Honoring Sergeant Carter (11 page)

Again there was to be no success. Over the next two years there were occasional letters between Eddie and Levy. In May 1954, Eddie wrote that he was forced to concede defeat. He asked Levy to return all papers and his Distinguished Service Cross. Levy responded that although he was pessimistic, he would not admit defeat.

But in the end Levy did return all of Eddie's papers and his Distinguished Service Cross. The return of these materials meant the end of any hope of redress. “After looking at the Cross,” Eddie told Mildred, “I almost broke down and cried. That Army deal I took harder than anything I ever had to. You'll never realize just how tough it was on me.”

 

A
s it became apparent that the ACLU case had gotten nowhere, the family decided to return to Los Angeles with the hope of making a new start. The farm in Orting, while a pleasant interlude for the boys, was not economically viable. Both Eddie and Mildred held down jobs in Tacoma to make ends meet. In June 1954, they decided that Mildred and the boys would return to Los Angles to live with Mildred's parents. Eddie was doubtful that he could find work in Los Angeles, so he decided to stay in Washington working to pay off the family's accumulated debts. He rented a room in the home of friends. To Eddie, this separation must have seemed liked another defeat. It was a separation that would last for a year and a half.

During this long separation Eddie and Mildred wrote to each other faithfully, as they had during the war years. Mildred, as she had done before, saved all of Eddie's letters. Their main concern was to reduce their debt and reunite the family. In almost every letter Eddie reported that he was paying off the bills as they planned. He often sent money to Mildred as well. He reported on his work
situation and his hopes of getting to Los Angeles soon. “All I am doing is working like the devil and coming back to my room,” he wrote. “I do not go anywhere at all.” Eddie found work with an automotive supply and service company in Tacoma. It was a union job—he was a member of the Teamsters Union—but the work was not always certain. Still, he managed to keep bill payments current. From time to time, he asked Mildred to watch for work in Los Angeles, but he was not optimistic.

Photo insert not available in e-book edition

Eddie was determined to pay off the debts before
coming to Los Angeles. But Mildred was pressing him to set a date for rejoining the family. “I shall be home just as soon as possible,” he told her sharply in one letter. “So please don't make it any harder for me. Dammit! There are bills to pay. Do you have a job for me? Shinning shoes? Washing dishes? Cooking in someone's kitchen? No? Then you'll just have to wait.”

When Mildred protested the tone of his letter, Eddie tried to smooth things over: “Darned if you didn't detect the ice in my letter. Oh, how I love you for you.” But the longer the separation lasted, the more the tension built between them. By May 1955, they had been apart for nearly a year. Eddie sensed that Mildred was making a life for herself in Los Angeles, and he felt a need to reassert his control. “In your letters you write that you never have any time. And that you are always on the run. Do you think that you need a husband? Do you think that you will ever have any time to be a wife? You seem to be loving and living the life and the pace that you have set. When I return I intend stepping in on some of these people. In other words I intend telling them that you are my wife and not a social butterfly. Make up your mind now because I do not intend running around all over town. Now and then okay.”

Eddie's growing edginess toward Mildred was compounded by health problems. On May 25, he complained of having bad headaches. “I just about go blind,” he wrote. His war wounds also started acting up. He wrote
Mildred in July that his left arm, which had been wounded in the war, was giving him such pain that it kept him awake at night.

In September, Eddie was counting the days until he would be with his family. By then Mildred was working at the Los Angeles County Hospital as an aide and their financial situation was looking better. “Fifty-one more days until my last day of work up here,” Eddie wrote on October 26. Then on December 2 he happily proclaimed:
“All bills are paid off.”
He would work for two more weeks, he said, to pay for a plane ticket to Los Angeles. He didn't want a big group to meet him at the airport—only Mildred, her daughter Iris, and Iris's boyfriend Fred Scott would be there. In the final days before his departure Eddie told Mildred, “I still love you very much. It seems as though we are staring all over again. But we will and must make it.”

