Author: James Jones
Category: Literature
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Being a latrine orderly is usually acknowledged as being a particularly odious task. Usually, it is worked on the duty roster so that the job rotates daily among the privates, a portion of whose lot in life it is to do such jobs when their turn comes. One of the inducements offered toward becoming a non-com is that a man no longer has to pull such details. It is a policy that a non-com is used more for his brain than for his back. While it is not physically one of the hardest jobs in the world, being a latrine orderly is not as easy as generally supposed. When a company comes in from the field and mobs a latrine, of which there are two for something like one hundred and fifty men, they leave it in a poor condition. Sergeant George Baker has aptly handled this situation in one of his Sad Sack cartoons. It’s not an easy job to clean it next morning after they’ve used it again so that it is fit to pass the daily inspection.
Johnny Carter, being physically disabled, was a fit person to fill this most disliked of jobs. He was not able to go out in the field, and his disability did not keep him from being useful here. Of course, he could have been a cook’s helper, or a permanent KP, or an additional clerk, or an aid in the supply room—all of which jobs, like clerking and supply, he had had previous experience in, as his records testified.
Being a malefactor and in no position to gripe, Johnny forced himself to do the job, and which is much harder, forced himself to say nothing about it. The gold-spectacled captain had every ground for being in the right: Johnny had been over the hill, had been busted, had been ostensibly insolent, was not fit for field duty. But to Johnny—especially knowing the army as he did—the captain’s attitude was just a shade too personal and too righteous. Johnny was in a position where he could do nothing or say nothing, could not protest or fight back. His only alternative was to get himself into a worse situation. Only a man who has been in such a position can appreciate or understand what a man goes through in that kind of setup. It’s a kind of setup very common in the army. Johnny thought that it must be the way many criminals must feel in prison under the personal jurisdiction of a guard, and he did not wonder that now and then a criminal goes berserk and becomes a Public Enemy of a society which fosters such things. Of such a nature was the legend proudly displayed by guards armed with pick handles in the Post Stockade of Schofield Barracks: They pridefully informed prisoners that John Dillinger served six months in the Schofield Barracks Post Stockade, and forever after swore that if it took the rest of his life, he intended to get even with the United States.
To Johnny his job was an indignity. He saw it as a deliberate attempt on the part of the captain to humiliate him or to break him to heel. He could not walk out as he had done with Erskine, he could only force himself to act like he liked it and thus dull the captain’s pleasure a small bit. For him, with his experience and his intelligence, it was the worst kind of slap in the face a man could give him. He had to keep forcing himself to turn the other cheek. When the captain made his own personal inspection, as he often did before the battalion adjutant came around, his praise of Johnny’s “work” and his impersonality were much too studied and much to obvious to be believed. Johnny would look up unexpectedly and catch his eyes now and then and detect the faintest kind of a twinkle of relish behind the gold spectacles.
In the midst of all this, Johnny received regular letters from Sandy Marion and from Eddie. These were like messages from another world, a world in which he was able to think rationally and clearly, a world in which there was good food and good liquor, a world in which he was able to read and to draw conclusions and to think out things that were too general and too far removed from his present position for him to even attempt. It was as if intelligences and processes of thoughts and ideas had dropped out of his mind as that world had dropped from around his body. There seemed to be nothing compatible between the two worlds, although he saw posters in the latrine every day that stated openly and honestly that this war was being fought for the existence of such a world for all men, not just a few. This seemed to be a vast incongruity, but his brain was not in the proper condition to dwell upon it and find the fallacy—if there was one. The world of thought and conversation faded more and more from his mind between letters, and with it faded his capacity and desire for the kind of thinking that generated such conversation. His face became more bony, his cheekbones more gaunt, his lips thinner, his eyes more burning. When he answered those letters, he did not mention what was going on with him.
After he had been on the latrine orderly job three weeks, the captain called him in. He walked into the office, saluted, and stood at a rigid attention. The captain began to talk without giving him the customary command of “at ease.”
“You will be transferred out of this company as unfit for combat infantry duty, Carter,” the captain said. “The papers are going through, but they are taking quite a while. We’re getting ready to shove off, and there will be an exodus of such transfers, all taking place at the same time. What kind of outfit you’ll go to, I don’t know. It will probably be some kind of QM outfit.”
“Would the captain mind giving me at ease. Sir?” Johnny asked, using the correct third-person address to a superior.
The captain was momentarily confused. “Yes,” he said, waving his hand. “At ease.” Johnny moved his left foot twelve inches, crossed his palms behind his back and slumped. The captain’s eyes narrowed behind his gold spectacles and his pinched face seemed to grow tighter. The first sergeant and the clerk were listening to all this in the outside room, the captain having neglected to have the door shut.
He looked up at Johnny from behind his desk. “I realize that your disability is the result of a wound and that you are not to blame for it. Also that you are not malingering. At the same time, there are a lot of jobs in my company that you could do, even overseas, if you wished to stay in it.” He raised his hand when Johnny started to speak.
