A Fistful of Fig Newtons (16 page)

“You two guys have drawn KP. Every company on the train provides three men for KP. You guys and Ernie drew the tickets. You’ll be on duty twenty-four hours–four on, four off–any questions?”

Gasser and I in unison muttered: “Nosir.”

Good Christ Almighty! I thought, KP on a goddamn troop train! Everybody else will be laying around on their butts, sleeping and goofing off, and me and Gasser and Ernie will be on the goddamn Pots and Pans. God dammit to hell!

“By the way,” Cherry went on, “I will guarantee you will not pull KP again for a minimum of sixty days. Okay? Put on your fatigues, leave all your gear here, and take off. The chow car is eight cars ahead. Now get moving.”

Lieutenant Cherry moved on down the car to give Ernie his bad news.

Ernie was a tall, thin Iowan with a pale, tired-looking face. I only knew him slightly, since he was an antenna specialist and I
was a Keyer man, along with Gasser and the rest of my platoon. Antenna men always had sad faces, since they spent a lot of their time clinging to a mast a couple of hundred feet in the air, where occasionally they would meet their sudden end. We had lost two in one day when some fool–we never discovered who–had hit a switch and rotated the disk while they were aloft tuning it. The damn thing flung them out into space like a kid’s slingshot hurling ball bearings. Ernie just missed being one of them. He was about ten feet below them on the mast when it happened.

The only other squad that carried the weight of doom on their shoulders were the Power Supply men. Twenty-five thousand volts at up to two amps is damn near enough juice to ionize the whole city of Hackensack. One day when a couple of safety interlocks failed to function, one of the Power Supply men went up in a puff of light purple smoke, leaving behind only the remains of a charred dog tag and half of a seared canteen.

Keyer men were considered the dilettantes of Company K. We were also the company’s intellectual elite, since the keyer was by far the most complex component to maintain, and its inherent instability lent credence to our image as Bohemian, unpredictable artists. Our keyer unit, which was wired with secret dynamite charges for immediate detonation in case of enemy capture, was the heart of our radar.

Silently, Gasser began to pull on his fatigues. I did likewise, making sure that I was putting on my crap fatigues. Every experienced soldier always keeps one pair of clean, reasonably decent fatigues for casual wear around the company area. The other pair is used for crap details such as Latrine Orderly or KP. This suit is often impregnated with everything from chicken guts to sheep dung, which is used to fertilize the lawn around the Officers’ Club. This suit is mean, rancid, and gamy beyond civilian understanding.

At last Gasser and I stood up in our fragrant work uniforms. Ernie came up from the far end of the car. Wordlessly, the three of us moved down the center aisle, little realizing at the time that
we had begun a saga that was eventually to be a legend throughout the entire Signal Corps.

Gasser led the way. I followed; Ernie trailed behind. As we moved up the aisle, three or four of our peers emitted faint chicken-clucking sounds, the universal GI signal that says roughly: The Army has done it again. Another indignity has been heaped upon the defenseless enlisted man’s head. I find this amusing, since it has not happened to me, at least this time. My clucking denotes both sympathy and faint scorn since you were dumb enough to get caught in the Army Crap Detail net. Cluck cluck cluck.

The chicken has to be one of nature’s most maligned creatures, being a universal symbol of cowardice as well as petty harassment and general measliness. My heart goes out to the chicken. What has the chicken done to deserve this reputation? Is the chicken more cowardly than, say, the mole or the gopher? It is one of those unanswerable questions. Even the chicken’s daily provender is looked upon with scorn and derision. “Chicken feed” aptly describes most of our salaries. I have never heard anyone term his paycheck “goat meal” or “squirrel food,” always “chicken feed.”

These murky thoughts drifted through my GI brain as we went up the aisle toward the chow car. We went through car after car filled with alien soldiers wearing mysterious patches. Gasser muttered over his shoulder:

“Christ, did you get a load of those Paratroopers back there? What in the hell are we heading for?”

The same thought had occurred to me when we went through one car filled with wiry, mean-looking GIs wearing gleaming jump boots and the kind of expressions that you see at three o’clock in the morning on the faces of the birds in poolrooms and all-night diners. They all wore crazy patches that looked like a smear of blood with a mailed fist clenching a length of chain emerging right at you. Behind me, Ernie added his two bits:

“I swear that must have been a company of Mafia hit men. Did you see that captain?”

Their CO, sprawled at the head of the car, looked like a carnivorous orangutan dressed in skintight fatigues with a trench knife at his waist.

