A Fistful of Fig Newtons

by Jean Shepherd

  At last Gasser and I stood up in our fragrant work uniforms. Ernie came up from the far end of the car. Wordlessly, the three of us moved down the center aisle, little realizing at the time that we had begun a saga that was eventually to be a legend throughout the entire Signal Corps.

  Gasser led the way. I followed; Ernie trailed behind. As we moved up the aisle, three or four of our peers emitted faint chicken-clucking sounds, the universal GI signal that says roughly: The Army has done it again. Another indignity has been heaped upon the defenseless enlisted man’s head. I find this amusing, since it has not happened to me, at least this time. My clucking denotes both sympathy and faint scorn since you were dumb enough to get caught in the Army Crap Detail net. Cluck cluck cluck.

  The chicken has to be one of nature’s most maligned creatures, being a universal symbol of cowardice as well as petty harassment and general measliness. My heart goes out to the chicken. What has the chicken done to deserve this reputation? Is the chicken more cowardly than, say, the mole or the gopher? It is one of those unanswerable questions. Even the chicken’s daily provender is looked upon with scorn and derision. “Chicken feed” aptly describes most of our salaries. I have never heard anyone term his paycheck “goat meal” or “squirrel food,” always “chicken feed.”

  These murky thoughts drifted through my GI brain as we went up the aisle toward the chow car. We went through car after car filled with alien soldiers wearing mysterious patches. Gasser muttered over his shoulder:

  “Christ, did you get a load of those Paratroopers back there? What in the hell are we heading for?”

  The same thought had occurred to me when we went through one car filled with wiry, mean-looking GIs wearing gleaming jump boots and the kind of expressions that you see at three o’clock in the morning on the faces of the birds in poolrooms and all-night diners. They all wore crazy patches that looked like a smear of blood with a mailed fist clenching a length of chain emerging right at you. Behind me, Ernie added his two bits:

  “I swear that must have been a company of Mafia hit men. Did you see that captain?”

  Their CO, sprawled at the head of the car, looked like a carnivorous orangutan dressed in skintight fatigues with a trench knife at his waist.

  “I’m sure as hell glad they’re on our side,” I chirped, stepping over a pile of gas masks.

  “Don’t be too sure, buddy,” Gasser answered without looking back. One thing that really got to me was that this captain wore a single set of captain’s bars on his fatigue collar. They were painted a dull, lethal black. You just don’t see outfits like that in the late late movies.

  Eventually we arrived at the chow car. Actually, it was two chow cars; one for cooking, the other for serving. The feeding facilities on a troop train are not exactly in the civilian elegant dining car tradition. Since there were two or three thousand soldiers aboard, they were fed like hogs at the trough. It was all very functional. The serving car had a long stainless-steel table that ran the entire length of the car itself. At intervals there were holes a couple of feet in diameter cut in the gleaming steel, and huge thirty-two-gallon garbage cans filled with GI food were lowered into the holes. Only the tops showed. Mashed potatoes in one, creamed chipped beef in another, soggy string beans, and at the far end “Dessert,” garbage cans filled with cherry Jell-O or runny fruit salad. The soldiers to be fed moved in an endless line through the car, carrying their mess kits. Sweating KPs on the other side of the steel table ladled out the glop. It was a messy job, messy and hot and hypnotic. In the next car the cooks and a team of KPs toiled away, brewing up oatmeal, meatloaves, and stewed squash in a bath of searing heat that would have done a sauna proud. Since there were so many on the train, the feeding went on almost without a break. When one part of the endless line had returned to its car after breakfast, another part of the line was ready for lunch. The instant Gasser and Ernie and I arrived, the mess sergeant, a sweaty tech wearing a white apron and a crew cut, put us to work.

  “You guys from that Signal Corps bunch, right?”

  Gasser grunted.

  “Okay, grab them aprons. And you”—he nodded to me—“you’re on gravy. And you, get down there on them peas. And you, you’re on Harvard beets.”

