Reluctant Warriors (44 page)

The last part of the trip from Knoxville through the Appalachian Mountains to Asheville
was rough. The rails were well worn from endless carloads of heavy war matériel traveling
over them. The ride was a jolting one as the train curved around the various mountain
peaks.

With so many servicemen in the car smoking, Wiley found it harder and harder to breathe.
All the way from Asheville to Columbia, he felt winded and faint.

The erect and soldierly bearing he'd displayed in his travels of the last few days
was absent as he stepped onto the platform in Columbia. Even sitting in the car,
he had breathed hard. Now, as he entered the station, he bent slightly as the wound
seemed to get worse.

Doris Day's new recording of “Sentimental Journey” wafted across the building, echoing
perfectly against the ceiling.

Sharp pain, worse than ever before, flared in Wiley's side. The pain blotted out
the song. He suspected what had happened, that the wound had ruptured. He could feel
it.

He had no idea that it had never been attended to correctly in New York. The nurses
and doctors, so busy tending more seriously wounded men, had passed him along without
examining the wound carefully enough. No one had realized that the bullet had nicked
his spleen and that he needed two more months in the hospital. He was used to pain
and privations, this veteran who had never voted in a presidential election. Like
his doctors, he still thought he would be all right.

His mouth widened, though his lips remained close together in what almost appeared
to be a smile. He stopped, leaning against a wall next to a glass display case. A
spot of blood appeared on his shirt. He blinked once or twice, staring into the case.
There in the middle was a red rose made of paper! It was the only thing he noticed
in the display. One of the only things he'd ever seen that belonged to his mother
was a similar red paper rose.

Wiley's mind went back to his childhood in West Virginia, when he spent his time
at his grandparents' house. The rose, red fading to pink, sat in a vase on the end
table.

“You know your mama made that,” his grandmother had often told him. “She loved flowers
so!”

He had looked at it a thousand times, wondering about his mother, what she was like,
and why she had gone away and left him. He knew every petal of the faded flower,
every detail of the two leaves as they sat in the plain amber-colored glass vase.
When he first noticed it, the vase was fully two of his little hands high. By the
time he'd run away, his fingers had nearly reached the top.

He spoke to the flower, his mouth moving but no sound coming out. “Mama, I made it.
I never thought I'd live through it, but I made it. I'm alive. I'm a lieutenant now
and people respect me and look up ta me for the first time in my life. I'm somebody!
I just wanted you ta know . . . I'm pretty tired now.”

The sight of the faded rose took the strength out of him. He breathed even harder.
A Marine walked by, and Wiley reached out for him.

“Ser-ge-ant?”

The soldier turned and looked at Wiley. “Yes, sir?”

“I think . . . I'm gonna faint.”

The husky man grabbed him.

“Get me outta here. . . . Is the sun shining?”

“Yeah, it's real bright!”

“Okay . . . okay . . . get me outta here . . . I can't breathe.”

The Marine put Wiley's arm over his shoulder and took a good deal of the scout's
weight. In a minute they had left the bustle of the station and went into a brick-paved
courtyard. He sat Wiley down on a bench and leaned over, looking him in the face.

“Sir, you don't look so good. They got corpsmen in there. Let me get one for you.”

Though still winded, Wiley felt better. “Is it . . . hot, sergeant?”

“No, sir, it's real nice, maybe seventy? Hell of a lot better than Eniwetok.”

Having heard of that Pacific island battle, Wiley smiled weakly. He looked up at
the man. “I didn't mean ta . . . hold you up from your family.”

“That's all right, sir. It's only me and my mom. I gotta take the bus to
Bamberg.
That's west of here,” he said, correctly gauging that the young lieutenant was not
from the area. “You know you're bleeding?”

“Yeah . . . I got it in February . . . and can't seem ta shake it. I was . . . doin'
pretty good till yesterday. I guess the train jarred me.”

“Let me get you a corpsman.”

“Naw, I feel better. If I can just sit here awhile.”

“You got anybody comin' for you?”

Wiley looked up and managed a smile. “I do,” he said hopefully. “I do. I got people
here. . . . They're comin' for me. Go ahead, get your bus. I'll be fine.”

