angelo, who came from Brooklyn. He was a corporal, a company clerk, from B Company, 31st Infantry. Ordinarily a corporal and a private don't buddy up, but rank didn't mean anything to those of us on furlough. We were all of a kind, from different branches of the service, and an infantry corporal didn't have any jurisdiction over an Air Corps private in the rest camp. So D'Angelo and I became good friends, mainly because, in the beginning, we played golf together. The golf course at Camp John Hay was one of the toughest in the world. The holes were long, with a couple of par lives, and you were driving either uphill or  downhill. The course was maintained beautifully by Filipino landscapers, and the grass on the fairways was cut almost as short and neat as it was clipped on the greens. The roughs were nearly impenetrable, though, because of the trees. If you sliced into a dense stand of trees you could kiss your golf ball good-bye.

We were both novices, so we didn't keep score. When it took ten or more shots to get a ball into a hole, there was no point to it. But in the early morning, after breakfast, with a light mist on the green course, in cool weather, it was wonderful to be out there, whaling away and walking the fairways. I played with a two-iron, a five-iron, and a putter, to keep my bag light, and bought second-hand balls from the ragged Filipino kids who scoured the woods for them. We usually stopped playing after nine holes because the ninth green was near the barracks.

We got to know the three Signal Corps guys who had a little house, complete with their own bathroom and shower, right next to the number nine green. These three guys manned the message center twenty-four hours a day, but they worked it out so that there were two shifts of twelve hours. That way, one guy always had a full day off between shifts. When they were off duty these signal corpsmen sat on the front porch of their little frame house drinking gin and watched the struggling golfers try to get the ball up to the ninth green from the tee at the bottom of a dingle. It was almost straight up, and if the ball didn't make it all the way up to the green, or into the sand trap in front of the green, it would roll back down the hill for a hundred yards or more. This was the most frustrating hole on the course, and we were usually ready to turn in our clubs when we iinished playing it. The first time we played the hole the Signal Corps guys had kidded us so unmercifully they felt sorry for us. They then invited us over to the porch for a glass of gin. That's how we got acquainted with them, and they were all nice guys. These guys could take or send telegraph messages at fifty words a minute or more, and one guy, named Fellows, was even faster than that. Fellows had specialized for ten years as a relief man for other signal corpsmen who re-enlisted for ninety-day leaves. He filled in for them for ninety days, and when they came back he was assigned somewhere else. As a consequence he had been almost everywhere the Army had a post, camp, or station, including Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

When I found out that Fellows had been at Fort Huachuca, I told him what the old retired sergeant at Dagupan had told me about Edgar Rice Burroughs being there, and he confirmed it.

"That's right. Edgar Rice Burroughs was in the Seventh Cavalry at Huachuca for a few months, and then his father bought him out and he left. It was long before my time, but if you ever go there, he's the first guy they tell you about. Huachuca is a fucking hell-hole in the desert, and Burroughs is the only thing they've got there to brag about. But he hated the Army so much he bought out as soon as he could get the money from his father."

I realize that it doesn't make any difference whether Edgar Rice Burroughs was ever at Fort Huachuca or not, but now that I knew the old retired soldier had told mé the truth about knowing Burroughs, I knew that I had also met, in all probability, the last sergeant in the Army who had scalped an Indian.

I brought that up, and we had a long discussion about whether being scalped would kill a man or not, and we concluded that it wouldn't. It would be painful, and it would leave the top of your skull exposed, but if it was done right, and you didn't cut into any head arteries, it wouldn't kill you.

I got to know D'Angelo very well. We took long walks together, including walking into town and back, and he liked to talk about himself. He didn't have as much time in as I did, and yet he had made corporal in the infantry because he knew how to type. He had enlisted, he told me, to wait out the Depression, knowing if he hung around Brooklyn much longer without a job he would get into some serious trouble. He had graduated from high school, but in two years of trying he couldn't find a job. His father had a high-paying job with the Veterans Administration, pulling down $1,800 a year, and his father (with his pull) told him that if he spent an enlistment in the Army he would have a priority and could probably also get a position with the V.A. when he was discharged. By enlisting directly for the Philippines, he would only have to serve two years instead of three, and he spent most of his free time studying V.A. regulations his father sent him so he could pass the civil service exam when he got back to Brooklyn. D'Angelo was different from any other guy I had met in the service so far because he had a long-range plan for his life. No one else, including me, ever planned ahead much farther than the next payday, if he planned ahead that far.

D'Angelo had also read a lot, and we both liked Thomas Wolfe. D'Angelo thought that Wolfe's short story "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" was one of the greatest stories ever written, even though the dialect Wolfe had used in the story was off by ten blocks or more. Otherwise, though, Wolfe had captured the feeling of Brooklyn, and that was the important thing.

I showed D'Angelo my poem about the fire ants, but even after he read it three times he claimed he couldn't understand it.

"I think I know what you mean, Will," he said, "but I can't explain what I think you mean."

"I could explain it to you, but if I did that there would be no need for the poem. What I'll do, I'll copy it out for you, and you can read it again a few months from now. In time, I'm sure it'1l be clear to you."

"I'd like a copy. What I'll do, I'll borrow the typewriter in the orderly room and type it. Sometimes a poem looks different in type."

So he typed it for me, as well as a dozen more I had in my notebook. Then he gave me the originals and kept the carbon copies for himself. He didn't comment on the other poems either, but I think he was impressed. And what he said was true: typed, the poems seemed stronger, somehow, than they had looked in my scribbly handwriting.

We were in the Baguio market one morning, walking around and looking at the bare breasts of the Igorot women. Their breasts were brown and taut, and the nipples stuck straight out. This was because, D'Angelo said, none of these women had ever wom brassieres, which break down the muscles under the arms and cause breasts to sag. We ran into Tom Higdon in the market, and Higdon had a grande of gin. Higdon was an M.P. from Manila who came from Terrell, Texas, and he was already a little drunk. He offered us each a drink from his bottle, and told us that they were going to hang an Igorot in the morning. The Igorot had killed a man, and then he had eaten the man's heart after roasting it on a charcoal fire. Because of the American influence, the Philippines were sensitive to things like cannibalism, and they were making an example of this Igorot, although they had never bothered them much before, not while the Philippines were still under Spain, anyway. After all, it was a tribal custom to eat the heart of an enemy after killing him. The bolo fight, apparently, had been a fair one, so they were hanging the Igorot more to stamp out cannibalism than they were for murder.

"What I'm worried about," Higdon said, "is that this here Igorot's a pagan. What I'm going to do is go down to the jail and talk to him and show him the light. If I can convert the little fucker, he'll have a chance to go to heaven instead of purgatory."

Higdon was Southern Baptist, and even though he was a little drunk, he seemed serious about this mission.

"I don't think they'll let you talk to him, Higdon," I said. "And even if you did, he won't understand English."

"That's right," D'Angelo said. "With your Texas accent, I can hardly understand you myself."

"Look who's talking!" Higdon said, bristling. "You got a black dago Brooklyn accent that only foreigners talk."

"I'm as white as you are," D'Angelo said. I think he was probably sensitive about his dark Mediterranean skin. Texans like Higdon didn't make any distinction between Negroes, Mexicans, Portuguese, Italians, or anyone else with dark skins—they were all black to Higdon. I didn't want to see these two guys get into a fight about something stupid. I stepped between them.

"We'll go with you, Higdon. The constabulary might let three of us see the Igorot, where he might tum down just one guy."

"It's not that I want to go," Higdon said, shrugging, "but I wouldn't be much of a Christian if I didn't try."

So we walked to the jail, finishing the rest of the gin on t the way.

There was an uneasy relationship between the Philippine Constabulary and the armed forces in P.I. As a national police force, they could, technically, arrest a soldier or a sailor, but they never did. They might hold on to some soldier who was tearing up a bar or something, but they turned him over to the M.P.'s as soon as possible. The constabulary, anywhere you went, was a smart group of policemen. They were well trained and bore no resemblance to the sloppy new Philippine Army. I don't think they were paid well, but they undoubtedly had several kinds of graft working for them, and you never saw a member of the constabulary in a dirty or sloppy uniform. Higdon was an M.P., but he was on furlough and had no official capacity in Baguio.

There were three members of theconstabulary at the jail, a corporal and two patrolmen. The sullen corporal didn't want us to see the Igorot.

"No." He shook his head. "I can't let you bother the Igorot. He's going to be hanged in the morning."

"That's why we have to see him today," Higdon explained. "Tomorrow will be too late. I've got to show him the light." Then Higdon pulled out his M.P. I.D. card, and that placed the corporal in a quandary. He knew that he was supposed to cooperate with American M.P.'s, so he reluctantly took us back to the cells.

The Igorot, wearing a pair of dirty white pants, was a dark little man of about four six. When we stopped outside his cell he scrambled up the tier of six bunks and peered down at us over the edge of the top bunk with the terrified dark eyes of a lemur.

"Come down here a minute," Higdon said. "I want to talk to you."

"He don't understand English," the corporal said.

"You tell him then."

"I talk Tagalog, not Igorot."

"Tell him in Tagalog."

The corporal said something in Tagalog, but there was no response. The little Igorot just backed away in that top bunk until all we could see were his nose, brown eyes, and his fingers gripping the iron rail of the top bunk.

"I guess you'll have to open the door," Higdon said. "I'll have to go in there and get him."

"No," the corporal said. "I can't let you bother that Igorot. He's going to be hanged in the morning?

Higdon was six four, and he must have weighed at least 190 pounds. He had red hair, bright blue bloodshot eyes, and long arms. He squatted down until his eyes were level with the corporal's. He lowered his voice to a whisper:

"Open the door."

The way he said it, anyone would have reached for the keys, let alone a little constabulary cop in a small town like Baguio. He opened the cell. Higdon went inside while we stayed outside and watched. After a few minutes our sides were hurting from laughter. I've never laughed so hard before in my whole life. The little Igorot didn't come as high as Higdon's chest, and he was faster than greased owl shit. Higdon would climb the tier, and then the Igorot would scramble down headfirst, as slippery as mercury. Then, as Higdon started down, up the Igorot would climb again to the top bunk. Higdon was getting angrier by the minute, calling him a pagan sonofabitch, and anything else he could think of. By the time Higdon finally caught the Igorot by the leg, he was breathing heavily through his mouth. He twisted the little man's arm behind his back, forced him to kneel, and said:

"Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?"

The Igorot didn't say anything, so Higdon jerked the arm up a little higher and asked him the same question. This time the corporal said something in Tagalog, and the Igorot nodded his head vigorously. Higdon accepted the nod for a yes and released the man. He immediately scrambled up the tier again and looked down at us from the top bunk. If the Igorot was saved, he sure as hell didn't know it.

"I'm sorry if I hurt you, boy," Higdon apologized. "But you'll thank me for it someday when we meet in heaven."

D'Angelo also thanked the constabulary corporal for his cooperation, and I gave him a cigarette and lighted it for him. The cell was locked again, and Higdon seemed oddly subdued and sobered. The corporal was happy to see us leave the jail, and he shook his head solemnly as we left.

"You shouldn't have bothered that Igorot. He's going to be hanged in the morning."

"Does he know it?" I asked.

"No, no. That would be too cruel, to know that you were going to be hanged. No, he doesn't know."

"He was tried, wasn't he‘?"

"Oh, yes, he was tried. The judge decided."

"But they didn't tell him?"

"No, that would be too cruel. We are not a cruel people, we Filipinos?"

"Nobody said you were."

When we got outside again, we decided to walk back to Camp John Hay. There was plenty of time before noon chow. On the way, D'Angelo said that they didn't tell prisoners in France when they were going to be executed either. In America, of course, we always told our prisoners well in advance, down to the exact date and minute. We discussed which was the best way, whether to know or not, and concluded that the American way was best. How in the hell could a man sleep at night, knowing that any time someone could come in and put a noose around his neck?

"I'm sorry if I hurt that little fucker," Higdon said suddenly. "But I think I saved his soul. He doesn't know he's going to be hanged and he doesn't even know that what he did was wrong. They probably didn't tell him that it was against the law to eat his enemy, either. Jesus, what a fucking backward country this is! Can you imagine what this place'll be like when we pull out? As soon as they begin starving to death, they'll probably start eating each other again, and that little bastard's death will be in vain. It makes me sick to my fucking stomach."

"Don't look at it that way, Hig," D'Angelo said. "It's their country, not ours, and they're entitled to run it the way they want, just as we do ours. Besides, you did your Christian duty. So look on the bright side."

"Of course," I added, "you should've baptized him while ' you were at it-——"

"Jesus!" Higdon said, slapping his forehead. "I should of baptized him, shouldn't I? Let's go back!"

"It's too late for that now, Hig. That corporal wouldn't let us in again."

"I guess you're right. Besides, a baptism without total immersion is a half-assed way to baptize anybody, and they don't have any tank or water trough at the jail."

When we got back to the barracks, Higdon didn't go with us to the mess hall. He wasn't hungry, he said, and he had a headache. He stretched out on his bunk and put the pillow over his face.

"You know," D'Angelo said after we sat down at the table and filled our plates, "that was the hardest I've ever laughed in my life. My stomach still hurts. But I don't think I'll ever tell anybody about it."

"Me neither," I said. "But I might write something about it someday."

"That's the best way, Will. That way, nobody'll understand why we laughed."

"Fuck you."

D'Angelo laughed, reached out, and speared another pork chop.

FIFTEEN

THe NEXT WEEK D'ANGELO AND HIGD0N BOTH WENT back to Manila. I rode down on the truck with them to the bus station to say good-bye. I also got their addresses. I thought that if I went to Manila again on a three-day pass I might look them up. I knew I wouldn't, however, because life in the Army doesn't work out that way. A man is always making and losing friends, and most of the time he never sees the guy again. But when you do run into an old buddy again, you take up with him as though there has been no separation at all. I had liked both of those guys, and after the bus pulled out for Dagupan I felt oddly alone.

Before they left, however, a Filipino driving a battered Willys parked ahead of the bus and brought three gold ingots over to the bus driver. They were heavy, because he made three separate trips, carrying one ingot at a time. He dumped the ingots on the floor by the driver's feet, got into his Willys again, and drove away. The bus driver didn't sign for the ingots, and there were no destination tags on them either. They had been stamped with serial numbers, but that was all.

"You'd think there'd be an armed guard for all that gold," D'Angelo said. "That gold's worth thousands of dollars."

"They don't need no guard," Higdon said. "Luzon's an island. If someone stole it, where would he go with it? When we get down to Dagupan, some guy from the train will put it in the baggage car, and it'll be safe till it gets to Manila."

l'd never thought about it before, but there was very little crime in the Philippines. There were plenty of Filipino prisoners locked up in Bilibid Prison, down in Manila, but they were mostly there for crimes of passion, and very few for robberies, rapes, and hold-ups. When they got mad at each other, Filipinos had a tendency to carve each other up with a bolo, and women were more apt to reach for a bolo than a man. On the other hand, everyone was so poor there was very little to steal from one another, anyway. If a man stole something from a rich man's house, he couldn't sell it because he couldn't explain how he got it.

It was much too easy to get jawbone, too. A soldier could establish credit almost anyplace just by signing his name to a chit. If he couldn't pay at the end of the month he simply avoided that place until he could pay, and then his credit was good again. Filipinos were much too trusting for their own good. American soldiers, when they knew they were getting ready to leave on the next quarterly boat, frequently ran up big tabs during their last month, knowing that they had no intention of ever paying the bill. We even had a saying about this: "When the whistle blows [meaning the boat whistle], all debts are paid."

After being stung dozens of times, you would think that the Filipino bar owners would be more careful about whom they gave jawbone to, but they never seemed to learn. Having to depend upon one another for centuries had apparently destroyed their ability to use common sense in money matters. It also explained why the Chinese immigrants were so successful at business and the Filipinos weren't. Chinese gave credit, too, because that's the way business operated in the Far East, but they limited their credit severely. And somehow a Chinese store-owner always knew when a soldier had arrived and knew when he would leave. Chinamen rarely got taken. Of course, with c so many transients in Baguio, it was difficult to establish jawbone, but with my long leave I could have gotten credit if I had wanted it.

***

I WAS AT LOOSE ENDS AFTER THE BUS LEFT. IT WAS A beautiful sunny day, and there was very little humidity. I walked over to the outdoor skating rink, watched the skaters for a while, and then rented a pair of roller skates. The large plaza was paved, great for skating, and it didn't take long before I got the hang of it again. I hadn't skated since I was a kid, but there was music blaring from a pipe organ and plenty of room to experiment. The sun was warm but the air was cool. There was no laughing or fooling around. The Filipino skaters, men and women, looked upon skating as a serious business. This was a place where they came to meet someone. A man would join a woman, and then, talking, they would skate together for a while. If they liked each other, soon they would be holding hands, or he would have an arm around her waist.

I started trailing a girl who was wearing a quilted jacket with a white rabbit collar and cuffs. She had on a short, pleated navy blue skirt. Her legs were long for a Filipino, although they were bowed slightly. She was cute, though, with dark, slightly flushed skin and mascaraed eyes. She was a much better skater than me, and when I attempted to get close to her, in an effort to come alongside, she would speed up slightly. Not too much, but just enough to keep me trying. She was playing, or teasing; that was unmistakable. She always managed to stay out of reach until I called out, "Okay, I'm giving up."

I was out of breath, so I skated over to the side of the rink and sat on a stone bench. She circled the rink again and then came over to my bench. She made a slow and perfect circle on one foot, spun around a couple of times, and stopped in front of me.

"I haven't seen you here before You are from Camp John Hay?"

I nodded. With my white sidewall haircut, it was obvious that I was a soldier in civilian clothes.

"Permanent party?"

"No, I'm on a six-week leave."

"Do you know the Mecca? I work at Mecca."

I knew where the Mecca was; it was one of the better restaurants in town, an upstairs café with a small dance floor and a six—piece orchestra. Every decent restaurant in P.I. had an orchestra;and the band members always wore tuxedos, even at noon. I had eaten pansit a couple of times in Baguio, but I was husbanding my money, so I preferred to eat free at camp.

"Sure," I said, "I know the Mecca."

"I have to go to work now. You come to Mecca tonight, and then we go out. Okay?"

"Why not? What's your name?"

"Maria."

"Okay, Maria. My name's Willeford. What time do you get off work?"

"Midnight. I'm cashier at Mecca."

"There ain't a hell of a lot to do in Baguio after midnight, is there?"

She laughed. "We find something to do."

She skated away, without looking back, and crossed the rink. She took off her skates with her key, slung them over a shoulder by the straps, and disappeared into the crowded street.

That's how my romance with Maria began, and at first it was a damned fiasco. It started to rain that night right after chow. By ten P.M. it was pouring down like a squall at sea. The rain was icy cold, and the strong wind made the trees sigh. I didn't relish the idea of going into town.

The last bus left camp at ten-thirty for its final round trip of the night, and came back from town at eleven. If I met Maria at midnight I knew that the least it would cost me was a three peso taxi ride back to camp. On the other hand, this girl—a woman really, she was twenty-two—excited my curiosity. She was a working girl, not a prostitute, and it was obvious that she wanted to get laid. She had as good as told me so. I caught the ten-thirty bus, wearing my G.I. slicker over my blue suit, and went into town.

I climbed the steep stairs to the second floor at the Mecca and got a table by the dance floor. There weren't many people in the restaurant, not on a wet night like this one, but there were four or five couples. The orchestra was playing a medley of show tunes from N0, N0,  Nunette, including "Tea for Two," and the bandleader was grinning and beating the air with his baton as if thefloor were crowded with dancers. Maria was standing behind the cash register. I signaled to her when I sat down and she waved back.

I ordered a gin highball and a chicken salad sandwich. Midnight came, and by then I had put away the sandwich and two more gin highballs. The place closed at midnight, yes, but it took her another half hour to check out the register with the manager. However, when the waiter gave me my check, and I paid him, she tore up the check at the register and sent him back to the table with my money.

I left him a good tip; I had a hunch I would be coming back. At last she put on a red raincoat, and we left the Mecca. Out on the street, she hugged my arm. "I didn't think you'd come."

The rain was still coming down hard, and I was feeling my drinks. I laughed.

"Why you laugh?"

"Ak0 malagaya ini ibig gita," I said.

"You make fun?" She dropped my arm and stopped dead.

"I hope so. Where're we going, anyway?"

"I thought my house. Okay?"

"Why not?"

I followed her lead for about ten blocks, cutting through narrow, stinking alleys and streets, and we finally arrived at her house. I didn't know, or care, where I was. She rented a room, she told me, which she had to share with three small children of the family who owned the house. I should have picked up on the implications of that, but I didn't. She told me to be quiet because everybody would be sleeping. There were about five or six bodies on pallets and covered with blankets in the living room, and I almost stepped on one when she opened the front door. We picked our way over and around them on the way to her room, where three children were sleeping under a comforter on the floor. There was a streetlight outside the window, but no curtains or blinds, and her room was as bright as if it had a three-hundred-watt overhead bulb. She started to unroll a mattress by the window.

"You want to do it with the children here?"

She nodded and put a finger to her lips.

"No," I said. "What if they wake up?"

"We must be quiet."

I shook my head. "Anybody passing by can look right in the window and see us, for Christ's sake!"

She shrugged and pointed to the curtain on the wall. She crossed over to the curtain, opened it, and beckoned.

It was a tiny bathroom, the kind with a hole in the floor  and two cross-hatched footrests. It smelled terribly, and there were a half dozen little piles of used toilet paper on the floor, too. The floor was wet, and there was a bucket of soapy water in one comer with a long-handled bottle brush sticking out of it.

"You must be very quiet," she whispered as she took off her raincoat. I kept mine on. The room was small, stinking, and I wasn't going to get down on that wet floor. Although there was no light in the bathroom, plenty of light filtered through the flimsy curtain from the bright

streetlight.

"Let's go out and get a cab," I said.

"All right."

She shrugged back into her raincoat, and we made our way out again, but not before I stumbled over a body in the living room and almost fell. These inert people didn't move a muscle, but I could feel the tension. They were all awake, all right. We walked about three blocks in the rain before we found a little Willys cab. After we got in, I told the driver to take us into the mountains and to find a level pull-off and park. He drove out of town for about a mile and then pulled off under a stand of dripping pines. If it hadn't been raining, I could have made him leave the cab and stand a dozen yards or so away, but I couldn't very well make the driver stand out in the rain. He turned off the overhead light and sat behind the wheel while I took off my pants and Maria removed hers. The driver was watching us in his rear-view mirror with a solemn expression. The meter ticked away. There was no way to do it in the little space we had. My legs were too long. The back seat of a Willys simply isn't designed for straight fucking. There was only one practical way, and that was to bend Maria over the front passenger's seat and come in from behind. But I didn't want to do that because the driver's serious face, when I bent over, would be right next to mine. Finally, I told Maria we would have to go outside. She stood on the running board, squatting slightly, and I stood on the ground. I would get it in, and then it would slip out again the moment she moved. The condom came off, and I put it on again. When I finally got a good position, my feet would slip in the mud beside the car, and then the condom would come off again. After a while I began to get tender, and I realized that I had scraped at least two tissue—paper layers of skin off the head of my dick. I was soaking and so was Maria. The rain, including the heavy drip from the trees, sluiced down my face and into my mouth. Maria's hair was matted, and her hiked wool skirt was heavy with water.

"I guess that's enough for one night," I said. We got dressed again, pulling on our pants, and she told the driver in Tagalog where she lived. He drove us to her house.

"I had a good time, Wirrafold," she said. "Tomorrow night at the Mecca?"

I nodded and grinned. "Tomorrow night at the Mecca."

The next night I rented a hotel room for two pesos before going to the Mecca. At midnight, when she finished work, we went to the hotel. The family she lived with was pissed off, she told me, and she said we couldn't go back to her place anyway. That's what I did for the next thirty days. I'd pick Maria up at the Mecca, take her to the hotel and screw her once or twice, and then I'd go back to camp and she would go home.

When I ran out of money, she paid for the hotel room, and I walked back to camp instead of taking a cab. Usually at the Mecca I would get something to eat and a drink or two on the house, because Maria would always tear up my check. We never talked much, but then we didn't have much in common. I wasn't interested in her Mecca Café gossip about the help there, and she wasn't interested in how much my golf game had improved. I was now breaking 70—on nine holes, not on eighteen.

If it hadn't been for High Commissioner Paul V. McNutt, our romance would have continued for the full duration of my leave, but because of McNutt I got kicked out of Camp John Hay a week early, and I never saw Maria again.

SIXTEEN

WHEN I READ TIME AND LIFE EACH WEEK, AS THE new magazines appeared in the day-room, I always looked first for news about the Philippines. At least once a month there was an item in Time about how Manuel Quezon, the canny little president, had managed to squeeze more money out of Uncle Sam. I never saw any evidence of this money being spent on the people in the islands, however. I had also read the Time story about the appointment of Paul V. McNutt to the position of high commissioner of the Philippines. According to Time he was "tall, tan, terriiic." The accompanying picture showed a tall, stooped man who had lost most of his white hair. But I guess he was handsome enough.

He was not, however, a terrific golfer.

When we found out that Paul V. McNutt and Bobby Jones, the world's greatest golfer, were going to play the course at Camp John Hay in the morning, everyone in camp wanted to get a look at Bobby Jones. A big group of people was at the first tee down by Charlie Corn's when the game began, but they weren't allowed to follow the golfers onto the course. No one else was allowed to play the course until they had finished, either. It was a matter of security, and the two V.I.P. golfers were accompanied by an M.P. major, a buck sergeant M.P. , and three Philippine Constabulary policemen in dark suits, white shirts, and striped rep neckties.

The best place to get a close look at Bobby Jones was from the front porch of the signal corps-men's little house. I took advantage of my acquaintanceship with these guys to join them. Our view of the ninth hole and green was perfect, and we could look straight down the steep hill and watch them tee off as well. It was almost ten-thirty before they reached the number nine tee, and by that time we had polished off at least half of a grande of A1—1A gin.

Fellows, the senior corpsman, a P.F.C., third class specialist, was singing verses to "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," and the rest of us (five guys altogether), who didn't know the words, chimed in on "big rock candy mountain" at the end of each verse.

The three plainclothes constabulary men came up the hill first and checked the nearby bushes and trees for lurking assassins. Then one of them came over to the porch and put his finger to his lips. He told us we must be silent when the golfers teed off below.

"Don't shush me, you gook motherfucker," Fellows said.

The plainclothesman let that go. The three of them took up positions on three sides of the green with their backs to it. The two Filipino caddies, carrying the clubs, also came up the hill and took positions on both sides of the green. They didn't take out the flag, because the golfers needed to see the tip of the flag from the tee below. Bobby Jones, wearing voluminous plus fours and checkered argyle socks with his golf shoes, and a V-necked sleeveless sweater, teed off first. His ball landed in the sand trap in front of the green. For Jones, it would be a simple shot to the green, and with his putting ability he had almost a cinch for a par three. McNutt, however, blasted off three times in a row, and each time his ball would hesitate a dozen yards below the sand trap, and then, slowly at first, start rolling back down the hill until it stopped a few yards in front of the tee. On his fourth try he hit the ball too hard, and it bounced on the green and continued into the rough on the other side of the green, finally ending up in the road in front of the barracks across the street.

All of this was pretty damned funny, especially after a few gulps of hot gin on a bright and sunny morning. The two golfers, trailed by the major and the sergeant, both in uniform, panted up the hill. When they reached the green, McNutt saw his caddy standing by his ball out in the road about forty yards away. He walked over and joined him.

Bobby Jones was a good-looking, chunky man, and not nearly as big as I had expected him to be. But at least I got a close look at him, and now I would always be able to say that I had seen the world's greatest golfer, in person, in action.

He clipped out of the sand trap, and his ball stopped about three feet away from the cup.

"Go ahead, Mr. Jones," McNutt called out. The caddy removed the flag, and Bobby Jones sunk the putt with a slight tap. Tap. Just like that. The ball zipped into the cup as if it had eyes. The world's greatest golfer!

Then McNutt hit his ball. It cleared the green, the sand trap, sailed down the hill again, and made it almost all of the way back to the tee. All of us on the porch laughed. Fellows' piercing, whinnying laugh was louder than the laughs of the rest of us. We wouldn't have been human if we hadn't laughed, even if we were enlisted men.

McNutt was game, though, and he would have gone back down the hill to address his ball if Jones hadn't stopped him.

"Take another one," Jones suggested, "and hit it from the trap."

McNutt's caddy handed him a ball, and McNutt tossed it into the sand trap. He managed to get out of the sand trap, just barely, and his ball landed on the rim of the green. He got his putter and tapped the ball. It went about three feet because he had topped it, and he was still twenty feet from the cup.

"Too bad, McNutt," Fellows yelled out. "A little more oomph and you woulda had that!"

