Oil field people seem good at this postponing sleep until next week when duty calls. Barney developed the skill when he worked as a petroleum geologist and well-logger. One of my future wife’s uncles could go sleepless for days. I never developed that ability, and I certainly didn’t have it in August 1945, after spending month after sleepy month in hospital beds. The point of this paragraph is that while creeping up Nine Mile Hill, which runs from the Highway 66 bridge over the Rio Grande in Albuquerque toward Grants, I went to sleep.
I had been tagging along behind Truck One at maybe eight miles per hour. I dozed. Barbara was snoozing on her side of the seat. Truck One slowed. Truck Two didn’t. Whammo!! Luckily Truck Two had drifted far enough to the right so that the pipes sticking rearward from the Truck One flatbed missed the windshield and the only serious damage was done to Roger’s opinion of me—diminished at an earlier fuel stop when I forgot to restore the dipstick after checking the crankcase oil. Barbara and I had already run out of things to talk about and she (did I mention she was an intelligent girl?) seemed to be wondering what in the world had ever caused her to find me interesting. We finished the U.S. 66 part of the drive mostly in moody silence, turned off at Thoreau onto what was then a dirt road, and headed north toward Crownpoint, the Chaco Canyon country.
And fate.
Just south of Borrego Pass, a dozen or so horsemen emerge from the piñons up the slope. I stop and watch them cross the road ahead and disappear down an arroyo.
We had been driving through Navajo Reservation land for hours, seeing Navajos who, to no surprise to a kid raised among Indians, dressed just like rural folks everywhere else. But these riders were obviously dressed for a ceremony, and the leader of the group was carrying what looked like a flag of some sort on something which, had he been a Kiowa or Comanche, I would have called a “coup stick.” I was immensely interested and curious.
The well site where we eventually unloaded our cargo was near (five miles is near out here) the place of a white rancher. He rode up on his horse to find out what’s happening. I ask him about the group of horsemen. He tells me the delegation I saw was the “stick carrier’s camp” bringing some necessary elements to an Enemy Way ceremony. He’s heard this was being held for a couple of Navajo boys just back from fighting the Japanese with the Marines. The ceremony was an Enemy Way to cure them of the evil influences they’ve encountered being involved with so much death, and to restore them to harmony with their people. I keep asking questions. He says why not go see it. They last about nine days and if the stick carrier was just getting there today it would be still going on through tomorrow night. Would I be welcome? Sure, he says, if I don’t drink whiskey and behave myself.
Thus I got to see a wee bit of an Enemy Way without knowing what I was watching nor that the memory of it would provide the best section of my first novel. (I named it The Enemy Way but my editor for reasons beyond my ken changed that to The Blessing Way.)
The next day, Roger’s opinion of me was again diminished when I dropped my end of a pipe we were unloading, causing his end to bounce out of his hands and land on his toes. He paid me my salary and sent Barbara to drive me back out to Thoreau. From there I hitched back to Oklahoma City to while away what was left of my self-esteem and furlough time.
In the final week of that period Larry Grove made it back from the Pacific war and was deposited in the Navy hospital at Norman—about twenty-five miles south. I hurried down to see him.
Larry was my cousin, the youngest son of Uncle Chris Grove, the good buddy of my adolescent years and a dedicated romantic. He played end on the Konawa Tigers football team, first base on the Tiger baseball team (I was second-string guard, and substitute right fielder respectively), and we understood each other. From grade school days each of us would read anything we could get our hands on. He had considered becoming a priest but dropped that idea. After high school, he got a job in a plant at Pryor, intending to save enough to get himself started in college and eventually become a surgeon.
My first look at him in the hospital ward saw that idea wasn’t going to work. Larry had responded to Pearl Harbor by joining the Marine Corps. In one of those back-and-forth struggles for high ground on Okinawa a Japanese “knee mortar” shell had hit his foxhole buddy on the helmet, blowing off the fellow’s head and riddling Larry with shrapnel. It cut away part of his hand, mangled his wrist, and caused other less crucial damage here and there. Of all my boyhood friends, Larry was the wittiest and his wit tended toward self-deprecation.
