by War;Bluegrass If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood
“What difference does it make?” Clayton wanted to know. “You can shoot him from a hundred yards away or you can shoot him up close. I’ve killed a many of ’em, up close, far away. It don’t make no difference where you do it.”
“Well, you’re a sergeant. If anybody shoots him, it should be you.”
The other kid chimed in. “Why don’t we just take him prisoner? Haul him back to headquarters and see if he’s got any information?”
While Tweedledee and Tweedledum debated what to do, Clayton’s gaze never left the Jap, which was fortunate for the three Americans, because he saw the enemy begin to reach inside his shirt for something.
Clayton reacted instantaneously. He brought the butt of the rife straight up with a smooth, sweeping arc, catching the Jap squarely between the eyes with a sickening smack of wood crushing bone. The enemy soldier fell immediately, dead from this final, mortal blow. Clayton reached into the dead man’s shirt, which spilled a grenade onto the ground, the pin still fixed. The two greenhorns spoke nary a word.
“You see what I mean?” Clayton exploded. “You see what I mean? This is why you have to kill every Jap you see! Before he kills you first!”
Clayton kneeled down next to the dead enemy and reached for his shirt again. He ripped off a medal of oak leaves, removed the man’s wristwatch, and shoved them into his pocket.
“Now you can take him to headquarters,” he said to the rookies.
• • •
Ten days before Christmas, 1942, Clayton had awoken in a guest room of Roy Hall’s house on Shadeland Avenue in Roanoke, where he had been living that fall. He had pulled on a white shirt with a Dr Pepper patch affixed to the left breast, slurped a cup of black coffee, put on his white cowboy hat, and rode with Roy to the WDBJ radio station, where they spent a packed morning with the band. They played a live program at 6:30, followed by a recording session in Studio B to make a week’s worth of radio shows to be broadcast while the band members visited their families for Christmas.
During that morning session, Clayton had strapped on Roy’s Martin guitar, the one with Roy’s name spelled in mother-of-pearl along the fingerboard, and had sung “Old Shep,” a hit song about a boy who cannot summon the courage to shoot his old, suffering dog.
With hands that were trembling, I picked up my gun
And aimed it at Shep’s faithful head
I just couldn’t do it, I wanted to run
I wish they would shoot me instead
Sixteen days later, Clayton traded his cowboy hat for a helmet, his guitar for a rifle.
Now, here he was, two and a half years later, standing on the last patch of green grass on a godforsaken island ten thousand miles from home, a place laid waste by bombs, flames, and bullets where a quarter of a million people had died, a few by his own hands. The cowboy who sentimentally sang about sparing the life of an old dog had become a trained, professional killer, and a good one, who had no problem cracking a guy’s head open with a rifle butt. As he walked back to camp after that last patrol, he had to wonder if that cowboy kid would live again, or if he, too, was one of the casualties.
• • •
All the Deadeyes were pulled to the rear by July 1, 1945. Once on their new base, you’d have never known a war was still going on. The Deadeyes broke out the recreational boxes stuffed with bats, softballs, gloves, footballs, and volleyballs. If anything, the men were bored. They weren’t in training, they weren’t fighting, they were simply biding time. They suspected plans were being drawn up for an invasion of Japan (they were; Operation Olympic was scheduled for November), an invasion that would be spearheaded by a battle-tested division like the Deadeyes.
Finally, in late July, they were given their departure orders for Mindoro, a secure island in the Philippines. There, they would resume training and practice landings for the Japan invasion. They quickly packed for the move and then were told to speed it up because a typhoon warning had been issued.
That storm nearly got them. On July 29, 1945, the convoy of transports was struck by a massive typhoon. For nearly five days, Clayton’s transport pitched and rolled so severely that the men huddled below decks, believing it would flip over. The soldiers suffered miserably, and many puked and messed their pants. Guys were as scared on that transport as they had been in combat.
Three days later, the winds died and the seas calmed. Men climbed to the decks, swallowed life-giving oxygen, and welcomed the sunshine. The storm clouds were behind them.