I slipped through the door, went into the bathroom, and locked the door. I tried to open the window but it had been painted shut. Perhaps, I thought, they won't search the house. But I was wrong. A minute or so later the door handle was tried, and then someone rapped savagely on the door.

"I'll be out in a minute," I said.

"Open that door right now!"

I unbuckled my pants, dropped them, pulled down my shorts, and flushed the toilet. With my shorts and pants around my ankles, I hopped over to the door and opened it.

"What's the matter, sir?" I said, widening my eyes.

The M.P. major, his face red, was so angry he could hardly keep his hands off me.

"You're under arrest," he said. "Report to your orderly room immediately!" `

In the orderly room a second lieutenant who was the commandant of the casuals at Camp John Hay terminated my furlough, and I was given orders to return to Clark Field. A letter would follow, recommending squadron punishment. Major Burns, my squadron commander, was also directed to screen his personnel more carefully in the future before approving leaves to Camp John Hay. I protested my innocence to the lieutenant, saying that I had been in the bathroom and didn't even know that the High Commissioner and Bobby Jones were playing that day, but he didn't believe me. Fellows and another signal corpsman, being permanent party, received thirty-day restrictions to Camp John Hay. The other two guys, both on leave like me, were sent back to the 31st Infantry, also with recommendations for company punishment.

I didn't have a chance to say good-bye to Maria, and I felt bad about that. I had never kissed her, because a white man doesn't kiss a Filipino, but I regretted not being able to kiss her at least once. After all, the endearing way she pronounced my name entitled her to one good-bye kiss.

On my way back to Angeles on the train, when I considered the incident, I concluded that the M.P. major was the sensitive one, not the High Commissioner. McNutt had to know what a lousy duffer he was, and I doubt if he was ever told about our punishment. If he hadn't had a

keen sense of humor, he wouldn't have accepted the appointment as U.S. High Commissioner to the Philippines in the first place.

But Major Burns didn't have a sense of humor. When the letter from Camp John Hay arrived, a few days after I got back, I, too, received a thirty-day restriction to the post. I knew then, if I hadn't known it already, that I would remain firmly on the shit list for the rest of my tour in the Philippines.

***

OCTOBER 31, 1937, MARKED THE HALFWAY POINT IN MY tour. From now on I would be going downhill, starting on my final year, but I did not, like some guys, start counting the days: "Three hundred and sixty-four days and a meat ball!" A year is still a year, and each day, with the same hot sun, the same routine, was almost exactly alike.

Then, on December 12, the Japs sank the Panay, a U.S. Navy gunboat, on the Yangtze River. We listened to the news on the radio in the day-room. Everyone became excited and elated. Now we would get a chance to fight the Japs. The 31st Infantry was alerted, put into battle gear, and a naval transport was radioed at sea and told to steam into Manila and pick up these troops for China. Though the Sino-Japanese War had been going on for some time, no one had paid much attention to it before—but this was different; the stupid Japs had brought us into it.

The next morning, after we were marched to the hangars and told to go to work, about fifty of us (that's right, fifty out of the 120 enlisted men at Clark Field) ran over to headquarters, all of us wanting to transfer to the 31st Infantry so we could go to China and fight the Japanese. There were too many of us to go inside the building. The first sergeant told us to wait on the lawn, and that Major Burns would be with us in a few minutes.

At first, when the major arrived, he didn't know what to say. He said that it would be impossible to make out transfer papers for that many men. He did promise us that if the U.S. declared war on Japan we would all get our chance at killing Japs by sticking with the squadron. In a war, any war, pursuit planes would be required, and he needed us to keep the planes flying. And inasmuch as the 3rd Pursuit Squadron was the closest to China, we would

undoubtedly be going to China as soon as the 31st Infantry landed and secured an airfield.

Kossowski, the old infantryman who had been mowing the landing field for more than a year now, wasn't satisfied with this answer. He had never exchanged his light blue infantry hat cord for the darker blue one, with gold acoms, worn by the Air Corps.

"I can see why the major won't let his skilled mechanics go, sir," he said, "but some of us are trained infantrymen, and the Thirty-first will need us during the first days of fighting. Would the major consider letting ex-infantrymen put in for a transfer? Some of us, me for example, didn't join the Army to cut grass."

The major ignored Kossowski's legitimate request and went into a long speech. He told us that the chances of our going to war against Japan were negligible because we, as a nation, were not ready to fight a war. We had the smallest standing army per capita of any nation in the world. There were only a few soldiers for every million citizens. However, the sinking of the Panay would turn out to be a blessing. Now the Army, and the Air Corps, would have to expand. The Air Corps would double, nay, triple within five years, and we were all in on the ground floor. If we stayed in the Air Corps, he claimed, within five years all of us who were now privates would be sergeants. And he predicted that the crew chiefs, instead of being corporals, would have the grade of staff sergeants.

"Now go back to work," he said. "And if we, as a squadron, are alerted, I promise that you'll get plenty of action."

None of us believed the bullshit he had handed out, but he had had to say something. He couldn't let almost half of his squadron transfer to the infantry. What impressed me was that so many had shown up to ask for a transfer to an infantry regiment. It gave me another way of looking at these guys. I knew why I was there. I didn't join the Army to drive a gas truck, just like Kossowski, the former infantryman, hadn't joined the Army to cut grass, or Canavin to pound a typewriter. There were some highly skilled crew chiefs among the volunteers, and every man with any rank at all would lose his stripes and have to start over again if he was transferred to the infantry.

Even Old Patty was there, the World War hero from the Princess Pats. He was bragging in his squeaky old man's voice about what he would do tothe Japs once he got his bayonet sharpened. A strong wind would have knocked Old Patty over. Red Thompson, drunk and weaving, wearing his dirty undershirt and filthy khaki shorts, was also a volunteer. His gin-soaked breath alone would have done  a lot of damage to the Japs. Red Thompson was the only man there the major would have been happy to transfer to the 31st Infantry, but he knew he couldn't get away with it.

But nothing ever came of the Panay incident. A few days later President Roosevelt accepted a million dollars in reparations for the killing of the sailors and the loss of the gunboat, and the 31st Infantry never left Manila. Roosevelt was in his second term, the Depression was still in full force, and he needed the money more than he needed revenge. To prevent any future incidents, even the 15th Infantry (the "Can Do" regiment) was brought home from China and stationed in Fort Lewis, Washington. Our squadron wasn't even put on combat alert.

For a few days, however, the possibility of a war gave us a topic of conversation. As we sat around in the thatched huts on the line talking while the planes flew in the morning, I realized that being an enlisted man in the Air Corps was the worst place for a man to be if there was ever a war. In a war our airfield would be bombed and strafed (after all, that's what our pilots practiced doing to enemy airtields). Any enlisted man running around on the field would be killed. He would have no way to defend himself or to shoot back. I didn't know whether I would stay in the Army or not. I was going to wait and see how things were going back in the States before making the fateful decision. But I wasn't a fool. If I did re-enlist, I certainly wouldn't re-enlist in the Air Corps and become a defenseless sitting duck for some hot-shot Jap pilot.

***

AFTER CHRISTMAS THE 3RD PURSUIT SQUADRON WAS transferred down to Nichols Field, in Paranaque, right outside Manila. There we became just one squadron among several others, including an attack squadron, a bomber squadron with Martin B-10's, and a transport and service squadron. Not every man in the squadron went along, however. A few guys, like those men in Utilities, including Kossowski, the grass cutter, and the men in the fire department, stayed behind. Our squadron commander lost his second hat, as post commander, and became just another squadron commander at Nichols Field.

But I went, being the gas truck driver, although there were other gas trucks at Nichols. I was happy now that I drove the gas truck, and I got to drive it to Nichols from Clark, carrying all my stuff in the front seat with me. I would have hated to stay behind at Clark Field.

Paranaque was a suburb of Manila, and being in a city again would, I hoped, provide a little more excitement. The peculiar thing is that we were never told why our squadron was transferred to Nichols Field. This seemed strange to me, if not to anyone else. The Army never gave enlisted men a reason for any of the decisions it made. If a soldier knew why he was doing something or other, he would probably do a better job.

I never saw Canavin again. A few months later I got a postcard from him from Philadelphia. He had a job in a hardware store, and he was taking care of his mother and sisters again. I wrote back, telling him how things were going with me at Nichols Field, but he never  answered my letter. The Army lost a hell of a good soldier when they lost Canavin. If they had let him be a soldier, instead of making him pound a typewriter, they could have held on to him forever.

SEVENTEEN

THE BIGGEST ADVANTAGE IN BEING AT NICHOLS FIELD, compared with Clark Field, was that time passed faster. The biggest disadvantage was that more money was needed, and there was no way to make more. I had gotten used to living on very little at Clark Field, but there were a great many things to do in Manila, or even in Paranaque, right outside the main gate, and I was broke all the time.

I was no longer the only gas truck driver selling a little gas on the side, either. All of the other gas truck drivers had customers, and I ran into competition. Luckily, the mess sergeant in the attack squadron owned a Model A Ford convertible, and he preferred to lend the car to me one night a month instead of paying for the gas. All I had to do was to keep his gas tank filled at all times, and on paydays he would give me the keys. With the car I got to know Manila very well, from Dewey Boulevard, where all the rich people lived, to the outskirts of town, where the cabarets were. With the car it was no trick to pick up a woman. Except for an occasional taxi ride, a good many Filipino women had never ridden in a car before, and they were happy to give you a free piece of pookie just for the chance to ride around the city with their hair blowing in the wind. It was exciting for them to ride in a car. There is something about a convertible that attracts young women. All you have to do is stop and ask the girl if she wants a ride, and in she hops. It's the uniform, too. Perhaps it's the combination of the uniform and the convertible that attracts them.

Outside the main gate in Paranaque there were dozens of small bars, and seven whorehouses, all within walking distance of the gate. Some of the freelance prostitutes who hung around outside the gate were only twelve and thirteen years old. I never took one of these young ones home because they invariably lived with their parents in one room. A man would have to screw them in the room while the father smoked a cigarette and the mother cooked something or other over a charcoal fire, both of them watching. There would also be two or three smaller children crawling around on the floor. Most of the guys in the Army claimed that there was no line, but I maintained that there had to be a line somewhere, and one of the lines I drew was in not screwing children. I also drew the line at accepting free blow jobs from binny-boys. There were literally thousands of homosexual Filipinos in Manila. At night when you walked around downtown, especially if you were in uniform, a binny-boy would proposition you in almost every block. Many of them were well-dressed, too, men you would never suspect of being homosexual. In Los Angeles you could always tell a homosexual because they all wore red neckties. But you couldn't tell with Filipinos because there's a touch of effeminacy in all Filipino men. It's a kind of gentleness, really, a reluctant passivity, but this quality makes them seem effeminate.

One weekend I looked up Henderson, and we got drunk together. We went to the Santa Ana Cabaret, and when we ran out of money we began to steal drinks when the owners left them on the bar to dance. We got caught at that, and the M.P. who was stationed there told the manager he was taking us to the guardhouse. But he just drove us downtown and let us go. He told us not to go back there, and that if he ever saw us out there again he would prefer charges against us.

After he let us out and drove off, Henderson pulled an unopened fifth of Bell's Scotch from under his suit coat. At one point earlier in the evening he had reached over behind the bar and snatched it off the shelf. We climbed up on top of the wall around the walled city and drank the entire bottle. We awoke at four A.M., sick with hangovers, covered with mosquito bites, and without a centavo in our pockets. I walked back to Henderson's barracks with him in the walled city. He woke a friend of his and borrowed fifty centavos, which was just enough for carrimetta fare to get back to Paranaque. I was in time for breakfast, and then I had to go to work, even though I felt like I would die before eleven-thirty rolled around. I vowed then and there, no more Scotch.

I didn't see Henderson again until I met him on the boat going back.

At Nichols Field, Pilkington became my best friend. I met Pilkington at the squash court. A squash court is a rare thing on an Army post. Most people, in fact, have never seen the game played. It's expensive to build a squash court because there are four solid walls, and you go down into a pit on a ladder. The ladder, which is on springs, is then pushed up, and you are in an oblong room with a hard floor and four hardwood walls. You play the game something like handball, but with rackets, and you can hit the ball off all four walls. The ball is harder and livelier than a handball, and if you slam it hard enough it'll bounce off the forward wall at ninety miles an hour. The court at Nichols Field had been built for a former commanding officer who had since returned to the States, but very few people used the court after he left. It was hot down in that pit. When the temperature hit a hundred outside, it was another ten degrees hotter down in the court. After you played a half hour, prickly heat would break out all over your body and sting like crazy. But I had prickly heat all the time anyway, and I was determined to lose some of the weight I had put on and to get back in shape. I was also filling out in my shoulders and chest, and I could no longer get away with shaving only once a week. I now had to shave three times a week, including Saturday mornings before barracks inspections.

Besides, I enjoyed squash. I loved to whack the ball, especially when I could hit the floor-and-wall dead shot that killed the ball altogether. But it was hard to find anyone to play with, so most of the time I would go down into the court and bang balls around by myself for a half hour or so.

Pilkington, a clerk at headquarters, was also overweight, and he had learned to play the game in England. He was one of the most sophisticated guys I had met in the Army. Pilk had been all over the world, but he was only twenty-two years old. His father was in the diplomatic service, and Pilkington had always been with him in the various countries where his father had been assigned. Pilkington spoke French, German, and some Spanish, but he spoke German with a Viennese accent because he had attended a Gymnasium in Vienna, or Wien as Pilkington called it, for four years. He had then, after some months in England, been sent back to the States to attend a prep school in Massachusetts. His father wanted him to prepare for Georgetown so he could also become a diplomat. After a year at the prep school Pilkington had walked away from it and joined the Air Corps in Boston. After basic training he had transferred to the Philippines. Because he knew how to type they made him a clerk-typist in headquarters at Nichols Field.

Pilk was chubby, good-natured, with a soft, rounded gut, and he wore ugly wire-rimmed G.I. glasses. These steel issue glasses, with thick lenses, made his dark blue eyes seem almost twice as large as they actually were. When he removed them to play squash he resembled a different, handsomer person. G.I. glasses are all right for a man's vision, if the prescription is correct, but they are not designed for style. It would be just as easy to design attractive glasses instead of these wire-rimmed monstrosities so that soldiers who have to wear glasses would look better in them, but I don't suppose that this will ever happen.

At first Pilkington was beating me every game, but I had more stamina and I was stronger, and when we played a fourth game I usually won it. I got better, though, and we soon played the same game (as I picked up pointers from Pilk) and then we were about even. Each game became a drawn-out contest, and sometimes I would win and sometimes he would. So we became good friends, so to speak.

After a game we would shower and go over to Charlie Com's for a beer or a Coke. Even when I was broke I could sign chits at Charlie Com's up to five pesos a month. Pilk's father, even though he was disappointed in him, sent him an allowance every month, and Pilkington also earned ten pesos a lesson for teaching a surgeon at Stemberg Hospital how to speak German with a Viennese accent. The doctor, a captain, was purported to be one of the top surgeons in the Army, and he had already established a  speed record at Stemberg for taking out appendixes and leaving the smallest scars. The Arrny likes to retain surgeons like him, and they were going to send him to Vienna to study at government expense for a year under some

famous Austrian surgeon. But the captain was vain, Pilkington said, and wanted to speak German, which he knew fairly well already, with a Viermese accent when he got there.

He was also a little crazy, Pilkington said.

We didn't become friends right away because we were feeling each other out. In the beginning I didn't like Pilkington all that much. He was a bigger snob than I was, and he hadn't learned, as yet, how to conceal his sense of  superiority from others. The police and prison sergeant had kicked him in the ass, and Pilkington wanted to get revenge on the dumb bastard.

Every morning a hundred or so Filipino prisoners from Bilibid Prison were trucked out to Nichols Field and turned over to Sergeant Amyx, the police and prison sergeant. He broke them into groups of twenty-five and assigned guards. The guard was armed with a riot shotgun and five brass double-aught shells. But the weapons were just for show. These short-term prisoners were so happy to get out of the dismal prison for a day of work they weren't going to run away. We used them on the post to steam-clean engines at the motor pool; to beautify the area by white-washing the rocks that lined all of the walkways; to collect garbage; and to scrub hangar floors with gasoline to remove grease spots.

We usually had from eight to ten Air Corps prisoners in the guardhouse too, but these G.I. prisoners did lighter work, like mowing lawns and picking up litter. Sergeant Amyx, who shaved his head andwore a walrus moustache, was a giant of a man with enormous arms. Every evening, with a fifteen pound boulder in each hand, he ran around the flying field, more than a square mile, pumping those big boulders as he ran. He had a mean streak, and would tighten the lawn mowers with a screwdriver so that the Air Corps prisoners could hardly push them. He could, with his great strength, push them easily, and he would laugh at the prisoners as they struggled on the parade field with the lawn mowers.

Sergeant Amyx had papers to prove he was crazy, and other papers, with a later date, proving that he was not crazy. Anytime someone disagreed with Amyx, which was seldom, he would say, "You're crazy!" When this accusation was denied he would pull out his papers and say, "I've got papers to prove I'm not crazy. Where are yours'?"

In this way, Amyx won every argument. Anyway, when Pilkington had his twenty-five prisoners lined up in a column of twos, ready to march them to the motor pool, it occurred to him that he had only five shotgun shells and twenty-five prisoners.

"Just a minute, Sergeant Amyx," he said. "You gave me twenty-five prisoners and only five shells. If they all start to run, I can only get five of them."

"You crazy bastard!" Amyx screamed. "You planning to shoot twenty-five men?" He came rushing over toward Pilkington with his huge fists clenched. Pilk dropped his shotgun and ran and Amyx chased him. They circled the guardhouse twice until Amyx managed to catch up with Pilkington and kick him hard in the ass. The kick sent him flying.

Calmer now, Amyx handed him the shotgun and said: "If they run, boy, just shoot the first five. I won't hold you responsible if the other twenty get away."

Pilkington had asked what he considered a logical question, although if he had thought for a minute, he wouldn't have asked it. With our own Air Corps prisoners, a man never guarded more than three at a time, and he usually only had two. Some of these prisoners would try to escape, and many of them were criminals. A couple had been sentenced to life imprisonment for rape and murder. They were still in the Nichols Field guardhouse, waiting for the next boat to take them back to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I would rather chase fifty Bilibid prisoners than these two killers. Besides, once the Bilibid prisoners got to the motor pool and were given various jobs, they scattered out and J there was no way to keep track of them all after a few minutes.

A But Pilkington felt humiliated by getting kicked in the ass, and he wanted revenge.

"There are at least a hundred guys," I told Pilkington, "who would like to get revenge on that crazy bastard. But I advise you to forget it. If we were in L.A., we could get a couple of cholos from Jacob Riis High to beat him up with bicycle chains, but you can't find any Filipinos here to go up against Amyx. And anything else you do would be too petty to constitute a satisfactory revenge. I say forget it. Just make a rule, like I have, not to ask questions of anybody."

"A man can't live like that, Will. Sometimes questions have to be asked."

"But not by you. Remember when you took basic? There was always a question or two you wanted to ask, but then, just when you started to ask it, some other asshole would put up his hand and ask the same question. Isn't that right?"

Pilk nodded and grinned.

Pilkington eventually gave up the idea of getting revenge on Sergeant Amyx. Pilk was bright as hell, but it takes a long time for a man to accept the Army way of doing things.

A week later Pilkington cut our squash game short. He had been playing poorly anyway, and I could tell that ' something was bothering him. After we showered and went over to Charlie Corn's he told me that he had been invited to the captain's house the night before for dinner.

Doctors in the Army aren't as rank-conscious as other officers, and they prefer to be addressed as "Doctor." Pilkington was the son of a highly placed diplomat, so it wasn't unusual for the captain to invite a private like Pilk to his house for dinner. In truth, Pilkington's social status was higher than the doctor's.

Ordinarily, Pilkington went to the hospital once a week to give the captain lessons in his oflice, so this was the first time he had been in the doctor's house. But when Pilk arrived, wearing a white sharkskin suit, he was so upset by some of the things the doctor showed him he could hardly eat his dinner.

The doctor, apparently, had access to unclaimed Filipino bodies in the Manila morgue. He had taken a couple of bodies home with him, ostensibly to make laboratory skeletons from them, but he had made a standing ashtray out of the bones of one body, using the foot, the leg, and the skull (hollowing out the top for a glass ashtray insert); and then he had used the skin of a woman's body he brought home to make wristwatch bands. He had given one of the wristwatch bands to Pilkington, and there were line dark hairs in the tanned skin. When Pilkington showed me the wristwatch band I could hardly believe it.

"I don't know what to do, Will," Pilk said.

"About what? The band? I'd keep it, if I were you, but I wouldn't wear it. People would think you were strange. But someday it'll be a nice souvenir of your two years in the Philippines?

"I don't mean the wristwatch band. I mean the captain. What he's doing with those bodies is morally wrong, and I was wondering if I should turn him in to my squadron commander. "

"Turn him in for what? He's entitled to take bodies home, you said, and no one else wants them. You can see bodies every week floating in the Pasig River. Studying anatomy is how a doctor learns his job, so if you stir up things you're liable to get into trouble yourself. What do you care what the crazy bastard does?"

"But that ashtray, I mean, that ashtray, it really got to me, Will. The skull was full of cork-tipped cigarette butts. Kools. The doctor smokes Kools."

"What did you have for dinner?"

"Steaks. Baked potatoes. Snow peas."

"What kind of steak?"

"Rib steaks. Beef."

"Are you sure?"

"Am I sure—?"

Pilkington began to laugh. "You sonofabitch! Yeah, I'm sure. But that's the last time I go to

his house for dinner."

"What did you talk about?"

"Wine, mostly. Rhine wines. I drank a lot of wine in Europe, although I'm not an expert on wines. But the captain hardly knows one wine from another. He's worked and studied so hard all his life he's been socially deprived."

"If he starts to show people his watchband collection he'll really be socially deprived."

We left it at that.

Something or other should probably have been done about that surgeon. But there are a good many crazy officers enlisted men know about who are never detected or reported. Officers superior to a junior officer can do something, but anything reported from below is considered prejudiced, and immediate steps are taken to cover up. I'm not sure that what the doctor was doing was legal. It may or may not have been, but as Pilkington said, it was certainly immoral.

Because he worked at headquarters Pilkington could get free tickets, and he got tickets a couple of times for the fights and we went. Flyweights, bantamweights, and lightweights mostly, but the Filipinos were good boxers even if their fights rarely ended in a knockout.

Pilkington also got us free tickets to see the world premiere of Lost Horizon. I don't know why Manila was chosen, but it was, and Pilkington got us two tickets way down front, in the third row. We had to crane our necks to look up at the big screen, but we sat there transiixed. The entire audience was mesmerized by this picture. Jane Wyatt swam naked in a wooded pool, and it was the first time I had ever seen a naked woman in the movies. Margo was in the movie, too, and I remembered her from Winterset. In Lost Horizon Margo lied to her boyfriend and told him she was young when in reality she was about a  hundred years old. The audience registered horror audibly when Margo turned into an old lady on the screen right before our eyes, proving that everything the old Lama had said about Shangri-La was true.

I didn't fall for the analogy at the end. I knew where the real Shangri-La was—it was Camp John Hay, in Baguio. But unlike Ronald Colman, I knew I'd never get back to my Shangri-La.

EIGHTEEN

DURING THE FINAL MONTH OF A MAN'S TOUR IN P.I. he was relieved from duty. The Army figured that a man needed to pack, to get his affairs in order, and  the Army also knew that his work would be on the indifferent side as he began to count his dwindling days. My date of departure was October 31, 1938, having arrived on October 30, 1936.

Major Burns, our squadron commander, had left on the last quarterly boat, and I had thought that now I would finally make private first class, the grade my job as gas truck driver called for on the Table of Organization. But such was not the case.

In August I was relieved and sent to the motor pool, and another guy, a recruit named Daniels, with only six months' service, was assigned to the gas truck in my place. He was promoted to P.F.C. the same day, and I was given the rations truck run. The rations run was a plum job, but I had been cheated out of my deserved promotion. A  P.F.C. made thirty bucks a month, and that extra nine bucks would have made a world of difference to me. I also had almost three years' service, and it was embarrassing not to have a single stripe on my sleeve.

I mentioned the injustice to Pilkington, of course, but I didn't complain to anyone else. When new guys arrived every quarter, I was always pointed out to them as the guy who had shot the major's dog. I was a short-timer now, and the first sergeant had written me off. I liked driving the rations truck, and realized that I could have been given a much worse assignment. I settled in and made the best of it.

In the morning, right after breakfast, I would walk to the motor pool, check out my two-and-a-half-ton truck, and drive to the mess hall. The mess sergeant, Sergeant Travigliante, would give me the requisition for the provisions he wanted, and then I would drive down to the commissary by the dock in Port Area, across from the walled city. Once there, I waited my tum, together with all of the other rations trucks of the units stationed in Manila, and handed over my list to the N.C.O. in charge. He took the forms and gave them to his Filipino helpers, and they filled the ration boxes with meat, vegetables, and the other supplies on the mess sergeant's requisition. The Filipinos loaded the truck, and I drove back to the mess hall at Nichols Field. The Filipino K.P.'s unloaded the truck, and I drove to ·the motor pool. There, two or three Bilibid prisoners washed my truck, and I parked it. By ten-thirty every morning I was through for the day. I loved driving through the city in the early mornings.

While we, the drivers, waited for our trucks to be loaded, we congregated in a bar on the pier overlooking the bay and drank icy dark draft San Miguel beer from frosted mugs. I met some interesting guys from the other outfits in the bar, and it was always a pleasant hour of good conversation, or sometimes, when I had a few pesos, liar's poker. But I didn't have enough money to drink a beer every morning, much less two beers, as I preferred, so I began to wonder if I could make a little money on the side from the rations. On the list, if an item wasn't in stock, the N.C.O. in charge ran a red line through it on the form. The mess sergeant didn't get that particular item. Sergeant Travigliante had to reorder it the next day or else come up with a substitute. The N.C.O. at the commissary used a red grease pencil, and I asked Pilkington to get me one just like it at headquarters. All I had to do then, after my order was filled, was to stop the truck and red-line the items on the form I wanted to keep for myself. I wasn't greedy, nor did I want to affect the quality of the food in the mess hall—I ate there too—so I only red-lined a few items, and then only occasionally, things like a gallon of canned peaches or canned pears, or perhaps a pound or two of rat cheese. I sold these items to shack rats, whose girls liked sweet things to eat, especially canned cling peaches in heavy syrup. I made very little money on these petty thefts, but with the extreme heat down by the docks I deffnitely needed a cold beer or two while I waited around for my rations to be loaded.

I also drove back to Nichols Field as quickly as I could, and I picked a devious route that avoided stoplights. There were Filipinos in Manila hungry enough to jump into your stopped truck and throw down your ration boxes to waiting friends. Because I took an out-of·the-way route I never lost any rations. The only drawback to the job was that I had to drive to the commissary on Saturday mornings, too, which gave me a six day work week. On the positive side, I was excused from Saturday morning inspections. Our new squadron commander, a forty-year-old captain who had been passed over for promotion once and was terrified that he would be passed over again, which would put him out of the Air Corps forever, held  inspections every Saturday—in ranks, and in the barracks. Major Burns had only held inspections once a month at Clark Field, and sometimes he skipped a month. But Nichols Field was in Manila, and everything had to look nice all of the time in case some visiting V.I.P. came onto the post. Saluting was enforced, and a man had to be in proper uniform. If you wore civilian clothes, you had to wear a necktie. Red Thompson, gone, now, back to the States, wouldn't have lasted very long in this spiffy garrison atmosphere. There were M.P. foot patrols walking around the post, and strange officers, not from our squadron, were always looking for some enlisted man to pass them by without saluting. I liked it better this way. After all, if a man is going to play soldier, which is what Air Corps soldiers are doing, he might as well play by the rules. I missed the old houseboys we had at Clark, however; these new Manila houseboys never polished my shoes as well as the boys at Clark had polished them.

On October 1, when I was relieved from duty, I told the first sergeant that I wouldn't mind driving the rations truck right up until the day I left. But the first sergeant turned down my offer.

"Nothing doing, Willeford," he said. "I know you too well. If I didn't relieve you from duty, you'd probably complain to the Inspector General that I discriminated against you. Now, get out of here."

I didn't argue, because it would have been pointless. But I would never have gone to the I.G. about anything: the first sergeant misjudged me there.

Once a month an officer from the Inspector General's Department came on the post, and he sat in an otiice at headquarters all day, waiting to hear grievances from enlisted men. The date he was on the post was always printed on a memo on each squadron bulletin board, but no enlisted man in his right mind ever went to see him, Whether a man had a legitimate grievance or not, just to see the I.G. automatically marked that man as a troublemaker. From then on, his ass was up for grabs.

