Melville Goodwin, USA

by John P. Marquand

  “Well, anyway, you’ve still got me, Mel,” she said.

  Actually the charge blew up half an hour later and half an hour after that he was called to the post headquarters office.

  “Now wait,” Muriel said. “Before you go, take a shower and put on a clean uniform.”

  The captain was in the CO’s office and the door was not even closed, so that everyone heard Captain Burdock get his orders to apologize and everyone heard Burdock do it. Muriel was the one who fixed it up later by asking the Burdocks to come in to supper. It was not his fault or Muriel’s that everyone at Jellison called the captain “Delayed-action” Burdock after that. He was always called “Delayed-action” Burdock, and Muriel still sent a card to them every Christmas.

  Melville Goodwin could go on endlessly with his stories once he was in the mood. He seemed to tell them for much the same purpose that a chain smoker smokes cigarettes, for their soothing effect on the nerves rather than for any individual point or moral, and most of them seemed to me to illustrate nothing except a certain mediocrity and a snail-like advance upward on the service list—a list which was governed entirely by seniority until 1935. The General kept saying that he hated nothing more than blowhard officers who pulled wires and who sucked up to their superior officers at headquarters, but you could have a glimpse of Muriel Goodwin through the General’s verbiage, dusting him and brushing him and showing off his right points to the right people by skillful indirection. Yet obviously his own abilities and virtues were the factors in getting him where he was. No woman could push a chump up to two stars.

  I remembered what she had once said—that she never worried about Melville when he was with troops, and I could think of her as breathing a sigh of relief and putting her mind on the children and the house when Melville was out somewhere on field maneuvers. Also, I had heard some of his contemporaries vaguely and guardedly imply that the farther he was removed from basic realities, the less effective he became, but he possessed great reserves of clearheadedness, resilience and mental durability. Furthermore, he was fearless, not only intellectually but physically, in an unimaginative, unhysterical and dedicated way. This arose from what I had always thought about him—that he was essentially annoyingly simple.

  Melville Goodwin was never happier in his life, he said, than when he was assigned to command a company in the Philippines in Colonel Curly Whittell’s regiment—Curly was subsequently relieved after a visit from the Inspector General’s office and ended his career at a G-2 desk in Washington. Before he was assigned to the Philippines, Melville had been attending a lot of schools. It was good, after all this theorizing, to get down to basic fact, and no matter what anyone said, Infantry was fact. All the special branches and the bright boys in them, the Artillery, the Signal Corps, the Tanks and Aviation, had no other basic purpose than to push ahead the Infantry, and you had better not forget it. He always resented the snooty attitude specialists took about Infantry.

  One night at the club at Baguio, when he was up there in the hills for a week’s leave to see Muriel and the boys, he got into quite an argument with his classmate, Phil Mitch—who was commanding a field artillery battery—and some flying officer who had something to do with a pursuit group on Nichols Field. This might not have happened if Muriel had been there, but Muriel had a low fever and had told him to go ahead to the Saturday night dance. Someone in a corner had been singing that one about caissons rolling along, and Phil had asked Melville why he hadn’t chosen a real branch of the service instead of the Infantry. Their voices must have risen because quite a crowd began gathering around them, including some higher officers. Melville said plenty about Infantry and he quoted Henderson’s Stonewall Jackson to prove it, just the way dogmatic ministers quote the Bible. Phil had said he sounded as backward as the late William Jennings Bryan and the monkey trial, and he had told Phil to keep the conversation away from monkeys, that they were talking about Infantry. He must have said more than he intended and perhaps he stuck his neck out because Lieutenant Colonel Dowel—that would be old “Gypsy” Dowel, who was infantry himself, but on a four-year tour as Inspector General—kept handing him drinks and saying he was a fundamentalist himself and thank God there were a few fundamentalists left in the army, and Melville had said thank God there were, sir, that sometimes he thought the army was drifting away from fundamentals; and some of the officers below field rank had said go ahead and give it to him, “Fundamental” Goodwin.

