Author: James Jones
Category: Literature
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“Yes,” said Johnny. “That’s right, Jim. Are you sure you won’t come in and have a steak and a drink? Oh, that’s right, you don’t drink.”
“Nope. Nor anything else that might make me soften up.”
“There’s a fellow in the house from Vincennes who lost a leg on Attu,” said Johnny. “Maybe you’d like to talk to him.”
“No. Those cripples give me the creeps. They’re nice guys and all that, but they’re all through and they know it.”
“That’s right. Well, Jim, take it easy and keep your head down.”
“Not me. I’m going to see all I can see and get all I can get. To hell with the ducking.” The hard cold look stared at Johnny out of Jim’s face. This was not the boast of a callow youth, bragging about something he didn’t know anything about. Jim was not bragging.
They shook hands and Jim climbed into the car.
“What’re you going to do after the war, Jim?” Johnny asked suddenly.
Jim’s grin drew his lips back from his teeth. His eyes threw out bright splinters of the dial light, “Well,” he said. His laugh was a bark. “I might stay in the army and get to be a goddamned general; that’s not a bad idea. But I ain’t worried about that. I’ve got too much egg-dropping to do.”
He started the car. “Well, old Johnny, so long. Maybe I’ll see you in London, hey?” He leaned over and shook hands with Johnny.
“Maybe,” said Johnny. “Goodby, Jim.”
Johnny watched the car drive away, and then he turned and went back into the house shivering slightly with the cold.
“I need a drink,” he said to George. “I need a real drink.”
“What’s the matter, old son?” George asked.
“I just said goodby to a guy I used to like.” He took the drink George handed him, and stood staring down at the glass in his hand.
“I wish I knew what it was that did that to Jim. Jim and I were buddies in Wahoo. Something sure’s happened to him. It might have been The Seventh; he was at Hickham, and Hickham got hit hard. But I’ve seen worse than that since then. It must just be what’s in the individual. Some people are affected one way and some another.” He took a long deep drink from his glass.
“Jim,” he said, “is an American Nazi.” He looked at George meaningly. “He doesn’t drink anymore nor smoke, and he goes to bed early every night. He’s cut himself off from everything that might weaken him. He does everything he’s told and believes everything he’s told—which is worse. He lives for one thing and one thing only. He lives to kill. An American Nazi: America should rule the world: Everything for The State. A fanatic, and like all fanatics, unbalanced. Where’s he going to be when this war is over?
“George and I are lost. But old Jim is double-lost.” Johnny’s shoulders were hunched and he stared at the tablecloth. “I wonder where it’s all going to end. Or if it’s ever going to end. Jim’s the kind of man the army wants. The army tries to teach a man to be the way Jim is. Jim’s a good soldier. He’s a perfect soldier. But where’s it going to end? After Germany, what then? Russia? England? Bankruptcy? Russia’s got more men like Jim than America. So had England. America has less than any other country, but America has too many, and getting more. America has gradually set up an ideal for men to emulate, and that ideal is Jim. Everything you read preaches it, everything teaches it. Even the magazine advertisements subtly teach people that a man like Jim is a perfect ideal to build toward.
“Look at all the big corporation advertisements. Millions of dollars a year. Do you think they’re doing that to sell things? Paintings of GIs, made-up letters to Dear Mom, telling everybody to trust in God, telling Dear Mom not to worry her head, that’s not to sell products, that’s indoctrination. That’s the subtlest and most deadly propaganda there is.” Johnny looked around the kitchen, nobody answered him, or had anything at all to say.
“There is no ending. It just goes on and on, deliberately creating killers like Jim and holding them up as examples. Don’t think, don’t reason, don’t even feel except what you’re told to feel. Advertising has become the greatest danger this country ever faced. Our big boys learned a lot from Hitler and he from them.