  I was gravy, Ernie was peas, and Gasser was Harvard beets. Seconds later I began ladling. Now, on a swaying troop train there is a real trick to ladling gravy into lurching mess kits filled with ice cream and salmon loaf and chopped cucumbers. The job leaves a lot of room for artistic interpretations. Hour after hour faceless yardbirds jostled past amid the din of complaints and muffled cursings. There were sudden wild bursts of laughter. Through it all, the mess sergeant kept yelling mechanically:

  “Keep it movin’. God dammit, keep it movin’. God dammit, keep it movin’. Hey you, this ain’t no Schrafft’s or nothin’. If you don’t like what you get, dump it in the can at the end of the car, but don’t hold up the damn line. God dammit.”

  I have often since wondered what became of that poor, driven mess sergeant. No ribbons, no applause, only an endless belt of hungry, wooden faces year after year. He must have had one of the most realistic views of mankind of anyone around. Like some keeper in the cosmic zoo of humanity where it is always Feeding Time, which is not at all the same as Dining Time or Lunch Time. He presided over his steaming feeding trough with a wild look of dogged persistence in his eye and a leather voice prodding the herd on.

  “Keep movin’, God dammit, keep movin’. Come on, you guys, let’s have more mashed potatoes out here. Change them cans quick. Hey, quit spillin’ that coffee all over the damn floor. Get a goddamn mop, fer Chrissake, stupid. Let’s go, let’s go. Keep movin’.”

  Time became all jumbled as I hunched over my vast tub of dark brown, steaming gravy. My wrist ached from ladling, ladling, ladling. After a couple of hours in the heat, the sergeant told us to strip down to our shorts and GI shoes. It was a little relief, but not much. Steam rose in swirling clouds from the boiling hot food; sweat dropped from my dog tags and into the gravy. Who cared? A little sweat never hurt anyone. I toiled on. Gasser wielded his beet ladle with dash and élan. Ernie was switched from peas to string beans. Other KPs from time to time emerged in pairs from the cooking car, struggling on the slippery floor, carrying giant cans of soup or gravy or scrambled eggs. As one tub was emptied, another was immediately lowered into the slot.

  I quickly discovered that the gravy ladle was highly controversial, since gravy has to be handled with skill, not to mention restraint. Too much wrist on the ladle and some poor joker’s whole meal was swimming in brown glue; ice cream, fruit salad, and all. I grew hard and unyielding, impervious to the steady torrent of abuse that was heaped upon me. I ladled gravy mechanically, with no prejudice or favoritism. After all, when you’re feeding half the U. S. Army on a thundering troop train there is no place for faint heart or even mere civility.

  “No gravy, please. Hey you, NO GRAVY!” meant absolutely nothing to me as I ladled on hour after hour.

  At long intervals the line would peter out to a faint trickle and the exhausted sergeant would holler out:

  “O.K., you guys. Take a ten-minute break. You’re doin’ a great job, yessir, a great job. If you want any apples or ice cream or anything, just grab ’em but don’t leave the car.”

  An endless supply of food is the quickest way to kill an appetite. One day there will be some hotshot doctor who will write a diet book based on that fact. Put any fatty in a room with tons of ice cream, mashed potatoes, and chocolate cake, with butterscotch malted coming out of the faucets, and within five hours the fatty will not be able to stand the sight of food.

  I squatted down on a packing case behind the counter, my legs stiff from all the standing, my ladle hand sore and tired, my forearms and elbows itching from dried gravy. Ever since that hellish twenty-four hours of KP I have never again touched gravy in any form. Gasser sat with his head hanging low around his knees, blood-red beet juice dripping from his hairy chest. He looked
like a major casualty that had taken an 88 shell right in the gut. Ernie leaned back against the side of the swaying car, his legs outstretched, straddling his string-bean tub, his eyes closed. The ten minutes flashed by in milliseconds.

  “Here they come again, you guys. Keep it movin’, come on, quit stragglin’. God dammit, this ain’t no Schrafft’s.”

  I tried ladling with my left hand for a while to ease my aching wrist and elbow. I was rapidly developing a severe case of Gravy Ladle Tendonitis, which occasionally still troubles me. Unfortunately, with my left hand I was gravying more shoes than potatoes and had to switch back. I tried the overhand motion; side-arm. The complaints rose and fell like the beating of an angry surf on an unyielding rocky shore.

  From time to time through the surrealistic blur of the endless line I would spot a familiar face as Company K went by. They were no longer my friends, just more links in a chain that went round and round.

  As the three of us toiled on along with other KPs from other units, the outside world ceased to exist. Was it day, was it night? Was it winter, was it summer? What year was it? Do they still have years? What country were we in? Were we in any country? Had we died and were we now toiling in purgatory, struggling hopelessly for redemption? Who am I? What is my name?

  I ladled on and on. During one of our breaks, Gasser, chewing on a piece of celery, ambled over, trailing beet juice, to where the sergeant was moodily checking a tub of purple Kool-Aid, known to the troops as the Purple Death.

  “Hey, Sarge, when do we get our four hours off?” The sergeant glanced up from the tub of inky fluid in which floated two tiny chunks of ice about the size of golf balls. He was stirring it with a huge, long-handled wooden paddle.

  “Huh? What’d you say?” He wiped the sweat from his brow with his left hand and flicked it into the Kool-Aid.

  “When do we get our four hours off?”

  “What four hours off?” The sergeant barked a dry, hard, yapping laugh. “Jeez, what the hell are they sending me now? I ain’t had four hours off since last November.”

  Gasser chewed angrily on his celery. “Our lieutenant informed us that we would have four hours on and four hours off and that …”

  The sergeant shook his head slowly in the incredible wonder that anyone could believe such a transparent fairy tale. Gasser got the message. So did we.

  Ernie, slumped next to me, was slowly drinking a canteen cup of cold milk.

  “Boy, I’ll say one thing about this job. You sure get thirsty. Boy, do you get thirsty.”

  “Yeah. It’s all this sweating,” I said, running my hand over my chest like a squeegee, pushing a wave of sweat ahead of it. My dog tags dripped steadily. Ernie nodded.

  “Boy, I never sweated so much in my life.”

  The humidity in the car from all the steam, the moving bodies, and the fact that the ventilation system had gone out during the second year of Lincoln’s administration, made the chow car about as comfortable as the inside of a catcher’s mitt during the second half of a doubleheader in July.

  “Well,” I yawned, stretching my aching back, “it’s a great way to lose weight.”

  “What weight?” Ernie said as he gulped his milk. Ernie was the only guy I have ever known standing six feet six and wearing size fifteen shoes who wore a shirt with a thirteen and a half collar and had a twenty-seven-inch waist. Ernie was so skinny that if he stood sideways in the wind, he made a high, whistling sound. He looked like the guy in those ads in the back pages of Boy’s Life captioned: Are you a 98 lb. weakling? The guy that gets the sand kicked in his face. One time on a twenty-mile march, Goldberg hollered out:

  “Hey, Ernie, will you please march over on the other side of the platoon? I keep hearin’ your bones rattle and I get out of step.”

  The platoon laughed at that, and so did Ernie, who was a good guy, although very quiet. Few of us at the time would have guessed at the fate that lay ahead of him.

  He raised his long, white, boy face–he looked a little like a nineteen-year-old Uncle Sam with no beard–and repeated:

  “Boy, I’m so damn thirsty I could could drink some of your crummy gravy.”

  “Don’t worry, Ernie,” I said, “we only got about fifteen hours to go and we’ll be home free.”

  I tried to pump as much sarcasm into my voice as I could manage without getting into trouble with the sergeant, who was listening to our exchange of pleasantries. The clank of many feet approaching cut short whatever Ernie was going to say. We went back into the trenches.

  From time to time during the long hours I was switched to Jell-O, which I found was even trickier, if possible, than gravy. For one thing, it bounces around on the ladle and occasionally takes on a life of its own. GI Jell-O ranges in consistency from golf ball rubbery to a kind of oozy reddish gruel, and you never know what kind you’re going to get on any given ladle scoop. I learned to play the windage, rolling my Jell-O scoop from side to side in the manner of a Cessna 150 approaching a narrow grass runway in high, gusty crosswinds.

