Before Their Time: A Memoir (6 page)

The air that day swirled with dust and flags and the confused sound of bugles and drums clashing dissonantly. It was the first time that some of us had ever seen the general; certainly he was nowhere in sight during maneuvers. (In my experience, World War II generals did not like to be eyed by the troops; they seemed to be amazingly shy.)

Captain Antonovich, huge as a Clydesdale, marched at
a dignified step at the head of the company, moving ponderously and steadily, but he blurred the salute as we passed the reviewing stand because he suddenly began to hurry. When this happened, he gave a few embarrassed coughs and seemed to shrink a little. Behind him, old Arch hupped along on his bandy legs, helmet gleaming in the powerful sun. Lieutenant Gallagher paraded alongside the platoon in a uniform that was a size too large for him, making him look even smaller than he actually was, but he kept us laughing with his side-of-the-mouth wisecracks. We must have looked impressive—the company, the battalion, the regiment, the mighty division itself—spread out almost a full mile, end-to-end. I certainly felt impressive to myself for a moment or two, marching along in the middle of that scrubbed and obedient mob.

Afterward, when we had come to rest in front of him, glittering like heroes of Sparta, Gangplank Paul attempted to make a rousing going-away speech into a microphone that turned out to have feedback problems. Everything he said returned to echo in his face. Nor was he able to rouse us much to battle fever—it was probably too late for that—but clearly his words and the sound of his own voice coming back at him did something for his self-esteem. Maybe they helped to wipe out the memory of the Cumberland crossing, which was much on our minds that day. Maybe it helped him to believe that we were really as tough as he claimed we were. Who knows? Maybe Arch was tough, maybe Rocky and a few others were, but not us, not Bern Keaton or me and surely not our new squad member, Ira Fedderman, who stood alongside me, at parade rest, breathing hard after our march. I could smell his sweat in the heat.

Yes, we thought about the Cumberland crossing a lot that day. It had become a talisman of disaster in the Yankee Division, a bleak reminder of what could happen to any one of us in the future. The message it delivered was stern, and we read it clearly and well. I stood there alongside Fedderman in the August sun, dreamily reviewing the events in Tennessee and thinking of my pal Moose Monchick, who had drowned in the Cumberland with all the rest. Moose Monchick was the drollest person I had ever known, his face always puckered, as though he couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. Ultimately, of course, he always laughed. God knows, he made us laugh, at Benning and in Maine, with his mostly self-deprecating wit. Anyway, I was thinking about him, in an abstract way, while Gangplank Paul droned on about his ambitions for us, and I had to catch myself. I was beginning to work myself into an emotional state (easy for me), and I did not like emotional states; they gave me hives.

So the day proceeded. We grew tired. There was muttering in the ranks, a plaintive threat of rebellion that passed quickly. At the end of the ceremony, sweltering and dusty with sand, we all nevertheless felt an irresistible sense of pride in ourselves, as the Army had always intended. Even Fedderman, smiling in disbelief at my side, felt it, and at least for this moment he was exactly like everyone else, an infantryman for better or worse. Once we broke ranks, I never saw Gangplank Paul again. It was as though he disappeared from the face of our parade grounds into a no-man’s-land of his own, where he could manage the troops from a hidden headquarters, curtained off from the rest of us, like the Wizard of Oz.

That, in any case, was how it came to appear to some of us in the Yankee Division.

AT THE last moment, a few strangers showed up to fill out the platoon. Second and third squads suddenly went to full strength, a startling novelty. Two vague and somewhat reserved individuals, Ralph Natale and George Brewster, joined the first squad, giving us a roster of nine. At last, we all thought, eyeing the newcomers with a cold eye. They were neither ASTPs nor old-timers. Just two poor saps, called replacements, who had been squeezed through the tight pipeline of Army commands, from one outfit to another, ever since they had finished basic training. At last they had found a home. I don’t think I ever spoke more than ten words to either of them, or they to me, but at least the squad had put on a little needed fat; with their arrival, we weren’t scarecrow-thin anymore.

