Thank you. World War II is the most significant event of the 20th century. It had an enormous effect on all of our lives, particularly on the lives of those of us who served at that time in the armed forces. This is the way I felt at the end of World War II -- a poem called "Dog Tags."
I found myself on a table, naked. While they stitched me up, some orderly stole my grandfather's watch and all my cash. While I was dog sick with ether, some doc gave me the Purple Heart. So I crawled out of combat with only a battered body, an empty wallet, dog tags, a medal. When I got home, they gave me a new uniform and a nice ward. Every six months they let me sell my blood. After I got out of the army, I gave my Purple Heart to my grandmother.
I first published on the war in 1968, and what I have done in my book, On the Road to Innsbruck and Back, is to chronicle my full experience from my enlistment in the army in October, 1942, to my discharge from an army home in March, 1946.
I was a member of a regimental intelligence reconnais- -- reconnaissance platoon in Europe and I write from the perspective of a private, an ordinary dogface. My memoir is one of the very few written by an enlisted man about infantry combat and it is the only war memoir written as a series of short stories, 16 in all, each with its title, its subject, its theme. Think of me as being a witness. But I was also a member of another unrecognized, unheralded group.
According to figures given by the historian, Steven Ambrose, there were 190,000 of us. As late as March, 1944, we were attending colleges and universities throughout the United States as members of the Army Specialist Training Program and as members of the Air Force Cadet Program. And then the people in high places decided that with the advent of the invasion of Europe, they wouldn't need translators or engineers or airplane pilots that the colleges and universities (spend) themselves. The brass needed cannon fodder.
And so all 190,000 of us went to, or back to, the ground forces and got ready to go to Europe to fight the war on the ground. We were ill-trained, but not so untrained as those 18-year-olds who would be sent to Europe as replacements. I found myself in the 103rd Division, the Arizona-New Mexico National Guard. It had all of its officers and all of its noncommissioned officers in place and when we 12,000 privates arrived, the 103rd became a certified infantry division.
It was a little discouraging to discover that your only possible future would be that of an infantry private. Paul Fussell, the noted war historian, was a 20-year-old lieutenant in my division -- just a rich kid. In his autobiography, he asserts that all of the enlisted men in the 103rd Division -- he means all the privates -- were pissed-off soldiers, and so that Steven Ambrose, who was never even in the peacetime army, spent his time on citizen soldiers, uncontent to speak for 190,000 pissed-off student soldiers.
About three months ago, after I had read one of my stories to a church group, an old man who had been in the Army Specialist Training Program came up to me and said the United States is the only country in the civilized world to send its best and its brightest young men to serve in the front line. I don't know about the best and the brightest, but as the self-appointed spokesman for about 15 ground force divisions, I want to assure you that we were not happy campers.
Under any conditions, life in the in- -- infantry is no walk in the park. Being in the infantry is no way to make a living. Life there is liable to be short, brutal, and deadly. There is nothing glamorous or glorious about infantrymen. I didn't have a bath for six months. And so I was not political or patriotic. The 1930s had convinced me that the war would solve nothing; still, it had to be fought and won. And then, why me? The truth is that I was afraid the war would never end; that I'd never get out of it alive.
It may come as a surprise to you that except for invasions, only one United States soldier out of 10 was ever even in any great danger at the time, but then I should allow that to the foot soldier, someone in the artillery leads a life of comfort and ease. The real truth is that I very much resented being a guy whose best friend was his rifle.
Basic training, which I took four times, has only limited value, for nothing can prepare you for combat. You think you know what to expect, but the reality hits you like a 2-ton truck. Suddenly everything is too much -- too noisy, too deadly, too chaotic -- and if you manage to adjust to this new world of no rules and dangerous consequences, you were up against a world like that of the Old West.
In such stories as Brett Hart's "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flats," the best man is an amoral gambler, the best woman is a harlot, the best shot is that coot with one eye. In combat, the football player turns out to be a coward, the sissy volunteers for night patrol, the best soldier is someone you previously ignored, now he's your buddy. In my platoon, even the name of the best soldier, George Jones, was as unremarkable as Billy the Kid. The worst thief in the regiment is revealed to be a major, a medical doctor.