On paper, I guess the idea of an Inspector General's Department looks like a good one. The I.G., who is accountable to no one, can go right to the top to correct any and all complaints. But when he leaves, the man who made the complaint is still there. The only thing worse than complaining to the I.G. is to write a letter of complaint to your congressman. The congressman will take care of your complaint all right, but you will probably end up being transferred to some isolated station in Brownsville, Texas, or some other horrible place, and spend the rest of your enlistment guarding an empty warehouse on a midnight to eight A.M. shift.

One guy at Nichols Field, a parachute rigger, wrote to his congressman about some injustice or other, and was transferred to the morgue at Port Area. He spent the rest of his tour embalming dead soldiers and sailors who were to be shipped back to the States for burial. On the other hand, he learned a new trade, so perhaps he came out ahead of the game at that. But he was just the exception that proves the rule.

***

To GET SOME SPENDING MONEY 1 SOLD MY TWO LINEN suits, the blue one and the oyster-colored one, and all of my civilian shirts, socks, and neckties. Wearing my uniform, I would ride into the city with the new rations truck driver in the morning, get out downtown, and spend the day in Manila. As a rule I ate lunch at the Steinberg Hospital mess hall, where no one ever checked on casuals in uniform, and then I would go to the Y.M.C.A. and get free tickets to a movie. Toward sundown I·would make my way back to Paranaque, take a swim in the bay, or perhaps help some of the guys who owned outrigger canoes secure their boats for the night.

I could have found a few bars in Paranaque where I could establish jawbone, and where no one knew I was leaving, but I wouldn't do that. Those small bars operated on a marginal basis anyway, and it would have been a chickenshit thing to do.

On my last night before leaving I spent the last of my money getting laid and bought a bottle of macakabuhay, a sweet wine with a low alcohol content. Three days out on the water I came down with a case of crabs, an infestation I had managed to avoid successfully for two years.

***

As SOON AS 1 PUT MY TWO BARRACKS BAGS AWAY ON MY assigned bunk in the forward hold, I made a beeline for the chaplain's office. Henderson was already there, and sowas Isaacs, the Q.M. man from Camp John Hay, in Baguio. The same chaplain was on the boat, and I realized that this poor guy had been riding the U. S. Grant for two full years. The chaplain was a bald, fat, genial Presbyterian, and he had mastered the art of delegating almost every one of his duties to someone else. Except on Sundays, when he held a fifteen-minute service on the afterwell deck for a handful of enlisted men, and the same fifteen minute service for a few officers and their wives in the officers' lounge, he didn't do a damned thing.

There were about eight hundred men aboard, and the chaplain could pick as many helpers from them as he wanted to maintain morale. He remembered the men who had worked for him before, so Isaacs got the newspaper again, and Henderson became a runner again. He had another guy to run the P.A. system and play records, a guy to emcee the soldier shows, and an experienced projectionist to show the movies at night.

As I saw all these jobs disappear (which meant being excused from K.P. and every other detail), I got a little desperate, and when my turn came to talk to the chaplain I told him that I wanted to form a choral group to sing at the G.I. shows. (The men who performed at the various shows that were put on during the voyage were each given a free carton of Red Cross cigarettes.)

"That sounds interesting," he said. "How many men will you need?"

"Five, at least. But I'll have no trouble getting volunteers if I have a pass to do some recruiting. Also, I'll have to rehearse these men."

Henderson, who was standing there grinning, put in a good word for me. "Willeford has a fantastic voice, Chaplain."

The chaplain shrugged. "Give him a pass," he told his assistant.

I got my pass, which excused me from duty and gave me free run of the ship, plus access to the mess hall for early chow. Being able to go to the head of the line was perhaps the best part of the deal, because the chow line usually took two or three hours to get through.

The day before we reached Guam, which was four days out of Manila, the crabs appeared. I went to the iniirmary, and the medic made me shave my pubic hair. He gave me a tube of blue ointment to rub into my genital area. Larkspur lotion is much better for getting rid of crabs, because you don't have to shave your pubic hair, but there was none available on a ship at sea so I had to undergo this messy blue ointment treatment. It worked, though, and in a few days the crabs were gone.

There was a G.I. show scheduled on the afterwell deck on the night after we left Guam, and I realized that I had to get some kind of singing group together. This proved to be more difficult than I had thought it would be. Soldiers like to watch these amateur variety shows, but they enjoy them most when they can boo and ridicule the performances. As a consequence, it's hard to get volunteers to perform. Even guys with good voices, or musicians who truly know how to play their instruments, are reluctant to appear. But there were several men who were flat broke, like me, who needed a free carton of cigarettes. I finally found three guys, all of them unhappy with the idea, and none of them could sing worth a damn. The only song I knew by heart was "A Tisket, a Tasket." I had learned this song by hearing it on the radio constantly all over Manila, as sung by Ella Fitzgerald. These other guys didn't know the words, so I got Isaacs to type them, and we practiced singing the song in the forward head.

The singers I had recruited were unhappy as hell with "A Tisket, a Tasket" but none of them had an altemative to suggest. I decided   would go on with just this one song, and then, if the audience wanted an encore, we could sing it again. I didn't expect an encore, and I was iight. When our turn came, we sang the song, reading the words from the typed sheets as we went along, and not only were our voices unharmonious, there was a slight feedback from the P.A. system, and that made us sound even worse than we were. We were booed throughout the song, and for the next few days, everywhere I went on the boat, guys would call out, "Hey, Willeford, did you ever find your little yellow basket?"

But I didn't give a shit. I had my pass; I could still eat early chow; I didn't have to pull K.P. in 110-degree heat; and I had a free carton of Chesteriields. I spent most of my time on deck, thinking. I was trying to decide what to do—get out, or re-enlist. A decision like this is not an easy one to make. Even soldiers with twelve and fifteen years of service call it the "horrible decision" that comes up every three years. By reading Time and Life I had kept up with what was going on in the States, and I knew that there was no improvement in the Depression.

If anything, economic conditions were worse now than they had been two years earlier. The Supreme Court was shooting down most of Roosevelt's government spending programs. I had learned how to drive a truck in the Army, but there were thousands of experienced unemployed truck drivers in the United States.

On the other hand, I knew I didn't want to re-enlist in the Air Corps. The only practical way to get ahead in the Air Corps was to become a mechanic. The only way to ensure advancement as a mechanic was to attend the Air Mechanics School at Chanute Field, in Rantoul, Illinois. But to get into the school, which already had a two-year waiting list of applicants, a man had to be a mechanic already. For a while there, the Air Corps had established an oil reclamation school at Chanute Field. Used oil can be cleaned and reclaimed and used again and again. The process would save the Air Corps thousands of dollars a year, and for a while it did. Then Standard Oil Company recruiters came to Chanute Field and bought the discharges of all the oil reclamation graduates, and gave them good jobs with their company, so the Air Corps had to reluctantly close the school. Standard Oil, naturally, didn't want the Air Corps to use reclaimed oil, so the Air Corps, unable to retain technicians, phased out its use of reclaimed oil. And this had been one of the few technical jobs in the Air Corps that had interested me.

I talked over my prospects with Coslow, the old guy who had been our squadron clerk at Clark Field. Coslow had twelve years of service, and he was big. He was about 250 pounds, and he had large puffy fingers, but he could type one hundred words a minute on a standard Underwood. When he was typing a long report, men would stand in the doorway and watch him, marveling at his speed. He used a method called the "rhythm system," which caused him to bounce up and down in his chair as he typed. With his big ass overlapping the typing chair, and bouncing and typing away, he was a sight to marvel at, all right. Coslow's real name was Costello, but when he enlisted the first time the recruiting sergeant had spelled it "Coslow" on all of the enlistment forms. Rather than change it, he told Coslow that he would just have to use the new name.

Coslow knew that he was going to re-enlist, and he was happy because this would be the first time in his military service that he would get an "Excellent" character discharge. Before that, the best he ever got was "Very Good," which had caused him problems in getting a waiver to reenlist. Coslow was a dedicated, but periodic, alcoholic, yet Major Burns, before he left, had given instructions to give Coslow an "Excellent" character. On paydays Coslow disappeared for two or three days to drink up his money. He then returned, and because he was now broke he worked hard all month, including putting in overtime. He accomplished more work than anyone else in headquarters, so Major Burns put him on an automatic three-day pass every payday instead of listing him as A.W.O.L. While he was in Wheeler Field, in Hawaii, Coslow had taken the Ten-Series ofiicer's correspondence course. He had passed all the tests with high grades, and he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the infantry. He had never served any active duty as an ofticer, but he was a reserve lieutenant, and if there was ever an emergency or a war, he would be called in as a lieutenant.

Coslow told me that the best job in the Army was to be a straight-duty infantryman. All a man had to do was to keep his rifle and his nose clean, and he would be let alone. But that didn't appeal to me. Coslow had loved being an anonymous infantry private, but because he got out of shape physically, and could no longer march twenty-five miles with a full pack, he had been forced to re-enlist in the Air Corps and take a desk job.

Henderson was planning to re-enlist in the infantry and go to Chilcoot Barracks, in Alaska. In Alaska infantryman were given ten-day hunting passes, and they could sell the valuable skins of the grizzly bears they shot with their Army rifles. During the summer months enlisted men were given time off to work as stevedores unloading ships and were paid union wages. During a two-year tour in Alaska, Henderson claimed, a man could make and save two or three thousand dollars.

"You'll freeze your ass off up in Alaska," I told him.

"So what? Think what you could do with two thousand bucks back in San Francisco."

"Think of all the things you'll have to do to make that two thousand. You'll freeze all winter, and in the summer, working on the docks, monster mosquitoes will suck out your last drop of blood. Besides, you'll still have to train as a rifleman, which means long hikes in freezing weather, and guard duty at night in snowstorms."

"What do you know about it? You've never been to Alaska."

"No, but I've read Jack London. Did you ever read The Call of the Wild, White Fang?"

"Those are kids' books. All I read is Tiffany Thayer."

"I've read him, too. The Old Goat, and Three Sheet. But he doesn't write about Alaska. And that's another thing, talking about Tiffany Thayer—except for Eskimos, who don't take baths, you won't get laid in Alaska either."

"I don't worry about gettin' laid. If there's an army barracks around, there'll be women within spitting distance."

Henderson was probably right about that.

***

I ALSO RENEWED MY ACQUAINTANCE WITH TULI0 Micaloni. He was no longer the same guy I had met on the boat coming over to P.I. He was still in good physical shape, except for a small beer belly, but his olive face was lined and drawn. His personality was subdued, and his sienna eyes had receded into his head. His skin was a couple of shades darker than I remembered, and he was no longer the cheerful person he had been two years earlier. His speech was slower, almost halting, and he rarely laughed.

What had happened to Tullio Micaloni was Fort Drum. On the way over, Tullio had thought he was going to spend a couple of pleasant years at Corregidor slapping Cosmoline on the artillery pieces, but he had been sent to Fort Drum instead. The big artillery pieces on Corregidor could easily prevent any naval invasion of Manila, but there was one blind spot, a gap that couldn't be covered by Corregidor's guns. So the Army had built a small concrete platform in the bay, armed it with some large guns to cover the blind spot, and then put a small complement of artillerymen aboard the concrete fort. Fort Drum could only be reached by boat from Corregidor. Some weeks, when the tide was running high and hard, or there were rough seas, and they couldn't send a small boat over to Fort Drum, supplies ran low. For recreation the men on the concrete platform had a sixteen-millimeter movie projector and two silent films. They alternated running these films every night. Tullio said that eventually every man knew what the actors and actresses were saying, and the dialogue bore no resemblance to the printed captions flashed between scenes.

The men Cosmolined the guns after breakfast, and then, at eleven A.M., a recorded bugle sounded "Beer Call." Fort Drum was the only camp, post, or station in the Army that had an official Beer Call. The men drank beer until lunch, and then, after eating, they were through for the day. They could sleep or drink more beer. Sometimes, Tullio said, they would fish off the rail if the bay was calm. Few fish were caught, but it was something to do. So long as a man had to site or stand around anyway, he might as well stand there with a fishing pole. But even when beer is only ten cents a bottle, twenty-one dollars a month won't last a man till the next payday. There are too many other expenses—laundry, toilet articles, cigarettes, losses at blackjack and poker—and a man needed a few pesos to spend when he took a monthly weekend pass to Corregidor. Some men, Tullio said, flat broke from gambling  losses, never left Fort Drum for the full two years. Tullio had only been to Manila once, although he went to Corregidor several times during his tour. During the rainy season, when it rained for eight or ten days in a row, life on Fort Drum became even more dismal. Tempers were short, and a good many fistfights broke out.

"I always looked forward to K.P.," Tullio said. "It gave me something to do."

I can't say that Tullio was unhappy, I can only say that he was resigned to whatever it was that was going to happen to him. When a man is resigned, it is not the same as being indifferent. Indifference means that a man has a choice but doesn't make it because he doesn't care. But when a man is resigned, it means that he has given up on the idea of making choices. When I thought about what had happened to Tullio Micaloni at Fort Drum, it seemed to me that common sense should have given the commanding officer at Corregidor enough insight to rotate the men at Fort Drum every thirty days or so. Any man can stand a month on a concrete rock without too much trouble, but to be stationed out there for two full years could only be considered by the man who was sent there as some kind of dire punishment. And if he was being punished, what had he done?— Not knowing, he would feel guilty for the rest of his life. I never discussed these ideas with Tullio, however. My tour had been so much better than his, there was no real comparison.

Tullio, as I mentioned earlier, was planning on re-enlisting, but his major concern was to get into almost any other branch of service except the coast artillery. His two years on Fort Drum had made him cautious, and he planned to wait until he got to Angel Island and see what the recruiters had to offer. Almost all the branches with vacancies sent recruiting sergeants to the island when a boat came in, because every outfit preferred a P.S. man to a recruit. Good deals were offered, like a ninety-day re-enlistment furlough before reporting to duty, and sometimes they had an open T.O. slot and could offer a man a P.F.C. or corporal rating to fill the slot. The trouble with a ninety-day re-enlistment furlough was that all of your furlough time would be used up in advance and you would then have to go three years without any more leave.

Tullio asked me questions about the Air Corps, too, but he was discouraged by the things I told him.

"No," he said with his sad smile. "I couldn't hack that kind of life, Will. Every man, even a private, should have some kind of self-respect. And a man who washes airplane parts in gasoline all day can't respect himself. I slugged my share of Cosmoline in the coast artillery, but all the same I was a gunner and I knew my job. If the time ever came to fire the damned piece I knew what to do and how to do it."

"You don't have to be a mechanic, Tullio. Parachute rigging, for example, isn't a dirty job. All you do is take the 'chutes apart periodically, and then refold them after inspection?

"Shit," he said, "if I had to do that all day, I might as well get me a civilian job in a restaurant making sandwiches. No, Wi1l, I'm a soldier, and I can't see myself sewing canvas with a needle and thread and folding over-sized handkerchiefs."

As it turned out, these conversations were academic. When I reported to Machine Gun Troop and had my first meal in the mess hall, the guy sitting across from me was Tullio Micaloni. But we didn't know, either one of us, that we were going to re-enlist in the cavalry. At the time, we didn't know what we were going to do.

***

THE MAJORITY OF THE MEN ON THE BOAT, AT LEAST those who were finishing their first enlistment, planned to get out and stay the hell out of the Army. All of us would have some money coming, thanks to the clothing allowance we hadn't used, and a few guys had even managed to save five dollars a month by putting it in Soldier's Deposits at four percent interest. I had never saved anything, but thanks to guarding my clothing allowance money, and with a month's pay coming in, I knew I would have close to a hundred dollars. With that much money I wouldn't have to re-enlist right away.

In the Philippines, when I had seen sailors in Manila pouring into the bars from their naval base at Cavite, all loaded down with cash they had saved at sea, I had considered re-enlisting in the Navy. It was a clean life, and sailors at sea ate five times a day instead of only three. But the thought of joining the Navy evaporated on the U.S. Grant.

The U.S. Grant was an army transport, not a naval vessel, but 120 sailors were in the ship going back with us to San Francisco. They had all completed thirty-month tours in the Asiatic Fleet. The Grant, in my opinion, was a horror ship. Anywhere below decks it was incredibly hot, with little or no ventilation, and there was a constant, nauseating reek of oil, paint, and vomit in the stale air below decks. Many guys who stood for two hours in the mess line, breathing that sickening oily air, couldn't eat the food when they got it. Sometimes a seasick soldier would get his food, sit at a table, and then vomit into his tray. When a man did that, the table cleared in a hurry.

We had salt-water showers, and after a few of these, red splotches would break out on your skin. It was impossible to get any lather out of the so-called salt-water soap they issued for the showers. Bunks were tiered, four or five in a vertical ladder, and they were so close together you had to get all of the way out of your bunk in order to turn over. And your two barracks bags were crammed into the bunk with you. Instead of sleeping below, I slept on deck until after we left Honolulu and it got too chilly. But the sailors, amazingly, thought the U.S. Grant was paradise. They were constantly exclaiming what a great ship it was, and how easy it was to do K.P. in the mess hall. The sailors carried everything they owned with them,

including their hammocks, and they would put their hammocks up anywhere and catch a few hours' sleep.

I talked to Henderson about these sailors. "If these sailors think the Grant is the best ship they've ever been in, can you imagine what it's like on one of those destroyers or battlewagons?"

"They like the Grant," Henderson said, "because they don't have to work. They don't mind pulling a day or two of K.P. because this trip is like a twenty-one-day vacation for them. On a regular ship they have to work four hours, and then they're off for eight. After a couple of years on a schedule like that, being off duty twenty-four hours a day seems like heaven to them."

"What about the stench below decks? They still have to smell it."

"Sai1ors can't smell anything. There are little sensor things in your nose, and after a time, like when you work in a sawmill town, these little sensors are killed. After that you can't smell anything." .

"But if you can't smell anything, you can't taste anything, either."

"That's right. That's why the sailors think the chow is so good on the boat. If you blindfolded a sailor, you could feed him shit and tell him it was mashed potatoes and he wouldn't know the fucking difference."

Henderson was probably right about the sensors in your nose, because toward the end of the voyage it didn't smell so bad below decks to me, either. I supposed that my nose had gotten used to the stench, but these joyful sailors, walking around the Grant with their moronic grins of happiness, put the idea of joining the Navy out of my mind forever.

NINETEEN

HENDERSON HAD A TEN-DOLLAR BILL AND FOR TWO days before we got into Honolulu I tried to wheedle a loan of four dollars from him. I didn't want to go ashore without a cent in my pockets. He didn't want to go ashore alone, and he knew I would pay him back when I got my discharge money, so he finally agreed to a loan.

He changed the bill in the Black Cat Café in downtown Honolulu and handed me four dollars. At the same time I saw the headline in the Honolulu Advertiser reporting the death of Thomas Wolfe from tuberculosis of the brain. I didn't buy the paper, but read the item on the top of the stack outside the café, and this news put a damper on my shore leave. Wolfe, who was only thirty-eight, was much too young to die, and although he wrote prose I identified with him as a fellow poet. A lot of his prose reads just like poetry, and there weren't all that many poets left in the United States. As if on cue, a black cloud came over, and a sudden rain pelted us for five minutes. The rain stopped abruptly and the sky cleared again, as it does in the tropics anyway, but I took the swift, angry rain as a bad omen.

Henderson, who only read Tiffany Thayer and Donald Henderson Clark, had never read anything by Thomas Wolfe, so I couldn't talk to him about the tragedy. Henderson bought a pint of Gamecock bourbon, which tasted as if it was half fusel oil, but it was the cheapest whiskey in the drugstore. We drank half of the bottle in an alley before walking to the Dee Rooms. The Dee Rooms was purported to be the best whorehouse in town, although I doubt if there was that much difference among them. The prices were all standard, a straight two dollars, no matter what you wanted, with a ten-minute time limit. The women were all fairly young, recruited from the States, and most of them had signed a one- or a two-year contract with the madam. On paydays they could take on fifty or sixty guys apiece from Schofield Barracks. In two years these young women made a lot of money; then they went back to the States with a nice dowry and married some gullible businessman. When a transport like the U.S. Grant came in, or naval ships came back to Pearl Harbor after a month or two at sea, these women really cleaned up.

Henderson got laid and made the ten-minute time limit with no trouble (if you didn't make it in ten minutes you had to fork over another two dollars), but I told Henderson I didn't think I could do it that quickly. Actually, I was embarrassed about my lack of pubic hair. A little stubble had started to grow again, but I didn't want some white American girl to laugh at me or to kid me about having crabs. Also, I was reluctant to pay two dollars after having paid only one dollar—or two pesos—for the last two years in P.I. A piece of ass would have to be twice as good, and I didn't think that was the case—not with their American hurry-up policy.

And these American girls, most of them from the Midwest, were large women, which meant bigger vaginas, not smaller, than the little Filipino girls had. So while I waited for Henderson, looking these women over, I decided to save my money. The girls all wore rompers, with ribbons in their hair, and even though they were young, they weren't young enough to get away with dressing like little kids.

When Henderson came out, I asked him how he had managed to beat the time limit, and he told me he had gotten a blow job.

"Jesus," I said, kidding him, "you paid two bucks for a blow job? You could've got one of the sailors on the boat to give you one for nothing."

"That isn't the same, you bastard, and you know it. These girls are pros. Try the one I had, Pepper, she's really good."

"No. What I really want is a fried egg sandwich. I've been thinking about a fried egg sandwich for the last three days. That, and a glass of milk."

Henderson didn't want to spend fifteen cents on a fried egg sandwich, but while I ate mine he grinned and said, "You bastard. You didn't want to get laid because you haven't got any pubic hair."

I had to laugh. "That's true. But I didn't want to spend two bucks either."

"Why don't you get a buzz job'? It's only four bits, and the girls are all Japanese."

There were dozens of buzz joints in Honolulu, but they did their best business between paydays. On paydays the men from Wheeler Field and Schofield usually got laid, but during the month, when they were mostly broke, they could only afford the fifty-cent buzz jobs. A buzz job was a speedy release, because the girl tongued a man hard and then, with a hand massager, gripped his dick and turned on the switch. It was an incredibly fast jerk-off with the vibrating massager on the back of the woman's hand buzzing away. A Japanese girl who knew how to handle the massager could get a soldier in and out of the room in less than two minutes. These Japanese girls, wearing kimonos, were very formal, and you couldn't touch them because their fathers and brothers hung around to prevent any trouble with the clients. But here I drew another line. A buzz job, I thought, was a demeaning mechanical procedure, for both the client and the girl. I wouldn't have accepted one if I could have gotten it free.

But I didn't mention this to Henderson. In the Army, if a man has scruples of any kind, his only protection against ridicule is to keep them to himself. I had already noticed the line that I had drawn for myself was getting narrower and fainter as time passed. If a man wasn't careful the Army could coarsen him, and I knew I had to protect my sensitivity if I was ever going to write anything first-rate.

At that exact moment I decided to get out of the Army. I didn't tell Henderson about my decision. In another five days we would be docking in San Francisco. When I was discharged, the chances were that I would never see Henderson again. Besides, what I did or didn't do was none of his business.

When we left the café, Henderson offered me the bottle, but I shook my head. "You keep it, Henderson. I don't want to get drunk. I want to go down and take a look at Waikiki Beach. I didn't see it the first time through, and I may not get another chance."

"I thought you wanted to go up to Schofield with me. We can look up some guys I know, drink beer all afternoon at the spiff bar, and we'll still have time to get laid again before we have to get back to the boat."

We had to be back on the ship by midnight because it sailed at sunrise.

"Why don't you go ahead," I told him, "and then we can meet back at the Black Cat about six. I don't want to spend my pass sitting around in a P.X. bar."

"I don't either, but I promised to look up these guys. They won't let us pay for the beer, either, so all it'll cost is the bus fare up to Schofield and back."

"I'll meet you at the Black Cat. I want to see Waikiki."

"There's nothing there but a strip of black fucking sand."

"So what? I'll always be able to say that I saw it."

"You could say it anyway."

"But it wouldn't be the same—as you said in the Dee Rooms."

Henderson was pissed off. He walked away without saying whether he would meet me at the café or not. Like most soldiers, Henderson hated to be alone, and the reason he had lent me the four dollars was because he didn't want to go into town by himself.

I've seen guys in the barracks who have had to take a piss wait until some other guy had to take one too before going to the damned latrine.

On the way out, I had been impressed by Henderson, by his know-how, by his insouciance, if that is the word, but I had changed during the last two years. He no longer impressed me. He hadn't changed, but I had outgrown him physically and mentally, and even in common sense. Any man who has just spent two years in the tropics had to be an asshole to go to Alaska.

But Henderson was right about Waikiki. It was merely a narrow strip of black sand. As long as I was there, however, I examined the luxury hotels. I suspected that I would have a different outlook on life if I could afford to live in one of these hotels. Despite the Depression, there were still a good many people with a hell of a lot of money to throw around. I sat in the lobby of the Royal Hawaiian to watch some of these rich people, and a minute later a man came over to my chair, flashed a badge, and told me to get out. I was in uniform, so he knew I wasn't a guest, but it irritated me that these rich bastards wouldn't even let you take a look at them.

I went back downtown and wandered through some of the stores. Everything in Hawaii was from twenty to twenty-five percent higher than it was in the States. Everything had to be imported by boat, so the people had to pay for the transportation costs. But the poor bastards at Wheeler and Schofield were still getting paid twenty-one dollars a month. Why didn't the Army offer a differential for soldiers stationed in places like Hawaii, where everything was more costly than in the United States? No wonder buzz joints had been created to meet the needs of underpaid soldiers.

Before going back to the boat I ate a steak and a baked potato. Then, because I didn't want my shore leave to be a total loss, I spent my last dollar on twenty candy bars. I distributed the candy bars in all of my pockets so I wouldn't look bulgy, and turned in my pass early at the gangplank.

The next morning I sold the candy bars for a dime apiece on the afterwell deck. Henderson was dead broke again, of course, so I gave him $1.50. He was so happy to have a little money again he forgave me for not meeting him at the Black Cat.

***

WHEN WE DOCKED IN SAN FRANCISCO THEY LET THE sailors off first, who were bused to Treasure Island. After the officers and the first three grades and their families disembarked, the rest of us, carrying our barracks bags, were disembarked alphabetically. The permanent party people at Angel Island were efficient at their jobs and were used to handling large groups of men. When we got off the Grant we had to march in a single file down three or four more docks to get on the smaller boats that would ferry us out to Angel Island. As we walked toward the ferries, whores were spaced along the docks, and they passed out cards with addresses of the hotels where they worked.

Finally, when we got to Angel Island, we were assembled in the large gymnasium, a  close-packed mass of about six hundred men. There was a big master sergeant, with a voice like a foghom, standing on a raised platform. He looked us over, not saying anything at first, until we quieted down. He didn't have to say anything because he was the meanest-looking man I had ever seen. When there was no longer a whisper from this mass of men, he told us what he was going to do.

First, he said, he had to call the roll, and then he would call it again for groups of sixty men, and a permanent party man would march us to our separate barracks. That man would be in charge of the sixty-man group for the entire processing period. He would see us through final physical exams, the buying and fitting of our civilian clothes, the finance office, discharges, and, in certain cases, re-enlistments. He would tolerate no grab-ass or noise, because the sooner he got through with the roll call, the sooner we would get our bunks and dinner.

"I'll call your last name first, then your first name and middle initial. You answer 'Here' if you're here. Any man who answers ‘Present,' ‘Yo,' or ‘Yup' will get a special check by his name on my roll. Later on I will make up a new roll from the list of names with check marks, and that list will be my shit list for the next two weeks. We only have one mission here on Angel Island, and that's to get your ass off the rock as soon as possible. If you cooperate, we'll get you out in a hurry. If you don't cooperate, I promise you that your life here will be hell!"

The silence, if anything, deepened. This big ugly master, sergeant with his deep, resonant voice had scared the shit out of every one of us.

Then the first name he called was Willeford, Charles R. I didn't answer immediately because I knew there were a lot of initials ahead of "W." He didn't repeat my name, and the pause wasn't all that long, but when I finally answered "Here," he said, in a sarcastic way, "Thank you."

A lot of men tittered.

"Front and center, Willeford!"

I picked up my barracks bags, edged to the outside of the group, and walked down to the front of the gym toward the platform, wondering why I had been singled out. I felt the eyes of everyone on me. Some of them, no doubt, probably thought that I was going to be punished for singing "A Tisket, a Tasket" during the three soldier shows that had been put on during the twenty-one-day voyage.

But when I got to the platform and looked up, the master sergeant beckoned to a medic, in whites, who was standing there with the other permanent party members.

"This man has crabs!" the master sergeant said. "Spray him!"