“Wait just a minute. You’ve been a corporal and have enjoyed the privileges of a non-com. But you’ve forfeited all that by going AWOL. You’re starting back at the bottom. I’ve looked at your Service Record and your 201 file, and I know that you’ve had a lot of various useful experiences—you had a platoon once, didn’t you?”
“For two weeks, Sir. Temporarily, in combat.”
“Yes,” said the captain. “I know all those things.” He permitted himself a slight smile, which however was lost on Johnny who stared straight ahead at the wall over the captain’s head. “I also know that your AGOT score was extremely high. What I want to point out is that all these things are commendable, but they do not give you the right to set yourself outside the pale. You are just as subject to discipline as anybody else. I play no favorites in my company; you can ask the men.” Johnny had already talked to most of them on this subject, but he did not attempt to refute the captain’s statement. “And neither do I pick on anybody.
“You’re at the bottom again, and you might as well become used to it. As I said, there are lots of jobs that you could do in my company that would not be hindered by your disability. How would you like to be a clerk in my company? It would be better than the job you have now. But you would have to start at the bottom and work up. There are things that could be done in this office on your time off from your other duty, for instance, this stove needs to be cleaned. My clerks aren’t as efficient as I’d like them to be. This office hasn’t been cleaned properly for some time. If you went to start in that way, and show me you’ve got the stuff, fine. You’ll have to prove it to me, though. But if, in time, I see that you are conscientious and mean to work hard, I’ll treat you accordingly.” The captain smiled up at Johnny magnanimously, but the look in his eyes did not seem to go with his smile. Johnny thought suddenly of the ancient saying: “What you are speaks so loudly, I cannot hear what you say.” He was momentarily shocked at the audacity of this man who could so magnanimously offer him the honor of cleaning his stove—on his time off, in addition to his other duties.
“The captain is mistaken, Sir,” he s
aid, not dropping the formal third person, “if he thinks I am dissatisfied with my present job. I’m quite content where I am—until my transfer goes through. I have no desire to remain in the captain’s organization.”
The captain’s face became more pinched, until it was almost prissy. His eyes squinted narrowly. “Very well, Carter,” he said. “This war is going to last a long time, and you might as well reconcile yourself to it. You may go.” It was apparent that the captain was pleased with his own generous humanitarianism. As he left, Johnny wondered if the captain could actually believe those things he obviously felt about himself. He couldn’t really believe them, and yet he apparently did. It was obvious that the captain would not be too displeased if “this war lasted a long time.” Being an officer in the army seemed to have the strangest effect on most men! If the people of the country could only understand the way their army worked.
A week later, Johnny was transferred from the 26th Division to the quartermaster, along with about a third of the captain’s company. They were assigned to a newly activated Gasoline Supply Company which had only a cadre of seven men from which to build itself.
A month after his transfer, he was made a buck sergeant.
At about the same time, the captain got his majority as a reward for his efficiency, sincerity, and success as an officer in the AUS and immediately began bucking for his lieutenant colonelcy.
Jones, assigned to the 842nd Quartermaster Gas and Supply Company, was promoted to sergeant on March 1, 1944, but he was, as Frank MacShane wrote in Into Eternity, soon distressed that a Jewish officer he admired was forced out. Earlier, in Hawaii, Jones had been helped by Captain William Blatt, another Jewish officer. Blatt knew about Jones’s interest in writing and encouraged him. Blatt was admired by his men on Guadalcanal because he ignored orders he knew would result in many deaths. Instead, he chose an alternate plan that achieved the desired result but with fewer deaths and injuries. Because of his disobeying an order, Blatt was relieved of his command.
Jones was not afraid to expose anti-Semitism in the army.
ARMY POLITICS AND ANTI-SEMITISM
CAMP CAMPBELL, EARLY WINTER, 1943–1944
THE NEW OUTFIT TO WHICH Johnny Carter had been transferred was suffering its birthpangs. It was in a state of metamorphosis, from idea to reality, and was encountering all those problems which are never provided for. Compared to the much older though inefficient 26th Division it seemed to be fluctuating wildly, grasping at straws.
With the exception of the original seven-man cadre, the new company was composed completely of men who had been officially marked unfit for the rigors of Infantry duty. Over fifty percent of them were men who had seen overseas service—overseas combat service—that designation is important, particularly to a man who wears the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, because the greatest percentage of men who go overseas never are in combat. These men, like Johnny, had been shipped back because of disabling wounds, or evacuated because of severe cases of malaria or dengue fever or jungle rot or trench foot or yellow jaundice—for any one, or several, of the fifty or sixty diseases combat soldiers are subject to and have to suffer in addition to danger.
The other fifty percent of the company were men who had not been overseas at all. Most of them had been in the 26th Division for three years, going from one maneuver area to another. They were also classed as physically unfit for Infantry duty. A great many of them were, because of illnesses or wounds contracted on maneuvers. Some of them weren’t.
The most disabling thing about all of them, including the combat men, was their morale. It had been knocked, cut, cursed, blown, and beaten out of them.