“I guess the best thing to do is just die and get it over with. The only trouble with me is I can’t enjoy it the way Jim does.” He looked up and grinned a shy sad smile that was out of place in the gaunt fighter’s face he had recently acquired. There was infinite pain in his eyes that went deeper and deeper and never seemed to end.
“Come on, George,” he said. “Let’s have a drink. You’re the lucky one, George. You’re all through. Unless Russia lands troopers in the Middle West in the next war. I’d trade places with you in a minute. I’d cut my own leg off to trade places with you, George.
“Come on, drink up. A toast!” he said, raising his glass and standing from his chair.
“To the end of the war!”
Johnny, broken to the rank of private for being AWOL, was reduced for a time to latrine duty. This extended account of Johnny the expendable “crumb” now back in a different company, is filled with specific details that increased the realism of his later war novels. “Stranger in a New Company,” however, is primarily expository, and Jones’s masterful dialogue is largely missing. Still, this story helps us understand Johnny and his fellow renegades and castaways in the authoritarian army.
“This war is going to last a long time,” the captain said to Johnny, “and you might as well reconcile yourself to it.”
STRANGER IN A NEW COMPANY
FORT CAMPBELL, KENTUCKY, LATE AUTUMN, 1943
HE WOULD RIDE THROUGH THE gate in the cab of the truck that met all the trains and he would look at the two MPs on duty at the gate, and once again the old familiar feeling of being trapped by a great indifferent power, the insignificance of being no more than a rifle or a grenade, another expendable crumb beneath the grinding thumb of Authority and the leering grin of Fate. Somewhere the wrong gears had meshed to throw the old balance of life out of kilter and every man’s life had been affected. Your life was your own and the only one you had, but now it was no longer yours; it belonged to Authority. Each man owed his life to Society. And this might go on for years, for scores of years, before a new balance might take form. Authority accepted for the moment might not be thrown off as easily as it had been accepted. A mystery, Authority, that came from whence nobody knew where, that could not he pinned down to any one man or group of men, a strange formidable power that grew and grew without seeming to take nourishment. You owed a debt to Society, and Authority was the cop with the tin badge and billy club to see that you paid. But Society owed you nothing.
And you were the goat. You were the crumb that was expendable. He would ride back through the gates where the two MPs stood, and the gates would close up with a clang and swallow him forever.
It was a feeling all soldiers, all the nameless millions who were only the pawns of Society, often have.
It was not a good feeling to have when he was reporting back.
The first thing that happened to Johnny, after he had been assigned to a regiment and to a company, was that he was broken to a private. This action was not unexpected, neither was it particularly resented. Because he was a non-commissioned officer with a rating to lose, and because he was a veteran of overseas combat, he got off without being court-martialed.
The 26th Division was being flooded with combat veterans released from hospitals all over the country and being sent back to duty. Johnny was one of the first, and after these first few came the flood. The sight of men wearing combat ribbons became a commonplace one, and after a while ceased to excite awed comments among the green men. The bright ribbons infiltrated into all the PXs and movies and Service Clubs, particularly into the sections of the various Post Exchanges (there were around twenty on the post) which dispensed the regulation 3.2 beer. At almost any time after Retreat up until closing time, a group of these men could be seen sitting together around several pitchers of beer, discussing the war, the ne
w outfit, the army.
Johnny was the first combat veteran to be assigned to his company, and so he enjoyed the pleasure of being somewhat of a celebrity. He was looked upon as some sort of strange alien creature who had been through combat. The men in his new company were typical of the whole division. The majority of them were young men with close-clipped GI haircuts, strong rugged bodies, and unlined faces. They constituted almost all of the privates and PFCs; very few of them were non-coms. They had all been drafted recently and had just completed their Basic Training; few of them were over twenty, none over twenty-two. There was an eager bright look, in their eyes, and they got a great kick out of Military Discipline and saluting officers and standing at attention. The whole thing was a great lark to them, a great adventure that allowed them to get away from homes, schools, or jobs that bored them. They were having a world of fun out of field problems with live ammunition.