• • •
The news of the atomic bomb came over the ship’s loudspeakers. Soldiers guzzled coffee and read mimeographed pages that updated war news and peace progress. On August 6, 1945, the first A-bomb was dropped on the industrial city of Hiroshima. The Japanese did not surrender. The second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Still, no surrender.
When the Deadeyes landed at Mindoro, the war wasn’t over.
But on August 15, 1945, Japanese emperor Hirohito finally stood up to the hard-liners in the government and military. He announced Japan’s surrender in a prerecorded radio address, which concluded, “It is according to the dictates of time and fate that we have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is unsufferable.”
The guys who had been on Okinawa, not to mention the island’s surviving civilians, also knew what it felt like to endure the unendurable.
After the Japanese surrender, the Deadeyes celebrated like a hundred Fourth of Julys. They fired guns, drank beer, sang songs, and danced with women from the Red Cross to the sounds and rhythms of the Ninety-sixth Infantry Division Band beneath a starry tropical sky.
World War II was over.
Nobody knows what I’ve been through
No one but God above
—“NO LETTER IN THE MAIL TODAY,” A SONG RECORDED BY BILL MONROE IN ATLANTA, 1940; THE SAME SESSION AT WHICH CLAYTON AND SAFORD FIRST RECORDED WITH ROY HALL
A fighting army without a war is like a kid without school—only with more firepower. Men didn’t know what to do with their sudden ration of free time. Military training was considered no longer relevant and was mostly canceled. Soldiers whiled away the hours playing sports, reading magazines, watching movies, and attending events at the enlisted men’s club, “Fatigue Junction.” Some took classes in math and science, as they prepared to return to a working world where knowing how to clean and reassemble an M1 rifle isn’t a job requirement.
Clayton did what he always did with his free time in the army. He found a guitar and played in a band, one that specialized in hillbilly tunes and cowboy songs. Music really did seem to tame the savage beasts of Leyte and Okinawa.
Clayton’s little band played shows in a bombed-out church on Mindoro. The crowd sat on old wooden pews and whooped and hollered like they were at an old-timey medicine show. They demanded that Clayton sing a song, like the ones he used to sing back at Camp White. But what songs did he remember?
He strapped on an old guitar, stepped up to the lone microphone, and flipped through the songbook in his head for a familiar tune. He complained that he’d lost the calluses on his chord fingers. He strummed a lonesome C chord over and over, natural as breathing. The words came back like the memory of a mother’s face.
Clayton sang “Old Shep,” the sentimental song about a boy and his dog. He crooned about good old days spent wandering over meadows and swimming in the old fishin’ hole, where Old Shep miraculously saved his owner from drowning one day. He sang the line about being unable to put the old dog out of his misery and how he wished somebody would shoot him instead. By the end, Old Shep had gone on to where the good doggies go, frolicking in the fields of heaven.
When he was done, I like to think that the rowdy men grew quiet as they listened with ears still ringing from the reverberations of 320 mm mortars and machine guns. Maybe they recalled their own boyhood days, or remembered a favorite old dog or fishin’ hole. Maybe, even after all the inhuman acts they ha
d seen and committed, one day they could forget it all and never have to talk about things like that again. They would be OK. They would be human beings again.
• • •
The army developed a point system called the Advanced Service Rating Score to determine who went home first. Soldiers earned points for service time, time overseas, campaigns, medals, and for having young children. Men who earned seventy points got a first-class ticket home. Clayton had sixty-seven.
Clayton occupied his time performing menial tasks, playing music, and hanging out with his new buddy: CoCo, a macaque monkey bequeathed to him by one of the seventy-pointers. CoCo’s main job was requisitioning smokes and gum from unsuspecting soldiers and returning them to Clayton, who smoked and chewed up the loot. Otherwise, Clayton was bored, dying to get home. Chow was bad—the men joked that the bitter, nauseating, malaria-fighting Atabrine pills were the best part of meals. Brothels flourished, even though prostitution had been officially banned by MacArthur, who may as well have been ordering the tides to roll backward.
Finally, the army called Clayton’s number. On December 15, 1945, he strode up the gangplank of a ship headed for California and sailed east. East. Home.