It was the low spot in my military career. There before all of those men I had to drop my pants while the medic sprayed my genitals with this oily spray in his Flit gun. He even made me turn around and bend over so he could spray me from behind. Everybody laughed, and who could blame them? If it had been someone else I would have laughed myself. What happened, I supposed, was that the medic on the boat had turned in my name for having crabs, and they were making sure they were gone by giving me this additional spray treatment. But there were better ways to handle it than that. For the next few days, whenever guys saw me in the P.X. or mess hall, they would point to me and snicker. When a man has been sprayed for crabs in front of six hundred men, it is difficult to hang on to any personal dignity.

***

BECAUSE EVERYTHING WAS SO WELL ORGAN1IZED, THE processing went fast. They had a clothing inspection and took back all of our uniforms except for one khaki shirt and one pair of khaki pants. I had wanted to keep my tailor-made pants and shirts, figuring that I could use them as work clothes if I got a job. I didn't mind the loss of my serge uniform. After two years in storage in the Philippines, it had gotten wrinkled and moldy anyway. We were allowed to keep two pairs of shorts, two undershirts, and two pairs of socks, but everything else was confiscated. There were nine Jewish civilian tailors to wait on us in the P.X. clothing department, and I selected an oxford gray flannel suit, a blue and white striped tie, a white shirt, and a pair of black wingtip shoes. I also bought a gray fedora with a black silk hatband. The tailors modified my suit for a good fit, and all of the clothes were charged against my discharge money and subtracted from my final pay. My new civilian outfit, altogether, cost me $21.25, but it would have cost more than that in San Francisco. I could have gotten a cheaper suit, but I wanted a good one that would last. I still had some civilian clothing at home in L.A., but I knew that none of my old shirts and pants would fit me now. I had grown another inch since I left, and I was twenty pounds heavier.

When I was paid off, and after I bought my Greyhound bus ticket to L.A., I had a fifty-dollar bill folded up and pinned inside my watch pocket, and five dollars and change in my pockets. It was an all-night bus ride down U.S. 101 to L.A., but I was so excited I couldn't sleep. After all, Los Angeles was a big city; surely, I thought, there's a place there for me.

TWENTY

MY GRANDMOTHER WAS AS HAPPY TO SEE ME AS I was to see her. We hugged and kissed each other and we both cried a little. But after we settled down and talked for a while I could see that her situation was worse now than when I had left. She had lost her job at the cleaning establishment, being replaced by a nephew of the owner, and the arthritis in her fingers was so severe she could hardly close her hands. My uncle still paid the rent and utilities on her cooperative apartment and gave her five dollars a week to live on. He still had his executive job with Southern Bell, but he also had a wife and three children to support. She had cashed in her insurance policy and had given him the money because a street assessment

in his neighborhood had to be paid or he would have lost his house. She cheered up a little when I gave her the fifty-dollar bill.

"By the time that's spent," I said, "I should have a job, and we'll be all right."

But things were not all right.

I took a battery of tests at the city's free employment agency on Hill Street, and the test-giver/interviewer, a heavy-bottomed woman in her late thirties, told me that I wasn't qualified for any of the few jobs they had on file.

She also told me that my fingernails were dirty.

"Fingernails," she said "are the first thing an employer looks at. So when I send you out on an interview, I want you to promise me that you'll clean your nails."

I looked at my nails, and they seemed clean enough to me. I felt like ramming all ten fingers up her big bureaucratic ass.

***

MY GRANDMOTHER STILL HAD HER PHONE, ON THE cheapest rate possible, $1.50 a month. You could make three calls a day, but if you made a fourth it would cost an extra nickel, and so would every additional call after that. We got around this restriction when we called people we knew by letting the phone ring once and then hanging up. Then the person we called, if so inclined, would call back. All of her friends knew the signal, but as time went along, she said, fewer of them returned her cails. She no longer had the money for giving dinner parties at home, which meant she couldn't accept any invitations either.

I had always called my grandmother Mattie, her first name, because she looked much too young to be a grandmother. And when she had gentleman callers, I always told them I was her nephew, not wanting them to know she was a grandmother. But she looked like a grandmother now. My mother had died in 1928, and Mattie must have been at least forty-eight then, so I now reckoned she was fifty-eight or perhaps older. Being that old, together with her crippling arthritis, made her chances of ever getting another saleslady's job seem unlikely. Mattie had sold millinery in the French Room of the May Company, where the cheapest designed hats sold for fifty dollars apiece. She had been on a commission as well as a salary. She had worked six days a week, Saturday being a big day at the May Company, and we lived well while she was working.

At one time, when I was small, our family had been fairly well off. That was when Mattie and my uncle and my mother and my stepfather, Joe, and I had all lived in a big house in Topanga Canyon. Everyone was working, and my mother gave piano, voice, and expression lessons at

home, so there were four good incomes coming into one house. We had a cook, a maid, and two Buicks.

But then my mother had died of T.B. My stepfather sold his garage and went back to New York, and my uncle got married and was transferred temporarily to San Bernardino. Mattie and I had still lived well in our apartment, but then the Depression came along . . .

***

ONE DAY, AFTER I HAD BEEN HOME FOR ABOUT A WEEK, the phone rang. It was Norma Shearer, the movie actress who was married to the producer Irving Thalberg. My grandmother talked to her for a while, and when she hung up there were tears in her eyes. "Miss Shearer called to ask after my health," she said. "Apparently they told her at the May Company that I had retired because of ill health. Poor dear, I sold her hats for years. God only knows what they'll put on that poor woman's head now!"

"It was nice of her to call you."

"Yes, I think so, too. Ordinarily I never accepted any Jewish customers, but Miss Shearer was a real lady."

Mattie tried not to let on, but I knew she was pleased because she called about six different people that afternoon to mention casually that Norma Shearer had called her that morning.

***

FINALLY THE EMPLOYMENT LADY SENT ME OUT ON AN interview. A taxidermist on Flower Street in downtown L.A. wanted an apprentice to sweep the store in the morning, to wait on customers, and to learn how to stuff birds. The store was dingy and musty. There was a dusty stuffed black bear in the unwashed front window, and dozens of glassy-eyed dead owls clutching wooden perches were on the plywood counter. The place looked as if it hadn't been cleaned in years. The taxidermist, an old man with a tic in his left eye, blinked and winked crazily at my discharge for about three minutes and then shook his head.

"It says here," he said, tapping my honorable discharge with a forefinger thick with dried glue, "that you're a chauffeur. I don't want a chauffeur, I want a taxidermist."

"I've never mounted any animals," I said. "But I could probably sell some of those stuffed owls for/you. Somebody should be pushing those owls."

"The owls aren't for sale." He shook his head. "They're mine, for display only."

"We1l, maybe the lady made a mistake sending me here. I guess she thought my fingernails weren't clean enough for a decent job. But thanks for considering me, anyway."

"I didn't say I wouldn't hire you. I just said that you,  being a chauffeur and used to driving around the city, might not like the confinement of a small shop like this."

"You're right. I walked downtown, more than five miles, so I'd appreciate it if you could let me have seven cents for the streetcar home."

He gave me a dime. The only major change in L.A. since I left was that they had raised the streetcar fare from a nickel to seven cents.

I walked over to Main Street and went into a long, narrow donut shop that sold five small donuts and a cup of coffee (no refills) for a dime. The donuts were much smaller than those in the Johnson's chain donut shop, but they were dense, and they stuck to a man's ribs. As I dunked and ate the donuts I felt as if I had just escaped from a cage. If the old man had offered me the job, which paid ten dollars a week, I would have had to take it. God, what a fate that would have been for a poet—stufling dead owls and rummaging about in a cigar box full of glass eyes!

As long as I was on Main Street anyway, I decided to see if the old recruiting corporal was still at his old stand at the P.E. Building. The corporal was gone, back to the coast artillery, I supposed, but there was a buck sergeant from the field artillery in his place. He was tall and thin and was wearing soft, pearly gray fox leggings instead of G.I. issue wraparounds. I tried not to stare at him as I lit a Chesterfield, but he grinned and beckoned me over.

"Well," he said, "you about ready to take out another stack?"

"Not yet." He had never seen me before, and I had I never seen him, but he knew that I was an ex—soldier, a P.S. man. I was pleased by the recognition.

"I guess" he said, "you were smart enough to join the Regular Army Reserves when you got out?"

"No."

He seemed surprised. "How could you pass up a good deal like the Reserves? You get a dollar a week, twelve dollars every three months, and don't have to do a damned thing to get it. Just sign up, stay home, and every three  months your check comes in the mail like clockwork. Most people I know, when they get a free check in the mail four times a year, forty-eight bucks a year for doing absolutely nothing, can always find a use for the money."

"Before I was in the Army I was in the National Guard, and I don't want to be tied down to drill every week."

"The R.A.R ain't the National Guard—" he spat into the gutter. "The Reserve is just that, a reserve. They don't go to meetings or ado anything else. It's found money."

"Let me think about it." I edged away.

"You know where to find me."

I don't know why I didn't take him up on the Regular Army Reserves. Because of the taxidermist interview I had my discharge with me, and he could have signed me up in minutes. But I was too uncertain about what I was going to be doing or where I would be living in three months. A man in the Reserves needs a fixed address to get the quarterly check. But it pleased me no end to be recognized as an ex-soldier. It's the way we carry ourselves, I supposed, our military bearing. I could feel my back stiffen as I pulled in my chin. I walked down East Fifth Street. Skid Row. The street was packed with bums. In addition to the thousands of Okies and Arkies who had drifted out to L.A., soon followed by the rest of their families, professional bums were wintering in L.A. , too. In the spring the professional bums would take the Poultry Route, hiking along the highway through the valley to Bishop, to Reno, and then into Utah, stopping at farms along the way for handouts. But now they were getting by on blood sales, mission handouts, and dinging in the streets.

There was a Skid Row employment agency on Los Angeles Boulevard (the Street of Forty Thieves, it was called, because of all the wholesale clothiers located there), and I wanted to see if any jobs were open. There were listings for dishwashers, busboys, and fry cooks on the blackboard outside the agency, but no interesting jobs. I went inside.

The man took one look at me, in my neatly pressed oxford gray suit, and shook his head.

"Not you, buddy," he said. "These jobs are for people who can't do nothing else."

"What makes you think I can do something else?"

"You got a suit. A hot-shot with a suit can sell Hoover vacuum cleaners and make a hundred bucks a week."

The man was a fool. Who in hell, in the winter of 1938, I could afford to buy a new vacuum cleaner?

I started back toward Main Street and bumped into Willie Taylor, Jack Taylor's older brother. Jack Taylor and I had gone to Menlo Avenue Grammar School and John Adams Junior High together, and had been good friends. Willie was ten years older than Jack, and a hero to both of us. A writer like Jack London could have made an interesting story out of Willie Taylor's rise and fall. Willie had worked for Safeway while he still attended Manual Arts High School. When he was graduated, first in his class, Safeway had made him the manager of the store, the youngest Safeway manager. He then put in an extra cash register in the checkout line, his own personal cash register, one the chain didn't know anything about. When people checked out through Willie's personal register, the money went into his pockets, not into the coffers of the store. After a year the store showed a loss, of course, and was investigated, but no one could figure out where the losses were coming from. No one thought about counting the cash registers and comparing them with the original setup. But finally a disgruntled employee Willie had fired, who had figured out the angle, tipped off the company and Willie was fired. He wasn't arrested, because Safeway didn't want the publicity, but he was blacklisted in the food industry. Because of his brilliance, Willie would soon get a new job in a grocery store. It usually took three or four days before Safeway found out he was working again and informed the store owner that Willie was a thief. He'd be called in and fired. Not being able to hold a job, and knowing nothing except the grocery business, Willie had quit trying. He stayed at home and drank muscatel wine.

Mr. Taylor, Jack and Willie's father,  had a modest income from an apartment house he owned, and he gave Willie a small weekly allowance. Willie didn't recognize me at first, but he remembered me as soon as I told him my name. We had often talked when I went to their house to get Jack for a softball game in Exposition Park. Willie was now about twenty-nine or thirty, but he looked closer to forty·five. His face was deeply wrinkled, and he was much skinnier than I had remembered him.

"What's Jack doing these days?" I asked.

"He went to sea. He's a mess boy in the Merchant Marine. He sent me a postcard from Hong Kong the other day, saying it isn't true."

"It isn't true. I just got back from the Philippines myself, and I can vouch for it. I spent two years over there."

"That long? I knew I hadn't seen you around the corner for a while, but I didn't know it was that long. " (The corner was Santa Barbara and Vermont, including Pop's Pool Room and Johnson's Donut Shop, where most of us had hung out in the evenings.)

"What're you doing down here on Skid Row, Willie? Did your old man finally kick you out?"

"No, I'm still living at home. I've got a job down here in a winery. It's just a temporary job, siphoning wine into one·gallon jugs, but I'm getting two bits an hour. You want to help me'? For every gallon you siphon, you can take a mouthful for yourself. I do."

"Sure."

I helped Willie, and both of us got drunk. I was siphoning zinfandel and he was siphoning burgundy. When we started giggling and laughing and began to miss the jugs with the hose, the owner fired Willie and threw us both out. We had been working in the back for more than two hours but the owner refused to give Willie the fifty cents he had coming, complaining that we had drunk twice that much in wine. It wasn't true, not when wine was only fifty cents a gallon, but we had put away a lot of it.

It had rained while we were in the winery, and L.A. is never ready for rain. The drains are inadequate, and the streets become flooded in minutes. The merchants along the street keep two-by-fours in their shops for these flooding rains, and put them out on the curbs to the street so people can come into their stores without getting their ankles soaked. The stream running along the gutter was a torrent. Willie and I were laughing about his dismissal, and I said that perhaps now he would be blacklisted from all the L.A. wineries as well as the grocery stores. He thought this was a funny remark.

About this time a one-legged man was coming down the sidewalk, making good time in the rain, using only one crutch. As he came abreast of us, Willie, for no reason that I know of, kicked the crutch out from under the guy's arm, and it landed in the gutter. The rushing water picked it up, and it sailed down the gutter like a speedboat. The one-legged guy hopped after it, cursing us and shaking his fist as he hopped along. I know this isn't funny (it's terrible), but we laughed so hard we got weak. Three Mexicans who had witnessed the incident came over to where we were standing. I was holding myself up with one arm around a telephone pole and clutching my sore stomach with my other hand. Two Mexicans grabbed Willie from each side, and the third Mexican hit Willie in the mouth. Willie's mouth began to bleed, and I jumped onto the back of the nearest Mexican, which brought us both down to the sidewalk. While I was on top of this guy, and punching him in the neck, one of the other Mexicans kicked me in the ribs. Willie, in the meantime, had kneed the third guy in the balls, so he was down, too, howling as if his ass had been turpentined.

A white Ford stopped at the curb. A cop in civilian clothes got out, flashing his badge. The activity stopped. The Mexican who wasn't hurt told the cop that we had kicked a one-legged man's crutch out from under him. The cop told the Mexicans to get lost. They left, two of them supporting the guy Willie had kneed in the balls. The detective told us to get into the back seat. We got in back, sobered a little, and Willie wiped his bleeding mouth with a handkerchief. The detective drove over to Figueroa and Ninth Street and parked at the curb. He turned around and said:

"East Fifth is my beat,. and I'm down there every day. If I see either one of you on Skid Row again, you're going to Lincoln Heights on a vag charge. And that means three days in the slammer, twenty-seven days suspended. You ever been in Lincoln Heights before?"

"No, sir," I said. Willie shook his head.

"I guarantee you won't like it. So as of now, both of you guys are washed up on Skid Row! D'you understand me?" .

We nodded and got out of the car. The cop was a big man, and looked as tough as he talked. I was completely sober now. I noticed that the sleeves of my suit jacket were torn loose at the seams under the arms. But my mind was bemused by what the cop had said.

Jesus Christ! I was only nineteen years old and I was washed up on Skid Row!

Hell, from Skid Row, there was no place lower to go. The absurdity of it hit me, and I started to laugh again. I laughed so hard I had to sit on the curb. Willie didn't laugh with me, but he sat beside me. He fingered his teeth to see if they were all there. They were, but his front teeth were a little loose.

"You lost your hat," he said.

I felt my head; the fedora was gone. "I can't go back for it, either, because I'm washed up on Skid Row."

"That cop didn't scare me," Willie shrugged. "I've been in Lincoln Heights before. I ate swordfish there for three days, courtesy of Zane Grey, who donates all the swordfish he catches to the county jail. They don't know how to fix it, though. They boil it, and that isn't the best way to cook swordiish. But if you're scared, Charles, I'll go back and find your hat for you."

"It wouldn't be there. It's a new hat. Somebody's probably sold it by now. Did you ever eat any dog, Willie?"

"Not yet."

"Dog's got to be better than boiled swordfish. Why did you kick that guy's crutch out from under him?"

"Why did it rain? Why did it stop?"

"What's that got to do with it?"

"Everything," he said. "Everything."

We sat there for a long time, smoking my Chesterfields, not talking, thinking our own thoughts. Then Willie got up, brushed off the seat of his pants, and started walking up Figueroa toward Eighth Street. I watched him go, but he didn't turn around and wave, and I didn't tell him good-bye.

TWENTY-ONE

IT DOESN'T PAY A MAN TO TAKE his worries too  seriously, but it didn't take much thought to realize that life as an L.A. civilian could only lead, at best, to bleaker prospects. When the fifty dollars I had given my grandmother was gone I would have to leave, and I didn't have anywhere to go. Job prospects were dismal for everyone, not just for me. Of the guys I had known most of my life, only one was working, and he had a low-paying job as a swamper on a Van de Kamp's bakery truck. The other guys, still living with their parents, or an aunt, or a divorced working mother, hung around Exposition Park in the daytime and around the comer at night. When they had a little cash, they shot pool or had donuts and coffee in Johnson's Donut Shop, but most of the time they just stood around in the parking lot next to the donut shop. If a man had no money at all, he wasn't cordially welcomed by Pop in the poolroom either. On the counter, Pop kept a water glass full of tightly rolled marijuana cigarettes, which he sold for ten cents apiece. Marijuana was an inadequate substitute for a gallon of wine, but a man can't graduate to drinking if he's broke. Reefers were for the kids still going to Manual Arts High in the next block, not for us, who were all men now, not children. But these guys, my age and older, still seemed like kids to me. Any man who has been a soldier feels superior to men who have not been in the Army. He has been tested, and they have not. It was also strange to call these guys by their first names again, after being used to addressing men by their last names only. And some of the nicknames, which had sounded natural in grammar school and junior high, no longer seemed germane. There was "Pep," who got his nickname in the seventh grade by falling asleep in center field during a softball game, and "Stinkbag," who never, to anyone's knowledge, skinned back or cleaned his uncircumcised cock, and Four-Eyes," who had worn glasses since the fifth grade. I could not bring myself to call a guy who now wore pleated gabardine pants and a necktie and looked as clean as anyone else "Stinkbag," so I called him Wayne, his real name. The other guys still called him "Stinkbag," and it didn't bother him a bit. I was still called "Sonny," but I no longer felt like a "Sonny."

Time meant nothing to these guys, either. I had been away for more than three years, and yet, to them my long absence meant nothing. Like Willie Taylor, they hadn't "seen me around the corner for a while," that's all. I resented their lack of curiosity about where I had been and what I had done, but my resentment was short-lived. I had outgrown these guys, and the only thing I had in common with them was a lack of money.

There were two or three girls I would have liked to see, but I couldn't look them up without any money to spend. A man should be able to buy a girl a Coke, or take her to a movie—something. But this idea didn't bother these other guys. They would drop in at a girlfriend's house, usually around suppertime, eat with her family, and hang around all evening listening to the radio or helping the girlfriend make fudge. The girls understood their situation, but I couldn't do something like that.

There was only one thing for me to do, and that was to re-enlist. It was as inevitable as doom.

That wasn't my intention, however, when I took the number 5 streetcar downtown to Main Street. I told myself I was going to talk to the recruiting sergeant about the Reserves. I would tell him I wanted some of that "found money" he was talking about. He remembered me when I came into the office and shook hands with me, ignoring  two other guys who had been sitting in the oflice when I arrived.

"You couldn't've picked a better day to come in," he said. "Let me see your discharge."

I handed it over. He read it and smiled. "I've got four openings this morning, but none in the Air Corps. However—"

"I don't want the Air Corps anyway. I'm not sure what branch I want, but I never want to wear dirty coveralls aga1n."

"You're down as a chauffeur," he said, tapping my discharge, "so almost anywhere you go they'll probably make you drive a truck."

"I just want straight duty."

"How about the cavalry? I can send you up to Monterey in the Eleventh Cavalry, and before you do anything else you have to learn how to ride a horse. Ever ride a horse before?"

"No. I was on a horse when I was six because a man came around the neighborhood with a horse and camera, and my mother had a picture taken of me sitting on the horse. My grandmother still has the picture, and I look scared."

"That's all the better. I'm a field artilleryman, as you can see, and the worst thing that can happen to a man is to already be a cowboy when he starts riding military style. He has to forget all the bad habits he's already leamed, so we prefer a man who knows nothing at all about horses, in the cavalry and in the Field Artillery both."

"What else is open?"

"Infantry, Panama, and infantry, Fort Missoula, Montana." .

"Montana? I didn't know they had any infantry in Montana."

"There's a battalion up there. It isn't bad duty if you like snow. During the winter they don't do much of anything because they're snowed in. And in the summer you can get hunting passes to shoot mountain sheep. And, of course, you've heard about the Thirty-third Infantry in Panama. Why don't you talk to the colonel?" the sergeant suggested.

"The colonel?"

·"That's right. Colonel Hanson. He's a cavalry officer, our L.A. recruiting officer."

"And I was wearing a beret," I said.

"A beret?"

"In the picture. The photographer didn't have a cowboy hat for me to wear, so my mother got her beret and put it on my head. A kid wearing a beret looks silly sitting on a horse, especially when he's scared. And I remember now. I was really scared." (I was nervous, or I wouldn't have rattled on like that.)

"I'll be back in a minute."

He went into the other office, and I waited. The two other guys, both eighteen or nineteen, sitting on the bench against the wall, looked frightened. One guy licked his lips and looked at the door. If the recruiting sergeant didn't come back soon, that kid was going to bolt. But the sergeant came back and told me that the colonel would talk to me now.

I went into the colonel's office, wondering whether to salute or not. I wasn't back in the Army yet, but old habits are hard to forget. What the hell? I thought. I saluted the old lieutenant colonel and stood attention.

"Sit down, son," he said, pointing to his client's chair. He was old, truly old, with a close-cropped circle of white hair around a brown bald skull, and although he was fat, he looked sick. His tanned face was splotchy, and there were brown spots ("death marks," my grandmother called them) on the backs of his wrinkled hands. He was probably on the verge of retirement and they had assigned him to recruiting to fill in the bottom line on his last dance card.

He was wearing a gray gabardine shirt, highly pegged breeches, and a pair of boots, with chromium spurs, that must have cost at least a himdred dollars. The effect of his beautifully tailored uniform was spoiled by his paunch. It was like a basketball under his shirt. He folded his hands on top of it.

"Sergeant Morgan told me you were in the Air Corps, but that you now want to re-enlist in the cavalry. That  interests me. Most of the young men who come in here ask us about the Air Corps first."

"They probably associate the Air Corps with flying. I was in the Air Corps three years, but never had a plane ride. I drove a gas truck."

"I see, and you didn't like it?"

"It was an easy job, sir, but it wan't what I wanted to do as a soldier. On the other hand, I don't know anything about the cavalry. The Philippine Scouts at Fort Stotsenburg at least wore uniforms, not coveralls."

"You were at Stotsenburg?"

"At Clark Field."

"I commanded a troop in the Twenty-sixth Cavalry once. It was a pleasant three years for me, but I never made the polo team. I've won my share of ribbons in horse shows, but I could never hit the polo ball worth a damn. Of course, as an enlisted man, you won't be able to play polo, but you'll be able to enter horse shows. The Chamberlain seat is the answer to that. When you think your stirrups are too short, tighten them up one more notch. That's the secret to the forward seat. That, and good hands. But they'll teach you how to ride. You're a fine-looking young man, just the kind we like to get in the cavalry. I've been commanding this station for six months, and you're the first young man who's come in wearing a suit and tie."

I was glad now that I had sewn up the jacket seams under the arms, and that my white shirt was clean.

"What else," he said, "can I tell you about the cavalry?"

"How far is Monterey from L.A.?"

"I'm not sure. Less than three hundred miles, I'd say.   Why?"

"I live in L.A. with my grandmother, and might want to come home on a three-day pass. I rode down from San Francisco on the bus, but I don't remember coming through Monterey."

"That's because you didn't. Monterey's out on the peninsula. You probably came through Salinas, where they have the rodeo every year. That's another thing. You'll be able to_ride in the Salinas rodeo and make some extra money. Last year a trooper from F Troop, Eleventh Cavalry, won the Brahma bull-riding contest."

"Before I try the rodeo, I'd better wait till I've finished basic training first."

He laughed at that. Then he looked at his watch and got to his feet. I stood up too, saluted, and went into the outer office. He was right behind me, tapping his paunch with a riding crop.

"You got anything else for me to sign, Sergeant Morgan?"

"No, sir."

"In that case, I'll be leaving now. If you need me for anything this afternoon I'll be at the Standard Club." He handed the sergeant a dollar bill. "Before you send these men down to San Pedro, see that they get haircuts. It'll make a better impression down there."

The colonel returned Sergeant Morgan's salute and left the office.

The three of us spent about an hour filling out papers. Then Sergeant Morgan gave us meal tickets for supper and breakfast at the U.S. Café, and a ticket apiece to turn in to the desk clerk at the Roslyn Hotel. We would have a three-man hotel room for the night. Sergeant Morgan gave me seventy-five cents in change and told me to take the other two men (Shimer and Abbott) out for a two-bit haircut. After their haircuts, Shimer and Abbott both had to go home and get their mothers to sign permission papers for them to get into the Army. When we got downstairs,

I took them down the street to the Main Street barber college, where haircuts were fifteen cents apiece, or two haircuts for a quarter. I got the fifteen-cent haircut, with short sidewalls, and told the other barbers to give the same kind to Shimer and Abbott. This way I had thirty-five cents left over, which I retained. Sergeant Morgan, of course, had kept the other quarter from the colonel's dollar.

After we checked into the Roslyn and went up to our room, I told Shimer and Abbott that they didn't have to I come back that night. They could stay home all night if they wanted to, but they had to be back by eight in the morning. We could check out then, eat breakfast, and be back at the recruiting office by nine. Abbott had signed up for Fort Missoula, Montana, and Shimer was going to the 11th Cavalry with me. In addition to permission forms signed by their mothers, they also needed three letters of recommendation apiece. I told them how to write the letters.

"Just head the letter ‘To Whom It May Concern' and say ‘I think Shimer [Abbott] would be a good man for the service,' and get three neighbors to sign their names and addresses. "

They both wrote this information down on some hotel stationery, and Abbott asked me whether "service" was spelled with an "e" or a "u." (That question explained why the dumb bastard had signed up for Fort Missoula, Montana.)

"Don't worry about it," I told them. "These letters are never checked. So if you can't get three neighbors to sign them, just pick three names at random out of the phone book, in your neighborhood, and fake the signatures and addresses. "

But they were both certain they could get three neighbors to sign their letters. I left the room key at the desk, and we,all took off in our own different directions.

***

I WAITED UNTIL AFTER SUFPER BEFORE TELLING MATTIE that I was re-enlisting in the Army the next morning. She cried about it because she didn't want me to go. But after we talked, and I told her that I'd be able to come home every once in a while from Monterey, she became reconciled.

"After all," I told her, "the Depression can't last forever. Maybe by the time this hitch is over, the Depression will be over too. I can't stay here and live off you and Uncle Roy, and there's no way he can increase your allowance to include me. And even if he could, I wouldn't feel right about it."

At ten-thirty I packed my toilet articles, clean underwear and socks, and my other white shirt in a paper sack, and left,. Mattie insisted on giving me a dollar bill, even though I told her I didn't need it. I told her that I had to stay downtown at the hotel because I had to be at the oflice early. I didn't, but I couldn't stand the idea of another emotional scene, all over again, at breakfast. I felt lousy riding the streetcar downtown, and if there hadn't been other people in the car I probably would have cried. Shimer and Abbott didn't know how long three years in the Army could be—but I did.

TWENTY-TWO

WE STAYED IN THE CASUAL BARRACKS IN SAN Pedro for three days, just long enough to get physical exams, our typhoid and smallpox shots, sworn in, and measured for uniforms. Cavalrymen were only issued one uniform at San Pedro, however, because there was a shortage of cavalry boots. I liked the idea of boots instead of wrap leggings; they laced up the front, almost to the knee, and they were much more comfortable. Cavalry and field artillery uniforms were undoubtedly the handsomest uniforms in the Army.

Shimer, the kid from L.A., and I took the train together from San Pedro. We were given three silver dollars apiece, and sleepers in the Pullman car, even though we had to be awakened at four A.M. at Watsonville Junction. We waited at the junction station for a half hour for another train to take us on the spur line into Monterey.