Eddie finally rejoined his family at Mildred's parents' home in Los Angeles in December 1955. Her parents now lived in a big, rambling, two-story house on South Bonnie Brae that had five bedrooms, a full dining room, and a music room with a piano. The peaceful household of Mildred's parents now became home to Mildred and Eddie, four children, two Great Danes, a miniature Doberman pinscher, two adult Siamese cats, and several kittens. In a sense, for Eddie and Mildred, moving back into her parents home was a return to their beginnings, but not an altogether happy project.

Mildred's job at the county hospital gave the family an economic foothold. Eddie, with the help of a letter of recommendation from his former employer in Tacoma, found work as a tire vulcanizer. “He worked at a tire recapping plant on Jefferson Boulevard,” Fred Scott recalled. “I remember seeing him come home in white coveralls that were soiled by the dirty work he had to do at that plant.” To Eddie, whose pride had been manifested in an immaculate military uniform with sergeant's stripes and medals for bravery, ending each day in dirty coveralls would have represented another blow to his dignity. For Mildred, the return to Los Angeles had allowed her to resume the kind of social life she had always enjoyed. Old and new friends were frequent visitors at the house. Eddie, on the other hand, seemed more distant, and he made few friends.

Among Mildred's new friends was Nicholas Cunningham, the young doctor who later wrote to the ACLU on Eddie's behalf. He and Mildred shared an interest in music, and Cunningham often came to the house to visit with Mildred's family and friends.

Cunningham remembered Mildred as a charming, attractive, bubbly person. “I really liked her family,” he recalled, “and for me it was like a home away from home. It was a very attractive, friendly environment. Sometimes we would play music together. She played violin and I played cello. Her youngest son, Redd, was really terrific—ebullient, talented, and very interested in sax and jazz.
Buddha, the oldest son, played alto sax, but he seemed a bit preoccupied, as if he was worried.” Cunningham recalled Eddie as “a quietly intense person who was completely his own man. He didn't feel a need to prove anything to anybody.”

If Buddha seemed worried to Cunningham, it was not without reason. When Eddie joined the family in Los Angeles, Buddha recalled, he “seemed more quiet and withdrawn. His spirit was different. It was like something had been taken away from him, but I didn't know what.”

Redd also noticed the change. “Eddie was pulling away from us. Maybe he figured we were old enough and could handle ourselves. He spent a lot of time in his room reading. He loved to read magazines like
Popular Mechanics.
He didn't like a lot of noise, and we knew not to bother him.”

Mildred also sensed a shift in Eddie's spirit, but she didn't talk about it. Still, the boys were aware of a difference in their parents' relationship. “My father and mother never had a fight in front of us,” Redd said, “but things changed between them. I noticed that sometimes when they talked, it seemed like something didn't go right. I can't really pinpoint what it was. But my father would go upstairs and my mother stayed downstairs. She seemed to be hurt.”

 

O
ver the following years Eddie developed noticeable health problems. A heavy smoker, he was often pho
tographed with a cigarette perched on his lips. He was particularly fond of miniature Italian cigars.

Eddie also sometimes exhibited strange behavior. “I remember one night he called me into his room,” Redd recalled. “I saw that he had two guns on the bed, a .357 magnum pistol and a big rifle that looked something like an M1 rifle only it wasn't. ‘What's all this,' I said. ‘I'm working as a security guard,' he said. ‘Well, I'd be worried about any guys breaking in…,'I started to say because I knew he could shoot. I once saw him shoot a crow out of a tree a long way off, and he told us exactly where the bullet had entered and exited before we retrieved the crow's body—and he was right. He picked up the .357 magnum and gave it to me. ‘Pull the trigger,' he said. ‘Eddie, you trained me never to pick up a gun unless I intend to use it,' I said. ‘So I'll put this back on the bed because I don't intend to use it.' He put the guns away. He seemed so different. I didn't know what to make of this, but I believe he was thinking about dying. Maybe he even wanted to die. I didn't know it then, but in fact he was already dying.”

Eddie was diagnosed with lung cancer. He was taken to the hospital for cobalt treatments, but his condition worsened rapidly. Within a matter of weeks, on January 30, 1963, Sergeant Edward A. Carter Jr. died at age forty-six.

