Something About a Soldier - Charles Willeford

by Charles Willeford

  I rolled another cigarette and looked on the bright side. Tomorrow was payday, and for the next two years, with tailor-mades at only fifty cents a carton, I wouldn't have to smoke Bull Durham; I could smoke Chesterfields.

  I picked up the Scribners and read a short story by Thomas Wolfe. It wasn't a regular story, it was an excerpt from a new novel he was working on. Again and again, throughout the story, he repeated, "Ah, April, sweet April," but nothing much happened. ·

  Then at eleven the C.O. turned out the lights, and I had to go to bed.

  FIVE

  WHAT I LIKED MOST ABOUT THE AIRR CORPS WAS the huge blocks of leisure time, which allowed me to read three or four books a week from the Fort Stotsenburg library. What I disliked most was that I was a flunky in coveralls. We were not soldiers in the Air Corps; we were all, in one way or another, manual laborers, peons. Most of the enlisted men's jobs could just as easily have been performed by civilians, and the appearance of being military men was bogus. We had mechanics, armorers, fabric technicians, oil reclamation and supply specialists, meteorologists, parachute riggers, and clerk-typists. When they told me to drive the fire truck, I became an instant fireman. A guy Hamed Reynolds was my nozzleman, and our fire chief was Corporal Gutweiler. There was another driver and another nozzleman assigned to the fire department, too, and we altemated duty periods every twenty-four hours. Corporal Gutweiler was on duty every day.

  On the day Reynolds and I were on duty, I drove the fire truck from its garage behind the barracks down to the firehouse behind the hangar. I sat there, reading until eleven-thirty A.M., and then I drove the truck back to the barracks. I didn't have to clean or polish the truck. That task was taken care of by one of the prisoners in the guardhouse jail next to the Firehouse. The firehouse office served as the guardhouse office at night. There were always one or two prisoners in the lockup. Usually the prisoner was Red Thompson, who was in and out of the guardhouse frequently, coming down from an extended, raging drunk.

  While he was drunk he was incoherent and quick to destroy people and things, and there was no point in talking to him until he had sobered up. Red usually spent three or four days in the lockup; then he was given either squadron punishment or a summary court—martial—fined, and released to get drunk again.

  Sometimes I had to put gas and oil in the truck, but I arranged things with the other driver, Burnley Johnson, to take turns on this chore. Once a month there was a fire drill, and we alternated on the drills, so I only drove the truck on the fire drill every other month. For the fire drill, I drove the truck to the hydrant in front of the barracks. Corporal Gutweiler and Reynolds attached the hose to the fire hydrant and the pump hose on the truck. I switched on the pump, and I could control the flow of water from the driver's seat. They held the nozzle as the water came and that was that. After I turned off the pump we put the hose back on the truck, and I drove back to the firehouse again.

  During my twenty—four-hour tour of duty I had to hang around the barracks on call, which made me miss the movie on the nights I was on duty, but otherwise my time was my own. None of us, including Corporal Gutweiler, had ever had any training in fire fighting. Gutweiler worried a lot about whether we would be able to put out a fire if one of the airplanes ever caught.

  I told him not to worry. If the plane caught fire, the all-fabric P-12's we still had would be twisted black skeletons before I could get the engine cranked and drive over to the hangar. He was relieved when we finally got the P-26's. With their metal bodies and streamlined pants over the tires, they wouldn't burn as fast as the P-12s. But there were never any fires. The only difficult job we had to perform was to check out the fire extinguishers every month. This job was a little scary. There were about twenty extinguishers to check, in the hangars and in the barracks and in the headquarters building. Each extinguisher had a small bottle of sulfuric acid in the lid. When the extinguisher was turned upside down, the soda water and the

  acid mixed and sent out a stream of foam to blanket the fire. We had to unscrew the top and fill the bottom of the extinguisher with more soda water if some had evaporated. Then we made sure the bottle of sulfuric acid was full. I didn't like to pour the sulfuric acid from the big jug into the little bottle. A spilled drop would smolder and smoke when it hit the pavement, and I was always afraid I might spill a drop on my foot and burn myself.