After we reported into headquarters, at the Presidio of Monterey, we were both assigned to Machine Gun Troop. We joined a group of twenty or so recruits in a separate barracks squad-room behind Headquarters Troop. We ate at our regular troop mess halls, but all of us recruits in this large squadroorn were from different troops on the post, including the line outfits, A, B, and F troops. They were waiting for a complement of thirty new men, enough to form a platoon, before beginning our basic training. Micaloni was in this bunch too, as I mentioned earlier, and for more than a month he had been doing odd jobs and details while he waited for basic training. Shimer was only five foot seven, wore size eleven boots, and stuck to me like white on rice. When we came up on the train he bombarded me with questions about the Army, but I was as much in the dark about the cavalry as he was.

The other recruits came from all over California, not just from L.A. There were also two young guys, both nineteen, from Ogden, Utah. These two, Bartlett and Wilcox, were Mormons. Their parents had sent them away from home for two years without any money to be Mormon missionaries. They were supposed to recruit Gentiles, as they called everyone who wasn't a Mormon, into the Mormon Church. Broke, hungry, and tired after hitchhiking from Ogden to Sacramento, they gave up the idea of being missionaries, lied about their ages, and joined the Army.

These two guys were pitiful. They had failed their families and their church, and they felt guilty. When they finally wrote home and told their parents they were in the Army, their parents tore their letters into pieces and mailed them back. Sometimes, late at night, you could hear them crying in their bunks, trying to stifle their sobbing. I didn't know anything about the Mormon religion, but I thought it was cruel to send two penniless men away from home for two years to be missionaries. These guys were both from large families, and fairly well-to-do families at that, and had no knowledge of the outside world. How in the hell had the Mormon Church and their parents expected them to survive?

Another guy , Parker, was from a wealthy family in Glendale. He had spent two years at the Pasadena Playhouse, and had an Associate of Arts degree in acting. He was a handsome guy, in a chubby-cheeked way, and he had a wardrobe of expensive civilian clothes. But he hadn't learned a hell of a lot about acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. He could laugh at will, creating a half dozen different kinds of laughter, and make each one sound sincere, but his voice was too high-pitched to play any parts other than someone's casual friend. Unable to find any acting jobs, and unwilling to sell real estate with his father, he had enlisted in the cavalry. Parker hadn't given up the idea of acting; he merely figured that three years in the service would toughen him up and get rid of his baby face so he could eventually play gangster roles in movies. In this respect, Parker was one of the few guys I had met in the service with a long—range life plan.

The one guy in our basic training platoon became quite friendly with, in addition to Tullio Micaloni, was Eddie Furler. Furler was an ex-marine, but he had hated his life on an aircraft carrier and had re-enlisted in the cavalry after spending almost all four of his years in the marines at sea. Furler, Micaloni, and I were the only P.S. men in the platoon. When our platoon leader made the assignments, we were each made acting squad leaders.

I was at a disadvantage here because, unlike Furler and Micaloni, I knew nothing about the Springfield rifle, the .45 semiautomatic pistol, or the water-cooled .30 caliber machine guns, and they knew these weapons well. Even the close order drill I had learned in the Air Corps was of little help to me here, because dismounted drill in the cavalry was the same as the mounted drill. I also, like everyone else, had to learn the manual of arms, and Furler was of great help to me in this respect. When he brought his rifle to port arms and slapped his tightened sling, you could hear the crack of his palm against the sling five hundred yards away. It sounded just like a rifle·report. When he went through the manual of arms it was visual poetry, so precise and fluid were his movements.

One other guy I'll mention now is Jack Burns, who claimed to be an Indian. The other recruits took him at his word and immediately started calling him "Chief," which is the accepted practice in the Army when a man says he's an Indian. I suspected that the man was a Negro, not an Indian, although he wasn't much darker than the Portuguese fishermen who went out looking for sardines every morning from Monterey Harbor. But I kept my suspicions to myself.

Corporal Royale, our instructor and platoon leader for the ninety days of basic, was on his second enlistment. He had spent his first enlistment in the 8th Cavalry, in El Paso, and he had been promoted to corporal after only two years at the Presidio. I thought when he first took over the pla- toon that he was about thirty-five years old, and was surprised when I learned later that he was only twenty-seven. He was tall, two or three inches above six feet, and he had the lined and furrowed face of a Texan who has spent his entire life in the sun, which he had. His sun-wrinkled face made him look older than he was, but he was a fine-looking trooper and an excellent rider. He wore a pearl gray twenty-dollar Stetson campaign hat, which he had sent away for, and all of his uniforms were tailored. He wore a green gabardine shirt and high-pegged elastique breeches, and had somehow managed to obtain two pairs of the highly prized yellow boots. We were all issued brown leather boots, which we had to dye cordovan and then polish, but his bright yellow boots, which took a high shine and were of better quality leather than the brown boots, were no longer issued. If a man had a pair of the yellow ones he could sell them easily to another trooper for as much as twenty-five dollars. And Corporal Royale owned two pairs!

A tailor made gabardine shirt cost ten dollars and tailor-made elastique breeches were thirty-two dollars at the post tailor's shop, so a lot of Corporal Royale's salary had gone into expensive uniforms. The power in Machine Gun Troop, meaning First Sergeant Mike Brasely, was apparently grooming Corporal Royale for promotion to buck sergeant. That's why he had been assigned to give us our ninety days of basic training. Ordinarily we would have had a buck sergeant in charge. In addition to writing the curriculum, preparing lectures, and training us in equitation and everything else, Royale had to write progress reports on all thirty recruits. His reports would be used by the various first sergeants to determine what kind of assignments we would get when we were turned to duty. He had an unenviable job all right, and he was with us every day from First Call right up until he turned the lights out in our squad-room at nine P.M. For the next ninety days we were virtually prisoners, except for Saturday afternoons, when we were given passes at one PM., which were good until midnight. We had to be in bed every other night at nine PM.

***

ON THE FIRST MORNING OF TRAINING, WHEN CORPORAL Royale marched us in a column of twos to the Machine Gun Troop stables, where we would get our tack and be assigned horses, there was a great deal of tension in the platoon. None of us had ever ridden a horse, and those horses tied on the picket line loomed very large. But at least I felt like a soldier; I was wearing a uniform, complete with boots and necktie. We had our gray goatskin gloves tucked into our belts, and we had already been told that anytime we were mounted we would be required to have these gloves on our hands. This rule was stressed, so we had already checked one another out before we left the barracks to make certain we all had our gloves.

Another rule that was stressed was that we had to carry our curb chains, for the curb bit, in our right-hand pocket. These curb chains, which were attached to the curb bit by hooks, were heavy, and they were kept in the pocket to prevent rust or loss. If the curb chain got a little rusty anyway, the rust could be removed by keeping the chain in a Bull Durham sack partially filled with sand.

Corporal Royale had already shown us how to fold the chain inside the right fist, just in case we ever happened to get into a fight with one of the Portuguese fishermen in town. If you held it correctly, it worked better than brass knuckles, he said, and fishermen who had been hit with a drain-loaded fist rarely picked a fight with a cavalryman again. This was useful information, but we learned so much that first morning I wasn't sure I could remember it all.

The saddler, Baldy Allen, who was only five four, measured us for saddles. We were issued McClellan saddles, saddle blankets, our bridles with snaffle and curb bits, saddle soap, dock rags, and other grooming equipment. Corporal Royale checked us over to make certain we had everything we were entitled to and then taught us how to clean the saddles on the racks outside the stables for saddle equipment. While we were cleaning our equipment we were also leaming the names of the different parts of the bridle and saddle. We kept our  grooming tools, feed sacks, and nose bags in our saddle bags.

The cleaning took more than an hour, and then we were given racks in the tack room to keep our equipment. After a ten-minute break we reassembled at the picket line. Corporal Royale told us to gather around him as he taught us the parts of the horse, using a horse named Snip as his model. Snip, he said, was a ridgling. A ridgling, he explained, was a gelding that still had one testicle, but the testicle had never come down, being embedded in the belly—Snip had, in effect, one ball left after his castration.

He was sterile, however, and it didn't do him any good. Snip would get horny, though, when mares were in estrus. At such times Snip had a mean disposition. He was called Snip because he had a white snip on his muzzle. If a white spot was in the middle of a horse's head it was called a star, and if it was a long, skinny white line on his face it was called a race. If the white stripe down the face was a wide one it was called a blaze.

"Suppose," a kid named Hammond asked, "a horse happened to have a star, a race, and a snip? What would you call that?"

Hammond was a slight kid with glasses, who came from Santa Barbara. Corporal Royale looked at him for a long time, as if he were trying to memorize Hammond's face.

"Then the horse would have a star, a race, and a snip. But he couldn't have a race and a blaze at the same time."

(Corporal Royale, I thought, didn't understand Hammond's question.)

Corporal Royale pointed out that white markings on the legs were called stockings: quarter stocking, half stocking, and full stocking, depending upon how high the stocking came on the leg. Horses with large white spots scattered here and there on their bodies were called paints—paints were rare in the cavalry—and closely mixed colors like black-and-white were called blues, and mixed colors like bay-and-white were called strawberries. But basically a horse was black, brown, gray, or bay. The color of a horse's muzzle determined its official color, regardless of its other markings. That was because horses often changed body color between winter and summer, except for their muzzles, which remained the same.

"Suppose," Hammond asked, "a horse's muzzle also changed color? Would you have to change the horse's official color all over again?"

"A horse's muzzle," Corporal Royale said slowly, "always remains the same."

Corporal Royale named the parts of the head, beginning with the bump between the ears, which was called a poll. He explained that the manes were roached, being clipped every six or seven weeks. A roached horse was easier to groom and the horse felt better without a mane. He told us about the withers, where the leading edge of the saddle blanket was placed before saddling, and told us that the height of a horse was measured from the ground to the top of the withers, not to the top of its head. The measurements were in hands, and each hand was about four inches. So old Snip here was fourteen hands high, the width of fourteen palms.

"Why don't they measure the horse in feet and inches?" Hammond asked.

"Because," Corporal Royale said, "they're measured in hands."

Behind the back, or saddle, were the kidneys. One other thing we had to remember was that when we were sitting in the saddle and the horse was urinating, we should sit forward to make it easier for the animal to piss. Also, when in the saddle, a man shouldn't put his hand back and lean on the kidneys because the horse would buck. Then there was the croup, the tail (also clipped on each side), and the dock. Never call a dock an asshole because it was a clock. The dock was the last thing wiped when the horse was groomed because it got very dusty.

Corporal Royale reached under Snip and pulled out his sheath. The horse's cock was called a sheath, and he never wanted to hear anyone call it a cock, a dick, or a penis. It was always called a sheath. Snip's black sheath was about two and a half feet long, scaly and stinky. It smelled so rotten when Corporal Royale pulled it out that we all stepped back involuntarily. Parker even took out his handkerchief and held it to his nose.

"Snip's sheath needs washing," Corporal Royale said. "We usually wash the sheaths once or twice a year, using warm soapy water. And we also have to reach up into the urethra and fish out the button. The button is what we call the chunk of waxy substance about the size of a marble or a little bigger that builds up in there. It has to be fished out with a finger. The button, if it's allowed to remain, will make it difficult for the horse to urinate, so it has to be removed at least once a year.

"The stable sergeant's going to assign your horses now, so while he does that, it might be a good idea for you, Hammond, to get a feed pan full of hot water. Get some soap and a sponge, and wash Snip's sheath. Well, Hammond, what are you waiting for‘?"

"Yes, sir," Hammond said.

" ‘Yes, Corporal.' I'm not an officer, so I'm not entitled to a ‘sir.' Get moving. And when you're finished, tell me, and I'll inspect the sheath. I also want to see that button when you get it, understand?"

"Yes, Corporal. " Hammond's face, already pale, turned as white as toilet paper.

We went into the corral to get our assigned horses as the stable sergeant pointed them out to us, and Hammond went to work on Snip's sheath.

For the next ninety days no one, including Hammond, ever asked Corporal Royale another question.

TWENTY-THREE

IF YOU HAVE THE TIME, AND THE CAVALRY HAS ALL the time in the world, there's no better way to leam how to ride a horse than the cavalry way. Horses are big, and they frighten men who don't know anything about them. The first thing a man has to overcome is his basic, if unadmitted, fear of horses. We were all assigned to gentle horses, well-trained trooper's mounts, and most of them were at least twelve years old. Each horse had its own personality and peculiar ways, and these had to be learned. A man could get hurt very easily if he wasn't careful. A horse would bite, and a horse bite is painful because the horse won't open his mouth after biting down on you. He just clamps down, pulls his head back, and then his teeth slide off eventually. The result is a cruel and painful pinch;

If your foot gets in the way, he will inadvertently step on it; and he will not get off your foot until you push him off balance. Horses, as Corporal Royale reminded us often,  are incredibly dumb animals, with brains about the size of  a walnut, and although they can be conditioned to respond to a certain set of signals—e. g., a right leading rein, a left bearing rein, and a firm right legion the girth will make him turn right—he doesn't know why he does it, or why you made him do it, but he will keep turning in the circle until you give him a new set of signals he has been conditioned to—but enough of all that.

During our first week we just used blankets and surcingles (to keep the blanket in place), bridles with sname bits, and single reins. Getting up on a horse without a stirrup is difficult; and learning to keep your reins short at all times isn't easy either. On the first morning, on our way to the fenced-in riding ring on the upper parade ground, and riding at a walk, with our legs dangling, Hammond let his reins get too loose. His horse, Lefty, got the bit between his teeth, turned left, and galloped back to the stables. Hammond fell off long before Lefty reached the stables, and then he had to get the horse and lead him back to the riding ring.

"That's why he's called Lefty," Corporal Royale explained. "He's stable-bound, and if you give him the chance, he'll always turn left before he gallops back to the stables."

Hammond wasn't hurt—just a few scratches on his face—but he kept his reins short after that, as did we all. When one man was growled at for doing something wrong, we all learned not to make the same kind of mistake ourselves. There was some security in training by platoon, because you weren't chewed out as much as if you were getting individual instructions.

In the ring, on that first day, we had to learn how to vault onto the horse's back from behind. Bourbon, a quiet bourbon-colored horse, was used for this purpose. One man held his head and we took turns running from behind,  placing both hands on the croup, and trying to leap up onto his back. This was harder to do than it looked when Corporal Royale demonstrated it. It was a long way up there, and you had to land on either the croup or the back and avoid landing on the kidneys. If you got it into your head that he might kick backwards as you reached him, you wouldn't be able to vault onto his back because you would hesitate just long enough to muff it. Before the morning ended, all of us had managed to do it several

times except Shimer. Shimer, at five seven, was a little short, and he was frightened, with his legs and hands shaking before he made his runs.

"Don't worry, Shirner," Corporal Royale told him, not unkindly, "you've got ninety days to learn how to do it. And if you can't make it by then, Sergeant Brasely will transfer you to the infantry."

We spent the first week at a walk and at a slow trot riding in a circle. The purpose was to learn balance and stretch your legs. We all became sore and raw between the legs, but I'm sure my legs were stretched at least an inch by the end of the week. We also spent a lot of time grooming our horses and having them inspected by Corporal Royale. We had to pick up their feet and clean them, but the horses responded nicely to signals, so no one had any trouble.

My horse, Chesty, had ear warts, and ear warts are very painful to a horse. I had to learn how to bridle him without touching his ears. I did this by unlatching the left cheek strap. I slipped the bit into his mouth and pulled the head strap over his head without touching his ears. I then retightened the cheek strap and didn't have to touch his ears. This was important to  remember, because if Chesty's ears were touched accidentally, he would strike at you with both front feet. This was scary; a striking horse can split a man's head open.

I was a little disappointed at first when Corporal Royale told us that our horses didn't know who we were, that men and women were exactly the same to a horse, and that if you rode a horse every day for five years he still wouldn't know you from Adam's house cat. He had no way of telling one person from another. Unlike a dog, the horse couldn't smell you, and except for the difference in weight, he couldn't even recognize the difference between a man and a woman rider. He could respond to a tone of voice, but not to words. As long as he got the same set of signals, he would react as he had been conditioned. Some of the guys in our platoon didn't believe all this about their horses, but I did. I I didn't like Chesty any less because he didn't know me.

On occasion I gave Chesty a handful of oats or an apple core, but I considered the animal's studied indifference to me as a positive. Who in the hell would want a personal relationship with a horse?

***

WE SPENT ABOUT FOUR HOURS EACH MORNING WITH THE  horses, which included riding, grooming, and cleaning equipment. Riding every day explained why there were so few fat men in the cavalry. Except for a few dismounted jobs, like the supply sergeant, dining room orderly, and cooks, everyone else in the troop rode about three hours a day. A man could eat all he wanted, but daily riding kept his weight down to trim.

We spent the afternoons learning the parts, and how to field-strip our rifles and pistols. We also practiced dismounted drill in the afternoons, studied cavalry tactics, map reading, and military courtesy, and memorized our General Orders (which I knew already). One afternoon

each week was spent clipping horses at the stables. The horses weren't clipped in the winter, except for roaching manes. It was possible to get hurt clipping horses, too, because many of them didn't like it, but those who fought the idea were held still with ear or nose twitches.

Since I was broke, I didn't take any Saturday passes. I was waiting for payday, but payday came as a shock. Payday was a holiday, but it was a cavalry-style payday, meaning that we had to groom horses from 7:30 to 9:30 A.M. before marching back to the troop area for pay call.

Sergeant Brasely made his famous payday speech, and as I learned later, it was the same lecture every payday.

"If you're going to get drunk, get drunk. If you're going to get fucked, get fucked. But whatever you do, don't get drunk and fucked. If you do, you won't take precautions, and if you d0n't take precautions, you'll get a dose of clap. Some men'll tell you that a dose of clap's no worse than a bad cold. That's a goddamned lie. You'll be told by some men that they've had eight doses of clap and got rid of every dose but the first one. That's closer to the truth. Clap will make an old man out of you before you're thirty. So just remember the simple rule. If you're going to get drunk, get drunk. If you're going to get fucked, get fucked. But don't get drunk and get fucked at the same time!" .

Parker, the actor, was appalled by the first sergeant's speech. He had never heard anyone talk like that before, using such strong language. I told him if he ever got the clap and had to see Sergeant Brasely, he would probably hear language a lot stronger than that.

The shock came when we went through the pay line. Except for a book of show tickets ($1.20), laundry ($1.50), and dry cleaning ($2.00), and 25¢ for the old Soldiers' Home, I had a good chunk of pay coming to me. To my surprise, I was only handed $1.50.

"There's been some kind of mistake, Sergeant Brasely," I said.

"Not at all. The rest of your pay will be held until you finish basic. Step back a pace, salute the captain, and get the fuck out of the orderly room."

Back in the squad-room, Furler, Micaloni, and I met and talked about the situation. We had all received just $1.50. When pay call was over Corporal Royale gathered the platoon together and explained:

"Everyone gets a buck-fifty, and that's all. That's for your toilet articles, and if you smoke, Bull Durham. The rest of your money will be held in the troop safe. At the end of ninety days, when you finish basic, you'll all be given a three-day pass and the rest of your money. On the tenth, for those who feel the need, I'll be able to issue you a three-dollar book of canteen checks. But that's the way we work it here."

"That's one thing you can't do," Furler said angrily. "Hold back a man's pay. I'm entitled to my pay and I want it."

"That's tough shit," Corporal Royale said.

"He's right, Corporal," I said. "You really can't hold a man's pay for him against his will. There're regulations against it."

"But we're doing it," Corporal Royale said. "Any more questions before I give out passes?"

"Does the captain know about this?" Micaloni asked. Corporal Royale smiled and shook his head. "Do you think, you fucking wop, that we could withhold your pay `thout the captain knowing about it? I know how you feel now, but I'll tell you one thing: when you get your three-day pass and three months' pay at the end of basic training you'll thank me for holding it for you. So smile as you come by me now to get your pass, or I'll tear up your fucking pass."

I smiled when I took my pass, although I didn't think I would use it. After lunch I slept all afternoon. Then I borrowed a dollar from Parker, whose mother sent him money in every letter she wrote to him from Glendale, and I went into town with Micaloni and Furler. We each bought a package of tailor-mades, Dominoes for ten cents a pack, and then went down to Cannery Row. The sardine factories were in full operation, as they would be until midnight or later. At the first factory, where there was a covered overhead conveyor belt from one building to another, we started wheedling sardines, calling up to the sardine queens. These women ignored us at first, but they finally weakened and tossed down twelve cans of sardines.

We bought some onions, three loaves of Italian bread, and a gallon of zinfandel at the Chinaman's store on the Row, and went down to the curving Monterey beach. We built a driftwood fire, tore the insides out of the loaves of bread, and packed the loaves with layers of chopped onions and sardines. Sitting around the fire, we ate the sandwiches and drank the wine. It turned out to be a very pleasant payday, even though we didn't have enough money to get laid.

"This sure as hell beats the marines," Furler said. "My ass is sore as a boil from riding, but at least they don't have us on a four-on, eight-off schedule. That's something I never got used to in the marines. A four-hour watch, followed by eight hours off, sounds easy enough, but it isn't. You always have a lot of things to do during your off hours, and then, there you are, back on another four-hour watch before you know it. Except when I was on leave, I never had enough sleep. The four-on, eigh-off just goes on and on, month after month, and you think you'll go crazy."

We had plenty of things to talk about, as the wine loosened us up a little. None of us had thought that our training would be so hard, for one thing, or that Corporal Royale could get away with so much. For example, when Shimer moved his head while executing a right shoulder arms, Corporal Royale hit Shimer in the back of the head with a rifle butt, knocking the kid unconscious.

"He shouldn't be allowed to get away with shit like that," Micaloni said.

"In boot camp, anything goes," Furler said. "In a lot of ways, it was much worse than this at Parris Island. None of our D.I.'s ever hit anyone with a rifle butt, but they did things like making a man dig a six-by-six-foot hole to bury a cigarette butt. Here, at least, there's no chickenshit.

Everything's done for a man's own good. You'll notice that no one ever moves his head any longer when we go through the manual of arms. Sometimes a hard lesson is a good one for everybody."

"As long as it was Shimer," I said, "and not one of us."

We laughed at that. The wine had mellowed us, and the juicy sandwiches and the crackling fire had made us a little sleepy. Although we had all complained at first about the nine P.M. bedcheck, we were so fatigued each night that we were all ready for bed before nine. So at nine-thirty we kicked out the fire and made the long climb back up the hill to Machine Gun Troop.

TWENTY-FOUR

THE FIRST MONTH OF TRAINING WAS THE HARDEST. After a week with just a blanket and surcingle we got to put on our saddles, but without stirrups. The third week we were allowed to put the stirrups on the saddles, and what a difference they made!

"Stirrups," Corporal Royale said, "mark the beginning of modern warfare. Before stirrups were invented, men couldn't wear armor. And then, after armor was invented, someone had to invent gunpowder to blast through the armor. So stirrups were the tuming point for professional warfare. Now, kick your feet out of your stirrups again, pick up a slow trot, and I'll check for the correct length."

We could all ride at a normal trot now without falling off our horses. But from time to time we still had to ride at, a slow trot without stirrups. Then, after we got into posting, we discovered that we all had to tighten our stirrup straps another notch because we were learning the forward seat, the seat developed by Colonel Chamberlain at Fort Riley, Kansas. With your back arched, and leaning forward slightly, and with your shoulders pulled back, it seemed like an unnatural position at first. But once you learned how to do it, it was not tiring, and it was quite comfortable.

With shortened stirrups, and with your heels down, your knees were almost welded to the saddle skirt. We also added the curb bit and chain to our bridles, which meant an extra set of reins. We had to learn how to hold four reins with one hand, and with both hands. If, by chance, a man didn't have the four reins held correctly in the ring, Corporal Royale would ride alongside of him and knock him off his horse with a blow to the neck. I was never knocked off, but Hammond, Burns, and Wilcox were knocked off on the first day we had four reins.

We learned various drill formations, in and out of the ring, and some basic dressage. We had to learn how to make our horses go sideways, backwards, and take diagonals; and to mount and dismount from the off side as well as the near side. Then, while one man led our horse, we had to run beside him and mount at the trot. By the fourth week we were taking long rides through the woods, staying four feet from head to croup as we rode in a column of twos, and learning how to duck tree limbs. (A horse doesn't give a damn; he will ignore the fact that you're on his back and scrape you off if he can when there's a low-hanging limb.)

Trotting at nine miles per hour (an extended trot) was hard on the kidneys. After six weeks of riding I noticed that I was pissing blood in the morning. I wasn't the only one in my squad, so I mentioned it to Corporal Royale.

"Don't worry about it," he told us. "If you weren't pissing a little blood by now, after six weeks, I'd worry that you were doing something wrong. Your kidneys are settling down, that's all, and so are your other organs. You're going to have lower back pain, too, and that's to be expected. But after six months or so, every internal organ will shake down nicely and you'll no longer be bothered. You ass won't hurt, either, unless we ride twenty-five or thirty miles in one day, as we do when we go on maneuvers."

I was reassured, but not much. It hurt my back to bend over in the mornings to lace up my boots, and it's scary to have blood in your urine. I didn't relish the idea of having a sore ass for six months, either. But at least we knew that there was nothing physically wrong with us.

In the evening our recruit platoon had to stand retreat at five P.M. , although the regular troops did not. Our rifles were inspected and Corporal Royale looked over our uniforms. If a button was inadvertently left unbuttoned, he cut it off with his penknife and handed it back to sew on again before the next formation. Our boots, now dyed cordovan, had to be polished as well. We were off duty on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, just like the other troopers on straight duty, but if a man was gigged at these retreat formations, he had to clip horses on Wednesday or Saturday aftemoon as punishment.

After the eighth week, however, Sergeant Brasely inspected the platoon only one night at retreat, and after that he excused Furler, Micaloni, and me from the daily retreat formations. We were P.S. men, so we were given this small privilege during our last four weeks of training.

We ate at live-thirty, but supper was usually light because the big meal each day was at noon. If you ate a big dinner, you weren't very hungry at supper. But by eight-thirty or later a man would get hungry again, and it was tough to be broke and hungry at the same time. There was a small off-post café down the alley about three hundred yards away from the barracks. It was possible to slip through the fence at this point and get to the café. There were four small tables and a counter without stools, and the old lady who ran the place would give a man jawbone, up to one dollar a month. I got jawbone there the second month of training, but when the tenth of the month came around I had to pay Parker back the dollar I owed him. After paying Parker I only had one dollar in canteen checks left, and I needed that for Bull Durham and a new chin strap for my campaign hat. Because I still owed the old harridan a dollar, I could no longer go to the café at night, and I would hallucinate about her ten-cent hamburgers, piled high with fried onions, sliced tomatoes, and mayonnaise. At these times I truly resented the withholding of my pay. Some guys, if there happened to be fruit for supper, would sneak out an apple or an orange to eat later. But if the mess sergeant, "Thin Slice" Nevell, caught you, he'd gig you.

Thin Slice Nevell wasn't our regular mess sergeant. Our regular mess sergeant, "Hambone" Jones, was on a ninety-day re-enlistment furlough. Sergeant Nevell was a section leader, the junior sergeant in the troop, and he was filling in until Jones got back. In the cavalry, if a man has three stripes, he is expected to do any job that calls for three stripes. However, except for the first two weeks of each month, Sergeant Nevell didn't do a very good job of feeding us.

There were 120-some-odd men in the troop, and the mess sergeant was allowed forty-three cents a day for each man in ration money. He was given this money on the first of each month, and we ate very well at the beginning. Then, by the third week, when Sergeant Nevell realized he was running short, either through inept management or by feeding us too well during the first week, the meals became starchier and skimpier, and meat practically disappeared. During the last week he was big on beans, artichokes, and mashed potatoes, and instead of roast beef or pork chops for dinner he served fried baloney slices. It was easy enough to see how Nevell had earned his nickname. But he got better at it as time went along, and on Fridays he always served us abalone steaks instead of fish. Very few soldiers like fish, but it's traditional to serve fish on Fridays because of the Catholics. By serving us abalone instead, he maintained the seafood tradition and made everybody happy.

***

BECAUSE WE WERE STILL IN RECRUIT TRAINING WE WERE excused from K.P., but not from all other troop details. In addition to clipping horses, which was considered part of our training, we often had to groom the horses that hadn't been exercised in the morning.

