We trained in that camp in England for about six weeks. By May, we were getting comfortable enough that we started thinking a little more like we did back home. Old Oily Chartelli, being the opportunist he was, cooked up a scheme. He figured we would have a Buzz Company Olympics. Every man would pony up one dollar. We would have nine sporting events, and each platoon could enter one competitor per event. If a platoon member won, his platoon got one ninth of the pot. Then the platoon would split those winnings.
Oily just wanted to make some money. He figured if we set it up, we could pick the events that favored people from our platoon. For three days, he pestered us. It was annoying! We’d head to mess, and he’d start in.
“Anyone here any good at jumping?” A bunch of grumbles.
“How about the sprinting?” Grumble, grumble.
Chartelli finally pulled us all together one night after mess.
“All right, yous goombas! I been patiently trying to find out if you got any talent, and as far as I can tell, this is the biggest group of no-talent SOBs in the army! Come on! Somebody’s got to be good at something?” After he told us that if we each gave a dollar we could get nine back, we got a lot more interested.
“I can swim,” said Franklin Butler.
His name wasn’t Frank or Frankie, it was Franklin. He said he was named after Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. We called him Senator. He was a blue blood out of Boston. He had that real thick accent, calling Boston Baahston. Butler never talked much about himself. He carried himself different than us. He wasn’t a snob. He was friendly enough to talk to, and he would pull his own weight just fine. He never complained about weather or food. And believe me, he had plenty of opportunity to complain about both. He walked real tall, with a kind of dignity. He seemed to rise above the misery, like he was floating just above all of the horrible conditions we faced.
“Swimming, huh?” grimaced Chartelli. “Nah man, there ain’t no way we can convince eight other platoons to pony up a swimmer. Besides, there’s nowhere around here where we could swim.”
Tom Duncan cleared his throat. We all looked at him. He hesitated.
“I’m a member of a circus family. I can walk a rope.” This wasn’t quite as unusual back then as you might think. There were more circuses back in the day. But it was still rare. I’d never known anyone from an actual circus, so I thought that was really interesting.
“Hot damn!” yelled Oily. “That’s the jackpot, man! I guarantee if we got someone from a real circus, no one can touch us! Now we’re gettin’ somewhere! What else?”
“Scrapping!” yelled Kozlowski. Everyone groaned.
“Nah, we can’t kill each other,” said Chartelli, “They got to be things where we compete. And we gotta have the EDGE, man. We can make some serious money on this, boys!”
There was a pause.
“Shooting targets,” said Cliff Peters. I never saw anybody better with a rifle than him.
“Hell yes!” exclaimed Chartelli. “Now we’re cooking. Not as much of a shoe-in as rope walking, but we’ve got a good chance. What else?”
“Ya, I’ve never lost an arm wrestling match,” said Big Swede. That drew a couple of snickers, because some of the guys in the platoon thought they were pretty tough.
“Ok, so we got rope walking and shooting, and arm wrestling. We need six more. Come on, what can you people do?” asked Chartelli.
“What about you, big mouth?” asked Tim Robinson.
Chartelli drew back in surprise. He hadn’t thought about himself! He rubbed his chin for a couple of minutes.
“I played a lot of stickball when I was a kid. I can throw a ball an’ hit a dime from thirty feet away,” he nodded to himself, deep in thought. “Yeah, that will be event number four.”
Unfortunately, those were the only ringer events we could come up with. But we might still make four times our money, so Chartelli started talking with the other platoons and arranging the event. Everyone was up for it, because they thought they could make money.
Even though the Buzz Company Olympics was created to make us money, it had some unintended consequences.
The platoons started jawing with each other, bragging about how they would kick everyone’s asses. We got to know a lot more people in the other platoons. The sense of brotherhood we had in our platoon was spreading across the whole company. That would help us later, but we didn’t know it at the time.