“I’m sure as hell glad they’re on our side,” I chirped, stepping over a pile of gas masks.

“Don’t be too sure, buddy,” Gasser answered without looking back. One thing that really got to me was that this captain wore a single set of captain’s bars on his fatigue collar. They were painted a dull, lethal black. You just don’t see outfits like that in the late late movies.

Eventually we arrived at the chow car. Actually, it was two chow cars; one for cooking, the other for serving. The feeding facilities on a troop train are not exactly in the civilian elegant dining car tradition. Since there were two or three thousand soldiers aboard, they were fed like hogs at the trough. It was all very functional. The serving car had a long stainless-steel table that ran the entire length of the car itself. At intervals there were holes a couple of feet in diameter cut in the gleaming steel, and huge thirty-two-gallon garbage cans filled with GI food were lowered into the holes. Only the tops showed. Mashed potatoes in one, creamed chipped beef in another, soggy string beans, and at the far end “Dessert,” garbage cans filled with cherry Jell-O or runny fruit salad. The soldiers to be fed moved in an endless line through the car, carrying their mess kits. Sweating KPs on the other side of the steel table ladled out the glop. It was a messy job, messy and hot and hypnotic. In the next car the cooks and a team of KPs toiled away, brewing up oatmeal, meatloaves, and stewed squash in a bath of searing heat that would have done a sauna proud. Since there were so many on the train, the feeding went on almost without a break. When one part of the endless line had returned to its car after breakfast, another part of the line was ready for lunch. The instant Gasser and Ernie and I arrived, the mess
sergeant, a sweaty tech wearing a white apron and a crew cut, put us to work.

“You guys from that Signal Corps bunch, right?”

Gasser grunted.

“Okay, grab them aprons. And you”—he nodded to me—“you’re on gravy. And you, get down there on them peas. And you, you’re on Harvard beets.”

I was gravy, Ernie was peas, and Gasser was Harvard beets. Seconds later I began ladling. Now, on a swaying troop train there is a real trick to ladling gravy into lurching mess kits filled with ice cream and salmon loaf and chopped cucumbers. The job leaves a lot of room for artistic interpretations. Hour after hour faceless yardbirds jostled past amid the din of complaints and muffled cursings. There were sudden wild bursts of laughter. Through it all, the mess sergeant kept yelling mechanically:

“Keep it movin’. God dammit, keep it movin’. God dammit, keep it movin’. Hey you, this ain’t no Schrafft’s or nothin’. If you don’t like what you get, dump it in the can at the end of the car, but don’t hold up the damn line. God dammit.”

I have often since wondered what became of that poor, driven mess sergeant. No ribbons, no applause, only an endless belt of hungry, wooden faces year after year. He must have had one of the most realistic views of mankind of anyone around. Like some keeper in the cosmic zoo of humanity where it is always Feeding Time, which is not at all the same as Dining Time or Lunch Time. He presided over his steaming feeding trough with a wild look of dogged persistence in his eye and a leather voice prodding the herd on.

“Keep movin’, God dammit, keep movin’. Come on, you guys, let’s have more mashed potatoes out here. Change them cans quick. Hey, quit spillin’ that coffee all over the damn floor. Get a goddamn mop, fer Chrissake, stupid. Let’s go, let’s go. Keep movin’.”

Time became all jumbled as I hunched over my vast tub of dark brown, steaming gravy. My wrist ached from ladling,
ladling, ladling. After a couple of hours in the heat, the sergeant told us to strip down to our shorts and GI shoes. It was a little relief, but not much. Steam rose in swirling clouds from the boiling hot food; sweat dropped from my dog tags and into the gravy. Who cared? A little sweat never hurt anyone. I toiled on. Gasser wielded his beet ladle with dash and élan. Ernie was switched from peas to string beans. Other KPs from time to time emerged in pairs from the cooking car, struggling on the slippery floor, carrying giant cans of soup or gravy or scrambled eggs. As one tub was emptied, another was immediately lowered into the slot.

I quickly discovered that the gravy ladle was highly controversial, since gravy has to be handled with skill, not to mention restraint. Too much wrist on the ladle and some poor joker’s whole meal was swimming in brown glue; ice cream, fruit salad, and all. I grew hard and unyielding, impervious to the steady torrent of abuse that was heaped upon me. I ladled gravy mechanically, with no prejudice or favoritism. After all, when you’re feeding half the U. S. Army on a thundering troop train there is no place for faint heart or even mere civility.