  At any rate, he must have stuck his neck out all right because Muriel, who felt well enough by Monday to go out to a ladies’ bridge luncheon, came back and said she had heard that he had been very noisy at the club and that maybe it would be just as well if he did not have such a chip on his shoulder about Infantry. Nevertheless he had been absolutely right, and he told Muriel then that she might as well face it, she had married someone who was going to be in the front lines if there was going to be another war, and never to mind the rank. He overheard her saying the next night that Mel was an eccentric, but as a matter of fact she was as proud as he was of that company. It was like owning something at last to have a company.

  An Infantry company, when you came to think of it, was the sharp edge of all war weapons and the individual enlisted man was the the primary unit. You could not be a successful company commander or a successful anything in the field if you could not put yourself in the shoes of the average American soldier. No enlisted man in his right senses ever expected an officer to be his pal, but if you could get the confidence of your people, you could do anything with them. Even the worst of them wanted to be the snappiest soldiers in the best outfit in the service, and they would rupture themselves trying to be if they felt they had a chance.

  Company A, when he took it over, was not bad, but its personnel were slowed up and were trying to cut corners. The food and the drill were mediocre and so were the uniforms. The first thing he did when he took command, even before he talked to the officers, was to interview the top sergeant, because the morale of the company and everything else was in the hands of the top kick. The top sergeant of A Company was a sullen-looking man named Politz, who had already served three hitches and who knew all about gold-bricking.

  “Now, sergeant,” he said, “I want to be frank with you. I’m ambitious and I want to get ahead, because I have a wife and two kids, and I’m going to make this the best God-damned company in the army. I want you to help me do it.”

  He could tell from Politz’s expression that he had seen officers come and go, so he decided he had to make it stick, especially as he was still a first lieutenant, though a company CO.

  “You think I’m handing you the old line of goods, don’t you, Politz?” he said. “All right, I’ll have to show you. I’ll back you up if you’ll back me, and if you don’t, I’ll bust you. First off, I want you to be the best-looking top sergeant in the regiment and so you’ve got to do something about your breeches and your blouse. Report here at two this afternoon, and I’ll take you to the post tailor myself.”

  He could see that Politz did not like it and neither did the mess sergeant when he got after the cooks, but he really turned that company inside out and in the end it could do close order and extended order like a drill team. They were all a team from top to bottom, including the junior officers, one of whom, “Long John” Gooch, he asked for, later, as his chief of staff in the Silver Leaf.

  Day and night he was out there. He would go over every man from head to toe, as though they were kids getting dressed up for a birthday party, and by God you should have seen his men at guard mount. Maybe Politz and some of them thought he would quiet down, but he didn’t. There was always wife trouble and girl trouble and drinking trouble in the company, and he was always ready after retreat to listen to troubles personally. No matter what engagements Muriel had made for him, she had to break them on the nights of the regimental boxing matches, and it was the same with the company ball team. When the men began to spend their own money at the post tailor’s so that
they could have their breeches and blouses like Goodwin’s, he knew that everything was in hand, and Muriel got the spirit of it and began doing things about the noncoms’ wives. When the word got around that Goodwin would go right down the line for anyone in A Company, he knew that he was getting where he wanted. He could always figure logistics in terms of live troops. They were never abstract figures but men with a certain limit of endurance. He could reach decisions by looking at the faces of troops. He had learned this from Company A.

  He often explained such problems to Muriel when they were together in the evening, and it was amusing to hear Muriel quote him, as she did sometimes at routine official dinners. You certainly learned about social life in the army, starting right as a shavetail, because of all those calls and courtesies and functions. You learned how to enter a room without tipping things over and how to pull out chairs and handle teacups and how to carry on a meaningless, harmless conversation with the lady on your right or left. It might be dull, but by God you learned. If incidentally you learned too much about somebody’s wife flirting with somebody else, you also knew when not to speak about it. Most officers might have started as small-town boys who had never seen a formal dinner table, but you knew your way around by the time you got to field rank, and no one could laugh at the army.

