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RIDING THE BEAT-UP OLD BUS UP THE MOUNTAIN was a scary experience. There had been some hard rains, and the dirt road that hugged the sides of the mountains, zigging and zagging, was muddy and narrow, and there were some long drops on many of the curves. This was Igorot country. The mountains were terraced, the way they farm rice in Japan, and the pattemed terraces made beautiful interlocking triangles as they formed giant steps up the mountain. It must have taken decades to carve out these mountainside terraces. Eventually we hit the tree line, and the tall pines, mixed with mahogany trees, reminded me of Big Bear, the R. & R. camp that the soldiers from March Field went to above San Bernardino, but these mountains were much more lush with tropical greenery than the San Bernardino mountains because of the much heavier rainfall in the Philippines.
Baguio had gold mines, the city's main industry, and some of the bus riders were miners, but many of the women passengers were returning to Baguiofrom trips to Dagupan or Manila. There were two Igorot women on the bus, with their distinctive horizontally wide-striped skirts, but they wore blouses and didn't have their breasts uncovered the way they did in the mountains. Many of the Igorot women, I noticed later in the downtown Baguio market, still walked around with their breasts exposed. Igorots were much darker than the usual run of Filipinos, and the women wore their black hair in long braids, like Indian women, hanging down their backs.
Baguio wasn't a large city, but it was surprisingly clean, unlike Dagupan, and it seemed to be the most prosperous of any of the places I had seen in the Philippines so far, including Manila. Wealthy people had built homes here, where they could get away from the humid lowlands, and there were several good restaurants in town. The big farmer's market was open every day, with all kinds of produce for sale. Baguio was also the home of the Philippine Military Academy. The military academy, which furnished officers for the Philippine Constabulary as well as the new Philippine Army, was modeled on West Point and was staffed with U.S. Army officers as instructors. The cadets wore the same kind of uniforms as West Point cadets, and I watched a few retreat parades while I was there. They had a beautiful campus, a strict regimen, and you could tell, just by looking at these cadets, that they had been carefully chosen. They even looked a little taller than most Filipinos, but that was probably because of the tall hats they wore on parade. I don't think a class of second lieutenants had graduated as yet, but I had a hunch that when one did the ofticers would be paid a hell of a lot more than the peso-fifty a month the enlisted men received.
I took the bus out to Camp John Hay, about two miles away from the center of town, because I didn't know about the free truck ride at the time. I turned in my orders and was assigned to a bunk and a wall locker. I had missed supper, but after I stowed away my stuff, which didn't take long, I walked down the hill to Charlie Corn's and had a hot dog and a beer. There were no level spots at Camp John Hay. Anywhere you went was up and down steep roads or asphalt walking paths, but the cool air felt wonderful on my skin. After walking back to the barracks from Charlie Corn's I realized that I hadn't scratched my prickly heat once since I got off the bus in the middle of town.
That night I slept under two blankets, and I remember thinking, just as I drifted off to sleep, that a place like Camp John Hay proved that, if the Army wanted to, it could do something right.
THIRTEEN
THERE WERE ABOUT FORTY GUYS ON FURLOUGH AT Camp John Hay. The personnel changed frequently because they had all taken various periods of leave, ranging from a short one-week leave up to one guy, a private from Corregidor, who had taken a ninety-day re-enlistment leave. Because I had a long leave of six weeks I was assigned to a lower bunk, and for the first few days I skipped breakfast and slept until ten or ten-thirty in the morning.
One of the guys I had met on the boat, Isaacs, a Jew, was a member of the permanent party. Isaacs worked as a clerk in the supply room, and he filled me in on some things I wanted to know, including current prices in Baguio. I had met him on the boat through Henderson, because Isaacs typed the stencil for the ship's daily newspaper in the chaplain's office on the Grant. To my knowledge there had been no enlisted Jews at March Field or at Clark Field, and they were apparently even more rare in the combat forces, although once in a while some guy like Isaacs would enlist. He had embezzled money from his father's firm in New York, he told me, and then after he had spent all the money he had been afraid to go back home. He knew his father would prosecute him. So he was hiding out in the Army till his father forgave him. He wrote to his mother through one of his female cousins, and his mother sent him a money order for ten or fifteen dollars every month. He needed this supplement because prices were a little higher in Baguio compared with Manila and Angeles. Everything had to be shipped up there by truck or bus.