“Not a chance, sir. I never left a man down yet, and I'm sure as hell not gonna start
now.”

“Thanks,” Wiley said gratefully.

“I'm gonna get you a Coke, hold on.” The Marine walked off.

Wiley thought again of the faded rose.
Mama would be proud a me now
, he thought,
his head leaning down staring at the brick. Still winded and blinking a little, he
looked up as he heard a sound.

“Chip!”

As he looked up toward the sun, he saw the outline of a woman's face.

“Chip!” He could not focus on the face with the brightness of the sun, but the voice
sounded familiar. He blinked a few times.

“Chip, it's me, Jill, Jill Gregory.”

She sat beside him on the bench, an eighteen-year-old dark-haired girl. His heart
leapt. He had thought about her so many times.

“Jill! I'm sorry. I didn't hardly recognize you. I–”

Jill stared at him, her smile turning worried. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, let me catch . . . my breath. I was lookin' for your mom. No . . . I didn't
mean that.” As the words were coming out of his mouth, he looked at Jill and smiled,
thinking,
Her hair isn't black. It's dark brown!

“That's all right. Mama couldn't come. She's baking you three peach pies.”

Jill looked at him, not even noticing that he was hurt. She had last seen him when
she was fourteen and a freshman in high school. She and her
mother had written him
letters and rejoiced at the occasional reply. The family had carefully followed the
European campaign news in the paper, wondering which action Wiley was part of. She
had thought of him a million times, and here he was! She didn't notice his labored
breath or the beads of sweat on his forehead. All she saw was that he was very good-looking,
a tall and handsome man.

Wiley saw the way Jill was looking at him and smiled. He thought:
I
do
have people!
I do! They came for me like they said. I know this'll work, I just feel it.

In a minute, the Marine came back. He smiled. “This your girl?”

Both Wiley and Jill smiled back weakly.

“Here, lieutenant, drink some of this,” the Marine said, handing him a six-ounce
Coke.

It rattled around some in his teeth as he drank. He took a deep breath. “Thanks.”

The Marine saw some men waving at him from across the way. He waved back. “Some of
my buddies got a cab to the bus station,” he said. “I need to go pretty quick if
I can. Think you can get up?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Haltingly, Wiley stood. Jill stared at the blood on his shirt
and the look of pain on his face.

“You're
not
okay, are you?” She took his hand, uncertainly. “Mama said you'd been
wounded . . .”

Wiley nodded. “I . . . think I better have somebody look at it again.”

“I'll take you home. We'll just call Dr. Hart, and you'll be fine!”

With Jill supporting him on one side and the Marine on the other, Wiley made his
way out to the Gregorys' car in the parking lot, his feet wobbling occasionally.
The Marine put Wiley in the worn-out red 1938 Chevy Cabriolet convertible. They shook
hands and parted ways, off to their new lives.

The Circle

I see him sometimes as he plays,
In endless summer days.
This little fellow from my past,
Who plays until the very last.
He smiles so much more than then,
Glad I'm not the man I might have been.

—
The Things He Never Had

Columbia, South Carolina, June 2007

Jill

J
illian Gregory Wiley sat at the huge desk, a relic left over from her father's law
office, wondering how to begin. Her children and several of her grandchildren had
approached her in the last few months after her husband Chip's death, asking her
to write a narrative on their lives together. She was eighty years old now. Her once
very dark brown hair, which had been her best feature, had become lustrous silver
that she wore in a pageboy. Like her mother before her, she was five foot seven inches,
fit in a size eight dress, and had never weighed more than 135 pounds.

The task before her was not an unhappy one: to write the remembrance of a happy life.
But her expression held a hint of sadness because of the recent death of her husband.
Though computers had become a way of life, she bent over a yellow legal pad. Occasionally,
she paused to look out the windows in
the den so familiar to her, once her parents',
then her own, and now her son Andy's. Her grandchildren were at school, and her son
and daughter-in-law, Kay, were at work. The large old house, in the family since
1930, was quiet.

She began.