One Thursday afternoon Wilcox and I had to help the stable orderly, a P.F.C. named Hampe, unload the semi-trailer of hay and straw and stack it in the barn next to the stables. Hampe  had a harelip, partially concealed by a ratty moustache, and it wasn't always easy to understand his garbled instructions. But we watched him closely and tried to handle our hay hooks the way he did. A bale of hay is 240 pounds, and a bale of straw is 120 pounds. Unloading the straw bales wasn't all that hard because a man can manhandle 120 pounds without too much trouble, but with the hay bales it was a different matter. The idea is to let the bale itself do most of the work and merely act as its guide, so to speak. Hampe, who had more muscles than brains, handled his hay hook with genuine artistry. He would knee a 240-pound bale of hay off the truck bed, jump down while the bale was still in midair, and then sort of dance the bale into the barn, steadying it here and there with his hook the way a male dancer handles a twirling ballerina. Once inside the barn, these bales had to be piled right up to the ceiling, and once again, when Hampe used his hay hook, it looked as if these bales were anxious to climb up there to please him. I got better at it before the afternoon was over, but Wilcox, the poor fucking Mormon, almost broke his back and strained a muscle in his side so bad that Hampe made him lie down for a half hour before continuing work. That night, after a long, hot shower, I was so stiff and sore I went to bed at six-thirty and didn't

move a muscle until the next morning.

I mention this hay detail because I'm certain that Hampe also put in a good word for me with the stable sergeant, telling him that I was a willing worker, and that was one more reason I ended up as Wheeler's replacement shoeing horses. As a stable orderly, Hampe worked a seven-day week. He was directly responsible for feeding all 160 horses, although the other members of the stable gang helped him hay and alfalfa them in the afternoon, and they also helped him muck out in the mornings. But Hampe was the only one who fed them oats twice a day, and he had to drive the wagonload of manure down to the railroad spur line and unload it onto the gondola. Using a pitchfork to throw heavy loads of straw-filled horseshit up on top of a gondola was a two-hour job, not counting the time it took to harness both draft horses to the wagon and drive down to the spur line in Monterey. Then when he got back, he had to unharness the horses, groom them, clean all of the hamess equipment, and wash the wagon. No one ever saw Hampe standing still. because he always had something to do, and he never got a day off. But the T.O. slot for stable orderly called for P.F.C., and a guy like Hampe, with his harelip, would never be able to get a promotion doing straight duty because it was next to impossible to understand what he was talking about—at least until you got used to him.

By the end of ten weeks I knew how to ride a horse. I still had a long way to go, and I knew it, but I was confident that I could stay on an animal, and I could jump the two-foot jumps without fear. I was anxious to try three-foot jumps, but Chesty wasn't that much of a jumper. Chesty was about 1200 pounds, and I was 165, so I had to ride him to get him over the two-foot jumps. The stubby G.I. spurs we had started wearing at the end of six weeks of training were a great help. When you wanted to move from a walk to an extended trot or a light canter, they made all the difference.

As our training drew to a close we talked about where we would go and what we'd do on our three—day pass. Parker invited me to go down to Glendale with him and stay at his house, but I turned him down. Micaloni and I agreed to go to Salinas together instead, rent a hotel room, and spend our money on whores, steaks, and bourbon.

Micaloni, after his two years on the concrete battleship in the middle of Manila Bay, wanted to make up for his deprivation, and I didn't want to spend most of my three days hitchhiking back and forth from L.A. A three-day pass was just that, because they didn't give us the weekend with it, which would have meant five days. We had exactly from six A.M. Monday until Thursday morning at six.

Before basic ended I had asked Corporal Royale if I could be assigned to his regular squad when training was over. It wasn't just a matter of picking a bastard you know over a bastard you don't know, it was something I had thought out. In a machine gun squad there are seven men or more: the corporal, squad leader; the number one gunner, a P.F.C.; the number two gunner, assistant, sixth class specialist; the number three, ammo carrier, private; and three horseholders, all privates. I had already figured out that Corporal Royale was next in line for the first available sergeancy as a section leader (in charge of two machine gun squads). When Corporal Royale was promoted, "Tootie" Colwell, the number one gunner in his squad, would probably make corporal. That would leave the number one gunner's spot up for grabs. Skinner, Royale's number two gunner, had failed to qualify on the machine gun during the last range season, and there was no way that they would make him a number one. In the day-room there were a dozen cavalry field manuals, and when I had nothing better to do I had been reading them. I read and reread the manuals on the .30 and .50 caliber machine guns. I had already memorized the parts of the machine gums, the gunner's rule, and the leader's rule, and I was determined to make expert on both machine guns when the time came to go to the range again. If Royale made sergeant, and if Tootie Colwell made corporal, and if I happened to be in that squad, I wanted to be the number one gunner and get that P.F.C. stripe.

When I asked Corporal Royale if I could get into his squad when we were turned to duty, he seemed surprised.

"Christ, Willeford," he said, "aren't you tired of listening to me by now?"

"In a way, yes, but I think you're going to be the next corporal to get a section. And when Colwell gets your two stripes, I want to be the next number one gunner in your squad."

He looked at me a little funny, and then he laughed. "I see what you mean, Willeford, but there are six corporals in the troop senior to me. I don't expect to make sergeant this enlistment. Right now, I can't think of a single sergeant in the troop who won't re-enlist to fill his own vacancy."

He was being modest. At least, this was the way I looked at the situation. Seniority didn't count all that much for corporals, except on day-to-day assignments. Once a man made sergeant, however, everything changed. Captain Bradshaw would promote any man Sergeant Brasely recommended. It was easy to see, from the way Brasely and Royale talked together about the progress we were making, and so on, that the Hrst sergeant had a lot of respect for Corporal Royale's ability. Royale was noncommittal and said he would see what he could do. Later on, when I came back from my three-day pass, I found myself assigned to Corporal "Kayo" Malin—'s squad. (I put a dash after Malin— because there were four more syllables in his Polish name, a mixture of k's, y's, z's, and ish's, and except for the first sergeant and Kayo himself, no one else could spell or pronounce his name right: so mostly he was just called Corporal Kayo or Malin. It occurred to me that I had made a mistake in asking Royale to get into his squad. He had probably considered me too eager.

***

MICALONI AND I HAD A GOOD TIME IN SALINAS. WE EVEN had breakfast served in our room in the Fremont Hotel. Our money went for whores, for the most part. There were several blocks of whorehouses in Salinas, and we spent the afternoons in the cribs instead of going down to the district at night with all of the lettuce pickers, artichoke choppers, and railroad workers. We wore civilian clothes, but the white stripes on our cheeks, left there by the chin straps we wore every day, gave us away as horse soldiers. We were out for a good time, not for any fights with Chicano field hands. There were several good bars in Salinas on the main drag; we usually just drank beer in the evening, listening to western music, and then, after a steak dinner, finished the evening with whiskey and water in our room.

A hot soaking tub bath; a pleasant buzz in your head from whiskey; a lazy rehash of the day's activities; that's all a man wants from a three-day pass.

I was, I must admit, a little disappointed in the Salinas whores. They were friendly enough, but these big farm girls from the Salinas Valley, unlike the women, say, in San Francisco, were not cut out to be professional prostitutes. These girls, I thought, if they had had a choice during the Depression, would much rather have had a job of some kind, or a working husband. But Micaloni, who liked big women and always picked the biggest and fattest women in each new place we tried, was just as happy as if he had good sense. Perhaps during his two years of exile on Fort Drum, with no women at all, he had fantasized about big women, and they had gotten bigger in his mind as the months passed; so here, at last, he had all of the fat women he wanted. I didn't say anything to Micaloni about his choice of women. A piece of ass still cost two dollars, whether the woman was large, medium, or small, or, as in one case, if she had only one leg.

Corporal Kayo, my new squad leader, was a sleazy amoral bastard, and I took an instant dislike to him. He was married to a whore on Cannery Row, and he owned a new 1938 Chevrolet. He was also the middleweight boxing champion of the Presidio and had never lost a fight. He had on two occasions been in a draw, and that was a source of irritation to him. Fights were held once a month in the large dance hall/recreation area on the post. Admission was a dollar. In the ten-round main event the winner got sixty dollars and the loser got forty. But if the judges and the referee called it a draw, the two lighters were paid only twenty dollars apiece. This rule may have been unfair, but it was designed to prevent fighters from coasting, so they went into the ring to win.

I disliked Kayo because he was a pimp—or what we used to call in the Philippines a bougau. I didn't want to be in the same squad with a corporal who pimped for his wife.

Wilcox, the Mormon, and I were both assigned to Kayo's squad as horseholders. The first thing Kayo told us was how fortunate we were to be assigned to his squad. Because we were members of his squad, he said, we could fuck his wife, Marie, on paydays for only a dollar instead of two. Marie worked at Flora Wood's house on the Row, and had to give that one dollar to Flora.

After being in the Army for as long as I had been I thought I had heard just about everything, but I was startled by this offer of largesse on Kayo's part. Wilcox, who was still religious, and still cried himself to sleep two or three nights a week, turned as white as a peeled almond. In fact, Kayo went on (not noticing how uncomfortable we were), he always drove his squad members down to the Row on payday in his car so that no one would have to walk.

A little numbed by this information, we just nodded, unable to come up with suitable replies. How a man could pimp for his wife was beyond my comprehension. I disliked Kayo, but Leech Quinn, the number one gunner in the squad, detested him. Quinn was nicknamed "Leech" because that is what he was, a leech. If you lit a cigarette, tailor-made or oll-your-own, he would say immediately, "Let me have the duck on that." He would stick to you like a leech, and even follow you to make sure you gave him the butt to smoke. Quinn never had any money because he was hopelessly in debt to the post tailor. As I mentioned earlier, a tailor-made green gabardine shirt cost ten dollars. The payments were taken out of your pay at the rate of two, three, or five dollars a month, depending upon the terms you arranged with the tailor. Quinn liked to wear tailor-made shirts with his gold P.F.C. stripes crossstitched in yellow thread on the arms. The poor bastard would order a tailor-made shirt. He would get the new shirt, wear it, and then toward the end of the month, being broke, would sell it to someone with money—usually Kayo—for five dollars in cash. Quinn would still owe ten dollars for the shirt, but he would order a new one, also on jawbone, so he had ended up owing the tailor for at least a half dozen tailor-made shirts. He didn't have money for razor blades, and he sharpened the one Gillette blade he did have on a piece of broken glass every morning. He used the strong brown G.I. soap in the latrine, and he even had to borrow shoe polish to shine his boots. He hated Kayo because the squad leader owned three of his beautiful green gabardine shirts, and yet he needed Kayo when he had to sell another one.

Later that evening, after Kayo left the squad-room to go down to Cannery Row, I asked Leech if he had ever fucked Kayo's wife.

"Once," he said, "but Marie's a lousy piece of ass and not worth the dollar. She chews gum and talks all the time you're screwing her, telling you how lucky you are to be in her husband's squad. When a woman talks all the time, it's hard to get off."

"Does Kayo hold it against you if you don't fuck her? I'd like to know the ground rules, and so would Wilcox here." .

"I do not lay with harlots!" Wilcox said. "He would have to kill me first!"

"What's the matter with him?" Leech said, looking at me.

"Wilcox is a Monnon."

"Oh. He won't kill you, Wilcox. And he doesn't give a shit whether you fuck his wife or not. If you do, Marie loses a dollar, but he wants us to be on his side, you see. If you don't, he'll just think you're an asshole for not taking advantage of a good thing. He sees nothing wrong with it. And he'll never hit you, because he's a professional fighter. If he ever hit you, he'd go to jail for assault with a deadly weapon, his fists. I have—" I lit a cigarette "—let me have the duck on that, Willeford—goaded the shit out of him, trying to get him to hit me. He ain't too bright, but he's too smart to take a swing at me."

"What kind of squad leader is he? Otherwise, I mean?"

"Good as any, I guess. He's been in the Army for nine years, so he knows how to run a squad. But Sergeant Dixon, the platoon sergeant, doesn't like him because he's a pimp, a Polack, and he goes to Mass."

"He goes to Mass?" Wilcox said.

"Every fucking Sunday. In fact, they're so short on Catholics on this post, half the time Kayo serves as an altar boy."

"If Sergeant Dixon doesn't like him, that kind of affects us too, doesn't it?" I said.

"You're fucking A it does. Watch how often this squad gets extra details. When the first sergeant isn't around, Dixon calls Kayo ‘Altar Boy' and then laughs like hell. How far down are you gonna smoke that thing, anyway?"

"Here," I said, "take it."

I arranged my stuff in my foot- and wall locker, feeling a little bitter.

Furler and Micaloni had both been assigned to squads in the .50 caliber machine gun platoon, and I was in a .30 caliber machine gun squad. At least I had a break there; it was easier to make expert on the .30 caliber than it was on the .50 caliber machine gun. If a man made expert on his assigned weapon, he was paid five dollars a month for a twelve·month period, so I had an advantage over them. I decided to practice dry-run manipulation of the machine gun every chance I got until we went to the range. As a horseholder I was armed with a rifle and a .45 pistol, so I also had another chance to make expert with the rifle. Everybody had a pistol, but the only men who could qualify for pay with a pistol were N.C.O.'s. With no hope of promotion in Kayo's squad, my only chance to make some extra money was to make expert on either the rifle or the machine gun.

Then my entire perspective was changed when I was told to report to the first sergeant in the orderly room.

TWENTY-FIVE

BECAUSE OF THE DEPRESSION, AND TO REDUCE government spending, every regiment in the Army had been reduced to eighty percent of its authorized Table of Organization strength. Officer personnel was also greatly reduced. Machine Gun Troop, which was entitled to have a captain, an executive officer, and three second lieutenant platoon leaders, had just one officer, Captain Bradshaw, our troop commander. The only time we ever saw any junior officers was when a reserve second lieutenant was called to duty for two or three weeks. N.C.O.'s did all of the work that would have been done by ofticers, if we had had any junior ofiicers. This personnel shortage made a world of difference in our day-to-day training and operations. Our assigned horses, unlike personnel, were up to full strength, and we still had to take care of them without the necessary manpower to do the best possible job. We didn't pack out and take the machine guns out every morning for drill because we had all of these extra horses to exercise. We trained only two or three days out of five, and on the other days we just went out for horse exercise.

Each man rode his own horse and led two more (except for N.C.O.'s, of course), and we spent the morning riding around and around in a huge sandy field about two miles south of the stables. Then we came back, cleaned our riding equipment, and groomed three horses apiece.

On the days we drilled, we packed out. There were three pack horses in a squad, one for the machine gun and two for the ammunition. We didn't pack live ammo on the pack horses, but we carried empty ammo boxes on them. As a horseholder, I had to lead an ammo pack horse and clean the pack-saddle as well as my own saddle when we got back. Drill consisted of putting the machine gun into action from a walk, a trot, or a canter. The hand signal was given for action front, left, or right. We reined to an abrupt halt at the signal. The number one and number two gunners got the machine gun off the lead pack horse and set it up in the direction indicated by the squad leader. Then we, the horseholders, took the reins of the horses belonging to the squad leader, the two gunners, and the ammo carrier, and rode to a place nearby under cover, if possible, but away from the machine gun. We dismounted and waited, holding the horses, until the squad leader blew his whistle before we mounted again and rode back. The machine gun was put back on the pack horse; everyone else mounted, and we were ready to go through the drill again.

From the time the squad leader gave the signal until the machine gun was set up and ready to fire took about forty-five seconds. If it took more than a minute to go into action, we all got our ass chewed out. Leech Quinn was so fast in setting up the tripod to receive the machine gun, however, our squad rarely exceeded forty-five seconds. Of course, for training purposes, we rotated positions. When my turn came with the tripod, my movements were not as precise as they should have been, so I often got my ass reamed. If I set the tripod up quickly enough, it wasn't always perfectly level. Or, if I concentrated on getting it level, I didn't get the legs locked fast enough.

There was also competition when the platoon, as a unit, went into action with all four squads at- the same time. Naturally, each squad leader wanted to be the first one to signal that he was ready to fire, and the slowest squad was chewed outby Sergeant Dixon, our platoon sergeant. Quinn may have been an asshole in economic matters, but his ability frequently saved us from getting extra flak from Sergeant Dixon.

I hadn't improved very much by the end of our first week of drill, but I felt that I was getting the hang of it. Then one morning, after horse exercise, while we were grooming horses on the line, Sergeant Dixon gave the order to "wipe eyes, nostrils, and dock." He then told me that Sergeant Brasely wanted to see me in the orderly room.

When a private is singled out that way, it's a scary business. On the way to the orderly room, double-timing down into the gully and up the other side to get to the barracks, I wondered what I had done. Somehow, when a man is summoned to the orderly room, he reverts to being a child again. Once in grammar school when a teacher sent me to the principal's office, I pissed my pants. To be on the safe side I took a leak in the latrine before reporting to the orderly room.

There were two offices in the orderly room, but the back office, which in other troops on the post was used as the captain's office, had been taken over by Sergeant Brasely as his own personal room. He had his bunk, footlocker, and wall locker in the room, plus a big easy chair and ottoman (which by rights belonged to the day-room), and two sets of bookshelves for his personal library. He also had dark blue velvet draperies on the two windows; and one wall had a G.I. blanket tacked to it, with all of his various horsemanship ribbons pinned on the blanket. Since he had taken over the back office, the front office was crowded because it now held the captain's desk and chair, as well as Brasely's and the troop clerk's desks. Sergeant

Brasely, the first sergeant; Sergeant Bellows, the stable sergeant; and Sokoloski, the horseshoer, plus the troop clerk and the charge of quarters, were packed in the small office.

When I came in, the charge of quarters left to distribute the mail, and the troop clerk went to early chow. The troop only got ten or twelve letters a day, and the C.Q., instead of holding mail call, usually just went to the various squad-rooms and put the letters on the recipients' bunks.

"Do you know Wheeler, Willeford'?" Sergeant Brasely I asked, after I reported to him.

"No," I said.

"He's the third horseshoer. He re-enlisted two days ago , and took a ninety-day re-enlistment furlough. To Buffalo, New York."

I nodded.

"Someone," Brasely said, "has to take his place in the stable gang until he gets back. Corporal Royale recomI mended you as a good worker, and that's what we want to talk to you about."

"I know this man," Sergeant Bellows, the stable sergeant, said, pointing. "Willeford. Your name is Willeford."

"I already told you before he reported to me that his name was Willeford," Sergeant Brasely said, turning to the stable sergeant and frowning.

"But I know Willeford from stable details. When he clipped horses at the stables." .

The stable sergeant knew my name all right. Sergeant Bellows, who had played football for IX Corps when the Army was still allowed to have a West Coast football league in the late twenties and early thirties, had been known as "Five·Yard" Bellows because he averaged five yards every time he carried the ball. It usually took the other team about two quarters to injure him enough to put him out of the game. As a result of all the physical damage he had taken for several years of ball-playing, he was a little punchy. Not much, but a little. When a detail came up to the stables to work, he would learn the name of one man in the group, and then he would call on that one guy, whose name he had memorized, to do everything that needed doing all afternoon. One afternoon the recruit platoon had ganged up on me as soon as we hit the stables. By calling out, "Hey, Willeford, got a match?"—"Wil1eford, what time is it?"—and so on, it didn't take Sergeant Bellows long to learn who I was. He had called me away from clipping horses several times that afternoon to perform other chores, simply because my name was the only one he knew.

"Men in the stable gang are highly privileged," Sergeant Brasely said. "They're excused from K.P. and guard duty and all other troop details. They eat early chow at all meals, and they don't stand Saturday inspections."

"That's right," Sokoloski said, raising the corners of his lipless mouth slightly. "The stable gang also gets to work a seven-day week, although, except for mucking out on Sunday mornings, they're off for the rest of the day."

Sergeant Brasely turned to Socky. "Do you want this man or not'?"

Socky shrugged. "I've got to have somebody. But I don't want some asshole in a size forty-four jacket and a size four hat. A man shoes horses needs some common sense."

"Do you know what common sense is, Willeford?" the first sergeant said.

"I think so."

"Well, I'll tell you anyway. It's the kind of sense that tells you the world is tlat."

"I know what you mean by that."

"Socky here is the best horseshoer in the regiment. I know you don't know the first thing about shoeing horses, but if you can't learn from Socky you can't leam from anybody. That is, if you're willing to leam."

"I'm willing to learn," I said, "especially if it's for the good of the troop. But what happens to me when Wheeler gets back from his ninety-day leave?"

"You go back to straight duty, but by that time you'll also know how to shoe horses."

"Back to Corporal Kayo's squad?"

"That's right. That is, if Wheeler comes back from his furlough. He left two days ago, with ten dollars in his pocket, planning to hitchhike home to Buffalo. There's about a seven-to-one chance he won't come back."

"If he re-enlisted, he has to come back, doesn't he?"

"Sometimes, Willeford, when a man's made it on his own for a couple of months on the outside, he doesn't feel any need to come back."

"Knowing," Socky added, "that he'll be shoeing horses for three years without another leave when he does come back."

"Third horseshoer calls for P.F.C.," Sergeant Bellows said.

"Do you mean I get promoted to P.F.C. now if I go to the stable gang‘?"

"No," the first sergeant said. "The rating still belongs to Wheeler. He won't be A.W.O.L.—that is, if he does go A.W.O.L.—until the ninety days are up. And, of course, he may not go A.W.O.L. at all. In all probability, he'll be back before his three months are up. Without any money, it's hard to survive for ninety days on the outside. No one knows for sure what Wheeler'll do."

"But if he does go A.W.O.L., then I'll make P.F.C.?"

"If," Sergeant Bellows amended, "you work out okay as a horseshoer."

"All right, then," I said, "what happens if Wheeler comes back? I go back to straight duty, and all the guys I took basic training with will be three months ahead of me. I'll be three months behind them in training and proficiency. If you order me to go to the stable gang, I know I'll have to go. But if I have a choice, what you're doing to me is handing me the shitty end of the stick. Deserting the Army is serious shit; but a man'll think twice before he deserts the Army, even though, as I understand things, they no longer look for deserters."

"I don't want a lawyer in the stable gang," Sergeant Bellows said, turning to the first sergeant. "I need a horseshoer."

"He's just showing a common-sense attitude," Socky said.

"Go outside on the porch, Willeford," the first sergeant said, "and smoke a cigarette."

I went outside, rolled and lit a cigarette, and sat on the porch steps. I didn't know why I had been singled out to Whee1er's replacement, but it seemed that whatever the reason, I was back in a familiar pattern. I had been singled out in the Air Corps to be a fireman, where there was no chance for promotion, and I had been fucked out of my P.F.C. stripe when they made me a gas truck driver.

Straight duty was the only path to advancement, and I knew it, but I had a hunch I was going to be in the stable gang whether I wanted to go or not. If I told them I didn't want to go, and they got someone else, I would then be on the topkick's shit list. I was in another no-win situation.

Socky opened the screen door and beckoned. I fieldstripped my cigarette and joined the group inside.

"Here's the deal, Willeford," Sergeant Brasely said. "I can't always make people happy, but I want them to be satisfied. If you work out as a horseshoer, here's what I'll do. When Wheeler comes back, I'll make you the next D.R.O. as soon as the job becomes vacant again. Dining room orderly, as you know, calls for P.F.C., but for some reason no one ever wants to keep the job for more than five or six months. But that will be a guaranteed stripe for you—that is if you work out to Socky's satisfaction. If you don't work out after a couple of weeks, you'll just go back to Kayo's squad."

This was a generous concession; after all, he didn't have to promise anything. All he had to say was "Report to the stable gang," and that would be it. However, the men in the stable gang, in close quarters and with regularly assigned jobs, had to get along. If one member of the stable gang dogged it, the other guys would have to pick up the slack. The D.R.O. job, on the other hand, was another dead end. Sure, it called for P.F.C., but when you got tired of working seven days a week taking care of the mess hall, cleaning the tables and sweeping and mopping the floors after every meal, and finally decided to quit, you lost your P.F.C. stripe to the next D.R.O. Then you would be back in your squad, no further along than before. Any asshole could do the donkey work of D.R.O., but only a donkey would want the job as a permanent assignment.

I shook my head. "That's okay, Sergeant Brasely. After thinking it over outside, I decided I'd probably like to learn something about shoeing horses. The more a man learns about horses, the better off he'll be."

"Okay, Willeford," Socky said. "Eat your chow, change into fatigues, and report to the horseshoeing shack by twelve-thirty. We've got us four horses to shoe this afternoon, maybe five."

"Should I move my stuff up to the stable shack?"

"Not on my time," Socky said. "You can move your stuff after chow tonight. Me and Halkins'l1 help you."

And that's how I became a horseshoer.

TWENTY-SIX

THE STABLE GANG, WITH ITS SQUALID LITTLE squad-room in the front part of the stables, was physically isolated from the rest of the troop. Because we always ate early chow, we were separated from the other men at mealtimes, too. I no longer saw any of the guys I knew, and I didn't make friends with the other members of the stable gang easily. None of them came from cities—they all had smalltown or rural backgrounds—and each man, in his own way, was self-absorbed. As a poet I too was self-absorbed, and I was aware of it, but these other guys didn't seem to be aware of their self-absorption. It occurred to me that that might be another reason the topkick had singled me out for the stable gang—thinking I would fit in okay with these other loners.

Sergeant Bellows was married. He worked an eight-hour day and rarely came around to the stables on weekends. Except for doing the necessary paperwork, he wasn't needed by any of us, beause we each had our own jobs to do. When certain things have to be done every day no matter what, close supervision is not required.

Baldy Allen, the saddler, had his own tack room, tools, and a large stock of leather. If something could be made out of leather, Baldy would make it. In addition to keeping all of the bridles and saddles in repair, he prepared extra halter shanks. In his spare time he carved leather wallets and elaborately intaglioed western belts, and he sold them to a clothier in downtown Monterey. Allen was an artist, all right, and he was the only guy in the stable gang besides me who ever read any books. He had John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat out of the library, and I borrowed it from him before he returned it. I liked the book because each chapter could be read as a separate story, and I was so tired I at night I could only read one chapter before I fell asleep. The little book also gave me some new insights into some of the other kinds of people who lived in Monterey, although they were not the kind of people I would want to

meet socially.

Allen also told me that he remembered Steinbeck from a few years back, when the author and his wife used to fish off the end of the pier. They were so poor then, he said, if they didn't catch any fish they didn't eat. Steinbeck was still living in Pacific Grove, the little town full of churches next to Cannery Row, but now that he had sold a couple of books he was finally making a living with his writing. Except for reading that one book, I hadn't read anything but a few magazines and training manuals in the day-room since I joined the troop. After dinner each night I usually listened to Socky's radio in our squad-room, and often fell asleep before eight o'clock. I was incredibly fatigued by nightfall, and all of my muscles ached.

Sokoloski, who had no lips at all, resembled an angry lizard. He was carving a wooden chain out of a solid two-by-four, link by link. So far he had about six links, which meant he had a long way to go. Why he would want a four-foot wooden chain, I cannot fathom, but he concentrated on it every night while he listened to big band music on his little radio.

Bill "Wild Horse" Halkins, the second horseshoer, had thick, curly russet hair, and there were always one or two straws caught in it. His acne-scarred face was deeply seamed, and he looked much older than he was. His left shoulder was lower than his right, and he lurched slightly when he walked. Halkins was almost forty, and had been in the cavalry for fourteen years.

During Halkins' first enlistment, according to the story Baldy Allen told me, they had sent Halkins to the Cooks and Bakers School at the Presidio of San Francisco. When he came back he cooked for about two weeks and then managed to get out of the kitchen and into the stable gang. But a year ago, one of the cooks finished his enlistment and didn't re-enlist. Sergeant Brasely, looking through his records, discovered that Halkins had once been to Cooks and Bakers School, and he assigned him to the kitchen.

The same evening the captain dropped by the kitchen and told Halkins that he would be in for breakfast the next morning at eight o'clock. The following morning, at eight A.M. , Halkins had fried two eggs, four strips of bacon, and some hash browns, and put them on a table in the mess hall, with two pieces of buttered toast.

The captain didn't get to the mess hall until nine-thirty.

"I'll have my breakfast now," he told Halkins as he entered the kitchen door.

"It's on the table," Halkins said.

Captain Bradshaw sat at the table for about five minutes, Baldy Allen said, staring at the cold, congealing bacon and the cold fried eggs, the greasy potatoes; then he got up and went to the orderly room. Ten minutes later the first sergeant came over to the kitchen and sent Halkins back to the horseshoeing shack.

I relished the story and thought a little better of Halkins for not offering to prepare a new hot breakfast for the captain. He had also ensured that he would never be assigned to the kitchen as a cook again. Halkins was from Missouri, from a part of the state so remote that there was no nearby town he could claim as a hometown. What I disliked about Halkins was his failure to take daily showers. We had a toilet with a urinal and a washbasin in it at the stable, but no shower. We walked over to the barracks to take a shower, wearing a mounted raincoat and carrying our soap and towel. Every night, after shoeing horses all day, I could hardly wait to get under that hot sluicing water. I would stand under it for fifteen or twenty minutes, trying to wash the tiredness and horsy smell away. But Halkins, after we finished shoeing, stripped to the waist and washed himself at the watering trough in front of the stables, after turning on the cold water spigot. He just washed his face and upper body and called it cleaning up. He only took a shower on Saturday nights, before he and Socky drove downtown in Socky's car to eat chop suey at the Chinamanls in Monterey. It was a ritual with these two guys: chop suey every Saturday night. They went to the fights once a month, but they never went to any of the dances at the rec center. Halkins snored, too, and. when he let out his breath after his deep snores, he whistled through his nose.