  There was nothing that made him more pleased and proud than hearing from other people what a really top-drawer girl Muriel was. Formidable women in the higher echelons who had marched with their husbands from the Point up to the big house on the post and who ought to know, and frightened clumsy little lieutenants’ wives who didn’t know anything, all kept drawing him aside at dances and functions to tell him how much they liked Muriel. She knew all the stories and the jokes and the special type of flattery that made the big brass feel good, and yet she could also turn right around and make all the young kids just entering the service feel right at home. It made him very proud that Muriel had so much faith in him, though when they began to get a little rank and he overheard small snatches of what Muriel was saying about him to the big brass, he would sometimes be impelled to laugh and say that Muriel overestimated the situation; but at the same time, Muriel never went out of her way to tell anyone that he was an unappreciated wonder, as a lot of other wives did while building up their husbands. In fact she would always start by running him down a little. She would say, for instance, that she was afraid sometimes that Melville was turning into a martinet … sometimes she really wished that the boss would put him on the carpet and tell him to relax. She sometimes thought that man of hers, as she occasionally called him, was such a perfectionist that people under him would resent it. Yet back there in the Philippines the men in that company of his had really adored him, though she was sure she did not know why, and when he got orders to return to the States, Sergeant Politz and a little enlisted men’s committee came calling at the house, bringing a silver cigarette box … it almost made her cry.… The box was presented to her, of course, to get around army regulations.… Melville was just as hard on his own two sons as he was on troops. She was sure she didn’t know why his sons were always following him around and always calling for Daddy when they went to bed—except that he could tell them nice stories.

  For instance there was the story of Corporal Hoskins and his dog. Melville was surprised when he heard Muriel telling this one to Colonel Frye at a formal dinner, because Muriel always disliked dogs and would not have one of them around the house. Somehow enlisted men always would go for dogs and monkeys and things like that. Every once in a while you’d have to have an open season on pets, or you’d find you’d be running a zoo. That mutt of Corporal Hoskins’s was one of those queer mutts you saw running around the rice paddy villages in the Philippines with sores all over him, but Hoskins had cleaned him up. The mutt’s name was Bolo, and Melville put up with Bolo because Hoskins was a good noncom, until one day at a battalion parade, when the company was passing in review and he had just given the command “Eyes right,” he happened to see Bolo right behind the adjutant keeping time to the music. The battalion commander put him on the carpet afterwards, in a nice way—but on the carpet.

  “I love you, Goodwin,” Major Grundy said, “but I don’t love your dog, and the colonel was right there, and the colonel doesn’t love him either.”

  “Neither do I, sir,” Melville said. “He isn’t mine. I didn’t know he was there, sir.”

  “Well,” the major said, “maybe he thinks the adjutant’s a hydrant.”

  “He didn’t commit a nuisance on his post, did he, sir?” Melville asked.

  It was all good fun and there was always apt to be kid and dog trouble around a parade when the band began to play, but still, he had taken a bawling out and when he got back to the company office, he put Hoskins and Bolo on the carpet.

  “Hoskins,” he said, “by tomorrow morning I want to see that pooch out of here.”

  “Sir,” Hoskins said, “if the lieutenant would watch what he can do, the lieutenant might go easy on him.”

  “What can he do?” Melville asked.

  “He can do it on his hind legs, sir,” Hoskins said.

  “Do what on his hind legs?” Melville asked.

  “The drill, sir,” Hoskins said.

  It was the damnedest thing. That mutt could stand on his hind legs and do a rightabout, left face and right face and walk around the room, forward, to the rear march, and eyes right, all by the numbers. Something had to be done about genius, and eventually he took Bolo and Hoskins up to the major, who took them all to the colonel’s. The colonel was giving a little dinner that night, and after dinner Bolo did his drill. After that Bolo entertained at a lot of parties, but he never did appear again at a formation.