I first met my husband, Joseph “Chip” Wiley, in the spring of 1940. He was a sixteen-year-old
private in the US Army, and I was a young girl of fourteen, a freshman in high school.
We were married in 1947, after I had two years of college. We had our first child,
Andy, in 1948. I had a hard time in the pregnancy, so we decided not to try again
until Chip got out of the service in 1960. We had two more boys, Jamie in 1961, and
Joseph, always affectionately called “L.C.” for Little Chip, in 1963. After sixty
years of a happy marriage, Chip died this March. I write this now, while I still
recall the details well enough, so that my children and grandchildren might understand
the times in which we lived and the complex man Chip was.

My mother and I, perhaps, didn't understand him all that much ourselves. Though she,
and I to a lesser extent, engineered the change that gradually made him into a family
man and a successful businessman, we never knew much of his earlier life. My brother,
Scott, first brought Chip here when both had weekend passes from Basic Training here
at Fort Jackson. Scott told us Chip's childhood had been very rough. We failed to
get very interested in his military career either. That he had extensive experience
with guns, tanks, and the madness of war never concerned us all that much. Mother
saw through the whole thing, as she usually did, by accepting Chip as he was. He
was absorbed into our family and loved as a son or husband, which, of course, was
what he needed.

There was much that his new family could not have understood about Chip. It wasn't
easy for Chip to adjust to a new life, his third. He had already experienced two
very different lives before 1945. His youth was almost a scientific case study of
“Survival of the Fittest,” one that would have made Darwin himself take note. He
survived his father's beatings only by cunning:
lying, knowing where to hide, learning
to sense danger, finally running away when cunning no longer worked.

His life in the Army had been more complicated but completely unscientific. In combat,
while experience could save you one day, each day brought a new set of chances where
the weakest and most foolish sometimes outlived the most careful. The conclusion,
to him, was that men were expendable, mere pawns in a game without rules, a game
beyond all understanding.

Many times he pulled the little Colt .25 pistol out of his pocket or a drawer, depending
on where he was, and held it against his temple. He never intended to pull the trigger.
He never even pulled back the slide to cock the weapon. It was not any kind of religious
belief that kept him from killing himself. He
had
no relationship with God. Through
his grandparents, he did believe in Goodness. He felt strongly that the Creator would
certainly put his new family under his loving wing and thought that others also deserved
His gaze. But he was sure that no beneficence awaited him. He saw soldiers like himself
as solitary players in the great scheme of things, ones who had no right to request
help. He held the gun to his head as testament to the fact that he thought himself
worthless and that his status could not be changed.

Chip remained in the Army for fifteen years after World War II ended. He saw still
more combat in the Korean War. He had no trouble commanding men and knowing that
they would instantly obey his orders. But he never considered himself superior to
any man, only a better soldier because he had more experience. He never spared himself
from sharing their privations, never kept for himself the better sleeping conditions
or food that were his due as an officer. If anything, he suffered more than the others
because he felt he deserved worse. Men loved him for this sacrifice and would do
anything for him. While he was glad to have the admiration of soldiers and the love
of his family, it took years to change his opinion of his worth.

And yet a third life was emerging with the Gregorys, where Goodness held ascendancy.
He could be worth something through them, and he dedicated himself to their service.
It was a world that made sense, one in
which he could be safe from the endless rolling
of the dice. He had despised those with means all of his life. Nevertheless, he clung
to his new family and what he saw as their high class, though they thought of themselves
as middle-class people.

He never really understood how he fit into their lives, and he never ceased to be
amazed when he came to live at “The Mansion,” as he called their house. He was always
the person looking in the window, rather than the one looking out from the safety
behind the glass. He felt guilty for what he took of their love and stability, unaware
of the qualities he offered in return: honesty, strength of character, dependability,
and selflessness.

Chip felt that he didn't belong in their world. Because they never inquired into
his past, he feared the day would come when they would see him as the low-class trash
he thought himself to be. Perhaps someone would denounce him. He often imagined being
forced to go away and never able to see his family again. No one ever said a word
to him to encourage such thoughts.

Jill teared a little for a moment, thinking of the life she had lived and enjoyed
with her husband. Then she began again: Our relationship began when I picked him
up at the train station downtown in the spring of 1945, after he came back from Europe.
He was still recovering from a terrible wound he'd received in Germany, and he was
not doing very well. I have to say I didn't notice at first. A soldier had to help
me haul him out to our old car.