For example: Larry shows me what remains of his hand. He notes where a finger had been and tells me the morning before the jump-off to recapture some hill for about the third time, the company commander tells everybody to quit being such sissies and stop calling for a corpsman if they can take care of the wound themselves. So Larry, slammed into the bottom of the foxhole by the explosion and covered with pieces of his buddy, decides he will convert himself from sissy to Marine Corps Semper Fi hero. He starts inspecting his own wounds. “I hold up this finger to see why it’s just hanging down,” Larry tells me. “I turn it loose. It falls off. You could hear me screaming for a corpsman all the way to the beachhead.”
It was a fateful meeting. What are we going to do now? Not a clue beyond both of us knowing that we won’t be farmers if we can help it. When Larry’s finger dropped to the bottom of his foxhole his dream of becoming a surgeon dropped with it. I have let self-knowledge rescue me from my odd notion of becoming a chemical engineer. I tell him what Beatrice Stahl had told me about writing. When I left the hospital, we’d decided we will take advantage of the GI Bill, enroll at the University of Oklahoma, and convert ourselves into journalists.
Barney comes home from the war and we drive the tired old sedan to the home place. Barney is a sergeant, wearing the famous Forty-fifth Division Thunderbird patch, but he can hardly wait to be a civilian farmer-rancher. He suggests we take our military separation pay, add it to what went into the bank when the cattle, etc., were sold, buy bred heifers, concentrate on raising alfalfa and cattle feed, sign up for GI Bill programs designed to get soldiers back into farming. Then we will begin to expand our hay and grazing lands by buying worn-out and abandoned farms. More and more people will be starving out of these little submarginal places and looking for buyers. We can get credit. We can put together a substantial ranch/cattle feed operation.
Barney had a good idea. I’m fairly sure it would have worked. But it fell on deaf ears. Little brother didn’t want the risk. Little brother therefore pointed to the problem. The price of beef had soared. Thus cattle I had happily sold for $12.77 a hundredweight, we’d be buying back at triple that price. That meant we’d have to start with too few cattle to make a living. The first year would be pretty much without income, devoted to repairing the damage to the property by three seasons without attention. Finally, I didn’t want to be a farmer.
One of the several things I’d liked about the Army was the security. Room, board, clothing, and a paycheck every month with nothing to worry about except, if you were in the infantry, maybe getting killed. No getting up in the morning to see the worms wiping out your cotton crop, or looking at a field of sweet potatoes not worth harvesting because no one would buy them, or your berry crop rotting for the same reason, or any of those thousand fiascos that turn springtime bliss to autumn gloom among tillers of the soil.
Okay, Barney said. No problem. I see your point. No rush to make a decision. So we walked down the section line to the eighty Papa had bought to take a look at how time had treated three of Barney’s projects. The fence was still there, built to last. The other two hadn’t fared well.
The creek we were straightening had returned to its old crooked ways, with floods from torrential rains cutting it deeper and ruining more bottomland. The Johnson grass we’d spent a hot summer repeatedly plowing out had come back with a vengeance. I think it was that, more than the creek, that finally dampened Barney’s optimism.
When the Army dischar
ged him, and we huddled with Mama and Margaret Mary to make family plans, the decision disconnected us forever from agriculture and, sadly, from Sacred Heart. Mama sold the farm and bought a little frame bungalow in Norman. We’d live there while Barney and I became two of the millions of G.I. Bill students flooding colleges.