• • •
Clayton’s transport ship sailed slowly. He arrived in the Port of San Diego on January 3, 1946, almost three years to the day he had ridden the train to Camp Lee to be inducted. His duffel bag of Japanese souvenirs—sabers, guns, the watch he took from the Japanese soldier—was lost on the trip, but he didn’t stick around to see if it would arrive. He boarded a train bound for North Carolina.
Clayton Hall became a civilian again on January 15, 1946, at Fort Bragg, where Saford had begun his own military hitch four and half years earlier. A clerk typed up his official Enlisted Record and Report of Separation / Honorable Discharge. Clayton provided a right thumbprint and signed his discharge, then personnel officer Captain J. B. Collier signed it, and that was that. He was issued his lapel button (which bore an eagle emblem that many an army man referred to as a “ruptured duck”), given a $100 installment of his $300 mustering-out pay, and handed a bus ticket to Mount Airy. He was on his way back home the next day.
The cold, damp weather was a shock to a man who had spent a good chunk of the past year and a half in the tropics. The temperature struggled to get out of the thirties, and the bus ride was shrouded in fog, rain, and a few snowflakes. When the bus traveled northward on U.S. 52 from Winston-Salem, the terrain started to roll and rise. He had traveled this route dozens of times before the war, when he played on WSJS and later when he and Saford had joined Roy Hall. Going home had never felt like this, though. The Virginia mountains were cloaked with fog, but he knew they were there—at least he hoped they still were.
The bus pulled into Mount Airy by midafternoon and dropped off Clayton near Main Street. He packed up his few belongings and walked to a barbershop, where his brother Sam cut hair. Clad in his wool army jacket and well-tanned from the Pacific sun, Clayton stood out among the winter-pale shoppers and businessmen on Mount Airy’s gray street. Sam didn’t even recognize his baby brother when he walked into the busy barbershop.
“Soldier boy, eh?” Sam said as he worked on a customer. “Have a seat and I’ll be right with you.”
Clayton sat down, knowing Sam didn’t recognize him. “That’s all right, I’ll just wait my turn,” he bellowed. “No sense in a fella giving special privileges to his brother.” Sam nearly clipped off a customer’s ear. He fumbled around, trying to get the scissors and comb out of his hands, finally just dropping them in the customer’s lap.
All the men in the shop shook Clayton’s hand, slapped him on the back, and welcomed him home. Saford had just been in the shop a couple hours earlier, Sam said. He might even still be in town. He offered Clayton a ride, and they set off down Main Street to look for Saford.
Saford had been home for nearly six months, and all these years later it’s impossible to say what he had been up to in The Hollow or how he was greeted when he returned from war. Did he receive a hero’s welcome? A parade down Main Street in Mount Airy? Perhaps he got only a pat on the back from the middle-aged guys too old to fight. Maybe the country people of The Hollow never even knew he was at war. They just assumed he was off playing music somewhere. It’s all a mystery. All we know is that he didn’t stick around Roanoke, he didn’t talk about his wife, and he was living off his mustering-out pay from the army.
Sam drove slowly down the crowded street as Clayton scanned the sidewalks and café windows for any sign of Saford. The streets buzzed with postwar activity. Soldiers were coming home, getting jobs, and buying cars and business suits. Clayton would never find Saford in this crowd.
Then, there he was.
Saford strutted out of a soda fountain flanked by two girls. He was talking a mile a minute, spinning who knew what kind of tale. He wore only a light coat over his white shirt and necktie. He looked good. He looked the same.
Clayton climbed out the passenger side window, which faced the wrong side of the street, and sat on top of the door so he could look over the car’s roof. He hollered across the busy street at Saford and asked if he needed a ride.
Who’s hollering at me? Saford couldn’t believe his eyes. He headed for the street, before he realized he had forgotten to bid the girls farewell. Cars blared their horns as he darted into traffic and ran down Sam’s car, which had not stopped and was pulling away from Saford. Sam offered to cut a U-turn in the middle of the street, but Clayton ordered him to keep driving. Make him chase us.
