The main thing I do learn is that I don’t ever want vested authority again. For one reason, I feel I’m not the right type of person. I am not responsible enough. For another, I don’t really believe in vested authority as such. Any authority I might have, any power anyone can have in this life, should be a result of what he or she can do, not power given as the result of a hierarchy. I’ve lived my life without getting involved in power.
The closest I’ve come to a power hierarchical structure is when I’ve been teaching. I did a fairly good job of it. The kids liked me and learned. Then they wanted to move me into school administration. I backed off. That was thirty-five years ago and I quit teaching fairly soon thereafter. Since then, I’ve only worked for myself, doing the things I’m good at, not having to tell anyone else what to do.
Of course there are the important people who build the roads, bridges, dams and so forth. In an abstract way they work for us, for all of us. But, in our family, we’ve never had any servants, I can’t take that responsibility. I don’t work for anybody myself, and have no one working for me.
At nineteen I made these decisions, and these decisions were from having had this kind of responsibility thrust upon me when I was too young.
7. HOMECOMING
FORT DIX, NEW JERSEY
You now know about my being responsible in a way for the massacre, the shooting and killing of people who had surrendered and the rest of it. Well, after the war I’m sent to Fort Dix. I have enough discharge points to get out, but they have to repair my jaw that was set crookedly in Metz, and check my semicircular canals. I’m there at Fort Dix almost five months. When I’m not being examined and worked on, I finally get to use that typing MOS.
I’m put to work paying partial payments to all kinds of guys who are coming in, mostly from the South Pacific. They’re being processed and discharged, processed like a word processor or a food processor. The army goes through their service records, calculates whatever money is owed them and debriefs them in a certain way, giving them the ruptured duck, we call it, an insignia indicating they are separated from the military with an honourable discharge. In the meantime, these guys, most of them with yellow skin from taking atabrine tablets, are waiting to be discharged. The atabrine was supposed to help them from getting malaria. Actually the pills didn’t help, they only put off the symptoms.
The guys are given furloughs. For most of them it’s been two, three or four years since they’ve been home. Usually they have no money. The army owes most of them a significant amount of salary, and it’s piled up. But there’s been no way they could actually get American money and spend it.
Generally there’s no paymaster, that is if you were in an infantry outfit and in combat. What are these guys going to do? They can’t even go buy a coke. It’s really stupid and they’re isolated at Dix without money.
So the military works out a system. The army gives them ‘partial payments’. These are advance payments on what the military owes them. There’s a Lieutenant Trout in charge of partial payments, but he’s never there. He has a girlfriend and is gone all the time visiting with her. He puts me in charge. He should have known better than to do a thing like that.
I’m typing out partial payments of a hundred dollars each for anyone who wants them. They’re going to give these guys three hundred dollars each, severance pay later, as well as back pay. They’d come up to me and give me their name, their service number and so forth so they can get the hundred dollars the army owes them. I’d type out what they tell me on a form, in triplicate. One I give them. This they’re supposed to take to the paymaster for the money. One is supposed to be signed by Lieutenant Trout and put in our files. The third is to be put in their service records so it can be deducted from their money when they’re discharged. I didn’t! I’ll never know how many partial payments I gave away, but I worked at that job while they worked on me for five months. I’d type the forms out, give them the one to get their money, sign the one that Lieutenant Trout was supposed to sign and ‘round file’ it, along with the one that’s supposed to go in their service record.
For years, I expect the government to figure this scam out and come after me. After all, I’ve probably given away about fifteen thousand dollars. As far as they’re concerned, it’s completely disappeared. Compared to the way the military is spending money it’s nothing, and who deserves it more? For about two years, I’m waiting for them to come, but they don’t.
That one I can live with. This particular bit of villainy I might even still do today, given the chance or the nerve. As I say, at that time I didn’t have much respect for virtually anyone. I was sort of an incipient psychopath, or at least, a misanthrope.
So this is the end of the tales I didn’t tell, as I can remember them now, sixty years later. Some of them are humorous, many tragic, but in all of them I appear in a light I didn’t want my children to see.
I’m not going to say I was the world’s worst soldier. There were times when I performed reasonably well, considering what we were doing, killing people we didn’t even know. When one is doing something as crazy and destructive as running a war, it’s hard to behave well.
As long as you don’t disgrace yourself too much and don’t hurt anybody wilfully, it’s more or less accepted in this life. But in a war, there’s no way out.
Most of us, in one way or another, do both those things. One learns to live with it and do what one can to see it doesn’t happen any more than necessary.
I never put notches in guns or anything like that. Some did. Other people had different kinds of wars than I did. I’ve met several guys who were in the infantry, in combat, and they say they never really saw anybody to shoot at. I can believe that. They probably gave cover fire, but never actually saw the enemy, or shot at him, on purpose, to kill him.
They were lucky. I can think of at least twenty times when that’s exactly the situation I was in and there was no way out. As far as I know I’ve never had anyone shoot directly at me, look me in the eyes and shoot. If they did, I didn’t know it, didn’t get IT!
Bullets went sailing over my head or went someplace else. My trouble was shrapnel, I never really learned how to duck it, if that’s possible.
I think in life, as I know it now, it’s about the way it is. There aren’t many people shooting to kill me or hurt me on purpose. They might kill me in an automobile, or by bad medical practice, but that’s normal in our hectic lives.
However, the general shrapnel of the human condition has hurt me quite enough, more often and seriously than I’d prefer.
The shrapnel in most people’s lives starts early, a rejection by a parent or loved one such as a good friend, not getting on the baseball team, not being chosen. The usual failures in the courtship rituals and trials, it goes on and on and sometimes if we’re not careful we can become disabled, unhappy, distressed or depressed by the small wounds we suffer, often without anyone meaning to hurt us. So perhaps I should just call this book, SHRAPNEL!
I hope my kids enjoy these tales and won’t lose too much respect for me. That would be like a land mine.
GLOSSARY
AGCT – Army General Classification Test
furlough – temporary unpaid
I&R – Intelligence leave and Reconnaissance
KP – kitchen police
MOS – Military Occupation Speciality
MPs – Military Police corps
non-com – non-commissioned officer
OD – olive drab, standard fighting uniform colour
PFCs – private first class
PX – post exchange
S2 – security
section 8 – discharge for being mentally unfit
SNAFU – situation normal: all fucked up
SP – Medical Specialist Corps
By the same author
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Dad
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Scumbler
Pride
Tidings
F
ranky Furbo
Last Lovers
Ever After
Houseboat on the Seine
Copyright
The Friday Project
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First published in Great Britain by The Friday Project in 2012
SHRAPNEL. Copyright © William Wharton 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
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EPub Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007458196
Version 1
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