Like the Old West, the infantry has its value as a testing ground, as a place where the truth is made plain. The story I'm going to read is called "The Hero Syndrome," first published in 1975 and modeled after George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant." If you're not familiar with Orwell's essay story, you probably think it's about an African safari or the exploits of a great white hunter. It's not. At the age of 22, the same age I was at the time of my story, Orwell was a policeman in lower Burma. One day, Orwell was ordered to search out and find a male elephant that had run amok, had overturned a cart and had killed a coolie.
When Orwell finally caught up to the elephant, it was no longer sex-crazed, just standing in a rice paddy feeding itself clumps of grass with its trunk. The elephant looked as tame as your grandmother. But, then, all of the natives had eagerly gathered to watch the policeman shoot the elephant. They wanted some excitement as well as some elephant meat to gorge on. Orwell found himself at the whim of a bunch of chattering natives and, although he knew he shouldn't, he felt compelled to shoot the elephant, but the elephant did not fall down and Orwell had to keep shooting. And after the elephant finally fell, he refused to die and he had to keep shooting. And suddenly Orwell felt the folly of the entire enterprise and all at once he realized that the white man in the tropics acts as he does in order not to look like a fool.
My story is a critique of heroism and war. It begins with a reference to the time of the Vietnam war. The football references are in part related to the football game in the Korean war movie "Mash," which came out in 1974. My story, too, had its moment of insight, its epiphany.
"The Hero Syndrome."
Many years ago, I read that George Hallas -- "Old Papa Bear," as the newspapers called him -- decided after seeing the movie "Patton," that George Patton would have been a great football coach. Old George Hallas was even tempted by the movie, so he said, to come out of retirement -- "hibernation" was the word he used -- and coach the Chicago Bears again. Imagine that.
When the movie was first released and before George C. Scott was brave enough to turn down an Oscar for the starring role, my long-haired daughter and I went to see "Patton." As the action developed, my general, though unexpressed -- unexpressed feeling was that although the facts were largely true or were based on truth, the movie was only calculated pop art, a display of merely specious good. History had been translated into a vulgar myth for fun and profit.
If anything, I was bored. When the lights went up, we rose and my daughter turned to me and said that if she were a boy, she wouldn't go to war, to any war. Patton was a psychopath; Bradley and Eisenhower were children. Oh, well, yes, I told her that I could see what she meant. The movie did seem to be a bit antiwar.
In the lobby, I turned at something a woman behind me said and the man with her, who I recognized as a campus cop in civilian clothes, declared with bitterness that there were real men in those days. They weren't lily-livered like these hairy kids today.
Although I never met or even saw Patton in person, I served, as they say, in the second World War and I did have a little experience with someone comparable to that general. In fact, I once was a driver for the new commander of the 103rd Division, General Anthony McAuliffe, the commander who said "nuts" to the besieging Germans at Bastogne during the Bulge.
In the early spring of 1945, we went for a ride in my Jeep into Ludwigshafen and we reached the Rhine. Commonplace and slight as that may seem, I didn't, and don't, find it so. I keep remembering. I sometimes think of how I could have behaved in the beginning. I think of what I could have done or should have done. It occurs to me now that before we ever started, I could have told the general that I was a lousy Jeep driver, the kind you wouldn't be caught dead with, or I could have made some casual comment of how unlucky I've always been in vehicles or "I've got them jinx," I could have bluntly said.
I might have told him that when I was 18, I was just driving along in my father's car and the front wheel fell off or maybe I should have simply confessed to the general how I got to be a Jeep driver in the first place. I got overseas with the M.O. -- whatever those letters are -- of a scout, but I didn't discover until we got into combat what a scout may have to do. He can be turned into a sniper. He can be told to impede the movements of the enemy. He can be counted on to be extraordinarily brave.
Well, I soon understood that and as soon as one of our Jeep drivers hit a mine, I volunteered to take his place. "Let me drive," I said, "I can drive." It had nothing to do with my being qualified to drive or being good at it. As I say, I was lousy and again I probably should have told the general that. My grandmother would have said that that's the Christian thing to do. I should say that I can't think about my army experience without many second thoughts and several regrets and, strange as it may sound, these include wanting to be successful. I even used to dream of being a lieutenant or a captain, but nothing worked out. I took basic training four times. It took me 28 months to make PFC. Then, finally, I was shot four times, first by a sniper and a few seconds later by a machine gunner, on May the 3rd, 1945, when the war in Europe was really over. Anybody can tell you how unlucky or stupid getting shot then was, but I don't want to sound neurotic.