There were only six guys in the permanent party for our casual barracks, and they had private quarters at the end of the building, separated from the casuals' side. They had a large stone fireplace with huge logs burning all the time, and there were comfortable leather chairs and couches in front of the fireplace. Because I knew Isaacs, I would visit him there at night sometimes and shoot the breeze by the fire. There was always popcorn available, and sometimes they roasted marshmallows. It goes without saying that I envied these guys in the permanent party, because Camp John Hay was about as close to being a paradise as the Army has ever provided. How these guys, all of them Quartermaster Corps, ever lucked into this lush assignment, I don't know.
When it occurred to me one evening that Isaacs was the only enlisted Jew I had met in the Anny, I asked him about it. Except for a few doctors and dentists, who were all officers, why were there so few Jews in the Army?
"The pay's inadequate," Isaacs explained. "In a Jewish family, everybody works. So if you've got a father working full time, a mother part time, and two boys and a daughter working, you've got five incomes together. After you pay expenses, there's always a lot of money left over, you see. Protestants like you are different. You all go off on your own, and then you have to work four times as hard to have the same amount of money you could have at easier low-paying jobs if you were all living together as a family. The Protestant ethic you guys go by only lets you make it on your own. I was a gang, or a thief, but when all of this blows over I'll be damned happy to go back to work for my old man. The Army stinks, and besides, my mother worries."
"How can you say that, Isaacs? You put in about two hours' work a day in the supply room, and you're living like a king up here in Baguio. You've gained at least twenty-five pounds since you got off the boat."
"You've put on about twenty pounds yourself."
"What does your mother worry about? That you'll fall out of bed, or overeat?"
"She thinks some Filipino might kill me because we're an army of occupation."
"That's crazy. The Filipinos love us, for Christ's sake! When we leave here in 1946, and they get their freedom, they're going to starve to death."
"You and I know that, but my mother thinks that soldiers get killed, sooner or later, and most Jews look at the Army the same way. That's another reason why Jews don't enlist."
In other words, Isaacs really didn't know why Jews didn't enlist in the Army. There was probably some deep-seated ethnic reason, but it couldn't have been merely the low pay or the fear of getting killed. Certainly Isaacs was safer at Camp John Hay than he would have been running around New York City. And if there ever was a war, which seemed unlikely, he still wouldn't have to fight anyone—not as long as he was in the Quartermaster Corps.
I started to run around with the guy who had a bunk next to mine, an Italian named D'Angelo, who came from Brooklyn. He was a corporal, a company clerk, from B Company, 31st Infantry. Ordinarily a corporal and a private don't buddy up, but rank didn't mean anything to those of us on furlough. We were all of a kind, from different branches of the service, and an infantry corporal didn't have any jurisdiction over an Air Corps private in the rest camp. So D'Angelo and I became good friends, ma
inly because, in the beginning, we played golf together. The golf course at Camp John Hay was one of the toughest in the world. The holes were long, with a couple of par lives, and you were driving either uphill or downhill. The course was maintained beautifully by Filipino landscapers, and the grass on the fairways was cut almost as short and neat as it was clipped on the greens. The roughs were nearly impenetrable, though, because of the trees. If you sliced into a dense stand of trees you could kiss your golf ball good-bye.
We were both novices, so we didn't keep score. When it took ten or more shots to get a ball into a hole, there was no point to it. But in the early morning, after breakfast, with a light mist on the green course, in cool weather, it was wonderful to be out there, whaling away and walking the fairways. I played with a two-iron, a five-iron, and a putter, to keep my bag light, and bought second-hand balls from the ragged Filipino kids who scoured the woods for them. We usually stopped playing after nine holes because the ninth green was near the barracks.
