The menu called for cold cereals, and 50-to-1. (50-to-1 was what we called the condensed milk and water mixture that was used for cereal, although the mixture was actually 4-to-1), bacon omelets, toast, hominy grits, and fresh fruit. The K.P.'s would take care of the dry cereals and 50-to-1 , and put the fruit out on the tables, so all I had to prepare were the omelets, grits, toast, and coffee. I found the kerosene to get the fires started. I put the big pot of water on, dumped in five pounds of coffee, and then made the toast. The fresh bread Potter had baked the night before was ready, but I had to slice it before I could toast it, and it took considerable time because the bread was still soft and tended to bunch up under the knife. But I slashed my way through the bread and put it into shallow trays and then into the oven. I opened the doors to the oven from time to time to catch it before it burned. But the raggedy sliced pieces of bread didn't toast evenly, and sometimes the outer edges would char. By the time I had 250 slices of toast ready, a few shack rats started to drift into the kitchen from the barrio.
Apparently this was a common practice. They had to walk from the barrio to the barracks, and they had to arrive in time for roll call at six A.M. Because the day-room was closed and locked, there was no place else for them to go. So when they got to the barracks early, they came into the mess hall and helped themselves to coffee. An A.M. 2, Salter I think his name was, had a grande of gin. He shared his girl with the others, and they made coffee royales with the gin and my coffee. They complained that the coffee was too weak and needed the doctoring. I got angry and ran them out of the kitchen, about eight of them, telling them to stay in the mess hall and out of my way.
I started breaking eggs for omelets, cracking them into an aluminum pitcher, and got the huge roasting pan, about three feet square and four inches deep, from under the table. I greased the pan with some olive oil I found in the refrigerator and poured in the eggs. I used about four pitchers of beaten eggs, pouring the mixture into the pan on top of the stove and stirring it from time to time. I didn't know that the bacon was supposed to be fried before putting it into the egg mixture; So I just dumped bacon chunks, as I sliced them, into the cooking eggs. The heat from the stove was tremendous, and the outside temperature was already in the high eighties. I wasn't used to working at such a swift pace, especially performing unfamiliar tasks. I was soon drenched with sweat. Potter came to, started to get up, and Salter, out of kindness, brought him a cup of coffee laced with two fingers of gin. Potter drank it down and promptly passed out again. I told Salter that if he came into the kitchen again I would cut his throat with the knife I was using to slice bacon., This time he believed me. I had wanted to ask Potter a few questions but he had slipped back into his alcoholic coma and it was too late.
The three Filipino K.P.'s came in just before six A.M. and started to set the tables in the mess hall. I had one of them bring in more wood for the fire and started another panful of omelets, not knowing for sure how much 120 men would eat. I had forgotten all about the grits, so I now put on a boiler of water and poured five pounds of grits into the cold water while I waited for it to boil. The cooling toast had been ready for more than an hour, and I told the K.P.'s to put it out one the tables. There were huge serving bowls for the omelets as well (we ate family style), and I started to dish them up. The bacon, unhappily, was still raw in the omelets, but I couldn't cook the eggs any longer because they would burn.
At six A.M. the shack rats left the mess hall for roll call on the porch outside, which gave me almost a half hour before I had to ring the bell for breakfast. Except for the grits, everything else was ready. The water had finally begun to boil with the grits, but I hadn't put in enough water in the first place, and had to pour in more. I stood on a stool and stirred the grits with a wooden spoon. The unsalted grits weren't truly done, and were lumpy as well, by the time the men came in to breakfast.
There was a lot of grumbling about the omelets and the grits. I told the K.P.]s to drag Potter outside because the men, as they glared angrily toward the kitchen, seemed to be uncomfortable looking at Potter's prone, outstretched body. In fact, Potter looked dead as the K.P.'s dragged his limp body through the kitchen and out the screen door.