Standing out amidst this group were the non-coms, most of them old men in the division, having been with it all over the United States during the three years since it was activated. The 26th Division—or YD Division—was a National Guard outfit and the non-coms and officers had been in the company before the division was activated. The majority of the non-coms spoke with a soft slurred New England drawl. The cooks, clerks, supply men were all old timers who had had their specialist jobs since activation, jobs that were gravytrain, and for which a man needed a good bit of pull with somebody in order to get the job—a job that stood no formations, made no marches, did not have stand Reveille or Retreat.
The company commander was a small, bowlegged, pinch-faced captain who wore gold spectacles and was a strict disciplinarian—so the non-coms said, having known him before the war when he was an assistant manager of a hardware store. The non-coms did not like him and enjoyed dwelling upon the fact that he had been a lieutenant in the CCCs after quitting his job in the hardware store in Boston, whence most of them came. He was in good with the colonel and was slated for a majority soon, they said, and prayed that he would make his majority very soon.
Johnny was in the company a week before the final orders on his bust came through. The first thing he had done in the company was to take a medical examination which marked him unfit for field duty. Since the company spent most of its time in the field, Johnny stayed alone in the barracks with the clerks and a few of the cooks, those who were not out with the company running the field kitchen. He was a corporal, and he was treated as one. There being no jobs befitting the prestige of a non-com available, he laid around and did nothing. He had to be out of the barracks and simulating some kind of work during each morning until after the battalion adjutant made his inspection of the barracks while the companies were out in the field. Although he had a medical chit excusing him, it was considered bad policy for the battalion adjutant to find any man doing nothing. The company went out at daylight and stayed out till dark, taking their noon meal in the field, thus giving him twelve hours to do nothing.
When the company was in, Johnny’s corner bunk became a gathering place for the boisterous eager-eyed kids. None of them suspected that Johnny was no more than three years older than the youngest of them. They misinterpreted Johnny’s hard set face and short clipped sentences, and they saw him as sinister and ominous, when in actuality he was only disgusted and dissatisfied. They congregated around his bunk and plied him with questions about the Japs; when he was drinking beer in the PX, they offered to pay for it, and plied him with questions about combat. He was a romantic picture to them, and they could see themselves being tempered by the fire of war into tight-lipped, cold-eyed, nerveless men who could kill or be killed without batting an eyelash.
They listened eagerly to his stories when they could get him to talk. He refused to talk much, and they jubilantly construed this to be because his experiences had been so terrible that he could not stand to talk about them. Actually, it was because Johnny’s personal experience and understanding of combat was so opposed to what they wanted to see and hear in his words that it irritated him to try to explain it. They listened almost breathlessly to what stories he did tell—such as the one about the time the Jap jumped into his slit trench from behind in the middle of the night. They thought this very exciting.
And also stories about him got around in the company. One night during the week he remained a corporal, there was a non-com’s meeting in the company dayroom, a long low building, the other half of which held the orderly room and supply room. The dayroom contained a ping-pong table with a broken leg and a badly warped surface, a magazine rack without magazines, a number of straight-backed wooden chairs, and a Coca-Cola machine. The captain gave a lecture on gas and the use of gas masks from behind his gold spectacles. After the lecture was over and the non-coms had stopped fidgeting, the captain said; “Corporal Carter, perhaps you’d like to tell us what provisions were made concerning gas masks and gas in your company while it was in combat.”
“We didn’t use them, Sir,” Johnny said. “When my outfit went up to the line the first time, everybody threw their gas masks in the bushes.” This was the literal truth.
A couple of the non-coms sniggered, and the captain’s eyes narrowed behind his gold spectacles, his pinched face became more so. “Weren’t you ever worried about being gassed? Wasn’t your company commander somewhat anxious about what might happen if his company were in a gas attack?”
