One weekend I looked up Henderson, and we got drunk together. We went to the Santa Ana Cabaret, and when we ran out of money we began to steal drinks when the owners left them on the bar to dance. We got caught at that, and the M.P. who was stationed there told the manager he was taking us to the guardhouse. But he just drove us downtown and let us go. He told us not to go back there, and that if he ever saw us out there again he would prefer charges against us.
After he let us out and drove off, Henderson pulled an unopened fifth of Bell's Scotch from under his suit coat. At one point earlier in the evening he had reached over behind the bar and snatched it off the shelf. We climbed up on top of the wall around the walled city and drank the entire bottle. We awoke at four A.M., sick with hangovers, covered with mosquito bites, and without a centavo in our pockets. I walked back to Henderson's barracks with him in the walled city. He woke a friend of his and borrowed fifty centavos, which was just enough for carrimetta fare to get back to Paranaque. I was in time for breakfast, and then I had to go to work, even though I felt like I would die before eleven-thirty rolled around. I vowed then and there, no more Scotch.
I didn't see Henderson again until I met him on the boat going back.
At Nichols Field, Pilkington became my best friend. I met Pilkington at the squash court. A squash court is a rare thing on an Army post. Most people, in fact, have never seen the game played. It's expensive to build a squash court because there are four solid walls, and you go down into a pit on a ladder. The ladder, which is on springs, is then pushed up, and you are in an oblong room with a hard floor and four hardwood walls. You play the game something like handball, but with rackets, and you can hit the ball off all four walls. The ball is harder and livelier than a handball, and if you slam it hard enough it'll bounce off the forward wall at ninety miles an hour. The court at Nichols Field had been built for a former commanding officer who had since returned to the States, but very few people used the court after he left. It was hot down in that pit. When the temperature hit a hundred outside, it was another ten degrees hotter down in the court. After you played a half hour, prickly heat would break out all over your body and sting like crazy. But I had prickly heat all the time anyway, and I was determined to lose some of the weight I had put on and to get back in shape. I was also filling out in my shoulders and chest, and I could no longer get away with shaving only once a week. I now had to shave three times a week, including Saturday mornings before barracks inspections.
Besides, I enjoyed squash. I loved to whack the ball, especially when I could hit the floor-and-wall dead shot that killed the ball altogether. But it was hard to find anyone to play with, so most of the time I would go down into the court and bang balls around by myself for a half hour or so.
Pilkington, a clerk at headquarters, was also overweight, and he had learned to play the game in England. He was one of the most sophisticated guys I had met in the Army. Pilk had been all over the world, but he was only twenty-two years old. His father was in the diplomatic service, and Pilkington had always been with him in the various countries where his father had been assigned. Pilkington spoke French, German, and some Spanish, but he spoke German with a Viennese accent because he had attended a Gymnasium in Vienna, or Wien as Pilkington called it, for four years. He had then, after some months in England, been sent back to the States to attend a prep school in Massachusetts. His father wanted him to prepare for Georgetown so he could also become a diplomat. After a year at the prep school Pilkington had walked away from it and joined the Air Corps in Boston. After basic training he had transferred to the Philippines. Because he knew how to type they made him a clerk-typist in headquarters at Nichols Field.
Pilk was chubby, good-natured, with a soft, rounded gut, and he wore ugly wire-rimmed G.I. glasses. These steel issue glasses, with thick lenses, made his dark blue eyes seem almost twice as large as they actually were. When he removed them to play squash he resembled a different, handsomer person. G.I. glasses are all right for a man's vision, if the prescription is correct, but they are not designed for style. It would be just as easy to design attractive glasses instead of these wire-rimmed monstrosities so that soldiers who have to wear glasses would look better in them, but I don't suppose that this will ever happen.
At first Pilkington was beating me every game, but I had more stamina and I was stronger, and when we played a fourth game I usually won it. I got better, though, and we soon played the same game (as I picked up pointers from Pilk) and then we were about even. Each game became a drawn-out contest, and sometimes I would win and sometimes he would. So we became good friends, so to speak.