And anyone who has ever been in infantry in any war can tell you of great inefficiency, of unbelievable stupidity, of shocking brutality. I don't want to dwell on that, though I should say that I am still incapable of liking officers of any kind. I hate Boy Scout leaders.
It was a dismal, dull day toward the end of March with dark, hanging clouds around us. We had occupied the village of Neustadt and the German civilians were huddling in damp cellars. The main roads of the village was clogged with soldiers and there was an occasional vehicle churning through the mud and the world, for a change, was almost silent with just the ticking of small arms fire somewhere in the distance. We finally wiggled through the Siegfried line and you would have thought we were rear echelon troops. I was standing slackly alongside the road by the fences down, probably smoking and perhaps calculating my chances of getting pneumonia or picking up yellow jaundice. Since I felt secure, I may -- may even have had a cigarette dangling from the corner of my mouth as I let myself fancy that I was Errol Flynn or some hotshot pilot.
If I was bothered by anything, it was the nagging awareness of the dead GI whose body I'd had to run over with my Jeep in order to get through the Siegfried line. So the day was like some Sunday in late fall at home, a perfect day for a fire in the fireplace, and then this sergeant came up and told me that he had a job for me and that I should get my Jeep.
Before I knew it, I was behind the wheel and the general was alongside me, really there, a living presence -- that famous man, a hero. I'm not quite sure how I felt. Though I could see those two stars on his collar, I don't think I was impressed. I think I just thought I was being taken advantage of, being put upon. One moment I had it made; the next moment I was about to have to do something dangerous. Why couldn't they pick on someone else? Why did I have to drive? I should have stayed out of sight. I was unlucky.
The way I felt then is now mixed up in my mind with the way I know I felt several months later when Betty Grable and other celebrity -- celebrities came to the hospital ward in which I was recuperating, a major leading them through. I remember watching the little elite troop stopping at each enlisted man's bed, clustering around it with side-show concern before passing on. The major had me take off my pajama top so that the celebrities could see my battle scars. I felt like cursing. I suppose I blushed. The general had on a greenish snug jacket with an imitation fur collar. His pants were new and sharply creased and they bloomed professionally over his polished jump boots and a 45 in a holster at his side like a gunslinger. I think he carried a hand grenade or two about his person. I imagine he was dressed according to the movie notion of what a paratrooper ought to look like.
The general was about 42 at the time, I'd guess, and he had this clean-shaven Irish face and he seemed tough and confident. I can believe that the general may have been living up to some ideal swaggering image of himself as a youthful MacArthur or a younger Patton. If you've ever seen a picture of the general, you can see how well-built and solid he was then, but he also reminded me of what, in football, journalists choose to call a watch-charm guard. The guy who had jumped into the back seat of my Jeep was also for the paratroopers and was dressed in the same fashion, though his jacket didn't have a fur collar. He was tall, young, athletic, a captain, and also very self-assured and eager, the tailback type. I mean he was from West Point. He was going places.
Whenever I remember these two officers, I always think about a third officer, the best line officer I've ever known -- Captain Joseph Bell from Kansas, tough and confident Joe Bell. For me, he was a kind of reference figure in much the way that old football specialists judged every running back in terms of "Johnny Blood." Captain Bell was my company commander in the states for a time. Before we shipped out from Texas, he got drunk one night and had -- had all of his enlisted men turn out of their barracks into the company street at 3 o'clock one Sunday morning and had the company barber clip everybody's head; his too. You stood in line and when your turn came, you went into the mess hall, sat on a table and had your head clipped.