Then there were the medals. Since the winners wouldn’t get any more money than the others in their platoon, Chartelli wanted the winners to get something special. It had to be something that they could carry during our tour and take home, so it had to be small, light, and durable. Chartelli got his hands on some round pieces of steel, which were perfect. They were round and could be added to our standard GI tags. He had them stamped with 1944 Buzz Co. Champ with the event name engraved on the back. They weren’t valuable. I mean, they were just metal disks. But once they were stamped and engraved, they carried some kind of magic in them. When Oily found an old gray board and hung the medals on a row of tacks in the mess hall, people gathered around them after every meal. Everyone wanted one. It wasn’t the medal; it was what the medal represented. To be the best of Buzz Company.
One night after mess, Trumbull and Edwards were standing by the medals as I walked out. Trumbull loosely pinched a cigarette in his lips as he held a medal real close with two hands, staring through his glasses. He could see distances fine, just couldn’t read worth a damn without glasses.
“What do you think, Harrys?” I asked, pleased with my own humor about two guys named Harry standing next to each other.
“I think, goddamn, I wish I could have one of these!” Edwards shook his head, kind of breathless.
I ran down the list of events in my head, and disqualified both men for everything. I felt a little sorry for them. Of course, there was a good chance that I wasn’t going to qualify for anything, either. So we were three potential losers commiserating.
“Think about it. If you win one of these, you are one of the best nine men in all of Buzz Company!” said Edwards. “The best out of three hundred men!”
I nodded. The events were stirring up my competitive blood too. Trumbull hung up the medal on its little nail, then grabbed the next one and studied the inscription.
“This is more than about bragging rights, boys,” he said, “The people that get these? They are the best... physically.”
“Well, of course!” laughed Edwards, “Why you think everybody wants one?”
Trumbull shook his head. “We ain’t been going through all this training to keep our minds off girls. The brass is running us and drilling us to prepare us for tough conditions. Miserable conditions. And brains and guts and luck, they don’t count for shit. All that stuff is fine, but it ain’t going to keep you alive as much as being physically superior. That’s what this war’s about. Brute force. Who lasts the longest? If you own one of these, you’re probably most likely to survive.”
Leave it to Trumbull to calculate something out of a con man’s attempt to make some money. But he was right. And he was visibly jealous, pinching his eyebrows into a big frown.
“Well, listen,” I said. “We’ll have nine of our best competing. Win or lose, nine of the Ninth platoon are going to be contenders. We’re a team. We help each other.”
Trumbull nodded, not taking his eyes away from the medal. “The question will be how many of those nine survive so they can help the platoon.”
Another unintended consequence was how the medals would affect Buzz Company throughout the war. There was a condition for the winners. Any time someone in Buzz Company wanted to challenge a champion, they could. If they won, they got bragging rights. But the medal winner never lost his medal. That meant that as platoons traveled together or met up in Europe, there would be contests. We desperately needed that diversion through the war, to get our minds off the hell we were in.
And, there was one final unintended consequence. And it
made the world a different place for all of us. Oily had been lobbying Cap hard to let us invite locals from all around to watch. His big idea was to charge admission. Just a nickel a person. He figured he could make a big show out of it and pocket some dough.
Cap refused. Said we weren’t taking money out of the pockets of these good people. But then we found out that he talked to the base Brass, and they gave permission to invite the locals to watch. For free. I guess Brass figured it was a way to create a little bond with our hosts. The big day was scheduled for a Sunday in mid-May. Brass gave us a full day off, which they had never done.
Well, that changed everything for the men. Now, they were not only motivated to be the best of Buzz Company, but they wanted to impress every fair-haired young lady in the land. Imagine a bunch of young men, cut off from their normal world, with a chance to demonstrate their physical prowess in front of women!
We spent the week before the big event having playoffs to identify our contenders.