After a game we would shower and go over to Charlie Com's for a beer or a Coke. Even when I was broke I could sign chits at Charlie Com's up to five pesos a month. Pilk's father, even though he was disappointed in him, sent him an allowance every month, and Pilkington also earned ten pesos a lesson for teaching a surgeon at Stemberg Hospital how to speak German with a Viennese accent. The doctor, a captain, was purported to be one of the top surgeons in the Army, and he had already established a speed record at Stemberg for taking out appendixes and leaving the smallest scars. The Arrny likes to retain surgeons like him, and they were going to send him to Vienna to study at government expense for a year under some
famous Austrian surgeon. But the captain was vain, Pilkington said, and wanted to speak German, which he knew fairly well already, with a Viermese accent when he got there.
He was also a little crazy, Pilkington said.
We didn't become friends right away because we were feeling each other out. In the beginning I didn't like Pilkington all that much. He was a bigger snob than I was, and he hadn't learned, as yet, how to conceal his sense of superiority from others. The police and prison sergeant had kicked him in the ass, and Pilkington wanted to get revenge on the dumb bastard.
Every morning a hundred or so Filipino prisoners from Bilibid Prison were trucked out to Nichols Field and turned over to Sergeant Amyx, the police and prison sergeant. He broke them into groups of twenty-five and assigned guards. The guard was armed with a riot shotgun and five brass double-aught shells. But the weapons were just for show. These short-term prisoners were so happy to get out of the dismal prison for a day of work they weren't going to run away. We used them on the post to steam-clean engines at the motor pool; to beautify the area by white-washing the rocks that lined all of the walkways; to collect garbage; and to scrub hangar floors with gasoline to remove grease spots.
We usually had from eight to ten Air Corps prisoners in the guardhouse too, but these G.I. prisoners did lighter work, like mowing lawns and picking up litter. Sergeant Amyx, who shaved his head andwore a walrus moustache, was a giant of a man with enormous arms. Every evening, with a fifteen pound boulder in each hand, he ran around the flying field, more than a square mile, pumping those big boulders as he ran. He had a mean streak, and would tighten the lawn mowers with a screwdriver so that the Air Corps prisoners could hardly push them. He could, with his great strength, push them easily, and he would laugh at the prisoners as they struggled on the parade field with the lawn mowers.
Sergeant Amyx had papers to prove he was crazy, and other papers, with a later date, proving that he was not crazy. Anytime someone disagreed with Amyx, which was seldom, he would say, "You're crazy!" When this accusation was denied he would pull out his papers and say, "I've got papers to prove I'm not crazy. Where are yours'?"
In this way, Amyx won every argument. Anyway, when Pilkington had his twenty-five prisoners lined up in a column of twos, ready to march them to the motor pool, it occurred to him that he had only five shotgun shells and twenty-five prisoners.
"Just a minute, Sergeant Amyx," he said. "You gave me twenty-five prisoners and only five shells. If they all start to run, I can only get five of them."
"You crazy bastard!" Amyx screamed. "You planning to shoot twenty-five men?" He came rushing over toward Pilkington with his huge fists clenched. Pilk dropped his shotgun a
nd ran and Amyx chased him. They circled the guardhouse twice until Amyx managed to catch up with Pilkington and kick him hard in the ass. The kick sent him flying.
Calmer now, Amyx handed him the shotgun and said: "If they run, boy, just shoot the first five. I won't hold you responsible if the other twenty get away."
Pilkington had asked what he considered a logical question, although if he had thought for a minute, he wouldn't have asked it. With our own Air Corps prisoners, a man never guarded more than three at a time, and he usually only had two. Some of these prisoners would try to escape, and many of them were criminals. A couple had been sentenced to life imprisonment for rape and murder. They were still in the Nichols Field guardhouse, waiting for the next boat to take them back to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I would rather chase fifty Bilibid prisoners than these two killers. Besides, once the Bilibid prisoners got to the motor pool and were given various jobs, they scattered out and J there was no way to keep track of them all after a few minutes.
A But Pilkington felt humiliated by getting kicked in the ass, and he wanted revenge.
