The Good Life (8 page)

Basic training was our first stop before being shipped over to Europe and into battle. I was sent to Fort Dix, New Jersey, and from there to Little Rock, Arkansas, for a six-week stint at Fort Robinson. Everything you’ve ever heard about boot camp is true, only worse. I was in training to be an infantry rifleman and, man, was it tough. They’d send us out on bivouacs, mock-battle training missions that consisted of endless marches through wild terrain and muddy trails. These exercises were supposed to break us in for the rigors of battle. They called it “good training,” but from what I could tell it was really an opportunity for officers to brutalize us and break our spirit. They treated us like animals. I began to have a really hard time with the whole military philosophy. From top to bottom, it went against every single thing I believed in.

The biggest shock was the level of bigotry I encountered as soon as I arrived. Unfortunately that never changed much while I was in the army, but I certainly wasn’t prepared for it to begin in boot camp. Our sergeant was an old-fashioned southern bigot, and he had it in for me right from the start because I was an Italian from New York City. I wasn’t the only one who experienced prejudice—it was just as bad for other ethnic groups, especially the Blacks and Jews. I had a good friend from back home, Chet Amsterdam, a fine bass player and a wonderful guy. But because he was Jewish those bigots constantly gave him a hard time. I like to think they were particularly
jealous because be was so good-looking—a dead ringer for Marlon Brando—and that was just too much for those guys to take. They’d pick fights with him on the smallest pretense. But he wouldn’t let them get away with it, and he always defended himself. Sadly, I saw many such incidents repeated throughout my time in the war.

I stuck up for myself too, although maybe it wasn’t always in my best interest. Our sergeant was always on my case. He’d scream at me, “Benedetto! You’re always late!” and accuse me of not being able to keep time while I was marching. Once during a bivouac mission he grabbed his crop and started hitting the top of my helmet with it and screaming at me. Well, that was it for me. I took my knapsack off and threw it into the nearby field and walked the seven miles back to camp alone. For that little rebellion I was put on KP (kitchen police) duty for a solid month (an awful job for even a
day)
, in addition to being assigned the job of cleaning the company’s Browning automatic rifles (BARs), which were extremely difficult to clean. Each rifle carried thirty-five bullets, and when they were fired, the gunpowder soiled the hammer, a small piece of metal about the size of a dime. It took forty-five minutes to clean just one hammer, and the sergeant gave me fifteen at a time. Everybody else got to go into town on the weekends for R and R, but I was virtually imprisoned in the barracks. Between KP duty, BAR-cleaning duty, and regular basic training, there was little time left to me for rest and relaxation.

When I was finally given permission to go on leave, I went home to Astoria, and by the time I got to my house I was so exhausted I fell onto the floor in a dead faint when my mother opened the door. The combination of the abuse I’d taken at boot camp and the intense emotions I felt upon seeing my family were just too much for me. My mother revived
me, but I really gave everybody quite a scare. Needless to say no one was excited about my going back to boot camp, least of all me, but of course I had no choice, and two days later I went back. Everybody got a furlough after six weeks of basic training, so when my training was over, I went home again and waited to be called up. I was to be sent with a group of other replacement troops to Germany.

The fighting in Europe had been fierce for months. When the German and British armies suffered severe losses in battle, they withdrew entire divisions of soldiers, but the Americans replaced individual soldiers in order to continuously replenish the unit. The U.S. Army felt that the replacements could simply join the veterans on the field and be taught firsthand the rules of combat and the tricks of survival. It was an unrealistic assumption, since in the heat of battle there was rarely time to teach the replacements anything. Many of the replacement troops had inadequate training, no combat experience, and—unbelievably—some had never even fired a gun. It was a disastrous situation, but those were desperate times, and I guess the U.S. Army felt they had no choice. The majority of the men in the campaigns of 1944—45 were, like myself, individual replacement troops.

Most replacement troops were sent to the port city of Le Havre, France, ultimately to be deployed to other destinations in Europe. That’s where I was shipped off to after basic training, and that’s where I had my next shocking experience. When I arrived in Le Havre, I was sent, along with my fellow replacement soldiers, straight to a replacement depot, unaffectionately referred to by the troops as the “repple depple,” essentially a holding area for the newly arrived. We were all total strangers. None of us had trained together, since we had all been pulled from different divisions, and there was no time to get to know anybody in the few days before they herded us
up and shipped us out. We arrived alone, we were trained—if at all—alone, and soon, as groups of strangers, we would be shipped together to the front.

I hated the repple depple system. We all did. It was demoralizing, impersonal, and terribly lonely—although fast friendships and a keen sense of camaraderie would soon develop. Here we were, all these eighteen-to twenty-year-old kids who had just recently been at home with our families, suddenly thrust into a completely alien and terrifying environment with not even a friend to commiserate with.

Of course, what happened to me was typical of what happened to most replacement troops in the final year of the war. The American army had suffered so many casualties it simply became a matter of maintaining a flow of warm bodies through the system to repopulate the depleted divisions, no matter how ill-equipped we were for combat. More than half of the replacement soldiers became casualties within the first three days on the front line. Unfamiliar with combat, and unable to be broken in by exhausted veterans, many replacements had no idea what to do, so they stuck together and died together. Anybody who thinks that war is romantic obviously hasn’t gone through one. Actually the war comedies like
M*A*S*H
and
Catch-22
are probably a more accurate depiction of war than the “guts and glory” films, because they show how pathetic the whole enterprise is.