On learning of Eddie's death, Fred Scott recalled thinking of the spirit who had told Eddie he would be a great warrior and survive many wounds so long as he protected his chest. “I wondered if the spirit whispered in his ear, ‘I didn't say to protect yourself just on the battlefield.'”

 

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n a rainy day, appropriately, he was buried at the Veterans Cemetery near UCLA. Mildred, the boys, and a small group of family and friends attended the ceremony. His brother William was there, but Miriam, his sister, had died three years earlier. His father, the evangelist, eighty-six years old and by then blind, did not attend because of his failing health. Eddie was buried in his old Army uniform, with his medals on his chest and, in a sense, the memory of who he had been.

E
ddie Carter was a fading memory by the time I married his son in 1973. By then his presence had been replaced by a deep silence that would not be disturbed until Gloria Long's telephone call more than thirty-three years after his death. My long and sometimes puzzling quest to discover what had happened to Eddie was often exasperating, producing more questions than answers. Finally, in April 1999, a critical piece of the puzzle finally fell into place—Eddie's almost forgotten Freedom of Information Act file arrived in the mail.

The packet, in response to my request in January 1997, contained more than sixty pages of documents. As I began looking through the files I was worried that, despite my confidence that Eddie hid nothing and had done nothing wrong, there might be some shock awaiting me in this material. I had already experienced many surprises, sometimes upsetting, in my research. So I braced myself as I began going through the files.

In the files were memos and correspondence, most pertaining to an investigation of Eddie by Army intelli
gence in 1942 and 1943, when Eddie was assigned to an all-black service battalion at Fort Benning in Georgia. The investigation was opened on October 1, 1942, according to a local military intelligence officer, “when it was learned that the Subject [Carter] had served in” the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Investigators subsequently reviewed personnel files Eddie had filled out when he enlisted in 1941—which were destroyed in a fire in 1973—and they found detailed information about his childhood in India and China and his combat experience in Spain.

The Army investigators interviewed officers and enlisted men who worked with Eddie, and found nothing questionable in his behavior or words. Military agents checked police, court, and credit records. They interviewed his father in Los Angeles as well as former landlords, employers, and acquaintances. They examined the records of the House Un-American Activities Committee and found nothing on Eddie there. Everyone they interviewed spoke favorably of Eddie. No one had ever heard him express disloyal views or, for that matter, political opinions of any sort. Nevertheless, reports had to be written and passed to higher-ups. A report to the Military Intelligence Division in the War Department summarized what it referred to as “adverse information” on Eddie:

ADVERSE INFORMATION:

• 1. Subject reportedly was a member of Abraham Lincoln Brigade, having served for two and a half years with said Brigade in Spain.
  
• 2. Potentially adverse—Subject is seemingly potentially capable of having connections with subversive activities due to the fact that he spent his early years in the Orient and has a speaking knowledge of Hindustani and Mandarin Chinese.
  
• 3. Potentially adverse—Subject's father resides at 115 Shanse Road, Shanghai, China and Subject's mother (name not available) was born in Calcutta, India; but no data is available as to whether she is living or deceased.
  

It was notable that Eddie's service with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was “adverse information” even though an earlier report had stated that members of the brigade were “not necessarily Communists.” And I can almost see the intelligence agent puzzling over the unusual circumstances of this “colored” soldier's upbringing and deciding that Eddie could somehow be connected with subversive activities. This unfounded speculation, a totally improper exercise of the agent's imagination, was based on nothing more than the agent's preconceptions and biases. But the agent's speculation was now part of the rationale for investigating Eddie. The memo concluded: “Subject's loyalty to the United States seemingly is unquestioned except as regards his background, but due to his former connections with above mentioned organization, it is thought that a more thorough investigation into Subject's loyalty should be made.”

I was not altogether surprised to see that this informa
tion was forwarded directly to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I knew from my earlier research that Hoover's FBI had a great interest in suspected subversives in the black population and employed spies to track the activities of African Americans, most of which appeared to me, from their own reports, to be simply civil rights activism. Nevertheless, this memo to Hoover suggested that the FBI and Army intelligence were collaborating in this investigation of Eddie from the very beginning.