We were in very close quarters in our stable gang squad-room, but no one else seemed to mind. It always smelled of horseshit, naturally, being at the end of the stable, but it also reeked of dirty socks and underwear, sweat, ammonia, lingering farts, and the odor from our doorless toilet. Sergeant Bellows should have made us keep the place a little cleaner, but he didn't give a damn because he went home at night. Goyette, the assistant stable orderly, who we called the Clean Old Man, was responsible for keeping our toilet and quarters clean, but he did a half-assed job. Goyette was a French-Canadian who had served in the American Expeditionary Force during the World War, and he was far from clean, even though we called him the Clean Old Man. He had a gimpy leg, which was bad enough to keep him on permanent dismounted duty, so the first sergeant, not knowing what else to do with him, had assigned him to the stable gang. Sergeant Brasely had tried to persuade Goyette to transfer to the Soldiers' Home in Arlington, but the Clean Old Man liked living in the stable gang squad-room and being around horses. He wasn't much help to Hampe, the stable orderly. He couldn't help Hampe load or unload the wagon because he couldn't throw a pitchforkful of manure that high. But he could prowl around the stables at night, checking for slipped horse blankets, and he took care of the sick horses in the morning when the vet came around. I guess Goyette made himself as useful as he could, but it wasn't like having another able-bodied man in the gang.

That left Milam Hampe, the stable orderly, who did enough work for two or three men, although his harelip made it uncomfortable to be around him. You hated to keep saying "What?" every time he said something, so we usually tried to avoid getting into any prolonged conversations with Hampe.

Anyway, such was the stable gang, and, we were isolated in almost every respect from the rest of the troop. We didn't go out to drill with them, and we didn't use the day-room at night because we had our own squalid room at the stables.

When the troop went to the field, the stable gang rode along, too, but at the back of the troop. As soon as we got into camp, Socky would set up his hand forge, which went ahead on the troop truck, and we would shoe horses until it was time to eat. We also hayed out on the field picket line, and we had our own horses and riding equipment to take care of in the field.

In garrison, my day started at five A.M., when Hampe got up. He and Goyette got the feed wagon and gave each horse a half gallon of oats, dumping the oats into the manger in each stall. I didn't have to get up until five-thirty, but I could always hear the horses stomping and whinnying for their oats even when Hampe and Goyette didn't make enough noise to wake me. I had a section of twenty stalls (two horses to a stall), and when the horses finished gobbling down their half gallon of oats they were released so they could run into the corral.

Breakfast was always a big meal, with a heaping plateful of S.O.S., when they had it, or four fried eggs with home fries and thick-sliced bacon. We ate fast because we had work to do, and we were always anxious to get started. I had to muck out my stalls, which meant shaking out the straw and piling up the wet straw and horseshit into small piles in the aisle. Later on Hampe harnessed the wagon and loaded all of this manure by himself. When I finished my stalls, I went into the corral with an armload of halter shanks—as did the others—and caught horses to tie on the line. When the troop arrived, either for drill or horse exercise, all of the horses were already tied on the line. The troopers found their own horses on the line, brushed off the shit marks, and saddled up.

Sergeant Bellows and Socky separated the sick horses and the horses to be shod that day and tied them on short, separate picket lines. Socky and Sergeant Bellows each maintained separate rosters. There were always a few horses that stayed in the corral all day and didn't get exercised, but not many, because, on the whole, we took very good care of the animals. After all, a horse cost $145, whereas a new man to take care of this expensive horse could be found under almost any railroad bridge in America—even if the man turned out to be, like Wilcox, a Mormon missionary.

After the horses were sorted out and tied on the line, Socky got his forge going (we had an electric-powered bellows in the garrison), and Halkins and I started pulling shoes on the first two horses of the day. We trimmed the hooves, rasped them smooth, selected cold shoes from the barrel, and then Socky, at the forge and anvil, made the shoes fit the horses. This was the number one rule in horse-shoeing:

Fit the shoe to the foot, not the foot to the shoe.

The rule is a tough one to follow because it would be much easier the other way around. We had to avoid severe paring or too much rasping. Also, the length of the foot had to be reduced evenly at both the toe and the heel. The frog in the middle of the foot must be able to touch the ground when the shoe is tacked on to the foot because the frog acts as a sort of shock absorber, giving the foot its spring. This meant that enough of the hoof had to be pared so the frog would indeed touch the ground when the shoe was tacked on. An adequate number of nails had to be used so the horse wouldn't lose the shoe or have it loosen up after a couple of days. The standard rule for this was three nails on the inside and at least four on the outside, although Socky always wanted one or two more nails for insurance. If a horse threw a shoe during ordinary horse exercise or drill, Socky took it as a personal affront.

So we had to be sure we tacked in enough nails and crimped them and cut them off without any jagged edges. Clenches had to be neat, in line, and the right distance up the wall. If Socky saw any daylight between the shoe and the foot after you told him the horse was ready, he would curse you and make you pull the shoe again. The other hazard was inadvertently getting a nail inside the white line (the quick) instead of into the wall. I was particularly careful about this, because it could make a horse lame. I was a novice, but I became very familiar with a horse's foot after a few days and I learned there was only one right way to shoe a horse—Socky's way. When a horse had a split hoof, or needed a leather pad, Socky or Wild Horse took care of it. After all, it would be a long time before I could learn all that these guys knew.

Altogether we had 160 horses, so if we shod eight a day, or forty a week, by rights we would be able to get to them all once a month. But there was payday, a half day of work, so we usually only completed two horses before pay A call. We also had to fit extra shoes, one for the front feet and one for the back feet, as spares for each horse. Making these shoes during the regular working day took extra time. There were also some horses, very few, luckily, that didn't want to be shod. They got shoes anyway, but then it took all three of us, a nose twitch, and a sideline to get them on. So the way it worked out, on the average, each horse got new shoes about every five weeks, and sometimes six.

This meant that there was never a time that a horseshoer  could sit back and say, "I'm all caught up—it's time for a breather." There would never be time for a breather because the work was unending, backbreaking, and no matter how hard you worked today there would be another eight horses to shoe tomorrow. Forever.

Forever!

It was best not to dwell upon this aspect of the job, but my mind would get around to it by midafternoon whether I wanted to think about it or not. By two or two-thirty I would have cut or burned myself at least once, my back would be aching, and sweat would be flowing from every pore in my body.

Then, in spite of myself, I would start to think about Wheeler, wondering what he was doing, where he was, what he was thinking about, and worrying that he would think about what an awful job he had left here and would decide not to retum from his ninety-day furlough. And if he didn't come back, I would remain here in this horse-shoeing shack, day after day, for three years, shoeing eight horses a day until my enlistment was up. Of course, I thought Wheeler would be a damned fool to desert the Army. The Army rarely looked for deserters because it was too expensive to do so, but all the same, if he ever got into some kind of trouble with the law and was fingerprinted, it would come out that he was a deserter. Then, whether he was convicted of some civilian crime or not, he would be turned over to the army for a ourts-martial.

As a rule, deserters were only sentenced to six months, served four and a half months, and then were returned to duty. But all four and a half months in the guardhouse were bad days, and they would have to be made up before the man could be discharged. Meanwhile, when a man was a deserter, he couldn't get a government job, not even at the post office during the Christmas holidays. A good many men deserted, or went A.W.O.L. from time to time (less than a ninety-day absence was just A.W.O.L. time), but  they usually came back by themselves. Their conscience got the better of them, I suppose.

One day an old guy came onto the post and turned himself in at the guardhouse. He was in his late seventies, and he had deserted from some old fort in Montana that had long since been dismantled and plowed under. He had deserted, he told the sergeant of the guard, because he didn't want to fight Indians. This old man wasn't courts-martialed; the regimental commander gave him a "deserter's release" and sent him on his way. But it just went to prove that sooner or later a man came back, even from the Indian wars. I tried to take some cheer from this case, and I thought that because Buffalo was so cold Wheeler would get tired of it and come back to California, where it was warm. But all those miles, three thousand miles each way, and perhaps more, and Wheeler without a dime . . . maybe he was trying to hitchhike back now? Or maybe he was frozen to death in some field in the Midwest, having been hit by a truck at night on the highway, and no one would ever iind the body? Or he would starve to death in Buffalo, or get killed in a barroom fight, or get lost somewhere in the middle of  Kansas? I didn't even know what he looked like. No one in the stable gang had a photograph

of him.

"What kind of guy is Wheeler?" I asked Socky one day.

"He's all right," Socky said.

"What kind of guy is Wheeler?" I asked Wild Horse.

"He did his work," Halkins said.

Socky and Halkins were not into character analysis, but I wanted some kind of personality picture so I could make up my mind one way or another about Wheeler. If he didn't return, I would finally make P.F.C. I would be the official third horseshoer instead of being in the limbo I was in now, and then I could look forward someday to becoming the second horseshoer, P.F.C., fourth class specialist.

Then, when I had four years' service, I would get five percent fogy pay tacked onto the forty-five dollars. But in order to make second horseshoer, Socky would have to make stable sergeant, and old Sergeant Bellows had at least ten more years to go before retirement. Socky, as a P.F.C., third class specialist, had said many times that he didn't want the headaches that were attached to a sergeant's stripes. He was happy in the horseshoeing shack, with his twelve years of service and fifteen percent fogy pay. He had nothing to gain as a sergeant except prestige.

So even if I made P.F.C. and officially became the third horseshoer, I would still be at a dead end. Hell, I still might be better off as the dining room orderly. The D.R.O. could make himself a pork chop sandwich anytime he wanted one, and his work, despite the seven-day week, was clean and simple, and during the winter months he was in a nice warm mess hall instead of out riding around in the rain. Because my mind wandered, I had accidents too often.

My fingernails, despite my gloves, were all broken. I had cuts and gashes on my arms and legs from nails being ripped across the flesh as a horse jerked his foot away from me. I had small burns from red-hot shoes, and my feet had both been stamped on by irritable horses. The toenail on my right foot was black, and I knew that I would soon lose this nail. Two-Spot Sally, a big black mare, had bitten me on the left shoulder, leaving a sore bruise the size of a baseball. But I couldn't complain about these accidents because Socky and Wild Horse still got hurt occasionally too. It was an occupational hazard. We worked in close quarters, and some horses simply didn't want to have new shoes. So sometimes we had to rig a sideline to give them to him anyway. A horse must have at least three legs to stand up, so if you rig a sideline and pull one of his legs into the air, he can't kick out with one of the other legs without falling down. When a horse's name came up on Socky's roster to get shoes that day, that fucking horse had new shoes before the day ended. Regardless. But a recalcitrant horse (there weren't all that many, happily) could take us two hours to shoe. 'I'hat's why instead of having Wednesday afternoons off like the rest of the troop, we shod four horses on  Wednesday aftemoons too.

When I finished paring and rasping a foot, and decided  it was ready, I would call Socky over. Invariably he would take my paring knife or rasp away from me and work on the foot-a little longer before getting the shoe from the anvil. This was irritating to me, because the fine adjustments he made were so minor I couldn't tell the difference.

He rarely did this with Halkins, although he would use Halkins' rasp once in a while, too. Then one day, after more than a month, he looked at a hoof I said was ready, nodded once, and handed me the new shoe. I had, at long last, got the hang of it. He didn't compliment me because the foot was supposed to be ready when I called him over, but for me the day was a minor triumph. After that I was even more careful, and the times for minor adjustments by Socky did not occur so often. Then something subtle happened between Socky and Halkins. None of us talked too much at work, but there was always some light banter between Socky and Halkins. Suddenly there was none. Socky, one morning, brought his little radio to the horseshoeing shack. He put it on a shelf next to the forge and turned it on low. I could barely hear it, but then when Halkins said something to him, Socky said that he was listening to the radio and that he couldn't talk and listen to the radio at the same time. With the bellows and the forge going, plus the hammering he did on the red-hot shoes at the anvil, I didn't see how Socky could hear the radio at all, turned so low, but his abrupt anger stopped all conversation. They had certainly fallen out over something or other, but I didn't know what it could be.

Then, the next Sunday morning, right after I had mucked out my stalls, Socky came up to me in the aisle.

"You like to take a little ride this afternoon, Will?"

"Sure."

"Okay. Bring your gloves and a pair of fatigue pants. We'll leave right after chow."

I wore my suit, but not my necktie, which I had rolled up and placed in my jacket pocket. Socky wore his gray flannels, a white shirt and tie, and a twiggy tweed hacking jacket. In his civilian clothes Socky resembled a successful dentist, except that not many dentists have alower lip filled with Copenhagen snuff. We climbed into his Model A and drove down the hill. After we got through Monterey and Socky headed toward Castroville, I asked him where

we were going.

"To shoe a couple of horses."

We rolled through Castroville and then took a secondary blacktop road for several miles through the brown hills before Socky turned in at a large farm. We parked by the barn. Socky got his portable forge and the bellows out of the back seat and his canvas bag of horseshoeing tools. There were two huge draft horses in the barn. I took off my coat and shirt and slipped my fatigue pants on over my good suit pants. Then I pulled the shoes on the first horse. These were enormous horses, with feet like platters, but they were gentle animals and didn't give us any trouble.

When we had almost finished the first horse, the owner came out of the farmhouse, watched us fora few minutes, and then told Socky to come up to the house when we were finished.

After we cleaned up at the outside spigot in front of the barn, we put on our shirts and jackets and started toward the farmhouse. I headed for the front door, but Socky said, "No, let's go around to the back."

"I'm not used to going into houses by the back door," I said.

"But he wants us to," Socky said. "His wife usually fixes something to eat, and he gets offended if we don't eat."

"Then he can be offended by me," I said. "I'm not going to eat in the man's kitchen."

But after Socky knocked on the back door, and the farmer let us in, I calmed down. There was a large breakfast nook next to the window, and it was obvious that the family ate its meals in the kitchen. They weren't trying to put us down by making us come in through the back door.

They were decent farm people and simply didn't know any better. Socky introduced me as Mr. Willeford, and I found out that the farmer's name was Kenmore.

"There's a Kenmore Amis on Santa Barbara Avenue in L.A.," I said. "It isn't your apartment house by any chance, is it?"

Mr. Kenmore laughed. "Lord, no," he said. "I haven't been down to Los Angeles since nineteen hundred and twenty-four. "

Mrs. Kemnore, who was about a decade younger than her husband, placed a bubbling hot apple pie on the table. She brought a pitcher of milk to the table, which was already set for four, and held a plateful of sliced cheddar cheese. Socky, Mr. Kenmore, and I sat down, but Mrs. Kenmore poured coffee before sitting with us.

When my tum came I helped myself to a piece of pie and two slices of cheese, but waited until the others were ready before I dug into it. It was great apple pie, and the cold unpasteurized milk was a perfect complement.

"Where's Mr. Halkins today?" Mrs. Kenmore asked Socky.

"I don't know," he said, "but he won't be working with me anymore. He's getting married."

"How nice for him," she said. "Help yourself now, and take another piece, there's plenty."

That's when I found out that Wild Horse Halkins was getting married, but I held my questions until I got outside.

Socky and I both ate a second piece of pie, and when we left, Mr. Kenmore handed Socky eight one-dollar bills.

When we got into the car Socky gave me two dollars, and I put the bills into my wallet.

"What's all this shit you were telling Mrs. Kenmore about Wild Horse getting married?"

"It's true. The sonofabitch sneaked around behind my back, got permission from Sergeant Brasely to see the captain, and the captain gave him permission to get married. He's already rented himself a used trailer at a trailer park in the Dunes."

My first thought had been, "Who in the hell would marry Wild Horse Halkins?" But before I said anything, and thought for a moment, I knew that there were always some women who would marry someone like Halkins, or anybody else who asked them. But I still had to drag the rest of the story out of Socky. I knew already that they had fallen out over something, but it seemed unreasonable to me that Socky should be so bitter about it. What difference did it make to Socky if the dumb bastard got married?

TWENTY-SEVEN

AFTER WE GOT BACK ON THE ROAD, SOCKY TOLD me that Halkins had written to his older brother in Missouri, and that his brother was sending him out a bride—a virgin.

I laughed. "That doesn't seem possible, to get a bride sight unseen, just like that."

"It's possible all right," Socky said, tightening his jaw. "Halkins already sent the bus fare to his brother. As he told me, 'If a man can't trust his brother to send him a bride, who can he trust?' "

"He might get a virgin all right," I said, "but she'l1 probably be well past the childbearing age."

"No, I don't think so, Will. His brother wouldn't do that to him. But chances are good that one of her legs'll be shorter than the other from running in circles around the mountain. You want to get a piece of ass? There's a place in Castroville I know about where it'll only cost a

dollar."

"Sure."

The place Socky drove to wasn't in Castroville. It was a wooden shack under a live oak tree about three miles south of town. The big live oak was the only tree to be seen for a mile or two in any direction, and we had to take a dirt road through fields of blooming artichokes to get to it. The girls were Mexicans in their early thirties who did a little whoring on the side when they weren't working in the fields. Socky took his inside the shack, and I took mine over to a big tractor tire that was under the oak tree. For what she did and the way that she did it, the one I had was worth much more than a dollar. I gave her the two dollars I had made shoeing horses with Socky. After all, shoeing two horses on a Sunday was found money. If Socky stayed pissed at Halkins, he might take me along with him again. I had a hunch he wouldn't stay sore at Halkins very long; they had been friends for too many years.

***

I LEARNED SOMETHING VALUABLE THAT SUNDAY AFTERNOON. Shoeing horses had an economic value, which was something I had never considered before. I could not, as yet, take a cold shoe out of the barrel, heat it, and shape it to fit a horse's foot, but I knew I would be able to in time, if I stayed in the horseshoer's shack long enough.

Once I learned how to do that, I could go out and find my own customers. With all of the farms on the peninsula and over in the Salinas Valley, there were a lot of horses to be shod. I only had about six weeks now before Wheeler came back—if he came back—and for my remaining time I was going to watch old Socky more closely. Hell, if a dumb Polack like Sokoloski could leam how to shape shoes on an anvil, I knew damned well I could.

***

NOW THAT THE WORD WAS OUT, WE TRIED T0 NEEDLE Wild Horse a little at night in the stable shack, kidding him about his mail-order bride. But somehow there was no fun in it. Halkins was too serious, and too worried about the outcome of the marriage himself. He wouldn't joke back, but he didn't get angry either. His long ugly face just got a little longer, and he refused grimly to respond. Socky, as I thought he would, got over being sore after a couple of days. After all, they had been friends for too many years, but they both knew, now that Halkins was getting married, that their relationship would never be quite the same as it had been.

When Halkins wasn't around, however, the rest of us guys talked a lot about the upcoming marriage, and Halkins wasn't around much now after five o'clock. He was fixing up his old second—hand trailer in the Dunes, and he had also managed to line up a job for his bride as a counter girl at the ten-cent store in Monterey. She would be making twelve dollars a week for a six-day week, he told Socky and me, and with her new job, plus drawing his ration money, they might even be able to save a little money after expenses. (Married men, if they wanted to, could draw their ration money instead of eating in the mess hall, and that forty-three cents a day would bring in an additional twelve or thirteen dollars a month for Halkins.) Also, now that Socky and Halkins had made up, Wild Horse would probably resume partnership of the horses they shod on Sundays. During the last few years Halkins had undoubtedly saved some money. How much, no one knew exactly, except possibly Socky, but it had to be a lot because Halkins was frugal to the point of being stingy. A two-bit box l of snuff lasted him for three days, and he didn't drink or smoke. His only expense, outside of laundry and toilet articles, was his weekly one-dollar chop suey dinner. He would have to give up those dinners now, but he would also have a cook at home to fix them for him, if he wanted chop suey, and his wife could cook a lot of pork fried rice and bean sprouts for a dollar. After I thought about it, I realized that old Wild Horse would be able to live very well on what he had coming in each month. In fact, I wondered why he had waited so long to get married, especially when it seemed so easy for him to get a bride. But then, that depended upon what kind of a woman  his brother sent him from Missouri. We were almost as anxious as Halkins to see what she looked like, so anxious, in fact, that all of us in the gang, except for the Clean Old Man, who never left the post, piled into Socky's car to go down to the bus station on Friday afternoon to meet Mary Elizabeth Tuttle.

Halkins, wearing his freshly cleaned brown gabardine suit and his polished cowboy boots, drove to the bus station with Sergeant and Mrs. Bellows in the stable sergeant's car. Mrs. Bellows was there because she was the official chaperone. She would make certain that old Halkins would never be alone with his new bride until after they were safely married. When the bus came in all of us were lined up on the platform: Sergeant Bellows in uniform with Mrs. Bellows, who was all dressed up in a wide-brimmed straw hat and a flowered dress that made her look fatter than  she actually was; Socky and me, both wearing our dark suits and ties; Baldy Allen in a suede sport coat with corduroy trousers; Milam Hampe in an electric blue suit and white shoes he had bought in a Chicano store in Salinas; and Halkins. Wild Horse was a little shy, with his unruly hair plastered down with Vaseline, and he was standing about three feet behind Sergeant Bellows, chewing on his lower lip, and probably wishing it was packed with Copenhagen.

Halkins hadn't sent his bride-to-be a picture of himself, and he hadn't received one from Mary Elizabeth Tuttle, either. I guess that both of them were afraid of being rejected if they got a good look at each other in advance—even in a snapshot—so the suspense was almost breathtaking. Four Chicanos got off the bus first (Mary Elizabeth had had to change buses in Salinas to get to Monterey); then an elderly couple, probably shoppers from Pacific Grove who had gone over to Salinas; and then a whore named Ginger, from Cannery Row. I didn't know Ginger, but Baldy Allen and Milam Hampe did. She started to say something to Baldy, but he jerked his head guardedly toward Mrs. Bellows, so Ginger just nodded instead and

trailed off to get a taxi. Then Mary Elizabeth stepped off the bus. At first I couldn't believe it, but then there were no other passengers, and I knew she had to be the one.

Mary Elizabeth was eighteen, but she looked more like fifteen or sixteen. Her face was white with freshly applied powder, but the powder didn't hide the sprinkling of freckles that covered her cheeks and little turned up nose. She had pale skin anyway, like most red-haired girls, and she had given herself, or a girlfriend had given her, a home permanent. The permanent hadn't taken right, and it had frizzed up all over her head, standing up straight and kinky in the middle, as though her little ass had been wired for electricity. She was tiny, too, not much more than five feet tall, if that. Maybe she looked shorter because she was wearing low-heeled patent leather Mary Jane shoes, with white socks folded over a couple of times. She wore a maroon faille suit that was wrinkled and rump-sprung from riding in a bus for two and a half days, and she carried a black patent leather purse about the size of a briefcase.

Even so, she was as pretty as a little white poodle as she smiled nervously and licked at her lipstick, which was already smeared a bit—probably from trying to touch it up on the moving bus.

What happened next was terrible. It was like one of those comic twists in a P. G. Wodehouse novel, when a Drone finds out he's wearing the wrong school tie at an old boys' dinner or something. Mary Elizabeth ignored everybody else in the line and came straight up to me. She

put her left hand on my shoulder and kissed me right on the mouth.

"Mr. Halkins," she said, "I'm Mary Elizabeth."

There's no telling, of course, what Halkins' brother had told her about what old Wild Horse looked like; they hadn't seen each other for ten years or more, and just kept up with letters two or three times a year. But it was awkward and embarrassing all the same for both of us. Before I could say anything, or even think of anything to say, Mrs. Bellows was right there, hugging the girl and dragging her over to Sergeant Bellows, who had pushed Halkins forward. Her face fell, and she blushed a bright red when the stable sergeant introduced her to Halkins, but on the whole I think she carried it off fairly well. Halkins rallied pretty quick from the shock of meeting his bride-to-be and introduced the rest of us to Mary Elizabeth.

When we got back to the stables we told old Goyette what Mary Elizabeth looked like, but he didn't want to hear about it. He thought that anyone who got married was insane. They also kidded me about Mary Elizabeth mistaking me for Halkins, but Baldy Allen was furious about the whole thing. Ordinarily, perhaps because he was alone so much in his tack room, Baldy was quiet and withdrawn. I had never seen him get angry before.

"That girl's too damned young for an old fart like Halkins," he said. "It's the goddamned Depression! A' young girl like that should be marrying some guy Will's age, not a randy old man like Halkins!"

"That's right, Baldy," Socky said. "Long's he's damned fool enough to get married, I'm glad he got himself a pretty young girl. Come Tuesday, I just hope he's got enough strength left to shoe horses again."

And so the conversation went. At least we had something to talk about for a change. The suspense was over, and now we could go back to work.

***

ON MONDAY HALKINS AND MARY ELIZABETH GOT MARRIED at the courthouse. The stable sergeant and his wife stood up with them as witnesses. Sergeant Bellows drove the couple out to the Dunes Trailer Park and came back to the stables to tell us about it. On the way out to the Dunes he had stopped, at Halkins' request, so that Wild Horse could get some takeout chop suey and a gallon of zinfandel to take to the trailer park.

"The way he looked," Sergeant Bellows said, "with his pants bulging out, I don't suppose he wanted his wife to waste any time cooking for him."

"How happy did the bride look?" Baldy Allen said. "Very nice. Mrs. Bellows sponged and ironed her suit and made her a nice bouquet of California poppies and ferns, all tied with a white ribbon."

"What I mean," Allen said, "was how'd she look? Was she happy about it, or did she look like she didn't want to go through with it, or what?"

The stable sergeant seemed to be surprised by the question. "Why wouldn't she want to go through with it? Hell, she came out here all the way from Missouri to get married—"

"I know that," Allen said, "but Wild Horse is old enough to be that girl's father. And she obviously didn't know that. I thought she might've had some second thoughts, after getting a good look at him, and al1."

"Lct me tell you something right now," Sergeant Bellows said, "all of you. Back there, or up there, in those Missouri mountains, they look at life a lot different than the rest of us do out here in California. You might think Mary Elizabeth's a little too young for Wild Horse, but back in Missouri she's pretty damned old herself not to be already married. Girls up in those mountains get married at twelve and thirteen, and Mary Elizabeth's almost nineteen years old. I seen her birthdate on the marriage license. And she'll have a damned better life for herself out here married to Halkins than she'd ever have back in them hills. Halkins is a hard-working member of this stable gang, and I don't want none of you railing him none about his child bride or nothing else."

He glared at us for a minute. "How many of you ever been married before?"

None of us had, and he knew it, but Baldy shrugged.

"I was shacked up once, for about six months."

"Then you got a rough idea of what it's like, although being married's a lot different than shacking up. To get here in time in the morning to muck out, Wild Horse, if he wants to eat breakfast, will have to get up at four-thirty. And at noon, when you all are sitting down to a big hot dinner, he'll be squatting up here at the horseshoeing shack eating a cold sandwich for lunch, probably a string bean sandwich on com bread. He won't have your companionship at night, either. He'll be out there in the Dunes in that rusty trailer of his, which still smells of baby pee from the last ten owners, trying to find something to talk about with a not-so-bright young girl who's been standing on her feet all day behind the china counter in Woolworth's. Except for money worries, God knows what they'll find to talk about.

"No." He shook his head. "You people leave old Halkins alone. He won't be the first man to sacrifice a good life on the cross of young pussy, and he won't be the last, neither. But if Halkins ever comes to me and tells me you're railing him about his child bride, I'm telling you

right now, your ass'll be buttermilk. Now get back to work!"

It was the longest speech any of us had ever heard Sergeant Bellows make. He had not only thought a lot about Halkins and his marriage, it seemed to me he had thought a good deal about his own marriage and three children.

But the picture of a marriage he left us with was a heathscape of a dismal swamp. As Hampe and I turned away, Hampe said, "Jesus, Will, I don't think I'll ever get married!"

I didn't think Hampe would ever get married either, so I didn't reply to his comment. But despite what Sergeant Bellows had said, I still felt sorrier for the girl than I did for Halkins. That girl had never had a chance, but now that she was married to Halkins, she wasn't ever going to get a chance.

On Tuesday morning I got into a fight with Wild Horse Halkins and tried to kill him.

TWENTY-EIGHT

TUESDAY MORNING HALKINS DIDN'T SHOW UP IN TIME to untie his horses and to muck out. Socky and I divided his stalls and mucked them out in addition to our own. After breakfast, when Socky and I got to the horse-shoeing shack, Halkins still hadn't shown up. Socky didn't say anything, but I could see the little round muscles bunching up in his jaw. I pulled the shoes on the first horse, old Bourbon, and when I tossed them into the empty barrel. I spotted Halkins across the gully, lurching up the alley behind Headquarters Troop kitchen. He was wearing his brown suit and carrying his fatigue clothes in a bundle under his left arm. When he reached the horseshoeing shack he was grinning like a moron, and the lingers of his right hand were wrapped with a white handkerchief.