STILL, it was a kind of bliss to be nineteen then, in uniform, and packed atom-like with all my pals from the Yankee Division aboard the SS
Argentina
, a former luxury cruise liner that had been transformed into a model troopship, as we sailed in convoy for France, land that I loved.

Not that I knew much about France that amounted to anything: racy novels like Zola’s
Nana
, hoary clichés about high life and worldly appetites, a beautiful and seductive language that I had valiantly studied in high school (to no good end), ravishing music by Ravel and Debussy, some of which I could actually play on the piano, and movies that seemed, in my provincial cave in hometown Baltimore, to cut close to the bone. I was a sucker for all that; it turned me into a Francophile (an amateur, however), and developed a taste in me—remnants of which still litter my psyche—for a touch of Gallic sophistication that I could call my own. And suddenly I was on my way to claim it at its source.

Vive la France!
I said to myself as I threw up again on the first day out to sea.
Vive la gloire!

We were all equally ignorant of France and the French in the Yankee Division. And the American Army was not about to fill the gaps in our education. It was not on their agenda. So we would have to take pot luck, just as we found it, and make our own judgments and our own mistakes. We would sail across the Atlantic, unthinking and blind, in the self-absorbed way of all traveling armies through history, and learn by doing, by being there. Nevertheless, it was still a kind of bliss.…

THE SS
Argentina
sailed from her Brooklyn berth at midnight on a Saturday in August 1944. It was ten weeks after D-Day. A band was playing somewhere under a shed at the end of the dock. I could hear the brass oom-pah and all the false cheer that went with it. My teeth were grinding together from the excitement. Word soon went out that Kate Smith was singing with the band, sentimental songs like “I’ll Walk Alone,” “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain,” but none of us could hear her, if she was really there. We were too far away, way down at the other end of the dock. Besides, the embarkation noise, overall, was terrific; not much sound could rise above that. And, as we had been repeatedly warned, our sailing was supposed to be secret. I was sure all of Brooklyn could hear us.

“Who’s singing?” Fedderman shouted.

“They say Kate Smith.”

“The cornfields of kitsch!” he shouted again, leaving me blank-faced. I had never heard the word before. I had to ask him what it meant and how to spell it.

It was hours before we sailed, amid a tumult of misplaced bodies, lost gear, shouting officers, and frantic NCOs, some of whom were missing entire platoons. The decks of the
Argentina
were packed with exhausted GIs, sprawled out on their equipment, waiting to be allotted a hammock below deck. We had missed the evening meal and were chewing rations slowly to make them last; dry and gristly stuff, packed, it was claimed, with nutrients. They filled us up.

Bern stuck to my side and I to his. Fedderman, bulking large, also stayed close. (By now he had become totally dependent on Bern and me; it didn’t matter that he was our prevailing intellectual and smartest kid, we had him on our hands.) I had the feeling that if Bern and I allowed ourselves to be separated, we would lose each other forever. (I worried less about Fedderman.) And it was easy to imagine: the
Argentina
was the largest ship I had ever seen. When we boarded, climbing the gangplank under our massive loads, I could see no end to her. She seemed to be without prow or stern, to go on forever. On our slow way up, I saw Bern suddenly stop and reach out with both arms, as though he wanted to embrace the
Argentina’s
black hull. He looked as though he was blessing the ship and maybe, as a superstitious infantryman, propitiating the gods at the same time.

By morning, the ship had made its first rendezvous a few miles off Cape Cod. About a dozen other ships—all shapes, all sizes—joined us there at dawn, gently rocking in a swelling surf. Watching them brought on our first seasickness, which we all took as a joke at first, especially when Fedderman chose to throw up into the wind. But we were all a little sick for the first twenty-four hours, and it
wasn’t long before the joke lost its point. It took Ralph Natale, one of our new men, another full day before he could sleep below deck.

Later in the afternoon, a second fleet joined us, one ship at a time. They slipped into position as though they had rehearsed it. By evening I could count sixty vessels—naval, cargo, troop transport, even a couple of aircraft carriers—spread in a stupendous 360-degree sweep that extended across the horizon. Standing on deck, immobilized by the power of what I saw, I could feel the strength of the SS
Argentina
, the ship’s engines rumbling beneath my feet, the ship itself trembling with contained energy. Down below, the sea suddenly shifted. So did the position of the other ships. In the half-light of early evening, under a gauzy moon, the
Argentina
slowly rose and fell in a steady, repetitive movement.