  Your GI mess kit folds open like a clam and has a treacherous metal handle which can operate, or nonoperate, at its own will. Half of the clam shell is a shallow oval-shaped compartment. The other side, of equal size and also oval, has raised divisions which theoretically separate the Jell-O from the mashed potatoes or the beets from the ice cream. Like most theories, the actuality was very different. For one thing, the metal of the mess kit transmits heat better than platinum wire carries electric current. A dollop of steaming mashed rutabagas in one compartment instantly turns the mess kit into an efficient hotplate. Ice cream ladled into another compartment instantly melts and is heated to the consistency of lukewarm pea soup, which is often what it tastes like after the peas have slopped over into the ice cream and the fish gravy has oozed over from the big dish. So naturally, all such old-fashioned concepts as specific tastes and conventional meal sequences are totally irrelevant when you’re dining tastefully out of a red-hot mess kit. For one thing, you usually eat your dessert first in the futile hope of getting at just a little unmelted ice cream before it’s too late.

  Over the years I became quite fond of some specific mixtures. For example, vanilla ice cream goes surprisingly well when mixed with mashed salmon loaf. The ice cream makes a kind of sweetish coolish salmon salad out of it, a little like drugstore tuna salad. If the ice cream is chocolate, however, or maybe tutti-frutti, you’ve got problems.

  Goldberg, the leading Company K chow hound, had a simple solution. He’d just take his big metal GI spoon and immediately mix everything in his mess kit together, forming a heavy brownish-pinkish paste in which floated chunks of, say, fried liver or maybe a pork chop or two, and just spoon it down between gulps of Kool-Aid or GI coffee or whatever we had to drink. It was all gone in maybe thirty or forty seconds. Goldberg would let out a shuddering belch and get back on the chow line for another go-round.

  There were others, perhaps more fastidious, who would eat only one thing per serving, going through the line first for turnips, which they would devour, then getting back in the line for the steamed cauliflower, then finally, after three or four trips through the line, topping it off with the Jell-O or the canned pineapple.

  Then there were those, and Gasser was a leading member of this group, who lived entirely on Butterfinger bars. It’s hard to say which group was right. I’ll say one thing. A stretch in any one of the Armed Forces is a sure cure for what my aunt Clara always called “picky” eaters. It’s not that GI food wasn’t good. It was, in fact, better than most guys regularly got at home. It just had a tendency to get all mixed up and run together, so that in the end being picky was even more stupid in the Army than it is in real life.

  The Army is also a sure cure for what is called “light sleepers.” After the first ninety days among the dogfaces you can sleep standing up, sitting down, going to the john, firing a rifle, making love, or swimming underwater with a pack on your back. In all my four years I never once ran into an insomniac. Insomnia
is a civilian luxury, like credit cards and neurotic mistresses.

  It must have been about the tenth or fifteenth hour that I became conscious, dimly through the hullabaloo and the scorching heat, that somebody in my immediate vicinity was snoring fitfully. Every time I glanced around it stopped. Who the hell was it? Again the snoring commenced. After fifteen or twenty minutes of this irritating phlegmy sound, I realized that it was me. It has been said that the human mind is capable of only one act at any given instant, but I can’t see how this can be since on numerous occasions I have found myself soundly asleep and still doing other things.

  As I ladled on, flipping Jell-O over my left shoulder occasionally, for luck, I thought of these things. An extended stretch of KP is good for your philosophical side. The mind wanders aimlessly to and fro like a blind earthworm burrowing in total darkness amid buried tree roots and dead snails. There is a certain basic soul-satisfaction in low down, mindless menial labor. The body completely takes over. A mess kit swims into view; your arm flips Jell-O at it without thought or understanding. The pores are open. Your entire physical being is now functioning without a controlling mind, like the heart and the liver, which go about their work without conscious control.

  Down the long line of KPs ladles rose and fell, feet in heavy GI boots clanked by. Gravy, mashed potatoes, turnips, beets, scrambled eggs, all became one. Once a voice snapped me out of my restful reverie.

  “How’r y’all makin’ it?”

  I glanced up from the brown sea of gravy, or Jell-O, or whatever I was scooping at the time.