  On weekends, of course, we didn't have to drive down to the little firehouse across from the hangars. The truck, a big red F.W.D., stayed parked behind the barracks. Sometimes I could make a deal with Burnley Johnson, the other driver, to hang around for me if I wanted to go somewhere, and I did the same for him when he was on weekend duty. As firemen, we didn't have to stand any Saturday morning inspections, which were held infrequently anyway, and we didn't have to pull guard duty either. Technically, Corporal Gutweiler was on duty twenty-four hours a day every day, but as long as he told the charge of quarters where he would be in case of a fire, he could go where he liked. When he wasn't in the firehouse,

  he was usually in the bowling alley, trying to improve his 185 average.

  I have gone on at some length about the fire department because I want to point out the waste of manpower, the sheer incompetence of the setup, and the feeling of worthlessness it engendered in those of us who were assigned to these meaningless jobs. My uncle Roy, who worked for the Southern Bell telephone company in Los Angeles, told me once that Southern Bell had saved thousands of dollars a year by eliminating fire extinguishers from their company vehicles. Not enough trucks burned to the ground during a given year to justify putting an extinguisher into each truck. Once they are there, they have to be maintained and inspected, and that calls for hiring men to do it. The company had also discovered, when they made a survey, that when a vehicle did catch fire, the driver leaped out and ran like hell to get away from the burning vehicle. — And when he ran, he invariably left the extinguisher in the cab.

  The difference here is that Southern Bell was a profit-making organization, whereas the Air Corps, as a branch of the Army, is not. And yet if a fire department is required, it would be difficult to find a cheaper department than our five-man group, with only one corporal and four buck privates and an old F.W.D. truck that had been chugging along for more than a dozen years.

  Everything in the Air Corps has been planned to make the enlisted men feel inferior, whether they are or not. Every soldier was supposed to be a skilled man, and many of them were, but they had all learned their skills on the job in a hit-or-miss fashion. Our line chief, a master sergeant who was also maintenance chief, couldn't read or write. Nevertheless, he had his six stripes because he had been in the Air Corps ever since it was still a part of the Signal Corps back during the Great War. He had a P.F.C. assistant who read the technical orders to him as they came in. He then explained the tech orders to the crew chiefs, when they required new procedures and new methods of fixing engines and so on. The system worked all right, because after he finished explaining them the crew chiefs had a chance to read the orders themselves. And yet, because the ancient line chief was an enlisted man, his inability to read and write was concealed from our officers. None of them knew that he was illiterate. The crew chiefs covered for the old man all the time, which added to their burdens. But he was a nice old guy. If a crew chief wanted a three-day pass to Manila, the line chief would red-line the crew chief's airplane and tell the officer-pilot that it wasn't ready to fly for a few days.

  On the other hand, our maintenance crews didn't work hard, and they seemed happy enough. A four-hour day is not a heavy load. Their work consisted of, for most part, inspections of their aircraft—a daily, a twenty-five-hour, and a fifty-hour inspection. The daily only took five minutes, but a lot of parts were taken off and washed in gasoline and put back on during the twenty-five-hour inspection. After the plane flew for fifty hours, it was practically disassembled before being put back together again. When the planes were flying, as they did almost every morning, the crew chiefs s
at under a thatched shelter in front of the hangar, talking and smoking until the planes landed again.

  The Air Corps also has two enlisted ratings that other branches of the service do not: air mechanic, first class, and air mechanic, second class. These ratings pay almost as much money as staff sergeant and technical sergeant, but they don't have the responsibilities that go with sergeant's stripes. To become an A.M. 1 or an A.M. 2 the mechanic had to pass a written test and then get on the waiting list. There were only a few of these ratings available in each squadron, but with two year tours, and with the rating belonging to the squadron, a good many mechanics got a crack at these ratings during their tours.