We had eight guys who wanted to compete in the arm wrestling event, so we held a tournament. The final four were Big Swede, Kozlowski, Gunderson, and Bill Stackhouse. If there was ever an appropriately named person, it was Stackhouse. Goddamn, he was built like a brick shithouse. All muscles and rippling. He beat Gunderson pretty easily. Big Swede and Kozloswki really had a battle. I’d say they were about dead even. But Swede just closed his eyes and looked down, and let out this big yell, and bent Kozlowski over. So, it was Swede against Stackhouse. Man, we all thought the Kozlowski match was a tough one. Swede and Stackhouse were deadlocked, and old Swede let out that yell three times, each time louder than the last. On his final yell, he was able to bring down Stackhouse’s arm in slow motion. We all congratulated both of them. We were sure that no one could beat Big Swede.
We had over a dozen guys try out for the rifle target contest, including me. Everyone got three shots at a target fifty yards away, with the center ring of two inches in diameter. The center was worth a hundred points, and each ring outward dropped by ten points. I shot a 220, but it wasn’t good enough. Cliff Peters shot a 270—100, 90, 80.
For the throwing contest, we made a game like you would see in a carnival. We set up ten bottles in pairs. If you threw a ball JUST right between the bottles, you could knock them both down. Each person got five balls. True to his bragging, Chartelli was our contender. He got seven bottles.
The wheelbarrow race was the only event with two participants. There weren’t real wheelbarrows. This was in the old days, when one guy was the wheelbarrow and would run on his hands, and the other guy held the wheelbarrow’s feet. Me and Petey Anderson tried out, and we came in a close second to Tim Robertson and Mike Franklin. Franklin had really strong arms but he was light in weight, so he made a great wheelbarrow.
For the hundred-yard dash, Harry Edwards won hands down. I couldn’t believe it! We all gave him a hard time, saying that he got a lot of practice running away from things in the dark. Or that he thought a chicken was chasing him.
By far the most grueling event was a homemade one: who could hold a full box of ammo with one hand the longest. That was an exercise in pain! I tried out for it, but I couldn’t compete. Stackhouse finally got into an event with a win there.
The seventh event was a three-mile run. Paul Taylor won that one hands down, blowing away the next closest guy by over a minute. We figured we had a lock on that event. We couldn’t believe we didn’t think of it!
The eighth event was, who could stay on a rope the longest. Tom Duncan won that one. I think he could stay on that damn rope all day! We had to coach him to not get cocky and start juggling or anything. That would give us away as a ringer.
The final event was chin-ups. We all tried out for it, because everyone wanted to compete in the Olympics. I did nine of them. But Morelli pulled sixteen of them, so he represented our platoon in that event.
I remember this so well because I had serious head games going on by that time. We were getting closer and closer to combat. Even though we were in a foreign country, the English weren’t that different than us. It felt like a summer camp. But all the training wore on me, with the talk about combat and killing. They were preparing us for the psychology of battle, and I was scared. So when this chance came up to forget about the war for a day, I embraced it. I think the best way I could describe it is when a kid’s summer vacation was over, and the next day he’s back to school. But multiplied by ten thousand. Gut full of butterflies, belching up stomach acid. My old life was gone, and I was about to face death in an unknown land. At least for a day, almost three hundred men would get to laugh and compete.
So, the big day was to start at one p.m., after lunch and church. It was an absolutely beautiful day. Big cotton-ball clouds sat so crisp in a dark blue sky. The temperature was in the seventies, and a light breeze brought smells of fresh grass and wildflowers. It was green everywhere! Like those pictures you see of England where there are miles and miles of green.
We had a big open field in our training area, and men had spent all morning setting up the events. Remember, we were expecting almost three hundred GIs and at least a hundred civilians. The spectators would sit on a couple of hills near the field. That gave everyone a view.
Then the people started showing up. The first thing we noticed was that there were no young men. All older folks, kids, younger women. We cussed about that, because a lot of the pretties were married. But it’s not like we were going to get to go on a date or anything anyway—the best anyone could hope for was a brief conversation with a pretty English lass. And maybe the chance to show her that he was the best of Buzz Company.