Overseas, Captain Bell once moved into a town after it was cleaned up and threw our platoon out of the house we had liberated because he said his men deserved it more. Another time, he and his company came upon a deserted house one night and occupied it, but when he couldn't fit the last few men into the place, he deserted the house. He and his men went outside and slept on the cold ground, leaving the house sitting there, sheltering no one, empty. They all suffered alike. If you were a private coming through a replacement depot at the time, you would get the word that if you got into Captain Bell's company, you would find yourself under a great officer, for no one could ask for a better leader and that's true. Captain Bell led every assault as any decent line officer should. He led his troops, rather than staying behind and letting someone else lead them. And Captain Bell was such a superb line officer that the staff officers wisely gave K Company many opportunities to lead assaults. So if you came to our division as a replacement, the chances were excellent that you would find room in K Company where you would get your great leader and that you, in turn, would end up on the ground and in it.
"Let's go to Ludwigshafen," the general matter of factly said, as today your old man might ask you to take in a movie so long as it wasn't X-rated. I remember wanting to say, "Why don't you go? I don't want to go. Drive yourself. Hire an airplane. Walk." I didn't say anything. What can you do? So big deal.
Off we started to Ludwigshafen, just the three of us, our new commanding officer and his aide at the mercy of a lousy driver. I mean, there was this war on and we could half believe that we were important. In a little while, I managed to say to the general, "I don't think they've cleared that town yet, at least they hadn't yesterday. "What's your name, Private?" "Bache," I said, and then being helpful, "It rhymes with H." "How do you spell it?" I told him. "Okay, Bach, let's go." I felt like telling him that it's a famous name.
Our original general had been sent to the states with a liver ailment or something and General McAuliffe has been rewarded for his marvelous performance at Bastogne by being given our division. He was like some new executive out to see what he had been given. Perhaps the reason he wanted to go for that ride was to do a kind of spot-check on his troops. Maybe he just wanted us to know he was around, but I could believe that he was just preoccupied with the Rhime -- Rhine for that was what he knew he had to get across.
Our first general would travel around overseas in his own personal Jeep with about three Jeeps in front and three behind, a regular convoy with machine guns, fore and aft, like a battleship, the panoply of rank. But not our new general. All in all, we had two 45s, maybe four hand grenades and one rusty M1 and there we were out to check the traps. You'd think we were out for a Sunday drive or something.
At first, there was some traffic and I was kept busy negotiating that. After a while, the traffic thinned out, almost stopped and then did stop. The countryside opened up. The road improved and I now concentrated on keeping a steady pace of 30 miles per hour and I'm trying not to think about the trip. There were some 155 _________ emplacements complete with camouflage nets on the side of the road now and the sound of rifle fire ahead, above the drone of the Jeeps, seemed brisk and almost near and the smell of Cordite hovered in the heavy air and we could see we were nearing this battered city. The day had become the kind of day in which you could easily believe that something bad would happen.
The general and his aide kept making little observations back and forth. Every once in a while, the general would have the captain take a note. "Maybe you better slow down," the general said to me. I took my foot off the gas. A German machine gun (rattled) far in front of us. "Well, this is Ludwigshafen," I said, as we went past the first outlying buildings. I don't know what they had expected. We had arrived. We went on for what seemed like a long time. We crept through that rigid mass of brick and stone, that ominous, bleak city, that eerie, empty-seeming place. I found myself hunched over the steering wheel, holding my breath. A stray squad of American soldiers strung out in combat formation, their backs to us, were cautiously going up a deserted street. I drove around a pile of disordered bricks in the road. Each street was littered with strange debris. An M1 and a helmet had been discarded on the sidewalk. A wall was spattered with what looked like dry blood. Life seemed absent, but I knew something was going on behind thick walls or in cellars.
"Try to go a little faster, Bach." The Jeep jerked ahead. "Turn here." At such a time it is much easier to walk through a desolate, dangerous place than it is to ride through it. The buildings loom around you and you feel the fear of what you cannot see. You may have the sense of being just part of the vehicle. You think how nice it would -- it would be to be hidden and just the fact of walking can bring a kind of small comfort. Physical movement mutes the hot flashes of panic. The mechanics of movement, dull thought, settle you down. And soon you get to feel trapped in a single open vehicle, vulnerable and superfluous.
I thought then that going into Ludwigshafen was just the general's whim. I felt then that if the general was trying to prove something, he didn't have to convince me. As we come to an intersection, I glance to the left and to the right of the canyon, the yawning streets, not knowing what to expect or when. Every moment was filled with this fear. He told me to turn again and I did and then we approached and went by a couple of dirty GIs, their bodies flattened against the building.
"You'll be sorry," one of them sang to us as we cavaliered by. You might have expected the general to order me to stop and then for him to give those GIs hell. I think I expected him to show us who our leader was. They'd be the ones who'd end up being sorry. A brisk firefight erupted perhaps a block away. The air was filled with the dust of stone now and I felt the way you do if you've been speeding your -- in your old man's car and you hear the wailing siren of a cop behind you and then you suddenly remember that your license is expired. I kept telling myself the first shot that came anywhere close, I was going to bail out, to vacate. I couldn't decide whether it would be better to get behind or beneath the Jeep or to make a mad dash for some thoroughway. That decision seemed very important at the time.
My mind was absolutely clear and racing. A bullet buzzed and twanged up something stone. It probably wasn't as close as it seemed, but I almost deserted the Jeep anyway. My hands was gripping the steering wheel as if I were afraid it would fall off. Strangely, I didn't either slow down or speed up the Jeep at all. It occurred to me that there were -- there's probably some lousy sniper up ahead and that he was at that heart-stopping moment lining up his rifle on the general, but he was probably such a lousy shot that he'd end up hitting me. I hoped that the Germans were better at picking snipers than we were. Then it occurred to me that any decent sniper would be aiming at me, the driver. I knew that they always aimed at your head. We had recently lost 31 men killed by snipers, most of them shot through the head.
"Let's go home," I muttered, dodging with my wheel some rubble on the road. "I mean, there's nothing to see." I felt like just refusing to go on, but, of course, you always go on. It has nothing to do with being brave. It's just simpler to go on. The general casually turned to the captain. "It's not too torn up, is it?" "No, sir." "The Rhine can't be far ahead." "No." It's just a river, I thought. The general acted as if it was something special, the kind of thing you went out of your way to see.
I felt the kind of doped resignation you get as you're being wheeled into the operating room. I'm aware of how your feelings can be affected by some slight thing. Really, I believe that if I had known for certain that there was some real purpose behind taking that trip, I wouldn't have felt about it as I did for a long time afterwards. I wouldn't have liked it any better than I did, but I would have understood. We got to the Rhine and stopped and gazed at the little flashes of light from the guns at Mannheim. The trivial sounds of war carried across the neutral gray water. We had come to the city for this.
There at the Rhine, I felt the way you do when your football team loses the game in the last few seconds. There at the Rhine, I felt drained and no longer afraid. There at the Rhine, I felt that I couldn't bear to look at the general as if he were some friend who had said or done some embarrassing thing. With almost unconcern, I listened to the dismal, far boom of fieldpieces, the thin cracking of rifles, and then we retired from the naked shore.
What was the use? We never even got out of the Jeep. Nothing happened. There was nothing to see. As I reached the outer edge of Ludwigshafen with my passengers, night beginning to fall, I felt a shudder of relief the way you feel when, as a kid, you come coldly out of a "House of Horrors" at the carnival. You feel like giggling as if you are aware that the experience has been fake, but that, still, you're glad it's over.
Then in the fresh, open country as I raced the night to Neustadt, I could tell that, like kids, the officers were pleased with themselves. And I felt the same kind of sudden disenchantment I felt in 1943, when a private hitchhiking through Ohio, I was led through Clark Gable's old home.
I'd been picked up by an old man in an outmoded Ford on his way to Cadiz. When we reached that town, the old man insisted on taking me through the now vacant site of the clabbered duplex where Clark Gable had been born. The old man was very proud of that narrow, yellow place; the rooms, high ceiling and cold, box-like, ugly. It was hard to believe that anyone could ever have lived there. The old man was proud of that empty, shabby place, showing it off to a stranger like some special prize accompanying the pleasure of some famous, dim association. As I left that old man in Cadiz, he told me with voluble pride that Clark hadn't been back for 20 years, but that they were sure he thought of them often. He'd be back when the war was over.
In 1945, on the way home from the Rhine trip, with the general chatting with his aide about how well the war was going, I was struck with the same truth about human beings -- their small, sad vanities. It was as if the football game was over and your team has lost and you know how bad you feel and you also clearly know that what you're feeling bad about is only a game. But more than that, if you are a new commander, you act the way you think a new commander ought to act. Only when at ease do you reveal the old person.