“No gravy, please. Hey you, NO GRAVY!” meant absolutely nothing to me as I ladled on hour after hour.

At long intervals the line would peter out to a faint trickle and the exhausted sergeant would holler out:

“O.K., you guys. Take a ten-minute break. You’re doin’ a great job, yessir, a great job. If you want any apples or ice cream or anything, just grab ’em but don’t leave the car.”

An endless supply of food is the quickest way to kill an appetite. One day there will be some hotshot doctor who will write a diet book based on that fact. Put any fatty in a room with tons of ice cream, mashed potatoes, and chocolate cake, with butterscotch malted coming out of the faucets, and within five hours the fatty will not be able to stand the sight of food.

I squatted down on a packing case behind the counter, my legs stiff from all the standing, my ladle hand sore and tired, my forearms and elbows itching from dried gravy. Ever since that hellish
twenty-four hours of KP I have never again touched gravy in any form. Gasser sat with his head hanging low around his knees, blood-red beet juice dripping from his hairy chest. He looked like a major casualty that had taken an 88 shell right in the gut. Ernie leaned back against the side of the swaying car, his legs outstretched, straddling his string-bean tub, his eyes closed. The ten minutes flashed by in milliseconds.

“Here they come again, you guys. Keep it movin’, come on, quit stragglin’. God dammit, this ain’t no Schrafft’s.”

I tried ladling with my left hand for a while to ease my aching wrist and elbow. I was rapidly developing a severe case of Gravy Ladle Tendonitis, which occasionally still troubles me. Unfortunately, with my left hand I was gravying more shoes than potatoes and had to switch back. I tried the overhand motion; side-arm. The complaints rose and fell like the beating of an angry surf on an unyielding rocky shore.

From time to time through the surrealistic blur of the endless line I would spot a familiar face as Company K went by. They were no longer my friends, just more links in a chain that went round and round.

As the three of us toiled on along with other KPs from other units, the outside world ceased to exist. Was it day, was it night? Was it winter, was it summer? What year was it? Do they still have years? What country were we in? Were we in any country? Had we died and were we now toiling in purgatory, struggling hopelessly for redemption? Who am I? What is my name?

I ladled on and on. During one of our breaks, Gasser, chewing on a piece of celery, ambled over, trailing beet juice, to where the sergeant was moodily checking a tub of purple Kool-Aid, known to the troops as the Purple Death.

“Hey, Sarge, when do we get our four hours off?” The sergeant glanced up from the tub of inky fluid in which floated two tiny chunks of ice about the size of golf balls. He was stirring it with a huge, long-handled wooden paddle.

“Huh? What’d you say?” He wiped the sweat from his brow with his left hand and flicked it into the Kool-Aid.

“When do we get our four hours off?”

“What four hours off?” The sergeant barked a dry, hard, yapping laugh. “Jeez, what the hell are they sending me now? I ain’t had four hours off since last November.”

Gasser chewed angrily on his celery. “Our lieutenant informed us that we would have four hours on and four hours off and that …”

The sergeant shook his head slowly in the incredible wonder that anyone could believe such a transparent fairy tale. Gasser got the message. So did we.

Ernie, slumped next to me, was slowly drinking a canteen cup of cold milk.

“Boy, I’ll say one thing about this job. You sure get thirsty. Boy, do you get thirsty.”

“Yeah. It’s all this sweating,” I said, running my hand over my chest like a squeegee, pushing a wave of sweat ahead of it. My dog tags dripped steadily. Ernie nodded.

“Boy, I never sweated so much in my life.”

The humidity in the car from all the steam, the moving bodies, and the fact that the ventilation system had gone out during the second year of Lincoln’s administration, made the chow car about as comfortable as the inside of a catcher’s mitt during the second half of a doubleheader in July.

“Well,” I yawned, stretching my aching back, “it’s a great way to lose weight.”

“What weight?” Ernie said as he gulped his milk. Ernie was the only guy I have ever known standing six feet six and wearing size fifteen shoes who wore a shirt with a thirteen and a half collar and had a twenty-seven-inch waist. Ernie was so skinny that if he stood sideways in the wind, he made a high, whistling sound. He looked like the guy in those ads in the back pages of
Boy’s Life
captioned: Are you a 98 lb. weakling? The guy that gets
the sand kicked in his face. One time on a twenty-mile march, Goldberg hollered out: