Tullio, as I mentioned earlier, was planning on re-enlisting, but his major concern was to get into almost any other branch of service except the coast artillery. His two years on Fort Drum had made him cautious, and he planned to wait until he got to Angel Island and see what the recruiters had to offer. Almost all the branches with vacancies sent recruiting sergeants to the island when a boat came in, because every outfit preferred a P.S. man to a recruit. Good deals were offered, like a ninety-day re-enlistment furlough before reporting to duty, and sometimes they had an open T.O. slot and could offer a man a P.F.C. or corporal rating to fill the slot. The trouble with a ninety-day re-enlistment furlough was that all of your furlough time would be used up in advance and you would then have to go three years without any more leave.
Tullio asked me questions about the Air Corps, too, but he was discouraged by the things I told him.
"No," he said with his sad smile. "I couldn't hack that kind of life, Will. Every man, even a private, should have some kind of self-respect. And a man who washes airplane parts in gasoline all day can't respect himself. I slugged my share of Cosmoline in the coast artillery, but all the same I was a gunner and I knew my job. If the time ever came to fire the damned piece I knew what to do and how to do it."
"You don't have to be a mechanic, Tullio. Parachute rigging, for example, isn't a dirty job. All you do is take the 'chutes apart periodically, and then refold them after inspection?
"Shit," he said, "if I had to do that all day, I might as well get me a civilian job in a restaurant making sandwiches. No, Wi1l, I'm a soldier, and I can't see myself sewing canvas with a needle and thread and folding over-sized handkerchiefs."
As it turned out, these conversations were academic. When I reported to Machine Gun Troop and had my first meal in the mess hall, the guy sitting across from me was Tullio Micaloni. But we didn't know, either one of us, that we were going to re-enlist in the cavalry. At the time, we didn't know what we were going to do.
***
THE MAJORITY OF THE MEN ON THE BOAT, AT LEAST those who were finishing their first enlistment, planned to get out and stay the hell out of the Army. All of us would have some money coming, thanks to the clothing allowance we hadn't used, and a few guys had even managed to save five dollars a month by putting it in Soldier's Deposits at four percent interest. I had never saved anything, but thanks to guarding my clothing allowance money, and with a month's pay coming in, I knew I would have close to a hundred dollars. With that much money I wouldn't have to re-enlist right away.
In the Philippines, when I had seen sailors in Manila pouring into the bars from their naval base at Cavite, all loaded down with cash they had saved at sea, I had considered re-enlisting in the Navy. It was a clean life, and sailors at sea ate five times a day instead of only three. But the thought of joining the Navy evaporated on the U.S. Grant.
The U.S. Grant was an army transport, not a naval vessel, but 120 sailors were in the ship going back with us to San Francisco. They had all completed thirty-month tours in the Asiatic Fleet. The Grant, in my opinion, was a horror ship. Anywhere below decks it was incredibly hot, with little or no ventilation, and there was a constant, nauseating reek of oil, paint, and vomit in the stale air below decks. Many guys who stood for two hours in the mess line, breathing that sickening oily air, couldn't eat the food when they got it. Sometimes a seasick soldier would get his food, sit at a table, and then vomit into his tray. When a man did that, the table cleared in a hurry.
We had salt-water showers, and after a few of these, red splotches would break out on your skin. It was impossible to get any lather out of the so-called salt-water soap they issued for the showers. Bunks were tiered, four or five in a vertical ladder, and they were so close together you had to get all of the way out of your bunk in order to turn over. And your two barracks bags were crammed into the bunk with you. Instead of sleeping below, I slept on deck until after we left Honolulu and it got too chilly. But the sailors, amazingly, thought the U.S. Grant was paradise. They were constantly exclaiming what a great ship it was, and how easy it was to do K.P. in the mess hall. The sailors carried everything they owned with them,
including their hammocks, and they would put their hammocks up anywhere and catch a few hours' sleep.
I talked to Henderson about these sailors. "If these sailors think the Grant is the best ship they've ever been in, can you imagine what it's like on one of those destroyers or battlewagons?"
"They like the Grant," Henderson said, "because they don't have to work. They don't mind pulling a day or two of K.P. because this trip is like a twenty-one-day vacation for them. On a regular ship they have to work four hours, and then they're off for eight. After a couple of years on a schedule like that, being off duty twenty-four hours a day seems like heaven to them."
"What about the stench below decks? They still have to smell it."
"Sai1ors can't smell anything. There are little sensor things in your nose, and after a time, like when you work in a sawmill town, these little sensors are killed. After that you can't smell anything." .
"But if you can't smell anything, you can't taste anything, either."
"That's right. That's why the sailors think the chow is so good on the boat. If you blindfolded a sailor, you could feed him shit and tell him it was mashed potatoes and he wouldn't know the fucking difference."
Henderson was probably right about the sensors in your nose, because toward the end of the voyage it didn't smell so bad below decks to me, either. I supposed that my nose had gotten used to the stench, but these joyful sailors, walking around the Grant with their moronic grins of happiness, put the idea of joining the Navy out of my mind forever.