We got to know the three Signal Corps guys who had a little house, complete with their own bathroom and shower, right next to the number nine green. These three guys manned the message center twenty-four hours a day, but they worked it out so that there were two shifts of twelve hours. That way, one guy always had a full day off between shifts. When they were off duty these signal corpsmen sat on the front porch of their little frame house drinking gin and watched the struggling golfers try to get the ball up to the ninth green from the tee at the bottom of a dingle. It was almost straight up, and if the ball didn't make it all the way up to the green, or into the sand trap in front of the green, it would roll back down the hill for a hundred yards or more. This was the most frustrating hole on the course, and we were usually ready to turn in our clubs when we iinished playing it. The first time we played the hole the Signal Corps guys had kidded us so unmercifully they felt sorry for us. They then invited us over to the porch for a glass of gin. That's how we got acquainted with them, and they were all nice guys. These guys could take or send telegraph messages at fifty words a minute or more, and one guy, named Fellows, was even faster than that. Fellows had specialized for ten years as a relief man for other signal corpsmen who re-enlisted for ninety-day leaves. He filled in for them for ninety days, and when they came back he was assigned somewhere else. As a consequence he had been almost everywhere the Army had a post, camp, or station, including Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
When I found out that Fellows had been at Fort Huachuca, I told him what the old retired sergeant at Dagupan had told me about Edgar Rice Burroughs being there, and he confirmed it.
"That's right. Edgar Rice Burroughs was in the Seventh Cavalry at Huachuca for a few months, and then his father bought him out and he left. It was long before my time, but if you ever go there, he's the first guy they tell you about. Huachuca is a fucking hell-hole in the desert, and Burroughs is the only thing they've got there to brag about. But he hated the Army so much he bought out as soon as he could get the money from his father."
I realize that it doesn't make any difference whether Edgar Rice Burroughs was ever at Fort Huachuca or not, but now that I knew the old retired soldier had told mé the truth about knowing Burroughs, I knew that I had also met, in all probability, the last sergeant in the Army who had scalped an Indian.
I brought that up, and we had a long discussion about whether being scalped would kill a man or not, and we concluded that it wouldn't. It would be painful, and it would leave the top of your skull exposed, but if it was done right, and you didn't cut into any head arteries, it wouldn't kill you.
I got to know D'Angelo very well. We took long walks together, including walking into town and back, and he liked to talk about himself. He didn't have as much time in as I did, and yet he had made corporal in the infantry because he knew how to type. He had enlisted, he told me, to wait out the Depression, knowing if he hung around Brooklyn much longer without a job he would get into some serious trouble. He had graduated from high school, but in two years of trying he couldn't find a job. His father had a high-paying job with the Veterans Administration, pulling down $1,800 a year, and his father (with his pull) told him that if he spent an enlistment in the Army he would have a priority and could probably also get a position with the V.A. when he was discharged. By enlisting directly for the Philippines, he would only have to serve two years instead of three, and he spent most of his free time studying V.A. regulations his father sent him so he could pass the civil service exam when he got back to Brooklyn. D'Angelo was different from any other guy I had met in the service so far because he had a long-range plan for his life. No one else, including me, ever planned ahead much farther than the next payday, if he planned ahead that far.
D'Angelo had also read a lot, and we both liked Thomas Wolfe. D'Angelo thought that Wolfe's short story "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" was one of the greatest stories ever written, even though the dialect Wolfe had used in the story was off by ten blocks or more. Otherwise, though, Wolfe had captured the feeling of Brooklyn, and that was the important thing.
I showed D'Angelo my poem about the fire ants, but even after he read it three times he claimed he couldn't understand it.
"I think I know what you mean, Will," he said, "but I can't explain what I think you mean."
"I could explain it to you, but if I did that there would be no need for the poem. What I'll do, I'll copy it out for you, and you can read it again a few months from now. In time, I'm sure it'1l be clear to you."