Before that could happen I had to get back to Fort Bliss, the William Beaumont General Hospital, turn in my furlough papers, and get through the ankle operation I was scheduled to undergo. I go to Tinker Air Force Base, show the proper people my free ride ticket, and get the word that no aircraft coming through there is going to Biggs Air Force Base at El Paso until the next day. So I come back the following day, a bit nervous now because this will make me a day late, which will cause the sentry to call the officer of the day, who will actually look at my questionable sixty-day furlough. I board the plane with two other returnees. It’s a C-47 cargo plane and it lands at Dallas. Some more cargo has to be loaded and our trip to El Paso will be completed on the morrow. The next morning we reboard (now two days late). We fly southwestward—the right direction—and land at something called Coyote Field. There some of the boxes and bundles we’ve been sitting on are unloaded and replaced with other larger boxes and pieces of machinery. We take off again, and fly, and fly, and fly. Our knowledge of the geography of West Texas, while limited, finally tells us three hitchhikers that even at the lumbering speed of an overloaded C-47 we should have been at Biggs Air Force Base long ago. No way to find out what’s going on because our way to the pilots’ compartments is blocked by stacks of cargo. Finally we land at Phoenix.
Sorry, the pilot tells us. The cargo loaded at Coyote had higher priority than three grunt hitchhikers. He has to take it on to an airfield near Los Angeles. He’ll drop us off at Biggs on the way back. When? He shrugs. The other two hitchhikers, who presumably had legal furlough papers to turn in, decide they’ll fly along to California. I climb off, take my bag, bum a ride out to the highway and start hitchhiking—now about a hundred miles farther from the hospital than when I started the journey. When I finally arrive at the sentry post at the hospital gate I am guilty of being Absent Without Leave for four days. Or sixty-four, depending on how hard you look at my furlough papers.
The sentry asks me how I managed to get a sixty-day furlough, tells me I’m late, and sends me over to report to the officer of the day.
The OD is sitting behind a desk. He looks at my furlough, at me, and says: “Sixty-day furlough?” I shrug. He says: “Four days AWOL, then. What’s the excuse?”
Perhaps the Army has changed by now, but at mid-century there was only one proper answer when an officer asked an enlisted man if he had an excuse and I knew it. I said: “No sir.”
He is pleased to hear that, a good sign. I have already noticed two other good signs. He is not wearing a West Point class ring and he is wearing a Combat Infantry Badge. He says: “How’d you get a sixty-day furlough? They quit giving them.” I shake my head, look baffled, shrug again—all correct answers since enlisted men aren’t supposed to know such things.
“Well,” he says. “You’re four days late anyway. We can’t have that.” And he marks through the sixty I’d typed, and writes in “sixty-four,” hands me back my papers and tells me where to take them to get four more days of rations money. Once again the brotherhood of the combat infantry has transcended Army foolishness.
Nothing left now but to check in with my doctor. He looks me over and schedules my ankle surgery. I’m sent down to the presurgery ward, given the presurgery sleeping pills. I doze off, happy in the knowledge that when I awaken it will be tomorrow, the knifework will be finished, I’ll be in the recovery room, bandaged up, healing, and finally on the slippery slope toward civilian-hood and home.
But I awake with a medical service corporal standing there, telling me to get dressed and report to headquarters. What’s happened to the surgery? No idea. I report to the headquarters building. A Medical Corps officer tells me I am being discharged. He gives me a bunch of papers, sends me to another building, where I get some accumulated back pay, my discharge money, a manila envelope holding the necessary documents, and the “ruptured duck”—the little faux-gold lapel pin representing an eagle and identifying wearers as honorably discharged from military service. The last stop was in the office of a weary-looking captain wearing the blue braid of the infantry. He looks at my eye patch and my cane. Did I want to sign up for enlistment in the Army Reserves? I said I didn’t. He makes a note of that and tells me I am his eighty-seventh consecutive negative. Thus, a few minutes after noon on October 16, 1945, I became a bona fide twenty-year-old unemployed civilian with a notion that I’d become a journalist—whatever that might prove to be.
15
Halls of Ivy
The spring semester at OU didn’t begin until late in January and the $90 per month largesse from the G.I. Bill didn’t begin until one was legally enrolled. Meanwhile I need a job. Back in Oklahoma City, I called the employment office. This time I was sent to the owner of a little engineering company and became part of a surveying crew—another example of the effects of severe labor shortages on hiring practices.
I arrived with no idea of what I was applying for. The interviewer asked me how much experience I had running a transit. I said none. He said that’s what we’re hiring—a transit man on a surveying crew and the employment office told us you’d studied engineering. One semester, I said, but we hadn’t got to surveying. Well, said he, I guess you could learn. So he gave me bus fare, a hotel address in Chickasha, and the name of the project chief to whom I should report. At the hotel, the project boss and I repeat the scene above. He takes me out on the street with a transit, spends a few minutes explaining how the thing works, decides I’m a slow learner and a poor risk. He will handle the transit himself and I can replace one of the chainmen who’d just quit.
Surveying crews, I learned, are a team of four. The transit man, the brains of the operation, peers through the telescope, fiddles adjustment knobs, and makes hand signals to the “pole man,” who holds a long pole with a target on it. He moves the pole around in obedience to hand signals from the TM and when TM is satisfied, the PM marks the spot. (Since we were surveying a Rural Electrification Administration power line, these spots marked the places where a high line pole would be planted to support the electrical cables and are a long way apart.) The duties of the remaining two on this team—the chain draggers—require less skill. The lead man picks up one end of the chain and trudges (limps in my case, since I was still using a cane) off in a direct line from the last marked pole location to where the next pole is being located. The last man holds his end of the chain at the last pole site until the lead man runs out of chain. That point is then marked, and the process is repeated, thereby giving the transit man information about precisely how far it is between each pole.
Despite the limp (and partly because of it) dragging a chain through the cold autumn winds of central Oklahoma was the perfect job for me at the time. While it lacked the warmth and love represented by the healing ceremony for the wounded Marines I’d had a glimpse of on the Navajo Reservation it was what the psychiatrist would have ordered for a fellow who needed to do some forgetting. When the transit man stopped to work on his math, we’d gather dead wood, build a fire, warm ourselves, and talk. But the talk on this frozen ground wasn’t of war and before long, back in bed in the walk-up Chickasha hotel, the dreams that came were simpler ones produced by honest fatigue. They no longer jerked me awake, sweating and yelling. Now and then I’d pass Sergeant Arras face-up in the ditch with the shells whistling in, or find myself standing on the cobblestones looking down into the helmet with the hair, brains, and eyeball in it, or trudging past the piles of dead horses still wearing their harness that the strafing P-47s had caught, but it didn’t happen often. The brain was growing scar tissue over all that nonsense, and the legs were regaining their tough teenaged basic training muscles. Better still I could now usually eat breakfast without losing
it within minutes to overpowering nausea. When I came back to Norman in January to enroll for the spring semester at OU I had slammed the trunk lid shut on most of those ghosts of bad moments and dead friends. I was ready for the University of Oklahoma and whatever was going to happen next.
The little frame house bought with Mama’s farm sale money was on the wrong side of Norman’s main street and about two miles from the campus. We moved a trailerload of stuff from the farm and established ourselves at this new address. Mama resumed her roles as family manager. Barney, his dreams of resuming farming demolished, decided to study geology. We became two of the flood of young men overwhelming America’s campuses.
For a very short while classroom fashion was heavily olive drab skivvy shirts, field jackets, and combat boots. That lasted only until the vets had funds to match their hunger for slacks, sport coats, neckties, and the whole costume of upper-mobility. Years had been used up by the war. No time to waste now. Hurry, hurry. Find a spouse, get a job, start a family, get on with life. I had given myself five years to find a wife. Who? I didn’t have a clue. I’d located my pre-Army girlfriend, we met and talked things over. Nothing came of that. I found the red-haired charmer from Oklahoma City, also now enrolled and living in an OU dorm. She had found another boyfriend. I was back to square one. Why worry? I intended to stay single until I put my twenty-fifth birthday behind me.
As statistics of the baby boomer years show, most vets were less patient. Surplus barracks buildings were hauled in by the hundreds to provide married student housing and the campuses swarmed with single men looking for wives—and outnumbering the coed prospects by about four to one. On fraternity row the Greek letter houses were taken over by squad leaders, tank commanders, and swabbies off the destroyers needing a place to sleep and lacking tolerance for the adolescent frat-hazing rituals. Classrooms occupied mostly by young women a year earlier were now crowded with men fresh out of the services. They brought a change in attitude.
Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir Page 16