NINETEEN
HENDERSON HAD A TEN-DOLLAR BILL AND FOR TWO days before we got into Honolulu I tried to wheedle a loan of four dollars from him. I didn't want to go ashore without a cent in my pockets. He didn't want to go ashore alone, and he knew I would pay him back when I got my discharge money, so he finally agreed to a loan.
He changed the bill in the Black Cat Café in downtown Honolulu and handed me four dollars. At the same time I saw the headline in the Honolulu Advertiser reporting the death of Thomas Wolfe from tuberculosis of the brain. I didn't buy the paper, but read the item on the top of the stack outside the café, and this news put a damper on my shore leave. Wolfe, who was only thirty-eight, was much too young to die, and although he wrote prose I identified with him as a fellow poet. A lot of his prose reads just like poetry, and there weren't all that many poets left in the United States. As if on cue, a black cloud came over, and a sudden rain pelted us for five minutes. The rain stopped abruptly and the sky cleared again, as it does in the tropics anyway, but I took the swift, angry rain as a bad omen.
Henderson, who only read Tiffany Thayer and Donald Henderson Clark, had never read anything by Thomas Wolfe, so I couldn't talk to him about the tragedy. Henderson bought a pint of Gamecock bourbon, which tasted as if it was half fusel oil, but it was the cheapest whiskey in the drugstore. We drank half of the bottle in an alley before walking to the Dee Rooms. The Dee Rooms was purported to be the best whorehouse in town, although I doubt if there was that much difference among them. The prices were all standard, a straight two dollars, no matter what you wanted, with a ten-minute time limit. The women were all fairly young, recruited from the States, and most of them had signed a one- or a two-year contract with the madam. On paydays they could take on fifty or sixty guys apiece from Schofield Barracks. In two years these young women made a lot of money; then they went back to the States with a nice dowry and married some gullible businessman. When a transport like the U.S. Grant came in, or naval ships came back to Pearl Harbor after a month or two at sea, these women really cleaned up.
Henderson got laid and made the ten-minute time limit with no trouble (if you didn't make it in ten minutes you had to fork over another two dollars), but I told Henderson I didn't think I could do it that quickly. Actually, I was embarrassed about my lack
of pubic hair. A little stubble had started to grow again, but I didn't want some white American girl to laugh at me or to kid me about having crabs. Also, I was reluctant to pay two dollars after having paid only one dollar—or two pesos—for the last two years in P.I. A piece of ass would have to be twice as good, and I didn't think that was the case—not with their American hurry-up policy.
And these American girls, most of them from the Midwest, were large women, which meant bigger vaginas, not smaller, than the little Filipino girls had. So while I waited for Henderson, looking these women over, I decided to save my money. The girls all wore rompers, with ribbons in their hair, and even though they were young, they weren't young enough to get away with dressing like little kids.
When Henderson came out, I asked him how he had managed to beat the time limit, and he told me he had gotten a blow job.
"Jesus," I said, kidding him, "you paid two bucks for a blow job? You could've got one of the sailors on the boat to give you one for nothing."
"That isn't the same, you bastard, and you know it. These girls are pros. Try the one I had, Pepper, she's really good."
"No. What I really want is a fried egg sandwich. I've been thinking about a fried egg sandwich for the last three days. That, and a glass of milk."
Henderson didn't want to spend fifteen cents on a fried egg sandwich, but while I ate mine he grinned and said, "You bastard. You didn't want to get laid because you haven't got any pubic hair."
I had to laugh. "That's true. But I didn't want to spend two bucks either."
"Why don't you get a buzz job'? It's only four bits, and the girls are all Japanese."
There were dozens of buzz joints in Honolulu, but they did their best business between paydays. On paydays the men from Wheeler Field and Schofield usually got laid, but during the month, when they were mostly broke, they could only afford the fifty-cent buzz jobs. A buzz job was a speedy release, because the girl tongued a man hard and then, with a hand massager, gripped his dick and turned on the switch. It was an incredibly fast jerk-off with the vibrating massager on the back of the woman's hand buzzing away. A Japanese girl who knew how to handle the massager could get a soldier in and out of the room in less than two minutes. These Japanese girls, wearing kimonos, were very formal, and you couldn't touch them because their fathers and brothers hung around to prevent any trouble with the clients. But here I drew another line. A buzz job, I thought, was a demeaning mechanical procedure, for both the client and the girl. I wouldn't have accepted one if I could have gotten it free.
But I didn't mention this to Henderson. In the Army, if a man has scruples of any kind, his only protection against ridicule is to keep them to himself. I had already noticed the line that I had drawn for myself was getting narrower and fainter as time passed. If a man wasn't careful the Army could coarsen him, and I knew I had to protect my sensitivity if I was ever going to write anything first-rate.
At that exact moment I decided to get out of the Army. I didn't tell Henderson about my decision. In another five days we would be docking in San Francisco. When I was discharged, the chances were that I would never see Henderson again. Besides, what I did or didn't do was none of his business.
When we left the café, Henderson offered me the bottle, but I shook my head. "You keep it, Henderson. I don't want to get drunk. I want to go down and take a look at Waikiki Beach. I didn't see it the first time through, and I may not get another chance."
"I thought you wanted to go up to Schofield with me. We can look up some guys I know, drink beer all afternoon at the spiff bar, and we'll still have time to get laid again before we have to get back to the boat."
We had to be back on the ship by midnight because it sailed at sunrise.
"Why don't you go ahead," I told him, "and then we can meet back at the Black Cat about six. I don't want to spend my pass sitting around in a P.X. bar."
"I don't either, but I promised to look up these guys. They won't let us pay for the beer, either, so all it'll cost is the bus fare up to Schofield and back."
"I'll meet you at the Black Cat. I want to see Waikiki."
"There's nothing there but a strip of black fucking sand."
"So what? I'll always be able to say that I saw it."
"You could say it anyway."
"But it wouldn't be the same—as you said in the Dee Rooms."
Henderson was pissed off. He walked away without saying whether he would meet me at the café or not. Like most soldiers, Henderson hated to be alone, and the reason he had lent me the four dollars was because he didn't want to go into town by himself.
I've seen guys in the barracks who have had to take a piss wait until some other guy had to take one too before going to the damned latrine.
On the way out, I had been impressed by Henderson, by his know-how, by his insouciance, if that is the word, but I had changed during the last two years. He no longer impressed me. He hadn't changed, but I had outgrown him physically and mentally, and even in common sense. Any man who has just spent two years in the tropics had to be an asshole to go to Alaska.
But Henderson was right about Waikiki. It was merely a narrow strip of black sand. As long as I was there, however, I examined the luxury hotels. I suspected that I would have a different outlook on life if I could afford to live in one of these hotels. Despite the Depression, there were still a good many people with a hell of a lot of money to throw around. I sat in the lobby of the Royal Hawaiian to watch some of these rich people, and a minute later a man came over to my chair, flashed a badge, and told me to get out. I was in uniform, so he knew I wasn't a guest, but it irritated me that these rich bastards wouldn't even let you take a look at them.
I went back downtown and wandered through some of the stores. Everything in Hawaii was from twenty to twenty-five percent higher than it was in the States. Everything had to be imported by boat, so the people had to pay for the transportation costs. But the poor bastards at Wheeler and Schofield were still getting paid twenty-one dollars a month. Why didn't the Army offer a differential for soldiers stationed in places like Hawaii, where everything was more costly than in the United States? No wonder buzz joints had been created to meet the needs of underpaid soldiers.
Before going back to the boat I ate a steak and a baked potato. Then, because I didn't want my shore leave to be a total loss, I spent my last dollar on twenty candy bars. I distributed the candy bars in all of my pockets so I wouldn't look bulgy, and turned in my pass early at the gangplank.
The next morning I sold the candy bars for a dime apiece on the afterwell deck. Henderson was dead broke again, of course, so I gave him $1.50. He was so happy to have a little money again he forgave me for not meeting him at the Black Cat.
***
WHEN WE DOCKED IN SAN FRANCISCO THEY LET THE sailors off first, who were bused to Treasure Island. After the officers and the first three grades and their families disembarked, the rest of us, carrying our barracks bags, were disembarked alphabetically. The permanent party people at Angel Island were efficient at their jobs and were used to handling large groups of men. When we got off the Grant we had to march in a single file down three or four more docks to get on the smaller boats that would ferry us out to Angel Island. As we walked toward the ferries, whores were spaced along the docks, and they passed out cards with addresses of the hotels where they worked.
Finally, when we got to Angel Island, we were assembled in the large gymnasium, a close-packed mass of about six hundred men. There was a big master sergeant, with a voice like a foghom, standing on a raised platform. He looked us over, not saying anything at first, until we quieted down. He didn't have to say anything because he was the meanest-looking man I had ever seen. When there was no longer a whisper from this mass of men, he told us what he was going to do.
First, he said, he had to call the roll, and then he would call it again for groups of sixty men, and a permanent party man would march us to our separate barracks. That man would be in charge of the sixty-m
an group for the entire processing period. He would see us through final physical exams, the buying and fitting of our civilian clothes, the finance office, discharges, and, in certain cases, re-enlistments. He would tolerate no grab-ass or noise, because the sooner he got through with the roll call, the sooner we would get our bunks and dinner.
"I'll call your last name first, then your first name and middle initial. You answer 'Here' if you're here. Any man who answers ‘Present,' ‘Yo,' or ‘Yup' will get a special check by his name on my roll. Later on I will make up a new roll from the list of names with check marks, and that list will be my shit list for the next two weeks. We only have one mission here on Angel Island, and that's to get your ass off the rock as soon as possible. If you cooperate, we'll get you out in a hurry. If you don't cooperate, I promise you that your life here will be hell!"
The silence, if anything, deepened. This big ugly master, sergeant with his deep, resonant voice had scared the shit out of every one of us.
Then the first name he called was Willeford, Charles R. I didn't answer immediately because I knew there were a lot of initials ahead of "W." He didn't repeat my name, and the pause wasn't all that long, but when I finally answered "Here," he said, in a sarcastic way, "Thank you."
Something About a Soldier - Charles Willeford Page 18