"Sergeant Morrow forgot all about picking me up. That's why I'm so late. I stopped by F Troop stables just now, to see why Sergeant Morrow didn't pick me up, and he said he forgot. I was all ready and waiting, and everything. But when he didn't come by my trailer I finally went over to his place and Mrs. Morrow told me he'd already left.

So I had to hitchhike into town from the Dunes and then walk the rest of the way from the San Carlos Hotel. It won't happen again, Socky, honest. Tomorrow morning I'll be waiting outside Sergeant Morrow's door."

"What's‘ the matter with your hand?" Socky said.

Halkins smirked (and that's the exact word). He put his bundle of fatigues on the workbench and very slowly unwrapped the white handkerchief from his fingers. He put them to his nose and inhaled.

"Ah!" he said. "It's still there. You guys are my buddies, and I want you to smell my new bride!"

Socky threw back his head and laughed as Halkins held out his fingers for Socky to take a sniff.

I had the shoe-pulling tongs in my hand. Without thinking, I swung them in an arc against Halkins' head. The closed ends of the tongs, which are fairly heavy anyway, caught Halkins on the left temple, but because he had instinctively jerked his head slightly at the same time I swung, it was only a glancing blow. But he was off balance, and when I dropped the tongs and leaped on him, trying to get my thumbs into his throat, he went over backwards.

I went down with him. Halkins was bigger than me, but I had the advantage of surprise, so I did get my hands around his neck, and I was trying to dig my thumbs in when Socky grabbed me and pulled me off. I was crying with rage by this time, and the flow of hot tears made me see everything in a blurry way. Socky slapped me across the face before pushing me up against the wall and holding me there.

"What the fuck's the matter with you?" he said.

"Let me go, Socky," I said, although I was crying so hard I could hardly get it out. "I'm gonna kill that rotten sonofabitch!"

"You ain't gonna do nothing but cool off!" Socky held me by both shoulders now, and I was so high up against the wall that only my toes were touching the hard-packed dirt floor.

Halkins took off his suit coat and put it on the workbench.

"Let him go, Socky! If he wants a fight, I'll give him a goddamned fight!"

"You cool off too, Halkins. And get into your fatigues. There'll be no fighting here long's I'm the chief horseshoer. We got work to do."

"It's all right," I said.

"What's all right?" Socky said.

"I'm all right. I'm ready to go back to work. Halkins isn't worth fighting. He's too fucking dumb to live, but I guess it isn't his fault that he doesn't know any better."

"Who you calling dumb?" Halkins said.

"You shut up, too," Socky said. "Both of you."

"All I'm saying," I said, "is keep that dumb sonofabitch away from me——"

"How'm I supposed to do that?"

Socky was still holding me against the wall, and the rough unpainted boards were scratching my bare back. I didn't struggle because it would have been useless to do so against a man as strong as Socky. Socky let me go. I went over to the other wall, where I kept my fatigue jacket and towel on pegs, and wiped my streaming face. My tears had stopped, but my hands were still shaking. I took the curved paring knife out of my leather apron pocket, stared at it for a moment, and went to work on Bourbon's right front hoof. My hands were damp under my gloves, and I oould hardly hold on to the knife. I took off my gloves, wiped my palms on my pants, and just stood there for a minute, my mind a big black cloud of hate. I wanted a cigarette, but knew that my hands were still too trembly to roll one.

Halkins undressed and put on his fatigue pants and his beat-up work shoes, which were encrusted with horseshit and ammonia, just like mine. He tied on his leather apron.

Socky was standing beside his anvil, looking first at Halkins and then at me. Halkins had brought his 'shack-rat lunch in a paper bag, which had been wrapped up in his fatigues, and now he put his lunch up on the shelf where Socky had kept his little radio during the time the two of them had fallen out.

"All right!" Socky said, banging his tongs down on the anvil. "You guys listen to me, both of you. Next Monday range season begins, and Wheeler won't be back for another month——"

"If he comes back," I said.

"That ain't your worry, Will. But range season means a tough three months ahead. One of us, each afternoon, has to go out to the rifle range for firing practice. Me on Monday, Halkins Tuesday, you Wednesday, and so on. But if you two assholes are fighting, it's gonna cause problems when I'm out on the range. What I want both of you to do now is shake hands and promise me that you'll get along. I don't want no accidental bumping, or nothing like that, to start it all up again."

"I'll never shake his fucking hand," I said. "But I'm sorry I hit him, if that makes you feel any better, Socky. And I won't start anything again. Anything starts again, it'll be Wild Horse, not me."

"I can accept that. Halkins?"

There was a blue mark on Halkins' temple the size of a half—dollar, and it was starting to swell a little. A piece of straw was already lodged in his curly hair. "D'you accept Will's apology, then?"

"I didn't apologize to the sonofabitch," I said.

"That'll do, damnit!" Socky said, exasperated. "You said you were sorry to me, Will, and I want Halkins to accept that." .

Halkins shrugged. "If he won't start nothing, I won't either."

***

IT WAS ALL OVER THEN. WE LEFT IT AT THAT AND WENT back to work. At eleven-thirty Socky and—I went down to the mess hall for early chow, and Halkins stayed in the shack to eat his sandwiches. When we got back from chow, we found that Halkins had finished another horse, shaping the shoes himself. So we only had three more horses to shoe that afternoon. All the same, after we finished at four-thirty, Socky made Halkins stay an extra hour and clean up around the horseshoeing shack. So Halkins missed his ride with Sergeant Morrow and had to hitchhike to the Dunes that night.

I had another month to go. I would be on the range for one or two afternoons each week, so I figured I could hold on that long. I had never talked all that much to Halkins anyway, but now I decided not to talk to the sonofabitch at all. We knew what we had to do every day anyway; we didn't have to talk about it.

***

DURING RANGE DEASON THE TROOP WENT OUT FOR HORSE exercise only, and returned to the stables earlier than usual. When they finished grooming, they went back to the troop area around eleven A.M. and practiced with the aiming circle, and with working their bolts for dry runs until chow. They propped small targets up against the barracks. I didn't get in on any of this practice with the aiming circle and dry runs because I was shoeing horses. All of us in the stable gang were armed with rifles, and that was the weapon we had to qualify with as expert if we wanted to get expert pay. The Springfield rifle is a wonderful weapon—a five-shot, bolt-operated rifle with sights that can be set for fine-point accuracy. But it takes a good deal of practice with the rifle to become an expert.

After dinner the troop was marched to the range by Sergeant Brasely, and when the troopers weren't on the firing line shooting practice rounds for single-shot and rapid-fire, they got concurrent behind-the-line training from the N.C.O.'s. But because we were in the stable gang we were cheated out of that much-needed practice, too. Instead of being at the range every afternoon, we each had to settle for one or two afternoons a week. I was paired with Baldy Allen, but even on the afternoons we went to the range we still had to leave early because we had to retum to the stables to hay out and tie in the horses. While we were on the range, however, we had priority. Sergeant Olsen, who had been on the Cavalry Rifle Team at Camp Perry for the N.R.A. national shootouts for five years in a row,coached the members of the stable gang. He also saw that we got in our fair share of range firing when we were on the range, but we still had hardly any practice at all compared to the troopers on straight duty. In other words, our stable duties cheated us out of a fair chance to make expert and get the extra money.

After a month on the rille range, the troop would put in another month on the pistol range (mounted and dismounted) and the third month on the machine gun range. The men in the stable gang, however, only got familiarization firing with the .45 and no training on the machine gun at all. When we finally fired for record on the rifle, I just barely qualified as a marksman. My chance at the extra five bucks a month went up in the air as wasted gunpowder, and now I would have to wait for a year to get another crack at it.

Halkins and Socky were about as friendly during working hours as they had ever been, and Halkins even had Socky over to his trailer for dinner one night. But I didn't talk to Halkins again, not even when there were just the two of us in the horseshoeing shack in the afternoon and Socky was on the range. Halkins was not as fast as Socky, but he could shape shoes on the anvil just as well. It took him longer, that's all. I think that I could have shaped shoes myself, just by watching Socky and Halkins do it, but I was never given the opportunity. The weeks passed quickly, thanks to the range season, and to my surprise and delight Wheeler came back from his ninety-day furlough three days early.

Wheeler was nothing like the man I had pictured in my mind during my early days in the horseshoeing shack. I guess I thought he would be a big man, like Socky and Halkins, but he was almost a head shorter than me. He was strong and wiry, however, and he had fought a few welterweight fights on the post before he was assigned to the stable gang. Wheeler did have that pale New York look, though, with the kind of white Irish skin that will always burn and never tan. I helped Wheeler move his stuff from storage to the stable gang squad-room, and he helped me move back to Corporal Kayo's squad-room. I liked Wheeler immediately (although I was prepared not to like him) just because he came back from furlough.

When I told him about Wild Horse's marraige, he couldn't get over it.

"Shit," he said, shaking his head, "I missed everything while I was gone, didn't I?"

"What you missed," I said, "was shoeing about a hundred and fifty horses."

"Yeah," he laughed, "there's that. But you won't believe how terrible things are back in Bufalo. I thought I'd get some kind of a job, but except for two weeks of night work pumping gas, I had to live off my old man. And he was only getting two or three days' work a week at the railroad yards. When I first enlisted, my old man didn't want me to join. But he told me it was the smartest thing I ever did to re-enlist. I visited my cousin one weekend in Albany, and things were worse there than they are in Buffalo."

"Why didn't you go out in the country and shoe a few horses?"

"Jesus, I don't know. The thought never even crossed my mind. All I ever thought about was sticking it out, knowing I'd have three months' pay coming to me when I got back."

The next morning, back in Kayo's squad, Sergeant Bellows came up to me on the picket line.

"You did a good job for us here, Will, and I won't forget it. You satisfied with Chesty? If not, pick out another horse you like, one that ain't assigned already, and I'll give him to you."

"Chesty's all right. I just clipped him last Saturday afternoon, and now that he's had a long rest he suits me fine. But thanks anyway."

I felt pretty good about that. After all, I had made some friends in the stable gang—except for Halkins. Baldy Allen, because we had been paired on the rifle range, coaching each other when we fired, had become fairly close, too. Allen gave me a wallet with an old English initial W carved into it, telling me that the guy in headquarters who had ordered it couldn't afford to paye for it.

"I'll pay you for it on payday."

"Forget it. Keep it as a present. I should've collected for the wallet before I made it."

I didn't insist on paying for it because I knew he wanted me to have it as a gift. I don't think any guy in headquarters ordered it, either. After all, I wasn't the only guy in the 11th Cavalry with a W initial. Baldy could have sold it to someone else, but he wanted me to have it.

After not riding for almost three months, my ass was tender for a few days. I hadn't forgotten how to ride though, and being back on straight duty, after all that time in the stable gang, was like being on vacation. The mornings were downright leisurely. I didn't have to get up until six A.M., and it seemed like I had all the time in the world to shave, make my bunk, and help clean up the squad-room. I didn't have to rush through breakfast, and there was always time for a second cup of coffee. We didn't fall in to go to the stables until seven-thirty.

But the horse exercise period was short, and we cleaned equipment and groomed the horses hurriedly so we could get back to the barracks and practice with the .45 pistol. The first week with the pistol was the hardest because we didn't use pistols. We had to stand there with a red brick in our right hand, not a pistol, holding the brick at arm's length as long as we could before we dropped our arm. This exercise was to get us used to the weight, and it worked, because when we did start to use the pistol instead of the heavy brick, the pistol seemed light by comparison. For rapid fire practice we tied a string on the hammer, and we would cock the pistol with the string, aim, and fire dry run shots at small targets stapled to the barracks. In the aftemoons we went out to the pistol range and fired live ammunition.

I pulled my first guard duty and got Post Number Four, the mounted post. During the night, with two hours on and four hours off, I made two two-hour tours of the post riding old Dempsey. Dempsey knew the route, and he was usually the horse you picked when the mounted post was a new one to you. He knew the route so well you couldn't make a mistake, and each round took one hour exactly. The man who had a mounted tour didn't have to chase prisoners the next day, so it was an easy guard tour for me.

Payday came, and on payday Sergeant Brasely posted a Troop Order on the bulletin board that made Eddie Furler a P.F.C. Micaloni had five years' service to Furler's four, but Furler deserved the promotion. I couldn't help feeling that if I had had the advantage of three months' straight duty, instead of being out of sight and mind in the horseshoeing shack, I might have been considered. Furler had also made expert on the rifle, and was drawing the extra live bucks a month for a year, too. I was happy for Furler, and we went down to Cannery Row that night to celebrate.

Just for the hell of it, and because I had had three glasses of dago red at Flora's bar, I took Mrs. Kayo upstairs. She knew I was in Kayo's squad, and she shook her head when I asked her for a blow job. "I don't do that, Willeford," she said.

"Bullshit. "

"Well," she said, "Kayo doesn't want me to do it for the men in his squad. He says it's too intimate. And not for the dollar discount he makes me give you guys."

"I'll give you the other dollar, Mrs. Kayo, and I won't tell him about it, either."

"Are you sure? You aren't just trying to get back at him some way, are you?"

"Get back at him? I don't know what you're talking about! We all consider it a privilege to be in Corporal Kayo's squad."

"All right, then. But don't tell him you gave me the second dollar, either."

"I won't. If I did, he'd think I was a fool."

"Yes, he would. Just remember that."

I gave her the second dollar, and Marie Kayo gave me the blow job. At least she couldn't talk and chew gum while she was sucking me off, but I felt guilty about it afterwards. I guess I was taking my frustration out on Kayo, although I didn't have anything against the man. He treated me decently, and he had even told me that he was glad to have me back in his squad. But a man, when he is pissed off, quite often does things that he is sorry for later. In that respect, I was as weak as the next man. But then, almost overnight, everything changed.

Mary Elizabeth Halkins shot Wild Horse between the eyes with his .45 pistol, and the poor bastard was dead before he hit the floor of his pissy-smelling trailer.

TWENTY-NINE

THE INVESTIGATING OFFICER WAS AN ARMY RESERVE first lieutenant named Geoffrey Shifrin. Lieutenant Shifrin was a civilian lawyer from San Francisco who just happened to be on a three-week tour of reserve duty with F Troop. According to the rumor, he was also supposed to be a polo player with a four-goal handicap, and he had managed to get a reserve commission in the cavalry so he could play polo when he did his two- or  three-week tour at the Presidio every year. But it didn't work out that way for Lieutenant Shifrin because Major "Chukker Charlie" Gerhardt, who was the captain of the 11th Cavalry Polo Team, made it a rule that only Regular Army officers could play on the team. But inasmuch as Lieutenant Shifrin was a lawyer, and on three weeks of active duty, and a more or less disinterested outsider, the colonel had made him the investigating officer for the case. What actually happened no one will ever know for sure, because the only witness present was Mary Elizabeth Halkins

Lieutenant Shifrin questioned Socky and me closely before writing down our statements. He had already talked to the other members of the stable gang, including Sergeant Bellows, but he questioned Socky and me a lot closer than the others because we had been working with Halkins in the horseshoeing shack both before and after Halkins got married.

The big question was, What in the hell was Halkins doing with his .45 pistol at home? Socky and I both told the lieutenant that Halkins and Mary Elizabeth had, so far as we knew, a loving and happy marriage. In fact, Halkins had once told Socky they had sex two or three times a night, every single night. The lieutenant raised his eye-brows when Socky mentioned that, but told Socky he couldn't put it down on his statement because it was not only hearsay, it was irrelevant.

What he was anxious to find out was why Halkins had taken his pistol home with him instead of turning it in to the supply room when he came down from the range to hay out at the stable before going home.

"I can't answer that," Socky said. "He never did anything like that before, not that I know of, anyway. And he knew better than to take his weapon off the post."

"I don't know for sure," I said, "but I can make a pretty good guess. He had to get down to F Troop stables to get his ride home to the Dunes with Sergeant Morrow. If he had taken the time to clean and turn in his pistol, waiting along with everyone else at the supply room, he would probably have missed his ride home."

"I think Willeford's right on that, sir," Socky said. "Used to be, before he got married, Halkins didn't care whether we worked late or not. Isn't that right, Will?"

"That's right," I said. "He didn't have anything else to do before he got married. Sometimes he even helped the stable orderly do things he didn't have to do."

"He was always doing something or other around the stables," Socky added. "But once he got married, I never saw a man so anxious to get home at night. Of course, he was just married, and if he'd missed his ride with Sergeant Morrow, he'd either have to walk or hitchhike out to the Dunes. There's a bus runs out there, but it only goes every two hours."

"All right." Lieutenant Shifrin nodded. "I'd better get a statement from Sergeant Morrow, too."

"He'd never tell Sergeant Morrow he had his pistol with him, wrapped up in his fatigues," Socky said, shaking his shaved head. "Sergeant Morrow would've turned right around and brought him back to our first sergeant and turned him in. I've known Sergeant Morrow for a long time, and he goes strictly by the book."

"I'll talk to him anyway," the lieutenant said. "What about the pistol itself? Did either one of you men ever hear him say that the weapon was defective in any way?"

"No, sir," Socky said.

"No, sir," I said. "But even if he did say something like that it would only be hearsay."

Lieutenant Shifrin looked at me for a long moment, and then he shrugged. "Well, here's what we've more or less decided. As you both know, there's a half-cock safety, a handle-grip safety, and a regular thumb safety on the forty-five semiautomatic pistol. Besides that, the slide has to be pulled back and released before a round goes into the chamber. So unless the weapon was defective in some way, it's a little difficult to understand exactly how it happened."

"She just accidentally pulled the trigger, didn't she, sir?" I said.

"Well, no, not exactly. What happened, she said, was that she unwrapped his fatigues. She was planning to wash them, and the gun fell on the iloor. When the pistol hit the floor, it went off. Halkins was standing by the little dining room table, at the end of the trailer, pouring a glass of wine. We confirmed that, because there was a broken glass and spilled wine on the floor. But the pistol, landing on the floor at an angle, must've fired freakily, and the round caught him right between the eyes. Mrs. Halkins couldn't understand what had happened at first, the report was so loud, she said. But when Halkins fell, she picked up the pistol and went down to the manager's trailer to have him telephone for a doctor. When I asked her why she picked up the pistol, she said she was afraid it might fire again. Of course, when the doctor got there, Private First Class Halkins was already deceased. Probably instantaneously."

"Come to think of it," Socky said, "I believe that Halkins did tell me once that the grip safety on his pistol was a little loose. Did he ever mention that to you, Will?"

"No. As you remember, Halkins and I didn't talk too much to each other. And when I went to the range, I always went with Allen."

"I'm going to add what you said to your statement, Sokoloski," the lieutenant said. "It was my opinion, and your first sergeant's opinion, too, that this tragic accident would never have happened if Halkins had turned in his pistol before going home."

"That's right, sir," I said. "Especially when Wild Horse didn't tell Mrs. Halkins that it was wrapped up in his fatigues."

"Wild Horse‘?"

"That was just a nickname for Halkins, sir," Socky said.

"Did he have a reputation for wildness, recklessness? This could be very important to the investigation."

"No, sir," Socky said. "He had that nickname for a long time, for several years, before I ever knew him. It was on account of his hair, you see. He had very curly, unruly hair, and it kind of stuck up like an unroached mane on a wild horse. Halkins was already called Wild Horse before I re-enlisted here. I used to be in the Third Cavalry before I came to California."

"In Washington?"

"In Arlington, yes, sir. Before I got into horseshoeing I used to walk honor guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier."

"That was quite an honor," Lieutenant Shifrin said.

"Yes, sir. We had to march back and forth at Attention on a rubber mat. If someone stopped on the mat, you halted, came down to port arms, and said, ‘Please get off the mat, sir, or madam.' Once, when I snapped my rifle down to port arms at an old lady, she fainted on me."

"What did you do?" I asked. I had never heard this story.

"I just stepped over her and kept marching back and forth. Those were our orders."

"I see," the lieutenant said. "Well, do either one of you have anything else pertinent to add to your statements?"

"I'd just like to say, sir," Socky said, "that Halkins was a good horseshoer. And before he got married, he was always a hard worker."

"Thank you very much. You've both been very helpful. One of you, if you will, please, tell Sergeant Brasely that I would like to see him down here."

"I'll tell him, sir," Socky said.

We both saluted and left the day-room.

***

THERE WAS A MILITARY FUNERAL FOR HALKINS, BUT THE  casket was closed. We wore a "formal" uniform, which meant black neckties and white shirts with our regular serge O.D. uniforms.

The first sergeant marched us down to the post theater, and the troop was seated from the second row back, leaving the front row for Captain Bradshaw, Sergeant Brasely, Sergeant and Mrs. Bellows, and Mr. Halkins, Wild Horse's brother, who had come from Missouri to get the body. Mary Elizabeth Halkins wasn't there, although I looked for her in the theater.

Lieutenant Shifrin and the District Attorney of Monterey County had finished their investigation, and after she was cleared she left the Dunes Trailer park, her job at Woolworth's, and Monterey. No one knew where she went, but I doubt if she returned to Missouri; after all, she had married Wild Horse Halkins to get out of that state.

The chaplain gave a short service in the theater, and the casket was loaded on a caisson. Old Goyette, as the oldest man in Machine Gun Troop, led Halkins' horse, Runner, following along behind the caisson, which was pulled by six horses, with three riders from the 76th Field Artillery. Goyette had polished Halkins' boots, and the boots were tied to the pommel by the boot strings, with the toes pointing backward.

We, the entire troop, with the exception of the charge of quarters and one cook, who had been excused, marched at half-step, following the beat of a single drummer from the 11th Cavalry Band. Then when we got down to the railroad station in Monterey, about two hundred yards away from the Old Customs House, Corporal Royale's squad fired three blank rounds from their riiles, and the regimental bugler played "Taps." The casket was put on a wheeled cart to wait for the train to come in the next morning. The captain had to take Mr. Halkins to the San Carlos Hotel for the night, so he turned the troop over to Sergeant Brasely, and the first sergeant marched us at quick-step back to the Presidio. Instead of marching us all the way back to the troop area, Sergeant Brasely dismissed us in front of the Main Post Exchange, knowing that by this time everyone would need a beer.

We discussed the shooting and the funeral in the spiff bar, and Parker and I both agreed that Mr. Halkins, with his white hair, looked more like Wild Horse's father than he did an older brother. We also speculated on what would happen to the widow, and decided that a girl as pretty as she was, and still young, would do all right whether she moved to L.A. or San Francisco. Everyone agreed that it was Hallcins' fault that he had been shot, because if he hadn't taken his pistol home with him, his wife wouldn't have been able to shoot him—either accidentally or on purpose.

All in all, it was a damned impressive funeral.

***

THB NEXT AFTERNOON, WHEN WE GOT BACK FROM THE range at four-thirty, I was feeling good. In rapid tire, at fifteen yards, I had shot a pattem the size of an orange. The pattem, unhappily, was about three inches to the left of the bull's eye, but it was a definite pattern. Sergeant Olsen looked at my target, borrowed my pistol, and fired three slow rounds at my target. His three shots were grouped at almost the same place as my five shots.

"It isn't you, Willeford," he said, "it's the pistol. Tomorrow, when we come to the range, use a little Kentucky windage. Put the bull's-eye on top of your sight, and then move the muzzle to the right one inch. If that doesn't do it for you, I'll see that you get a diiferent pistol when we fire for record."

I was getting the hang of shooting the .45 all right, and I felt good about it. Three months of shoeing horses had built up my wrists, and it was no trick to hold the pistol steady. I  field-stripped my pistol, getting ready to clean it, when Sergeant Nevell, who was charge of quarters that day, came into the squad-room. (Sergeant Nevell was back where he belonged as a section leader in the second platoon, and we were certainly eating a lot better now that Hambone Jones was back as mess sergeant.)

"The first sergeant wants to see you, Willeford."

"I just field-stripped my pistol."

"Leave it on your bunk. Quinn'll watch it for you."

When I got to the orderly room and knocked on the door, I could see Sergeant Brasely and Sergeant Bellows through the screen door. I knew, or thought I knew, exactly what they wanted from me, but I was wrong.

After Sergeant Brasely told me to come in, Sergeant Nevell left us and went outside. Both of these old sergeants looked at me for a long time without saying anything.

"How do you feel, Willeford," Sergeant Brasely said finally, "about going back to the stable gang?"

I shook my head. I had been fucked over long enough, I decided. I wasn't the same overweight kid I had been in the fire department at Clark Field. They had worked my ass off for three months as the third horseshoer, and I hadn't got an extra dime out of it. Now, I thought, they want to make Wheeler second horseshoer, and offer me his place as third horseshoer. I would make P.F.C. all right, but it would be a dead end. Hell, Wheeler had just   re-enlisted, and had almost all of his enlistment to go yet. I wouldn't be eligible for second horseshoer until he left—if he ever left.

"You mean as third horseshoer?"

"No, as second."

"Second? What about Wheeler?"

"Wheeler wasn't considered. Wheeler has already asked me for the next D.R.O. opening. He wants out of the stable gang, and Sergeant Bellows has agreed to let him go. I must admit that you're our second choice. We offered second horseshoer to Hampe, but he doesn't want it. He wants to stay on as stable orderly. But I'm going to put Wheeler into the mess as D.R.O. as soon as I can get a replacement for him."

"Do you mean," I said, still not quite believing it, "that if I take the job as second horseshoer, I'll get P.F.C. and fourth class specialist, too? First and fourth?"

Sergeant Brasely grinned. "The grade goes with the job. Can you handle it?"

"Sure. Of course I can handle it. I know I've still got a lot to leam, but I can handle it."

"Then consider yourself a private first class, fourth class specialist. There'll be a Troop Order on the bulletin board tomorrow morning. One more thing. Who do you think, among the new men, would work out as third horseshoer? Somebody that both you and Socky could work with?"

"Micaloni, Tullio Micaloni," I said without hesitating. "I don't know if he'd want it or not, but I can't think of a better man than Micaloni. I've known him ever since I was in the Philippines."

"Okay," Sergeant Brasely said, "we'll talk to him. He's quiet, isn't he? I don't think I've ever heard him say two words."

"He only talks when he has something to say. He spent a couple of years on Fort Drum, you know."

"A1l right, then, Will," Sergeant Bellows said. "You'd better move back to the stable gang tonight, after chow.  Socky tells me you guys are a little behind schedule in the shoeing."

"What about the pistol range tomorrow?"

"You've already had your familiarization firing, so you won't have to tire for record, now that you're officially back in the stable gang. Just go on back to work."

"Thanks a lot," I said. "Both of you. I appreciate your confidence in me."

I walked back to the squad-room, just about as happy I as I have ever been in my life. First and fourth! In less than six months I would have my four years in, and I would have another five percent in fogy pay. I could start enclosing a five-dollar bill every month in the letters I wrote I to my grandmother.

As I entered the squad-room, I looked at Quinn for a minute. Quinn was wearing a new green gabardine shirt, and his gold P.F.C. stripes were cross·stitched on both sleeves with yellow thread. I had eight dollars in my pocket, a five and three ones. I rolled a cigarette and handed the makings to Quinn. He rolled a fat one, as I knew he would.

I lit my cigarette and then Quinn's (he never had any matches, either).

"What size shirt do you wear, Quinn?"

"Fifteen-and-a-half, thirty-four sleeves. Why?"

I wore a sixteen neck, and thirty-four sleeves, but I knew that if I moved the top button over a quarter of an inch I would be able to button the collar.

"How much for your gabardine shirt‘?"

"Eight dollars.?

"You've been selling them to Kayo for five."

"That's when I needed the money. Right now I don't need money so bad. Besides, I paid ten for it, and it still ain't paid for yet." `

"I'll give you seven."

"That's fair. I'll take seven."

I gave him the five and two ones, and he took off the shirt. I went down to the latrine and tried on the new shirt in front of the mirror. It was a trifle tight in the chest, but it looked good on me. I turned sideways in the mirror so I could get a better view of the gold stripe on my right arm. The three creases in the back had been sewn in, and there was a faint smell of benzene in the shirt from the cleaners, but it was practically a brand-new shirt.

Well, what the hell, I thought, I had earned the new shirt and the goldstripes. It just went to prove that all a man had to do in the Army was to live right, work hard, and all the good things would eventually come his way. It had certainly worked out that way for me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHARLES WILLEFORD was a highly decorated (Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, Luxembourg Croix de Guerre) tank commander with the Third Army in World War II. He has also been a professional horse trainer, boxer, radio announcer and painter. He studied art in Biarritz, France, and in Lima, Peru, and English at the University of  Miami. He has published a collection of short stories and fifteen novels, including the best-selling The Burnt-Orange Heresy.

A former Californian, he lives in Miami, Florida, and is the regular reviewer of mystery and suspense fiction for the Miami Herald.

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