"There are at least a hundred guys," I told Pilkington, "who would like to get revenge on that crazy bastard. But I advise you to forget it. If we were in L.A., we could get a couple of cholos from Jacob Riis High to beat him up with bicycle chains, but you can't find any Filipinos here to go up against Amyx. And anything else you do would be too petty to constitute a satisfactory revenge. I say forget it. Just make a rule, like I have, not to ask questions of anybody."
"A man can't live like that, Will. Sometimes questions have to be asked."
"But not by you. Remember when you took basic? There was always a question or two you wanted to ask, but then, just when you started to ask it, some other asshole would put up his hand and ask the same question. Isn't that right?"
Pilk nodded and grinned.
Pilkington eventually gave up the idea of getting revenge on Sergeant Amyx. Pilk was bright as hell, but it takes a long time for a man to accept the Army way of doing things.
A week later Pilkington cut our squash game short. He had been playing poorly anyway, and I could tell that ' something was bothering him. After we showered and went over to Charlie Corn's he told me that he had been invited to the captain's house the night before for dinner.
Doctors in the Army aren't as rank-conscious as other officers, and they prefer to be addressed as "Doctor." Pilkington was the son of a highly placed diplomat, so it wasn't unusual for the captain to invite a private like Pilk to his house for dinner. In truth, Pilkington's social status was higher than the doctor's.
Ordinarily, Pilkington went to the hospital once a week to give the captain lessons in his oflice, so this was the first time he had been in the doctor's house. But when Pilk arrived, wearing a white sharkskin suit, he was so upset by some of the things the doctor showed him he could hardly eat his dinner.
The doctor, apparently, had access to unclaimed Filipino bodies in the Manila morgue. He had taken a couple of bodies home with him, ostensibly to make laboratory skeletons from them, but he had made a standing ashtray out of the bones of one body, using the foot, the leg, and the skull (hollowing out the top for a glass ashtray insert); and then he had used the skin of a woman's body he brought home to make wristwatch bands. He had given one of the wristwatch bands to Pilkington, and there were line dark hairs in the tanned skin. When Pilkington showed me the wristwatch band I could hardly believe it.
"I don't know what to do, Will," Pilk said.
"About what? The band? I'd keep it, if I were you, but I wouldn't wear it. People would think you were strange. But someday it'll be a nice souvenir of your two years in the Philippines?
"I don't mean the wristwatch band. I mean the captain. What he's doing with those bodies is morally wrong, and I was wondering if I should turn him in to my squadron commander. "
"Turn him in for what? He's entitled to take bodies home, you said, and no one else wants them. You can see bodies every week floating in the Pasig River. Studying anatomy is how a doctor learns his job, so if you stir up things you're liable to get into trouble yourself. What do you care what the crazy bastard does?"
"But that ashtray, I mean, that ashtray, it really got to me, Will. The skull was full of cork-tipped cigarette butts. Kools. The doctor smokes Kools."
"What did you have for dinner?"
"Steaks. Baked potatoes. Snow peas."
"What kind of steak?"
"Rib steaks. Beef."
"Are you sure?"
"Am I sure—?"
Pilkington began to laugh. "You sonofabitch! Yeah, I'm sure. But that's the last time I go to
his house for dinner."
"What did you talk about?"
"Wine, mostly. Rhine wines. I drank a lot of wine in Europe, although I'm not an expert on wines. But the captain hardly knows one wine from another. He's worked and studied so hard all his life he's been socially deprived."
"If he starts to show people his watchband collection he'll really be socially deprived."
We left it at that.
Something or other should probably have been done about that surgeon. But there are a good many crazy officers enlisted men know about who are never detected or reported. Officers superior to a junior officer can do something, but anything reported from below is considered prejudiced, and immediate steps are taken to cover up. I'm not sure that what the doctor was doing was legal. It may or may not have been, but as Pilkington said, it was certainly immoral.
Because he worked at headquarters Pilkington could get free tickets, and he got tickets a couple of times for the fights and we went. Flyweights, bantamweights, and lightweights mostly, but the Filipinos were good boxers even if their fights rarely ended in a knockout.