Five times in the reports it was recommended that the case be closed and that Eddie's records be marked “considered loyal.” Finally, on June 24, 1943, a report to the War Department declared, “Recommend no further action be taken. Case CLOSED.”

 

B
ut the case was not closed, or perhaps it was periodically reopened. Eddie was under surveillance when he served as a trainer in the California National Guard. This was even indirectly admitted by General Mark Clark when he made his ominous when-loyalty-is-doubted-the-individual-must-suffer remark. Eddie also fell under suspicion at Fort Lewis in Washington. All of this culminated in him being denied reenlistment.

Then I saw the pattern. In each instance when there was a flurry of suspicion, investigation, and trouble for Eddie, it followed in the wake of publication of a news
article about him in an Army newspaper. The first instance occurred a year after Eddie first enlisted. The Fort Benning post newspaper,
The Pine-Bur,
profiled Eddie. The article mentioned his life in China and fighting on the Loyalist side in Spain. The day the article was published, October 1, 1942, a surveillance file on Eddie was opened by the local intelligence officer. The second instance happened after the October 20, 1946, publication of a front-page article with photograph of Eddie in the
Lee Traveller
at Fort Lee, Virginia. The laudatory article focused on Eddie's heroism in the war, but it, too, mentioned China and Spain. At the beginning of 1947, when Eddie got back to California and joined the Army instructor group of the National Guard, he and others discovered that he was under surveillance, and he was later removed from the instructor group. This was also after the
Ebony
magazine article appeared. Finally, after being transferred to Fort Lewis in Washington, Eddie ran into trouble again. This time the trouble—denial of reenlistment—followed the appearance of another laudatory article with photograph in the May 13, 1949, issue of
The Flame-Spearhead,
the post newspaper.

In all of the Army newspaper articles, Eddie mentioned his early life in India and China, and his service with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Apparently this was enough to provoke a knee-jerk reaction from military intelligence and perhaps higher-ups, as though they
had just discovered a spy in their midst. If the consequences hadn't been so hurtful to Eddie, this all could have made an amusing episode of the Keystone Kops. But it did harm him, and there was a mean-spirited intent behind his persecution.

It became perfectly clear that the whole case against Sergeant Carter was a fabrication when I read the last document in the Freedom of Information Act file. It was a memo from the G-2 intelligence service of the Army to the director of the FBI, dated December 4, 1950, apparently in response to a query from the FBI about evidence supporting the allegation that Sergeant Carter was a Communist Party member. The memo said they had nothing: “Information on the allegation is not reflected in the files” of G-2.

I knew the 1942–1943 investigation of Eddie was closed due to lack of evidence, but here was a document suggesting that a new investigation had been initiated after the war when Eddie reenlisted in the Army. Significantly, the source of the allegation was given as the Sixth Army, which was General Mark Clark's command. Knowing his attitude, I had suspected Clark might be one of those behind the persecution of Eddie. This memo added to my suspicion. But what was most infuriating was the realization that this memo was sent in December 1950, a year after Eddie had sought help from the ACLU. Herbert Levy had been told that on the basis of so-called confidential information, Eddie could not be permitted to
reenlist for security reasons. Yet here was proof that Hoover, the FBI, Army intelligence, and probably the secretary of defense all knew that no such confidential information existed! And even after this memo was sent, David Niles, on advice of the Army, repeated Witsell's “security reasons…confidential information” smoke screen in a letter to the ACLU's Herbert Levy.

I now knew that there had been a concerted and continuing cover-up to hide the fact that there was no evidence against Eddie. A hearing might have brought this out—so no hearing could be allowed. This was cruel. Not only was Eddie prevented from reenlisting, but insinuations of disloyalty were continually leveled at him throughout his efforts to learn the truth. The institution that he so faithfully and heroically served, the U.S. Army, had betrayed him cruelly. In the end, it destroyed him and wounded his family. Sergeant Edward A. Carter Jr. was a casualty of the U.S. Army, and specifically of General Mark Clark.