“My God,” Bern said, at the sight. He was standing alongside me on deck.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“One sub,” Fedderman said. “That’s all it would take.” That was another way Fedderman liked to talk, as though it was his pleasure to scare us.

The next day we began to trace our zigzag route across the Atlantic. We could feel the strange, confusing motion as we changed direction, sometimes from hour to hour. Northeast by east, then northeast again, and back. By then the convoy had almost doubled in size, most of the ships traveling at the same speed, geared to the slowest. At the fringes, tough little destroyers moved at their own feisty speed, on the alert for a U-boat encounter. All was calm as we watched them.

•   •   •

EARLY that evening, I found Paul Willis standing on deck, staring out at the gray sea. From where we stood, we could hear the exhilarating whoosh of the
Argentina’s
wake. Even under restraint, the ship seemed to move fast.

“Some sight,” I remember saying, feeling a little shy. I was still not used to talking to Willis.

“Yeah.”

“I never imagined anything like this,” I went on.

Willis looked me in the eye, something he rarely did. He seemed to be trying to make up his mind whether to speak or not. Finally, he spit into the Atlantic and asked, “Is Fedderman going to make it? In your educated opinion?”

“What do you mean?”

“Has he got it? Can we trust him? Will he be there? He’s your pal, you should know.”

I had been asking myself those questions for a couple of weeks, and the answers made me unhappy. “As much as anybody, I guess” was what I said. But I spoke without conviction. Certainly as much as you, I wanted to add.

“I’ve made a recommendation to Rocky,” Willis then said, sounding self-important.

“What kind of recommendation?”

“Put Johnson at the head of the BAR, with you and Keaton as assists. Look for another scout to replace Johnson. Maybe that new man, Brewster. Brewster has an eagle eye, ever notice? Keep Fedderman an ordinary squad member, with Natale. With no special duties. That’s the part that counts, no special duties.”

He had certainly thought it through. I said nothing.

“I think it’s going to happen, too.” Willis puffed up as he spoke. “Rocky likes it. We’re going to have to carry Fedderman. Maybe Natale, too. I know the handwriting when I see it.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t really want to talk to Paul Willis about Ira Fedderman. It was disloyal. Besides, Willis was right; we
were
going to have to carry Fedderman, and I didn’t want to be identified with that.

For a moment or two, Willis and I watched the ghostly green spume, the phosphorescent gleam, trailing us. It was vaguely unsettling, as though a whole sinister other life was festering underwater, beneath our very feet. That feeling grew stronger as Willis and I watched together.

An omen?

“We need harmony in the squad, you know,” Willis said, looking at me again. “For what we’re going to.”

Harmony, indeed—at the very least. I nodded in agreement; I would give Willis that. Then, apparently satisfied with our exchange, he turned to look at the convoy. I could see him taking it in, from one end to the other. In a moment, he braced himself as though he was coming to attention. His eyes opened wide. I saw wonder, amazement, awe on his dim, pale face as he looked out to sea.

My God, I thought, Willis lives! Look at him!

No question about it, at that moment, my feelings about him changed. Willis became real to me at last. He was no longer just the thieving freak, the first squad’s feckless punk.

MOSTLY we lived on board the
Argentina
by comforting routine: sleeping in hammocks that rose six-high from
floor to ceiling; jammed into cabins, public rooms, the hold (Antonovich and Gallagher slept on another deck with the other officers, higher up; we never saw them); taking our meals quickly on our feet, standing at a chest-high mess table that was bolted to the floor; lining up for the washbasins and toilets in the head, where we could throw up; then on deck for the rest of the day (and the night if it suited), where we could throw up into the sea; participating in lifeboat drill, while the NCOs, frustrated at our indifference, threw tantrums; gambling (poker and dice); talking, mostly rumors and sex or rumors about sex, with Barney Barnato, who was strangely subdued during the crossing, relating vague anecdotes to the rest of the platoon about his colored past; napping often; reading.