A man in the Infantry, to get himself classified as physically unfit for the Infantry—even if he is—must raise more hell and create a bigger stink than any congressman who tries to get his favorite pet bill passed. To raise that much hell, a soldier must have reached the saturation point of disgust, to where he doesn’t give a good goddam about his officers’ opinion of him, his comrades’ opinion, or anybody else’s opinion of him. And most men care more for other men’s opinions of them than they care for their own, or would like to admit. The men in this company were a great contrast to the short-haired young kids who comprised the greatest part of the privates in the 26th Division.
Whether this emphasis on other people’s opinions is deliberately created to test the sincerity of a man’s disability is hard to tell. It may be that it is a natural outgrowth of certain social mores like patriotism or self-sacrifice or heroism or a continuation of the schoolroom authority. And it may not. In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon says: “. . . and it was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline that a good soldier should dread his officers far more than the enemy.” Whether or no, it exists and every soldier must surmount it first before he can even think of getting himself out of the Infantry. He has to fight shavetail college-boy doctors at dispensaries, has to fight company commanders, battalion commanders, regimental burgeons, clinical psychiatrists, and as likely as not, face a court martial. So the men in Johnny’s new company were a wild and wooly bunch.
The first thing this new company did as soon as it had its men assigned to their barracks was to proceed to give them a Basic Training course, which consists of hikes, forced marches, creeping and crawling, extended order drill—in short, all of the things that are taught to a raw recruit the minute he’s inducted. And which he must forget as soon as he gets into combat. This to a group of men none of whom had been in the army less than two years, and a great many of whom had seen as much as nine months’ continuous combat duty.
The first thing Private Johnny Carter did when he was assigned to his new barracks and heard this news was to offer his services as an experienced clerk in the Orderly Room! They were accepted.
A Quartermaster Gasoline Supply Company is a separate company. It is connected with no battalion or regiment or division, except the one to which it ministers gasoline at the moment. The men in this new organization were there because of physical disabilities. They soon learned that their new job consisted mainly of loading and unloading “bays” of five-gallon cans in and out the back ends of trucks that reached to their chests. A “bay” consists of 125 five-gallon GI cans. Rectangular ones with three parallel handles across the top, the same type can the Infantry carries water in. And the company had something like twenty-five or thirty bays. Hoisting these cans in and out of trucks four or five times a day is a man-sized job, even for a soldier who is physically fit for Infantry duty. One man in the company was unable to wear a helmet because of a wound scar in his head from a shell fragment encountered in the second battle of Kasserine Pass. He was apt to pass out from extreme physical exertion and fainted four times in two weeks. He was refused a transfer by the medical officers. Another man had had half of his calf muscle torn out by a shell fragment. He, too, could not get a transfer. Several men were constantly dosing themselves with atabrine begged from the dispensary. The wild and woolly bunch became wilder and more woolly.
The cadre, consisting of acting first sergeant, mess sergeant, supply sergeant, two section sergeants, one cook, and a clerk, were supposed to be trained for the job they undertook. It developed more and more obviously that none of them but the cook and mess sergeant knew what they were doing. After two weeks, the acting first sergeant quit and went back to the ranks, and a big burly red-headed staff sergeant who had come down from the 26th Division was appointed to take his place. The acting clerk became Johnny’s assistant, and Johnny was instructed to teach him how to make out a Morning Report, Sick Report, and most important of all, the Payroll.
The ratings were completely tangled up. All the men who had come from the Infantry had been transferred In Grade, so that there were at least three rating for every job, almost as many non-coms as there were privates. The total number of ratings was fifty percent higher than that allowed by the company’s Table of Organization.
The company commander who stepped in to take
over this mess was a first lieutenant, a young Jew, tall, stoop-shouldered, sad-eyed, and self-conscious. He brought with him another first lieutenant, a fiery Scotsman. Both men had been commanding Negro companies—what is known as a crummy detail at every white officer’s club. Both men worked themselves half to death, spending all day with the company, and half the night in the Orderly Room trying to straighten out the newborn records and reports. Johnny usually stayed with them and more and more assumed responsibility for the clerical work. His previous experience and natural quickness of thought were invaluable. The new acting first sergeant knew nothing about the job except how to handle men, which was no mean job in itself in this company, and frankly admitted his ignorance. Johnny spent a couple of hours a day teaching Red the first sergeant’s clerical duties. The company copy of Army Regulations became so dog-eared and thumbed that a new one had to be requisitioned and the old one salvaged.
From the moment he first stepped into the Orderly Room, Johnny worked savagely. He worked with a fanatical drive that carried the others along on his wave of energy. His mind was like a water-starved sailor, soaking up every drop of intense thought it could find. He worked constantly and gloried in it and in the release from himself that it brought. He forgot the existence of Johnny Carter. He cursed and threatened and raved at the old cadre clerk and the new assistant imported to help out. His intensity made them efficient at the things they hardly knew, in spite of themselves. His mind had been atrophied by looking at latrine walls, and it burst out now like a brilliant explosion which startled even him. He spent one whole day, worked clear through the night, and the next day till three p.m. making out the first Payroll and got it through the Finance Inspectors. It was the first Payroll he had ever made out in his life. He didn’t even take the rest of the day off.