But still more than that, you are new only briefly. It is a commonplace that something happens to men after they get great authority; they lose themselves in their roles and turn into something they weren't. In a war, they become captains or generals for they cannot remain simply themselves. They become the role they play. Moreover, an old public figure like the General McAuliffe of today is a stage beyond a man who has great authority, for he has had great authority, much clout; and, strangely, as fame rests finally on a single memorable act in a less significant past, a public man like the old general is what we are told he once for a fleeting moment was -- vaguely idealized, and thus dehumanized -- is for most of us frozen in -- in our minds in a famous gesture about which we have only read.
My slight experience with him on our trip has kept the general from becoming for me what he had become for others. I don't think of him the way the world does. In part, this is so because, like it or not, he depended upon me and, in part, this is so because his fame was new both to him and to me at the time. His fame was then like his uniform -- unexpectedly neat and somewhat derivative.
Strangely, the public fame of the general cannot obscure what I sensed is the true person. I have not intended to defame him.
When we got back to Neustadt, the general and his aide got out of the Jeep and then the general turned to me and said that if he was ever in our sector again and needed a driver, "Bach," he'd ask for me. I mumbled my thanks. I've never seen the general in person since and if General McAuliffe remembers me -- remembers me at all, I suppose I am, in his mind, only some vague GI, just a lousy driver who once took him for some insignificant ride to see some unimportant river.
Fear. By fear I don't mean the way I felt as a kid on Sunday mornings when the preacher said, "You are galloping toward hell." I don't mean the trembling sleeplessness at night when I had diphtheria or scarlet fever. I don't mean my sudden panic when I hit the baseball that crashed through Mrs. Gidder's (ph) window or when I was caught putting slugs in the cigarette machine or when I totalled my old man's car. And I don't have in mind bullies who couldn't be avoided or how I behaved when the retarded Benny went ballistics. And I'm not even thinking about the way I felt in the dentist's waiting room or when that girl unexpectedly said "Yes."
What I mean by fear, real fear, is what happened, not to me, but to Stanley Anderson when he and I and a 50 caliber machine gun shared a foxhole in basic training in 1943. While busily firing that clattering gun, I suddenly realized that Stanley was not participating in the proceedings. He was hunched over, shaking uncontrollably, round-eyed, his mouth open, drooling. Now, that's what I call fear and we weren't even in combat.
Don't believe what they tell you about it. Nothing can prepare you for combat. It is always upsetting, a visceral shock. When I encountered it at dawn as the final soldier of my regiment going forward, in charge of making sure no one in front of me turned back, I was as jumpy as a cat, as nervous as a virgin on the verge. All I knew was that I was on my way to the noisy front. I would have been happier if I could have been with the other guys in my platoon. We could have exchanged glances and asked the sergeant what was up.
Later that morning when a mortar shell suddenly landed yards away, I plunged into a ditch, a lump in my throat, panting, my heart pounding, my ears ringing. Soon I was mumbling to myself, trying to calm myself down, waiting for the next shell. I closed my eyes. I suddenly realized that my hands were sweating and that I was clutching my rifle hard, as if I were afraid I'd lose it.
When I finally managed to get out of the ditch, my knees were shaking, but I wouldn't call my first day in combat a fearful occasion. I was just anxious, getting acclimated to the notion that this wasn't a drill. You were someone's enemy and he didn't want you to forget it. Here's his calling card.
A couple of weeks later, as my friend, Martin, and I were in his Jeep delivering maps to various company commanders, we came upon a pleasant clearing on this mountain road and -- bam! -- an artillery shell landed right where our Jeep had just been. When we were again safely in the woods, we looked at each other and shivered, "God, that's what I call a close call." In combat, it's called a normal event. It's scariest when the close call comes in the form of being strafed. You're just going along in a formation, almost carefree, and out of nowhere comes this enemy airplane, spewing bullets, kicking up dirt, and then it's gone. If you're walking, your only option is to dive into the nearest ditch beside the road. Being strafed more than once is certain to give you the (bendoz). Being pinned down by small arms fire quickly translates into protracted nervousness. It often follows a close call and your first reaction is to be ecstatic you weren't hit. Once you're in a ditch or a foxhole or behind a rock or in a -- or a Jeep or in a building, you can just wait there and hope that something worse isn't in your immediate future.