Brass had decided that a GI would escort each family to their viewing spot, so a bunch of us got in a receiving line. Remember, we hadn’t been around normal people for months. So, we all gobbled up the chance to talk with civilians. Yeah, a lot of the guys were slobbering after the young women, but a lot of us found more pleasure in talking with the others. The little kids, the older folks. It was like being at a county fair back home. Some of the men picked up giggling kids and let them ride on their shoulders. I walked in with a group of three people. There was an old man, dressed in tweed and wearing one of those English flat caps. He had a woman with him, in her twenties. His daughter, maybe? And then a little girl.
The woman was a looker. Tall, blonde curls, bright blue eyes. But I only had eyes for Debbie, so I made small talk about the weather, and their beautiful country, and the fine sporting events for the day. I turned my attention to the little girl.
“How old are you, miss?” I asked.
“I’m seven!” she said.
“Well, you’re big for seven!” I said.
“Yes, I have to be. Because my pop’s gone. I have to be a big girl now,” she said cheerfully.
I shot a look at the adults. The man kept walking, eyes ahead, chin thrust forward. But the woman looked at me, and tears rimmed her eyes. She blinked them away, reached over and clasped my hand. She squeezed it hard as we walked and stared into each others’ eyes. Then she nodded and blinked some more, and we turned toward the hill to get them settled.
“I hope you enjoy the day today!” I put on my best cheerful voice.
The girl smiled back and looked out on the field. I reached out to shake the man’s hand. He shook my hand with a strong grip, and our eyes met. His eyes were moist as well. He grabbed my hand with both hands and shook it firmly. He didn’t say a word. I turned to the woman and awkwardly put out my hand. She smiled through tears, and reached up and hugged me tight.
“Good luck,” she whispered in my ear. As we separated, I looked her in the eyes again. She wasn’t talking about that day. I smiled, but then turned and got the hell out of there before I started bawling too.
The women brought treats! Real baked goods. We weren’t expecting it, so we had to improvise real quick, and bring out mess hall tables for all the food. Then the women told us we had to eat everything right away, so it didn’t spoil in the sun
. So, we all got a serving of dessert. The crowd cheered over us just eating! I had some kind of rhubarb crumble, and it was the best thing I’d tasted in years.
The first event was the rope walk. The rope was suspended three feet above the ground, between two poles. The winner was whoever could cross the most times. Duncan was competitor number six. By the time he was up, the current leader had somehow managed to cross back and forth one time—so he’d walked the rope twice. But boy, was he ugly doing it. He was flapping his arms like a big bird and swaying out of control, trying to keep his balance. But he drew guffaws and cheers from the crowd. And when he made it across and back, he got a standing ovation from the crowd.
While he was waiting for his turn, Duncan talked with the other competitors as they watched the contest. None of them had practiced more than a few days that week. So when it was his turn, he got the crowd going, motioning for applause as he climbed the pole. He wouldn’t go until the cheering was loud enough. Pretty soon, all the civilians were hooting and clapping, but it wasn’t enough. He turned and looked all around at the GIs all around, and motioned to them too. We were roaring pretty loud. Duncan nodded, and stepped out onto the rope, acting all tentative as he threw his arms out to try to maintain his balance. Then he dropped his arms and casually crossed it without any effort at all. Everyone started quieting down, trying to understand what they had just seen. Then Duncan turned, stepped on the rope again, and did a somersault! He popped back up on his feet and walked the rest of the rope. The civilians went nuts! They cheered and whistled. But the roar from the GIs turned to a collective groan, and guys started yelling “Ringer! Ringer!” But they weren’t mad. A handful of kids ran down from the base of the hill and sat up close.
Duncan, seeing he had an audience like back home, made the most of it. He walked backwards once. Then he asked for three balls, and juggled as we walked across. Then he played catch with three of the kids at the same time as he crossed again. After eight trips across, he jumped down from the pole and bowed. The civvies loved it, and even the GIs were OK with it. He started the day off with a lot of style. The kids surrounded him and cheered, and they watched the final three entrants. Not one of them crossed the rope a single time.
My Honor Flight Page 3