Old Doctor Francis Hart, who delivered my brother and me and was beloved by my family,
came to the house to examine Chip. Doctors made house calls in those days.

“I'm surprised the man could even walk,” he said. “The wound has not healed correctly.”

“Will he be all right?” Mother and I asked.

“Well, if he could make it this far with a hole in him like that, I expect he'll
live. I am supposing the bullet hit the spleen. He'll need two to three months to
mend, a month of bed rest, and probably a couple more with light activity. I'll call
[Major General] Bob Mores at Fort Jackson and get him to
square it with the First
Division people. Now Granton [my mother], if this boy had gone much longer like this,
it would have probably killed him, so you keep him in this bed. Under
no
circumstances
is he to be up wandering around. I'm not kidding. We'll get him an x-ray in a couple
of days.”

That was how it started. Chip made a slow recovery at our home, and he and I had
months to get to know each other as adults.

Eventually, time soothed the wounds he bore in both body and soul, though the healing
took years. The new life changed him slowly, from being a very efficient killer to
a successful citizen. The constancy of love he received could not be ignored. Over
time, it made him into a more complete person. His old prejudices died off.

In 1948, when Andy was born, Chip waited outside the delivery room. The nurse, in
her crisp uniform, came out to place the child in his arms. Awkwardly, he took the
bundle and looked at the little person.

“He's
yellow!
” he said. “Will he be okay?”

The nurse smiled. “Yes, this is very common. He just has a little jaundice. It will
go away in a couple of days.”

He gazed at the contented, sleeping baby.
This is
my
boy
, he thought. He remembered
when he was in Chicago and first thought of having a child of his own. Now here that
child was!
This child is me
, he thought in absolute wonder,
or at least part of me.
From now on, I have a real, permanent life that can never be completely taken away,
even if I get killed on my next tour of duty.
Andy's birth was the beginning of Chip's
change. He was never the same person thereafter. The Army became secondary; his family
came first.

The old woman paused in her task, realizing that despite the passage of so many years,
her understanding of her husband had large gaps. But she was not a poor observer,
and her intuition came to her aid. She continued:

Some men never grow up. But my Chip never had a childhood. While the rest of us were
still in high school, as a seventeen-year-old he was in North Africa with Germans
shooting at him. The result was a man who had
no patience for silliness, and not
much of a sense of humor. As the expression goes, “he was all business!” He had a
reputation here as a good man. I have never heard anyone say that he ever broke his
word or cheated anyone in a business deal.

He was a loving father to our three boys. Despite his background, or perhaps because
of it, he could never muster up the courage to spank any of them, not even once!
Of all people, I was stuck in the role of being the disciplinarian! He always defended
the boys when he thought it important.

In 1965, Andy was playing high school football. He was small-boned like me, so I'm
afraid he really wasn't much of a player. His coach was Willis Freeman, an imposing
man of maybe 250 pounds. His wife had left him some time before. He was an unhappy
person, and he was quite abusive to the team, physically and mentally. You could
get away with that in 1965, when paddling and such were still going on in schools
around here. Sometimes he would hit the players and push them around. Once at a game,
he berated our son along the sidelines and actually smacked him in the face, nearly
knocking him down. I couldn't believe it. I climbed down the bleachers to the fence
and yelled at the coach in my usual fiery way. Other fans were also upset. But Chip
just sat in the stands. The game kept going and it passed, or so I thought.

The following Monday, unknown to me, my husband was waiting for the coach in his
office after practice. Andy rode home with friends and so had no idea what went on
until Johnny Duncan, whose family is still close to us, told us about it. Johnny
had lingered to talk to the coach about not wanting to play left guard or center
. . . I have no idea about football. The sense of what he said follows.

The coach had a spacious office under the stands. He evidently had no idea why Chip
came to see him. The two sat, and the coach asked what he wanted.

Chip was direct, as always. “I noticed that you slugged Andy during the game on Friday.”

“Yes, Mr. Wiley. These boys need discipline. I believe in giving it to them.”