Who was Mark Clark, and why would he have gone after Eddie? Clark wrote two memoirs:
Calculated Risk,
about his World War II experiences, and
From the Danube to the Yalu,
about his “running battle with the Communists from 1945 on,” according to the jacket copy. Two other books,
Mark Clark: The Last of the Great World War II Commanders,
a biography by Martin Blumenson, and
Army Surveillance in America, 1775–1980,
by Joan M. Jensen, were also eye-openers that gave me insight into Clark and
the strange history of the Army's Military Intelligence Division.

Military intelligence has a convoluted history going back to the American Revolution. The Russian Revolution of 1917 heightened the Army's interest in potential domestic enemies—radicals of various kinds, including Bolsheviks, communists, socialists, anarchists, labor leaders, and others. The Army pushed hard to persuade Congress to fund peacetime spying on civilians. In the summer of 1919, race riots occurred in Washington and Chicago. The riots left dozens dead and hundreds injured, mostly black people. The Military Intelligence Division (MID), seeking to bolster its case in Congress, seized on the riots as evidence that foreign-influenced radicals were inflaming black communities and inciting insurrections. Black undercover agents hired by the Justice Department said the riots were caused by homegrown injustice, not radical agitators, but the media played up white fears of black rebellion and the die was cast. Military surveillance of civilians was accepted as necessary, despite the objections of dissenters, to protect the nation's security and tranquillity.

On the civilian side, a young assistant in the Justice Department, J. Edgar Hoover, was put in charge of the new Radical Division. Hoover, who later became head of the new Federal Bureau of Investigation, launched a series of raids against suspected communists and worked closely with military intelligence to cultivate a climate of national hysteria and racism. A pattern of sharing infor
mation between military intelligence and the FBI developed, as I was to see when I obtained Eddie's Freedom of Information files. Occasional efforts by Congress to halt or limit civilian surveillance were effectively subverted by MID and the FBI, as they continued their unholy crusade against “radicals.”

In 1921, in a period of criticism and reform, the name of MID was changed to G-2. But G-2 continued the practice of civilian surveillance, sometimes in direct violation of orders from Washington. G-2 would later spawn the Counterintelligence Corps, the agency responsible for much of the surveillance of Sergeant Carter.

Mark Clark, the son of a career Army officer, was an ambitious officer who swiftly rose into the ranks of the generals. With the help of his aunt Zettie, the mother of General George C. Marshall, he secured an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he had a rather undistinguished record. Nevertheless, his connection with powerful men (Marshall, Eisenhower, and later Truman) would assure his rise to the highest levels of the Army.

Clark's career was marked by controversy and criticism. As Blumenson, his biographer, wrote:

General Patton, Blumenson wrote, had grave reservations about Clark.

Problems in Clark's commands were not unknown. For example, serious charges were made that Clark's failure of leadership was responsible for the nearly 1,700 casualties suffered by the Thirty-sixth Division in an ill-considered and disastrous attempt to cross the Rapido River in Italy. Other troops under Clark's Fifth Army command included the all-black Ninety-second Division. According to Daniel Gibran and his colleagues, writing in
The Exclusion of Black Soldiers from the Medal of Honor,
the Ninety-sixth was accused by white officers of poor performance due to alleged racial characteristics of black soldiers, with the result that few awards for heroism were recommended for division members. Professor Gibran
and his colleagues instead suggested that racial discrimination was a factor in fewer awards being recommended.

In
Calculated Risk,
published in 1950, Clark sought to distance himself from overt racists. “The 92nd Division performed a useful role,” Clark wrote, “and its presence on Italy's west coast assisted us materially in our final drive into the Po Valley.” But Clark argued that black soldiers were beset by serious handicaps of leadership and training, and he opposed the “indiscriminate mixing of Negro and white soldiers in our Army.” Instead, he found acceptable the idea of including smaller all-black units within larger white combat units. This was the sort of modified segregation experienced by Eddie and the black combat volunteers in World War II.