Pilkington also got us free tickets to see the world premiere of Lost Horizon. I don't know why Manila was chosen, but it was, and Pilkington got us two tickets way down front, in the third row. We had to crane our necks to look up at the big screen, but we sat there transiixed. The entire audience was mesmerized by this picture. Jane Wyatt swam naked in a wooded pool, and it was the first time I had ever seen a naked woman in the movies. Margo was in the movie, too, and I remembered her from Winterset. In Lost Horizon Margo lied to her boyfriend and told him she was young when in reality she was about a hundred years old. The audience registered horror audibly when Margo turned into an old lady on the screen right before our eyes, proving that everything the old Lama had said about Shangri-La was true.
I didn't fall for the analogy at the end. I knew where the real Shangri-La was—it was Camp John Hay, in Baguio. But unlike Ronald Colman, I knew I'd never get back to my Shangri-La.
EIGHTEEN
DURING THE FINAL MONTH OF A MAN'S TOUR IN P.I. he was relieved from duty. The Army figured that a man needed to pack, to get his affairs in order, and the Army also knew that his work would be on the indifferent side as he began to count his dwindling days. My date of departure was October 31, 1938, having arrived on October 30, 1936.
Major Burns, our squadron commander, had left on the last quarterly boat, and I had thought that now I would finally make private first class, the grade my job as gas truck driver called for on the Table of Organization. But such was not the case.
In August I was relieved and sent to the motor pool, and another guy, a recruit named Daniels, with only six months' service, was assigned to the gas truck in my place. He was promoted to P.F.C. the same day, and I was given the rations truck run. The rations run was a plum job, but I had been cheated out of my deserved promotion. A P.F.C. made thirty bucks a month, and that extra nine bucks would have made a world of difference to me. I also had almost three years' service, and it was embarrassing not to have a single stripe on my sleeve.
I mentioned the injustice to Pilkington, of course, but I didn't complain to anyone else. When new guys arrived every quarter, I was always pointed out to them as the guy who had shot the major's dog. I was a short-timer now, and the first sergea
nt had written me off. I liked driving the rations truck, and realized that I could have been given a much worse assignment. I settled in and made the best of it.
In the morning, right after breakfast, I would walk to the motor pool, check out my two-and-a-half-ton truck, and drive to the mess hall. The mess sergeant, Sergeant Travigliante, would give me the requisition for the provisions he wanted, and then I would drive down to the commissary by the dock in Port Area, across from the walled city. Once there, I waited my tum, together with all of the other rations trucks of the units stationed in Manila, and handed over my list to the N.C.O. in charge. He took the forms and gave them to his Filipino helpers, and they filled the ration boxes with meat, vegetables, and the other supplies on the mess sergeant's requisition. The Filipinos loaded the truck, and I drove back to the mess hall at Nichols Field. The Filipino K.P.'s unloaded the truck, and I drove to ·the motor pool. There, two or three Bilibid prisoners washed my truck, and I parked it. By ten-thirty every morning I was through for the day. I loved driving through the city in the early mornings.
While we, the drivers, waited for our trucks to be loaded, we congregated in a bar on the pier overlooking the bay and drank icy dark draft San Miguel beer from frosted mugs. I met some interesting guys from the other outfits in the bar, and it was always a pleasant hour of good conversation, or sometimes, when I had a few pesos, liar's poker. But I didn't have enough money to drink a beer every morning, much less two beers, as I preferred, so I began to wonder if I could make a little money on the side from the rations. On the list, if an item wasn't in stock, the N.C.O. in charge ran a red line through it on the form. The mess sergeant didn't get that particular item. Sergeant Travigliante had to reorder it the next day or else come up with a substitute. The N.C.O. at the commissary used a red grease pencil, and I asked Pilkington to get me one just like it at headquarters. All I had to do then, after my order was filled, was to stop the truck and red-line the items on the form I wanted to keep for myself. I wasn't greedy, nor did I want to affect the quality of the food in the mess hall—I ate there too—so I only red-lined a few items, and then only occasionally, things like a gallon of canned peaches or canned pears, or perhaps a pound or two of rat cheese. I sold these items to shack rats, whose girls liked sweet things to eat, especially canned cling peaches in heavy syrup. I made very little money on these petty thefts, but with the extreme heat down by the docks I deffnitely needed a cold beer or two while I waited around for my rations to be loaded.
Something About a Soldier - Charles Willeford Page 16