Your best hope is that you won't have to come out and fight. Still, even if nothing happens, it's not the sort of thing you can smile at.
The exact opposite of being pinned down is going out on a night patrol. You're out there in no-man's-land in a small group of anxious enlisted man. An officer is just the guy who sends you out and waits for you to return and report and usually you've been charged with taking a random and unlikely prisoner, who all the officers hope will spill the beans. Unlike being pinned down, you're out there in the almost silent dark, feeling naked and vulnerable. You're probably wearing a woolen stocking cap instead of a helmet and your face has black stuff on it and you're carrying a knife and all you have that's good for anything is the name on your dog tag in case you're the one captured.
In retrospect, an eventless night patrol is almost a bore until some officer tells you you have to go back out there tomorrow night. In combat, your only real comfort is the thought of home and how much you've enjoyed being there.
In combat, only twice was I like my friend, Stanley Anderson. The first time began innocently enough. As the squad sergeant and I were in Martin's Jeep scouting the countryside, the sergeant came up with the clever, noncommissioned idea that he and I should investigate that house over there. "It looked empty, didn't it?" So the two of us crept ignobly toward it, with the sergeant going toward one side of the house and me toward the other. When we were sure no one was home, the sergeant motioned for Martin to bring up his Jeep. As the sergeant and I were inside the house assuring ourselves that German soldiers had indeed been there, a very loud, unexpected explosion knocked us down. God! At once the air was thick with dust and stone and heavy with the smell of cordite. Stuff that had been on the kitchen table was now all over the floor. A kitchen chair was on its side. I was sure a mortar or an artillery shell had struck the house and that the next one was on its way. The sergeant and I looked at each other with open mouths. His face was white with dust and fear. I was gasping -- gasping for air. I felt like screaming.
And then Martin was calling my name. "Oh, God," he then cried, "Help me! Help me, please!" All I wanted my old friend, Martin, to do was to shut up, but he didn't. And so for maybe 60 seconds, I was traumatized. I couldn't move. I couldn't think. And then the sergeant and I gathered ourselves together and got up and cautiously went outside. Poor old Martin was flat on his back alongside his metallic mess of a Jeep. His foot was a bloody stump; his face badly powder marked. Martin's Jeep had hit a mine.
The second time I was nearly cata- -- catatonic began like the first, in a commonplace way. I had been told to spend the night with some front-line soldiers in one of four houses on the fringe of this outstation town. The sun had sunk on this dismal day and we were supposed to wait in those houses till the morning when our troops would begin the tricky business of liberating the town. And so I was on the floor of the kitchen of this friendly house trying my best to think of nothing but sleep. Everything seemed lousy, but okay. I wasn't worried. Tomorrow would come.
About dawn, I woke to the clanking of heavy tanks outside. Without warning, a shell hit one of the houses and then all four of the occupied houses were at the mercy of the cannons of the German tanks.
Bam! Our -- our house was hit once and then again. The house shook. I was engulfed by dust and dry, stony dirt and then the heavy smell of cordite. I couldn't see and I couldn't breathe. Oh, God! Another shell struck our house a thunderous blow and things went flying through the air. Soldiers were scuffling around. Someone moaned. Someone cried. Someone cursed. I thought I was going to suffocate and I started to tremble. Please make them stop!
I found myself counting, one, two, three, four -- finally some guys darted through the hole that had miraculously appeared at what had been the back wall of the house and I frantically followed. I just scampered like a scared rabbit. I didn't care what was out there. Anything was better than this. At a time that I should have been bonkers, I incredibly wasn't. I was in a state of shock. That event, like the other two, began casually, simply.
The war in Europe was almost over and the four of us in my Jeep were told to skirt that roadblock and try to get to Innsbruck, about miles away. After traveling about 10 miles on this nice, empty highway, we came to an unexpected deep, brown crater in the road. I stopped the Jeep. The sergeant and I got out to examine the crater. We thought we could get around it and go on, but then I was shot in the shoulder and the crack of the rifle came and then hundreds of bullets were striking all around me. I'd been spun around by the bullet and knocked down, but I managed to crawl to the brush by the side of the road. My friends were already there. All four of us had been wounded. I had been shot four times.