  There were, however, some highly skilled men in the squadron, especially "Rip Cord" Collins, our operations sergeant, and Gamer, our chief telegraph operator, who could send or receive Morse code at fifty words a minute. Collins had to be efficient because he held everything together. He kept track of all the planes, those ready to fly and those on red-line, and he made out the flight schedules and kept track of flying pay for both the officers and the enlisted men. His job was made doubly difficult because many officers only wanted to fly the minimum time requirement. To get flight pay, which was a sum equal to half their base salary, they had to fly four hours a month.

  A few enlisted men were also entitled to flight pay, although no enlisted man could draw flight pay for more than twelve months in each enlistment. In a pursuit squaron, with one-man airplanes, four hours a month in the air were hard to get for an enlisted man. We had one two seated observation plane, an O-19, and the squadron commander was the only pilot who had checked out on it. 'Rip Cord' had to make sure there was a passenger in it every time it went up. It was this same O-19 that had given 'Rip Cord' his nickname.

  Collins had a hangover one morning, and he assigned himself to fly in the back seat of the O-19 when the major took off that morning. (One or two hours in cool, thin air at three or four thousand feet will cure a hangover quicker than almost anything.) But after they were aloft, Collins fell asleep. When the major landed and taxied up to the concrete ramp in front of the hangars, he noticed that Collins was still sleeping. The prop was still turning over, and the major stood up in his seat, leaned over, and punched Collins on the shoulder. Collins awoke, and the major gestured with his thumb for him to get out. Startled, Collins unbuckled his belt, leaped out, and pulled the rip cord on his parachute, thinking in his half-awake way that the major wanted him to jump from an endangered airplane. When he landed on the ramp he broke his leg. Then the propwash caught his 'chute and carried his screaming body for about fifty feet or so out onto the grassy landing field.

  His broken leg became about an inch shorter than the other one when an inept surgeon reset it at the hospital, and Collins developed a curious rolling walk when he returned to duty. Collins did not appreciate the nickname he acquired, but his limp reinforced his disciplined image, and he never lost the nickname. The story was told to new arrivals, and Collins' nickname was spread gradually throughout the Air Corps. We speculated about it down in the fire department, as we speculated about everything else, and we concluded that he would probably keep that name as long as he remained in the service.

  There were 120 men in the squadron, not counting officers. About twelve of them were entitled to flight pay, including the ancient line chief. The O-19 couldn't handle all of them every month, so once a month a captain from Nichols Field flew up to Clark in an old Keystone bomber that had been left over from the World War. All twelve of the men piled into the Keystone, and the captain would circle the field for a few hours until they all got their required time.

  There was another rule that could be substituted for the four hours-in-the-air rule, and that was to make ten landings instead. Many pursuit pilots liked this rule because they could make ten touch and-go landings in no time, but the enlisted men who flew in the old Keystone bomber begged the pilot to stay in the air instead. No wonder. Each landing of this cumbersome old airplane that only flew about ninety miles an hour at full throttle was liable to be its last. They earned their extra money, I thought, because nothing in the world could have induced me to fly in that old Keystone bomber.

  Even so, when you look at it, there was no reason to give any of these enlisted men flight pay (not in a pursuit squadron), so they were beating the Air Corps out of extra money every month and being humiliated in the process. A man in a bomber without bombs, riding around in a circle for four hours (and most of them got sick and vomited through the square hole that was supposed to be for the dropping of bombs) had to feel some kind of guilt for taking money under false pretenses. But I never heard any of these guys express any feelings of guilt, so maybe I'm making more out of this than it deserves.

  I tried once to discuss the ethics of enlisted men's flight pay with Reynolds, the nozzleman, but his standard answer was, as always, "Who gives a shit?"

  Reynolds was only interested in one thing, and that was in getting a fireman's hat. We wore coveralls and campaign hats, just like every other grease monkey, but Reynolds wanted to wear a fire hat to set himself off from the other enlisted men. There was no fire-fighter's equipment of any kind, not even rubber boots. Reynolds bugged Corporal Gutweiler about this and finally Gutweiler made out a requisition for two fireman's hats, but he never received an answer.