Because the toast was cold and the omelets were filled with cold, uncooked bacon and the grits were lumpy, not many men ate their breakfasts. One of them, I don't know who, phoned Sergeant Travigliante, who was married and lived in the sergeants' married quarters up at Fort Stotsenburg. He arrived at seven-thirty, more than a little upset by the phone call. After checking things out, he merely shook his head and told me that it was good that I had used my initiative under the circumstances, but that I should have called him when I found Potter passed out.
"Where's Potter now?" he asked.
"I had the K.P.'s drag him outside, out by the garbage cans."
We went outside but Potter was gone. The fresh air had revived him and he had left the barracks area, staggering across the plain to the barrio, under the impression that he was on his two—days-off cycle. So Potter didn't get back to the kitchen for two days. No one could find him in the barrio, and he said later that he didn't remember where he spent the time.
At any rate, the mess sergeant didn't think that I would be capable of preparing the noon meal. The menu called for fresh pork roast, candied sweet potatoes, string beans, and canned corn, so he told me to make chocolate pies for the dessert.
He got an off-duty cook to come in and prepare dinner, an Indian called Pete Whiteleather. Pete took an instant dislike to me because he had to work on his day off. Pete was a dangerous enemy; when he got drunk he was a terror. He was also, in everybody's opinion, a little crazy. He had one joke, and he pulled this one gag on everyone. If you didn't laugh, he would scowl darkly and sometimes take a swing at you.
"Do you smoke?" he would ask.
"Yes."
"So does a hot turd!" He would laugh crazily, and you had to laugh with him.
If you said "No" when he asked, he would say, "Neither does a cold turd!" He would laugh either way, and if you were smart, so would you. This single joke became old indeed after the sixth or seventh time he pulled it on someone. As a consequence, people avoided Pete as much as possible. He developed a grudge against me, however, and I made certain after he came into the kitchen that morning that I would never be alone with him.
I got out the recipe book and I made the chocolate pies, twenty-four pies altogether, enough for two pies at each table. But I must have gotten mixed up on the amount of sugar I put into the filling mixture, because all the pies came out as hard fudge.
I heard one old guy in the mess hall say, "I been in the Army eighteen years, but this is the first time I ever ate fudge-on-a-crust."
At noon Sergeant Travigliante told me that as of one P.M. that day I was a truck driver again.
As it worked out, I was wise to ask for my two days off first. Cooking for 120 men is not as simple as one thinks it is, and I developed a lot of respect for Army cooks, even though most of them are rummies.
NINE
CORPORAL GUTWEILER WASN'T HAPPY TO SEE ME when I returned to the fire department. He didn't say anything, nor did I, about the way he had gone behind my back to get me into the kitchen. But his little plot against me had backflred. The first sergeant held him responsible for recommending me as a cook, so what we had now was a sort of truce, and we were very polite to each other. I knew that I wasn't wanted, however, and I also knew that I should, if I could, get out of the fire department.
My opportunity came when a guy named Baxter, who drove the gas truck on the line, drank a canteen cup full of leaded gasoline, laced with Eagle Brand condensed, sweetened milk.
Baxter was a disturbed man who hated the Army and the Philippines, and longed for his mountain home in Boone, North Carolina. From the things he had said about Boone, one would have thought that almost any town in the world would be a better place to live than this snowbound, isolated, ingrown, bigoted, poverty-stricken little village u
p in the Carolina mountains. But Baxter didn't feel that way now that he had to stay put in P.I. for two full years. Being unable to return home for two years weighed heavily on many of the younger soldiers; homesickness was a problem, in varying degrees, for almost everyone.
It wasn't unusual for some homesick soldier to go down to headquarters and talk to the first sergeant about it. But the first sergeant, who was stuck forever in the Philippines, gave these supplicants little sympathy and no hope. If he liked the man, he might advise him to talk to the chaplain up at Fort Stotsenburg, a Methodist major, or he would say, "Tough shit. If you thought you'd miss your momma, you shouldn't have joined the Army."
Word got around that there was nothing to be done, and most homesick soldiers, after a month or so, got over it. Others did not. They brooded, and then they became sulky and withdrawn.
As Corporal Canfield told me, you could always tell when one of these guys was on the narrow edge. These were the men who couldn't, or didn't, sleep at night. If you came back from the barrio at one or two A.M., all you had to do was look around and see some homesick bastard sitting on the edge of his bed in the dark, his feet on the floor, his head and upper body behind his mosquito bar, smoking a cigarette. And when you got up again at four A.M. to take a leak, the guy would still be sitting there, still awake, smoking and brooding. A man who had already gone through the homesick stage would merely tell you to forget about it and put in your time. After all, time passes; two years is not forever.
Perhaps if mail service had been better, homesickness could have been alleviated somewhat. It took about a month each way for a letter, and sometimes when a man received an answer to a question, he had forgotten his question and was puzzled by the answer he received.
I wrote to my grandmother every two weeks, whether I had anything interesting to report or not, and her letters usually came in batches of three, although they were sometimes dated a week apart. Her condition at home had improved. She got a job in a cleaning establishment on Forty-third Street, just two blocks away from her apartment house, and all she had to do was take in the clothes people brought in and tag them. Her salary was small, but my uncle didn't know that she had a new job, so he continued to pay her rent and send her the same small allowance every week.
During my first year at March Field I had often hitchhiked home to Los Angeles for weekends, but even then we corresponded during the month. Usually she would enclose a dollar bill, and I would immediately spend it. But now, when she enclosed a dollar in her first letter to me in the Philippines, I returned it when I answered her letter. I told her we weren't allowed to have any American money in the Philippines. That wasn't true, but I knew she needed a dollar bill a lot worse than I did, and it was the only sure way I could think of to stop her from sending me any more.
Not many men received mail. Most soldiers didn't have families. Those who did, for the most part, had broken with them many years before. But there were still a few young guys with mothers and fathers, and even girlfriends, to make homesickness a problem. I think if a man had been able to talk to our squadron commander, the old man would have been able to do something or other for hopeless cases like Baxter's. But in order to talk to the commanding officer, a man had to have permission from the first sergeant. To my knowledge, the first sergeant never gave anyone permission to talk to Major Bums. Ever. It was impossible to bypass the first sergeant and talk to the major anyway, because the first question the old man would ask was whether you had permission to talk to him. If the answer was "No," you could end up with some kind of squadron punishment--an Article 104. And you still wouldn't have been able to talk to him. On the other hand, this was the first sergeant's job—to prevent people from bothering the C.O. with problems he could take care of himself. That was the Army way, and it's a good system in almost every case. But there will always be a few like Baxter, the guy from North Carolina.
Baxter didn't die easily. It took about eight hours while the lead particles in the gasoline penetrated his intestines. We discussed his suicide at some length in the barracks, and we concluded that it was a very painful way to die, although it was a foolproof method and had obtained the desired result.
At any rate, I asked the first sergeant for the job of gas truck driver, and I was reassigned immediately. The gas truck, like the fire truck, was an F.W.D. tanker, and the first soldier knew that I was qualified to drive it.
The gas tank held five hundred gallons, and all I had to do was to gas the planes after they landed each day so that they were full at all times and ready to fly. The job also called for a promotion to private first class, which I expected but didn't get because I shot the major's dog about a week after I got the new assignment. I now had to pull my share of guard duty and work five days a week on the line. And sometimes if a plane came in from Nichols Field
in the afternoon or on a Saturday morning I had to be there to refuel it. But I didn't mind.
Time passed a little quicker with a five-day work week, and once I got on to the dodge of keeping a fifty-gallon drum full of fuel to sell to those few guys who owned cars, my income increased slightly even without the deserved promotion.