"I'd like a copy. What I'll do, I'll borrow the typewriter in the orderly room and type it. Sometimes a poem looks different in type."
So he typed it for me, as well as a dozen more I had in my notebook. Then he gave me the originals and kept the carbon copies for himself. He didn't comment on the other poems either, but I think he was impressed. And what he said was true: typed, the poems seemed stronger, somehow, than they had looked in my scribbly handwriting.
We were in the Baguio market one morning, walking around and looking at the bare breasts of the Igorot women. Their breasts were brown and taut, and the nipples stuck straight out. This was because, D'Angelo said, none of these women had ever wom brassieres, which break down the muscles under the arms and cause breasts to sag. We ran into Tom Higdon in the market, and Higdon had a grande of gin. Higdon was an M.P. from Manila who came from Terrell, Texas, and he was already a little drunk. He offered us each a drink from his bottle, and told us that they were going to hang an Igorot in the morning. The Igorot had killed a man, and then he had eaten the man's heart after roasting it on a charcoal fire. Because of the American influence, the Philippines were sensitive to things like cannibalism, and they were making an example of this Igorot, although they had never bothered them much before, not while the Philippines were still under Spain, anyway. After all, it was a tribal custom to eat the heart of an enemy after killing him. The bolo fight, apparently, had been a fair one, so they were hanging the Igorot more to stamp out cannibalism than they were for murder.
"What I'm worried about," Higdon said, "is that this here Igorot's a pagan. What I'm going to do is go down to the jail and talk to him and show him the light. If I can convert the little fucker, he'll have a chance to go to heaven instead of purgatory."
Higdon was Southern Baptist, and even though he was a little drunk, he seemed serious about this mission.
"I don't think they'll let you talk to him, Higdon," I said. "And even if you did, he won't understand English."
"That's right," D'Angelo said. "With your Texas accent, I can hardly understand you myself."
"Look who's talking!" Higdon said, bristling. "You got a black dago Brooklyn accent that only foreigners talk."
"I'm as white as you are," D'Angelo said. I think he was probably sensitive about his dark Mediterranean skin. Texans like Higdon didn't make any distinction between Negroes, Mexicans, Portuguese, Italians, or anyone else with dark skins—they were all black to Higdon. I didn't want to see these two guys get into a f
ight about something stupid. I stepped between them.
"We'll go with you, Higdon. The constabulary might let three of us see the Igorot, where he might tum down just one guy."
"It's not that I want to go," Higdon said, shrugging, "but I wouldn't be much of a Christian if I didn't try."
So we walked to the jail, finishing the rest of the gin on t the way.
There was an uneasy relationship between the Philippine Constabulary and the armed forces in P.I. As a national police force, they could, technically, arrest a soldier or a sailor, but they never did. They might hold on to some soldier who was tearing up a bar or something, but they turned him over to the M.P.'s as soon as possible. The constabulary, anywhere you went, was a smart group of policemen. They were well trained and bore no resemblance to the sloppy new Philippine Army. I don't think they were paid well, but they undoubtedly had several kinds of graft working for them, and you never saw a member of the constabulary in a dirty or sloppy uniform. Higdon was an M.P., but he was on furlough and had no official capacity in Baguio.
There were three members of theconstabulary at the jail, a corporal and two patrolmen. The sullen corporal didn't want us to see the Igorot.
"No." He shook his head. "I can't let you bother the Igorot. He's going to be hanged in the morning."
"That's why we have to see him today," Higdon explained. "Tomorrow will be too late. I've got to show him the light." Then Higdon pulled out his M.P. I.D. card, and that placed the corporal in a quandary. He knew that he was supposed to cooperate with American M.P.'s, so he reluctantly took us back to the cells.
The Igorot, wearing a pair of dirty white pants, was a dark little man of about four six. When we stopped outside his cell he scrambled up the tier of six bunks and peered down at us over the edge of the top bunk with the terrified dark eyes of a lemur.
Something About a Soldier - Charles Willeford Page 13