Saford cut across to the sidewalk and caught up to Sam’s car just as it stopped at a traffic light. Clayton leaped out and met his twin with a handshake and embrace. The symphony of car horns was the closest thing to a homecoming parade that they ever got. The Hall twins were together again.
• • •
Here’s how I picture Clayton’s arrival at Mamo’s house:
The twins chattered the whole way as Saford drove his Buick north on Wards Gap Road. I am guessing they did not talk about the war itself, except in the indirect language of “Boy, am I sure glad to see you again!” There had been times when they doubted that they ever would.
Saford pulled up to the little house below the mountain where he and Mamo lived. Pale gray smoke, hanging motionless in the rain like cobwebs, hovered above the chimney. Mamo was inside, weaving an egg basket from oak splits, humming “Get Along Home, Cindy” or some other old mountain song. She heard the car pull up, wondered who it could be, and peeked out the window. That’s when she saw her baby boy.
“Clayton!”
Clayton climbed out of the passenger side and met his mother in the doorway.
“Hey, hey, Mama!”
Once she got over the surprise, I don’t figure that Mamo wept or shouted or melted into an emotional, convulsing heap. That would have been against her nature. Instead, she would have wanted to know if Clayton was hungry. “Have you eat yet?”
She fed him beans and cornbread, the first down-home cooking Clayton had in nearly three years. Word spread to the kinfolks, and before too long, sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, friends, and neighbors descended upon Mamo’s little cabin to welcome Clayton home. Mamo cooked up fresh sausage from a hog she had helped butcher in the fall, and she fried half-moon apple pies in the iron skillet.
“Boy, you didn’t make this big a fuss when I come home,” Saford said, half-jokingly, half-jealously.
“You hush up,” Mamo said. “I did so.”
The family ate and fellowshipped. Somebody brought out a guitar, Saford tuned it and played it, and the twins sang harmonies that soared like birds escaped from cages. Yes, sirree boy, the Hall twins were really back together.
Which means, at some point, they would’ve scrapped with each other. Eventually, they talked about the war. Saford assured Clayton that no enemy compared to the Germans. Those guys were a war machine, buddy, I’m telling you. They were the most disciplined, fearless, deadliest fighters the
world had ever seen, and I helped whip ’em.
What the devil are you talking about? Clayton demanded to know. At least a German surrendered when he was licked. A Jap fought to the death like a dog. The only way to whip him was to kill him. You ain’t fought a war till you’ve fought a Jap.
Like any good sibling rivalry, the argument escalated until somebody—probably Saford—bopped the other guy in the nose. Then the other dude—in this case, Clayton—retaliated. They punched and wrestled each other like boys on a schoolyard until Mamo stepped in and warned them that if they continued to act up this way neither one of them would get a fried apple pie. They obliged her, ate their pies, and sang until way past midnight, after everyone had left or gone to bed, leaving the twins to make music, just like when they were little boys, wondering what the future held.
That’s how I picture it, anyway.
• • •
Most guys came home from the war intent on improving their lot in life. Many opened their first savings accounts with their mustering-out pay. Some went to college or trade school on the GI Bill to earn an education and learn skills that would lead to good-paying jobs.
Clayton and Saford took their $300 from the army and hollered, “We’re rich! We’ll never have to work again!” They just wanted to play music and have fun. They were the first beatniks, and they didn’t even know it.
They wasted all of their mustering-out pay—and most of 1946, in the process—just by hanging out. They were like teenagers again, playing music in front parlors and at family reunions. They started going to church—not unlike most of their battlefield buddies who came home and thanked God for every day they were alive—joining nearby Mount Bethel Moravian Church. Clayton studied the Bible more diligently than Saford did, arriving early for Sunday school and even attending weeknight services and revivals. Both sang in the choir and even took up brass instruments to play in the church band. Those boys could play anything.
One Sunday morning in the Mount Bethel choir loft the ghosts of war returned to haunt Clayton for the first time. He had felt a little weak that morning but had decided to attend church anyway. During the service, he began to sweat profusely. He was burning up beneath his choir robe. A minute later, he was freezing. His head pounded. He asked Saford to help him up from the pew and escort him outdoors. Saford asked what was wrong with him.