Authors: Jerry Stiller
“You’re sixteen.”
“It’s a trick,” my father told me. “Once they get you in, they can do what they want with you.”
I had never seen him so upset. “I’m seventeen,” I said again. “They can’t send me over.” I could not comprehend the possibility that I’d ever get killed. I could only think of the free education I would receive at Harvard or Yale. I could see ivy-covered walls. I really wanted to get out of the Lower East Side, away from the fights between the two of them—yet here they were, fighting over me, begging me to stay out of the army.
“Tell him,” my mother pleaded. “Tell him not to join.”
“I could get a college education,” I said, “and you won’t have to pay.”
“They could call you up and ship you out tomorrow,” my father repeated. “They just cut basic training from twenty-six weeks to thirteen weeks. It can go down further.” He was right. “And they can change the law to take you in the regular army. Don’t join,” he said.
“I need your signature,” I said. I loved this moment. It made me feel brave. “I can go to Yale, Cornell, Harvard, all the places that have Army Specialized Training Reserve Program (ASTRP) programs. Clemson. Georgia Tech.” Just hearing the names of these schools was a dream come true.
“I’ll
send you to college,” my father said. I had never heard him say that before.
“How can you? It costs money.”
“I work, I’ll pay for it,” he said. It was like a cannon exploding in my heart. I knew my mother and father really loved me.
“You can’t, it’s too much money,” I said. The thought of going to a college in New York City, which was free, was out of the question. I really wanted to run as far away from them as possible. We argued the entire night. By morning I finally got them to sign.
I received my orders to report to City College of New York (CCNY), 137th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. I was less than an hour from home on the IRT subway. The army lied. My dream of going to Yale had not materialized. However, CCNY was at the top of the country scholastically.
On June 6,1944, two days short of my seventeenth birthday, I was readying myself for battle with integral and differential calculus, chemistry, and a course in Japanese for an inevitable landing at Tokyo Bay.
Then on August 6, 1945, we dropped the bomb—the landing in Tokyo Bay was not to be. I was ordered to report to basic training at Fort Knox, and was looking forward to a chance at qualifying for Officers’ Candidate School. Everything was going well until an episode during the third week of training. I had just been chosen the best soldier in my company. I performed the manual of arms and recited the articles of war, which I had memorized. My reward for being chosen best soldier was to be a three-day pass.
But first I was made an honor guard and given an MP armband and a .45 automatic, which I had not yet learned how to fire. I was then introduced to a sergeant wearing lots of ribbons who was to be discharged the following day. Together we were to circle Fort Knox in a jeep, for twenty-four hours, in four-hour shifts.
We started our tour. The sergeant asked me if I would mind driving; he’d take over later. I agreed, and we circled the perimeter of Fort Knox. Our MP presence was a deterrent to GI speeders.
As I drove, we chatted. The sergeant related how he’d been wounded in North Africa. Upon leaving the hospital he was sent back into action in Sicily, and was again hit. He was getting a medical discharge the next day, and was aching to get out. I told him my story.
The sergeant said he was twenty-seven, an infantry rifleman promoted to sergeant on the battlefield. “They wanted to make me an officer, but I didn’t want it.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“It would’ve been a battlefield promotion. You know what that is, don’t you? They give you the bar. Right on the spot you’re a second lieutenant. Two minutes later you’re out in front, and you’re dead.
“By the way,” he added, “would you mind if we dropped over to the package store in Elizabethtown? I want to pick up something. My company’s throwing me a farewell party tomorrow night.”
I knew this excursion was off limits, but sitting next to a battlefield veteran with a slew of medals, including a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and more, led me to believe nothing would happen to us.
“Just sit here,” the sergeant said as he pulled up at the package store. “You’d better take off the MP band and get rid of the .45.”
I obeyed, stowing everything in the rear compartment of the jeep. I got back in the jeep. It was one of those blistering hot days when the rising dust particles reflect and the sun creates a Hollywood sunset.
I waited in the jeep just as a civilian car drove up and an elderly major got out and also entered the store. He gave me an odd kind of glance. A woman, no doubt the major’s wife, remained in the car. The sergeant emerged carrying a brown paper bag. He handed it to me and asked me to stick it in the back compartment as he jumped behind the wheel. The major, carrying a purchase himself, bounced out the door of the package store.
“Let’s go,” the sergeant said, the wheels screeching as he put the pedal to the metal.
“Do you think he’ll follow us?” I asked.
It was now dusk, and through the dust I could see headlights. The vehicle behind us speeded up. It was the major’s car. The sergeant slowed down. “We’ll see what he wants.” He seemed unperturbed.
The car pulled alongside, forcing us off the road. The major got out and advanced toward the jeep.
“Dismount,” he ordered. The sergeant and I obeyed, then saluted. We were silhouetted against a moon that was just beginning to rise on one horizon as the sun was disappearing on the other. The major looked directly at me and said, “What were you doing in that liquor store, soldier?”
I didn’t answer.
He repeated, “What were you doing in that liquor store, soldier?”
“I was not in that store, sir,” I answered.
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“No, sir.”
“Is there any liquor in that vehicle?” he asked.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Why don’t you open the hatch.”
I walked hesitantly to the back of the jeep.
“Open it,” he ordered. I did.
“Take out what’s in there.”
I reached in and pulled out the MP band.
“Why aren’t you wearing it?”
“I thought I’d take it off,” I said.
“What else is back there?”
Once again I reached in and lifted out the .45 automatic.
“What’s it doing back there?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Is there any liquor in this jeep?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Why don’t you look.”
I removed the brown paper bag.
“What’s in the bag?”
“I don’t know.”
I stopped calling him sir. Was he trying to get me to pin it on the sergeant? Why wasn’t he questioning him? Why didn’t the sergeant own up? Nevertheless, Lower East Side ethics were in force: Never squeal.
“Take it out of the bag,” the major said.
I removed a bottle of bourbon from the bag.
“What are you holding in your hand?”
“I don’t know, sir.” I was calling him sir again, hoping he’d let up.
“Hold it up,” he ordered.
I lifted the bottle above my head.
“What’s in that bottle?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
His wife had got out of the car. I was on trial on a dirt road in Kentucky. Do I tell the truth? Blame the sergeant? This major can’t be serious.
Grabbing the bottle from my hand, he waved it above his head, and using the rising full moon to illuminate the evidence, he shouted, “What do I have in my hand?”
“I don’t know, sir,” I said quietly.
“You’re under arrest. Mount.” The sergeant and I got back in the jeep.
“Take me to your company commander.”
We drove back. I drove, the sergeant sitting next to me, tight-lipped. When we arrived at company headquarters, the major told me to remain in the jeep while he and the sergeant entered the office. I could overhear him telling the lieutenant that I’d been purchasing liquor. The three of
them emerged from the office. The major again asked me if I’d bought the liquor.
I said again, “I was not in that store, sir.”
He said, “Are you calling me a liar?”
The sergeant, standing right next to me, never said a word.
The lieutenant said, “You’re under arrest. Don’t leave the barracks.”
I was relieved of all duties and left wondering what would come next. Two days later I was called in by the lieutenant, who informed me that the sergeant had admitted his guilt. He’d been afraid of losing his honorable discharge if he admitted anything. He could have been court-martialed and might have lost his GI benefits.
“What made him tell you the truth?” I asked.
“He just felt sorry for you when you wouldn’t turn on him. We’re going to drop the whole thing and make out it never happened.”
“What about Officers’ Candidate School?” I asked. “Do I have a shot?”
He looked at me and said, “This incident is not going to go on your record, but OCS is not going to happen. By the way, I’m still giving you a three-day pass.”
Was somebody trying to make up for something? I wondered whether he was trying to compensate for having arrested me. I hitched a ride on a C-47 army transport plane at Godman Field, Kentucky. I wanted to get back to New York and away from Fort Knox. I was starting to feel lonesome for my father and mother.