Every six weeks I would allow the gas to get down to 250 gallons in the tank. Then I added 250 gallons of water. The water, being heavier than the gasoline, would swoosh to the bottom half of the tank. I drained the 250 gallons of water until I got back to the gasoline. This was called "flushing the tank," and it was a way of keeping impurities out of the fuel. It also enabled me to pick up about fifteen gallons of extra gas for my drum. I managed to get two or three gallons more by padding out the amount of gas I put into each airplane. So it was no problem to keep my fifty-gallon drum filled. The officer pilots always signed the sheet on the clipboard without question. I kept careful gas records, and unless someone discovered my full drum, well hidden in a cluster of banana trees on the far side of the hangar, I couldn't get caught. If someone wanted gas he drove down there himself, filled his tank, and later he would come up to me in the day-room and hand me one or two pesos. It was gas on the honor system and I was never cheated. I only charged twenty centavos a gallon, which was a lot cheaper than the peso a gallon the commercial stations in P.I. charged. Back in the States gas sold for about eight gallons for a dollar, and new arrivals with cars were shocked when they discovered that gas was fifty cents a gallon in the Philippines. I had no shortage of enlisted men customers. What I had going for me was an open secret. If.you look at soldiers as workers, we were being exploited insofar as our pay was concerned. Any employer who shortchanges his help gets the kind of worker he pays for. If a restaurant owner pays a cashier fifteen dollars a week and he, or she, sees that the owner is raking, in two or three hundred a day, that cashier is certainly going to supplement his income from the cash register. One is merely correcting the moral deficiency of the employer.
***
ONE FRIDAY MORNING THE PILOTS FLEW ALL OF THE P-12's down to Nichols Field. On Monday morning they flew back in new P-26's, cute little all-metal monoplanes, painted blue and yellow, with pants over the wheels. There were nine of these little planes, and the crew chiefs were excited about them. P-12's, apparently, were tunable to keep up with the new Martin B-10 bombers the Air Corps was getting, and they needed faster pursuit planes to protect them. As it turned out later, the P—26's couldn't fly fast enough either, but I don't think anyone knew that would happen at the time. The crew chiefs and the other maintenance people didn't know anything about these new pursuit planes. Instead of sleeping away the quiet hours in the afternoons, crew chiefs studied their new manuals. The crew chiefs also had to wax and polish these airplanes to pick up an extra ten miles per hour in the air. If they hadn't painted the airplanes, the weight they would have saved might have given them the extra speed they needed without the polishing, but apparently they Air Corps generals who had ordered the planes weren't aware of the extra weight of the paint. Every enlisted mechanic in the Air Corps knew it, but no one had enough nerve t
o mention it to our commanding officer, even if the first sergeant would give the man permission to speak to him about it. Air Corps planes had always been painted, and once a tradition in the service has been established it's almost impossible to break it.
Our officer pilots, for example, wore breeches and hightopped cavalry boots, and up until 1933 they had also worn spurs with their boots. On the line, crew chiefs still had I written instructions to ask pilots for their spurs before they got into the cockpit of an airplane. This order was no longer needed, but many officers still wore spurs when they were off duty, even though they had never been on a horse in their lives.
West Point officers knew how to ride, but the Air Corps didn't get many West Point officers from the top of the list of academy graduates. New graduates high on the honors list went into the army engineers automatically, whether they wanted to or not. The next ranked chose the cavalry or the infantry, where their chances of getting a command and fast promotions would be better in case of war. So the Air Corps, as a choice for academy graduates, was well
down on the list.
One of the main reasons, however, for not choosing the Air Corps was a fear of failure. West Point graduates, even though they were Regular Army second lieutenants, still had to spend a year or so learning how to fly. They usually wanted to be pursuit pilots—desiring one-on-one single combat someday with an enemy pilot. But not everyone has the reflexes needed to be a pursuit pilot, and those who flunked out either were reassigned to fly bombers or transports, or were reassigned to another branch of the service. Very few academy graduates volunteered to be bomber pilots. They knew that bombs would be dropped indiscriminately on innocent people someday, and a choice like that was antithetical to everything they had been taught at West Point. And if a man was unable to fly a bomber or a transport plane, and was reassigned to another branch of the Army, his failure would be on his permanent record and he would be doomed to some ignominious post for the next thirty years.
Something About a Soldier - Charles Willeford Page 8