And then the Germans came down from their positions on the hill and took us prisoner. My friends were led off, but I was just a discard. I couldn't walk. Soon it became clear to me that one of my three captors was about to commit a little murder and so I armed him a bloody pack of cigarettes and he calmly put up his rifle. After dragging me up to their machine gun emplacement, these maniacs started shooting at our approaching convoy. I thought I'd get out my Luger and kill those three soldiers, but I discovered that I'd dropped my Luger in the brush. After a shell from one of the tanks hit the tree above me and sent branches cascading down upon me, I decided that if I didn't escape, no one would ever find me.
And so I managed to get out from under that greenery. I tried to stand, but my pants started to fall and I stumbled and crawled down the steep hill to the road. I rolled into the gutter. Soon a medic was there and I was put on a stretcher. Some soldiers lifted me up and when some rifle fire came down from above, they dropped me back into the gutter and I was weakly furious at those cowards. Imagine being afraid of a little rifle fire.
All during that mess, I was completely rational. Everything made sense and it all took place in slow motion. I never felt nervous or panicky or afraid. I was calm and deliberate and detached. It was as if it was all happening to someone else. It was like being drugged. Later in the hospital, I was asked to write about my experience and when I did, they promoted me to corporal. I don't mean to indicate that what happened to me was something grand or noble, like a baptism by fire or a rebirth, but the experience changed my life. There is nothing like getting shocked to concentrate the mind and 10 months in a military hospital do not a recuperation make.
I knew there was no earthly reason that I should still be alive and so I understood that there was no longer any reason to be afraid of anything. I had been inoculated and was now safe. I didn't -- I don't mean to say that I suddenly became gloriously brave like an Audie Murphy or a General Patton. The truth is that I suffered from something like bravado. I was dangerous. I threw a glass of water in the face of a fellow patient because he stole the combat boots I had given him.
While on leave from the hospital, underweight and with an almost useless left arm, I got into a fist fight with a marine staff sergeant and broke his jaw.
While I was overseas, my best friend stole my girl. For six months after the war, I did whatever I could to pro- -- provoke a fight with my one-time friend. I insulted him and needled him to no avail. An excellent athlete, he probably would have beaten me up, but to me he was just another coward and if nothing else, I knew I could outlast him. I wouldn't give up. I wouldn't have minded being abused and battered. I was used to that. All I wanted was a chance to punch the son-of-a-bitch. Besides, he had been an ensign in the navy. What, I thought, did he know about anything?
Joseph Conrad says that all that's needed to make civilization work is for everyone to practice a little self- restraint and so I became civilized, but because I had been given a reprieve from death, I made up my mind that I wouldn't waste the rest of my life. I turned down an invitation to attend the University of Pennsylvania Law School. I didn't care about making money or about being successful. Instead I decided to get a Ph.D. and become a teacher of English, but not just any English. I wanted to concentrate on that which is best.
I've spent my undoubtedly (?pre-ish?) adult life teaching Shakespeare. I have not been an administrator, a careerist, an editor, a self-promoter. An infantryman is not concerned with nonessentials.
Since the war, everything I've done has been in homage to Shakespeare; that I've tried to clarify and explain what Shakespeare means. I first published in the Shakespeare Quarterly in 1953. I have published 33 books on Shakespeare. I have thus made every effort to be a good disciple, a good soldier.
In 1954, in his "Introduction to the Art in the Tempest," Frank Kermode said that Shakespeare's work in comedy is misunderstood to an astonishing degree. He should also have said that about Shakespeare's work in history and tragedy, that even misunderstanding of Shakespeare is far worse than it was then. Now no one gives a damn about meaning in Shakespeare. Ever since I was sent from the air force back to the infantry, I have never expected anyone to do anything for me. What I did in combat -- in combat has made no difference to anyone else. What I have done in behalf of Shakespeare has been disregarded, but I wouldn't change a thing. I'm not bitter. I'm not an ingrate. I'm not afraid. In my own mind, I'm still an enlisted man. I'm even glad I was shot.
[Conclusion of Interview]
Veterans History Project Home