When I arrived home I wanted my parents to see me in my army uniform. I was eighteen years old, serving my country. That night we were invited to the house of my grandparents, Bobbi and Zeidi, for the Passover Seder. Both of them were bigger than life. When I was around five or six years old they would arrive on Sunday afternoons at our house on South Fifth Street in Brooklyn and advance into the kitchen with large brown bags, like the National Recovery Act, dispensing food to the starving poor. They’d speak a truncated Yiddish, a shorthand that only they seemed to understand.
There was always a smile on my grandmother’s face as she eyed me with a special glint meant only for her favorite, as it appears I was. Grandmother looked like a queen out of Genesis. Her shiny black hair
was pulled back in a bun and her eyes burned like coals when she looked straight at you.
My grandfather, a tall, smiling, bashful man, would remove reddish frankfurters from the bag. They were strung together and wrapped in heavy waxed paper. The franks were thrown into a kettle of boiling water. Twice the size of ordinary frankfurters, they were called “specials.” Minutes later they burst. Our mouths watered. The seeded mustard, wrapped in cylindrical brown waxed paper, oozed out onto the rye bread in swirls, like toothpaste. We hungrily devoured all the franks.
My grandparents’ impromptu visits would elevate our lives on a Sunday afternoon. But they depressed my mother, who watched silently as our daily meals were eclipsed by my grandparents’ grandstand play for affection.
On Friday nights my father would take me for dinner at my grandparents’ house. The family sat at a long table with a white tablecloth.
The Friday night candles were always in the center of the table. My grandmother would put a handkerchief over her head, “Tsindt lecht,” light the candles. My grandfather struck the match and lit them, and my grandmother would wave her arms over the brass candle holder and say a prayer, more of an incantation. My grandfather would make a funny aside to take the seriousness out of everything, and all ten of their children would laugh.
First we’d sip the soup. This was chicken soup like none I’d never tasted. My grandmother cooked all day Friday in preparation. She made the noodles herself. If I arrived early I’d see her flattening the dough with a rolling pin. She would slice the dough into strips with a Lukshen knife and then drop the strips into boiling water.
At the table, she sat me closest to her. My father, the eldest, came next, then the rest of the family.
“Ehr iz zoi veir Villie,”
she told everyone in Yiddish.
“He looks like his father,” my aunts would repeat in English.
I took this to mean that because I resembled my father I was special, unlike my brother, who looked like my mother.
When the meal was finished and the evening ended, everyone took home cake. This was for the in-laws. My grandmother’s dinners went on for years.
When I was fifteen my grandmother took ill. She needed a transfusion. I arrived at Memorial Hospital, where the doctors checked my blood
and found that I was O-negative, the same type as my grandmother. I was scared but as I watched my blood filling the jar, the fear disappeared. When the family heard that I’d donated blood, cries of joy went up. “Jerry gave blood,” they said. This made me special. My grandparents had instilled a fear of doctors in my father’s family, and it had paralyzed them. Ironically, most of them lived into their late eighties and rarely went to a doctor.
Three years later, I arrived at my grandparents’ apartment in my uniform and sat at the same table with my aunts and uncles. My grandfather sat alone at the head of the table. I waited for my grandmother to appear and light the Sabbath candles. When she didn’t, I asked where Bobbi was. There was silence, and I knew.
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” I asked. I could have seen her before she died.
At the time it upset me. Today I think of it as my grandparents’ way of protecting their grandchildren from pain.
When I returned to Fort Knox, I was assigned to an eight-week course in radio at the Armored School. That’s where I met Joe DiSpigno.
Joe and I were the only New Yorkers in our company at the school. We were both 5-foot-6, weighed about 150 pounds, and when standing next to each other looked like twin fire hydrants.
On the first day of class the T/4 instructor explained the international Morse code: “Dit-da is A, da-dit-dit is B, da-da-dit is C …”
Joe was in the row in front of me and turned around, rolling his eyes back in his head as if seeking help. His eyes met mine. I seemed to be the only one who could read his thoughts. “Can we take eight weeks of this?” I knew he was thinking.
When the class was over, he said, “I’m Joe DiSpigno. I’m from Astoria. You’re from New York too?”