“It’s not as simple as that, Sir,” Johnny said. “None of us were worried about gas masks. We had too many other things to be worried about. Besides that, the Japs had discarded their own gas masks, too.”
“That seems very inefficient to me. But I suppose that is the way the Regular Army works.”
Johnny returned the captain’s pinch-faced stare without looking away, something not considered a wise action in the association between enlisted men and officers. “Combat is always inefficient, Sir,” he said. It was evident the captain did not believe this. “There are too many elements which are not taken into account. In fact, all possibilities can never be taken into account. The same thing never happens twice in the same way. From my own experience, I’d say that a man has to unlearn everything he’s been taught from the Soldier’s Handbook and begin all over again as soon as he gets under fire. Then he begins to pick up little tricks of the trade that keep him from getting killed, for my part, I don’t believe combat will ever reach the point where it can be efficiently mass-controlled.”
The captain blinked behind his gold spectacles at this. “Well,” he said. “We didn’t know as much detail about modern combat when your outfit went in as we do now. But there are men who have devoted their whole lives to the study of combat. We have found that the best way to prevent casualties and defeats is to follow a prearranged set pattern of action in which each man does his particular job obediently, synchronizing the whole into a welded action.”
Johnny said nothing to this, realizing that especially in the army is discretion the better part of valor. But he immediately thought of his old CC, Captain Rosen, who had refused via sound power phone an order from the battalion commander, who was eight hundred yards to the rear and out of danger; the battalion commander ordered Captain Rosen to proceed with a frontal attack as planned. Captain Rosen informed the colonel he had lived with the men in his company for a year and that the colonel could kindly kiss his ass. By this action Captain Rosen saved his company from annihilation, made a flanking attack and captured the objective, and was at once relieved of his command and sent back to the States in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, for which transfer he was duly grateful, even though it was considered a disgrace in the army.
The story of Johnny’s tilt with the gold-spectacled captain made a very good joke on the captain, who was not liked by the men in his company. The non-coms spread it around, and while they enjoyed the story, they looked upon Johnny as a damned fool for deliberately antagonizing the CC. No man who argued with his CC could be classed as intelligent.
The barracks w
ere very lonely when everyone was gone. Johnny bought several pocketbooks at the PX, but those books had to be hidden away during the mornings when the battalion adjutant inspected the barracks. They could not be kept under the pillow, and they could not be kept in the wooden footlocker, for the adjutant was also a disciplinarian and inspected the footlockers of all the men who were not out in the field with the company. Johnny found a library in the main Service Club, but this library was ordered to be closed until after Retreat which was at five-thirty.
The barracks were lonely even when the company was in. Johnny was a stranger in a new outfit, an outfit in which there were no old friends, no men who saw things as he saw them, no men with common experiences to be remembered and talked about. Johnny spent a good bit of time writing poetry, most of which he tore up and threw away. His new attitude of mind acquired in Endymion was not conducive to the writing of poetry, which never explained enough, and he found he had no aptitude for writing it anymore. He was concerned with more prosaic things. After the comparative freedom of expression in a combat outfit and in a hospital, the severe regimentation of this outfit was hard to take. If he had had a job, he might not have been so depressed and dissatisfied.
As soon as his bust orders came through, the job part was taken care of. As a private, he was made permanent latrine orderly. The captain called him in and informed him of his reduced status. As is customary, he was offered a chance to appeal this decision to a court-martial if he was dissatisfied with it. While political pull in the army, just as in civilian life, is never acknowledged openly, there is no man but what knows of its existence and governs his actions accordingly. The captain’s friend, the colonel, would sit as president of the court-martial if Johnny requested one; it would be asinine to imagine he might get an honest judgment from such a court, even if the reduction in rank was unjust—which it was not. He was not dissatisfied with the judgment, which he considered abnormally light; he was dissatisfied with the outfit, with his place in it, and with the army in general. He made no appeal, and the captain informed him of his new job.