  When it became obvious that there would be no response to the requisition, Reynolds said, "If there's a fire, I ain't going into no burning building to rescue some woman or child without a fireman's hat."

  "You're the nozzleman," Gutweiler reminded him, "and you'll be outside holding the nozzle if there's a fire. Willeford'll be sitting in the truck with the pump to look after, and I have to help you hold the nozzle. So none of us'l1 ever have to go into a burning building."

  "Ah, who gives a shit?" Reynolds said, although in this case he did.

  If the Air Corps had provided us with fireman's hats it would have been a small measure of distinction, a sign that we represented something worthwhile. A nozzleman, on the scale of things, is way down there on the totem pole, and Reynolds shouldn't have been a nozzleman in the first place. He was a slight, undersized man, and he had to have help from Gutweiler to hold the nozzle during drills because he wasn't strong enough to handle it alone. The force of the water going through the hose lifted him off the ground. Nor was he strong enough to crank the fire truck, like the nozzleman on the other shift. I had to crank the F.W.D. myself, which meant the risk of a broken arm every time I had to drive the vehicle. And if an arm was to be broken, I would have preferred it to be Reynolds' instead of mine.

  As little as I did, there were other men at Clark Field who did less. Much less. These were the old guys, the professional privates, men who had been in the Army since the World War. These men had never been promoted, had always been privates, and had never developed skills of any kind. In the States they could be assigned to clean latrines or to sweep porches, but in the Philippines, where all of the menial tasks were performed by Filipino houseboys, there was nothing at all for them to do.

  The old guy I mentioned earlier who always managed to get the "pilot's" seat next to the radio was officially assigned to the supply room, as a helper for the supply sergeant. But he was such a crusty old man, the supply sergeant would not let him come inside the supply room. He had to sit outside on a chair all morning, moving the chair periodically to stay in the shade of the building.

  There was another old guy we called "Patty." He had served in the "Princess Pats" regiment during the war. This was a Canadian infantry regiment, as I understood it, which had lost almost all of its complement in the Argonne Forest. Patty was one of the few survivors. He had a Victoria Cross and a raft of other campaign medals on his blouse. He was assigned to be a runner for the first sergeant at headquarters, even though he could barely walk. His legs and hands were crippled by arthritis, and he was a little senile on occasions. Sometimes, for example, he thought Clark Field was in Alberta, Canada. The first serge
ant didn't need a runner, anyway. If he wanted someone, he would call him on the telephone. In a one-squadron post like Clark Field, the first sergeant had the job of sergeant-major as well. So Patty had a useless assignment. He was unable to march down to the headquarters building each morning at seven-thirty, but he made his own hobbling way down there, getting to headquarters by eight or eight-thirty.

  When he reported to the first sergeant he was always told, "Nothing for you today, Patty. Go back to the barracks, and I'll call you if I need you."

  He was never needed later, and he had to go back to bed after this morning walk. Of course, the fact that he had to walk a half mile each way, from the barracks to headquarters and then back, probably kept the old man alive.

  There was also Red Thompson, the drunk I mentioned earlier, who had been at one time a first-rate parachute rigger. But he was now too drunk or too sick to do much of anything, so he wasn't assigned to any job. He usually spent his time in the barrio of Sapang Bato (which we called Sloppy Bottom) drinking gin, when he wasn't sleeping in the barracks or in the guardhouse jail. No one ever bothered him because he was a belligerent drunk, a dangerous man, to be avoided. Because of his many summary court lines he had no money, nor was he likely to have any on paydays; and he had sold off all of his clothing, civilian and military, as well as his sheets and blankets, to buy gin; Knowing he would sell them again, the supply

  sergeant wouldn't issue him any more sheets and blankets; and the mess sergeant, Sergeant Travigliante, wouldn't let him eat in the mess hall because he smelled so bad. He reeked of gin and sweat and no one wanted to sit by him in the mess. He didn't eat much anyway, but when he got hungry he had to go to the back door of the kitchen and one of the cooks would fill a plate for him and let him eat outside with a spoon under the mahogany tree.