  If Muriel’s ideas about him did not always coincide with what Melville knew about himself, they certainly were always favorable, and they always made him happy, and she certainly seemed to know better than he did how to get on the right side of individual superiors. To give just one example, when Lieutenant Colonel Witherell from the general staff came to Hawaii for the winter maneuvers, Muriel found out somehow that Witherell had a special weakness for the Civil War battle of Chancellorsville and that Witherell was particularly fond of everything that had happened on the Orange Plank Road. She had told Melville this several days before Witherell dined with them at Kahala and she had urged him to study up in his Henderson for two evenings on Chancellorsville. Then Muriel had simply said in a most casual way that she did wish that Melville could think of something besides the Civil War. Any time those navy people next door wanted a bridge game—and it was fun to see Melville make money off the navy—why he would always excuse himself and sit under the lamp with one of those Civil War books. That was all that Muriel needed to say. Witherell came around a lot after that. She also told Witherell one of those Philippine Company A stories, the one about his playing parcheesi with Robert after his supper.

  “Mummy,” Robert had said, “Daddy doesn’t try when he’s playing parcheesi. He keeps counting out one, two, three, four, five, halt. He’s thinking about A Company.”

  He could not remember Robert’s ever having said anything like that, but it made a pretty good story.

  Muriel kept after his bridge game, and then she went to work on his golf. That paid off pretty well when they were stationed around Washington, but by then Muriel had found out somehow that fishing and generals seemed to go together. When he finally got his majority, he could play good poker and bridge, not to mention chess. If he was not a good dancer, he was adequate. He could play fair golf and he could cast a fly and he always had been excellent at skeet.

  “You really have the makings of a good field officer now,” Muriel told him, “and don’t say I haven’t worked on it.”

  Of course this was partially a joke but not altogether. There was a lot to the army in peacetime besides routine duty and professional qualifications, and Muriel had recognized this much more clearly than he ever had. Some officers were good dancers and som
e were fine piano players and singers, but accomplishments like these, Muriel used to say, weren’t sound, and Muriel may have been right. There was Sewell Beebe, for instance, five years after Melville’s time at the Point. When Melville Goodwin was serving at Schofield on Tweaker Beardsley’s staff, everybody wanted “Soo” around because he could play the ukulele and he had a fine baritone. Yet seriously, Beebe was also a fine officer with brains and ambition. It surprised Melville, when a staff job was open, to find Tweaker Beardsley turning Beebe down. Though Melville hated politics, he had been serving under General Beardsley for about a year when Soo’s name came up, and he felt that he was enough of a member of the family to stick his neck out for a friend.

  “Soo’s a good officer, sir,” he said. “He wouldn’t fit so badly in Operations.”

  Tweaker Beardsley took a cigar out of his left-hand desk drawer and chewed the end of it for a while.

  “Give me a light, will you, Mel?” he said.

  Melville was ready, because Muriel had seen to it that he always carried a pocket lighter when he went to work for the Old Man.

  “He looks all right on his record,” the Old Man said, “and maybe he is, except that he sings.”

  If Melville had wanted to stick his neck out a few inches further, he might have reminded the Old Man that he always sent his aide for Beebe and his uke when there were dinner guests at the big house.

  “I don’t mind music personally,” the Old Man said. “Mrs. Beardsley always carries around a lot of red seal records and she chews on me if I break one, but to get back to Beebe, he’s too good a singer. We’ll scratch Beebe and take on ‘Plugger’ Hume. He played right guard, didn’t he, his last two years at the Point?”

  “Yes, sir,” Melville answered.

  “That’s more like it,” the Old Man said, “and, Mel, just as an older man to a younger one, don’t go sticking your neck out for singing officers. You might be misunderstood.”