I was assigned to the Seventh Army, 63rd Infantry Division of the 255th Regiment, G Company. We were loaded into army trucks and made our way east across France during the harsh winter months of January and February 1945. By March, we had entered Germany. We all went straight to the front line. It became evident upon our arrival that our basic training
was just that; nothing could have prepared us for what was in store.

The Battle of the Bulge had just taken place in France over the fall and winter of 1944. The Germans had been retreating since the invasion of Normandy in June, and by all accounts it seemed as if Hitler were on the verge of surrendering. But Hitler refused to listen to the advice of his generals and sent all of his resources to the front line in the Ardennes in a last-ditch effort to prevent the Americans from crossing the Rhine River and occupying Germany. Fierce battles broke out along the front line. Hitler sacrificed everything in this final push, but the Americans refused to give in. The Allies eventually broke through the lines and crossed the Rhine, the Germans once again retreated, and the Battle of the Bulge came to an end. We then replaced the exhausted and battered American troops.

It was such a horror to see the veteran soldiers returning from the front mourning the friends they’d left behind on the battlefield, victorious in battle yet defeated in spirit. I immediately felt the weight of their sorrow. They seemed to me to suffer from what we now call survivor’s guilt. I remember there was this one kid named J.R. who’d been killed before I arrived, and all the older troops kept talking about him. He must have been very special. Everybody seemed affected by his death. It’s as if he represented the entire tragic reality of war. They just kept asking, “How the hell could he have died? How could a kid like that just disappear?” They couldn’t get over it. They acted as if they would rather have died instead.

The winter months were rough. Snow covered the ground, and the front was a front-row seat in hell. It was an absolutely terrifying spectacle: air battles raging above me, with the roar of the airplane engines and the swirling sound of bombs; and artillery battles all around me, with shells bursting everywhere. I watched as my buddies died right before my eyes. All
I could think of was, “When am I gonna get it?” No less than General Patton once woke us up at four
AM
and gave us a speech, saying: “Now listen up! Forget your mothers and everything else you’ve ever known! You’re going up to the line.” That was because we were all just teenagers, kids really. Can you imagine saying that—“Forget your mothers!”—to a bunch of terrified kids?

What we were most afraid of were the eighty-eight-millimeter cannons that the Germans used. Those eighty-eights would come whistling right down on us. What a nightmare. Shrapnel flew and hot metal strafed anyone in its path. The only protection we had on the front line was the foxhole. Every soldier had to dig himself a hole before he could go to sleep at night. Sometimes it took hours to dig through the frozen ground, and by the time you were done, you’d have only a few hours of sleep before you’d have to get up again. Once the holes were dug, we had to secure the surrounding area with booby traps and set up communications lines back to the command post. We ate cold or frozen food before going to bed. And all this after a fall day of marching or fighting. My first night on the line I had a terrifying experience. I finished digging my foxhole, but I was so exhausted I just passed out on the ground before I could even get into the hole. When I woke up, my face and body were completely covered with snow. I was really disoriented, and once I realized what had happened, I started to look around. Directly behind me was a tree, and embedded in the trunk was a huge piece of shrapnel, right above where I’d been sleeping. If I’d been just a few inches higher off the ground, I would have been killed that first night.

Nighttime was the worst. We couldn’t light any fires to keep warm; we couldn’t even light a cigarette, because the glow would be detected by the Germans and give away our
position. The winter nights were brutally cold, and sometimes they would last sixteen hours—sixteen hours of lying underground in a foxhole, alone, watching and listening for the enemy. I learned the rules of the front line pretty quickly: don’t move. Someone is watching. Stay in your hole whenever you can. It was just awful. The whole thing was a big, tragic joke: the Germans were hiding from us, and we were hiding from them. Sometimes we were close enough to hear the Germans talking to each other. They must have been able to hear us too, but neither of us wanted to make a move unless we had to. Nobody wanted to get hurt. Everybody just wanted to stay alive.

Incredibly, there were some guys who actually enjoyed the war. There was one private who couldn’t wait to kill Germans. He just lived to fight and kill. The rest of us would be completely exhausted from fighting all day and he’d say “I want this war to end sooner than later, so you guys stay here, I’m going out!” It was really spooky. We’d all look at one another and think, “What’s with this guy?” He used to take his BAR and go out looking for soldiers in the trees. We all tried to stay away from him as much as possible.

Most nights we’d be awakened by the bombs that were going off around us. On the front line we’d see dead soldiers, dead horses, and big holes in the ground where bombs had exploded. To me, it’s a joke that they make “horror” movies about things like Dracula and Godzilla and they make “adventure” movies about war. War is far more horrifying than anything anyone could ever dream up.

We’d crossed the Rhine at the end of March, successfully occupying Germany and driving back the German army, but there were still German soldiers who were holding out until the absolute bitter end, defending the small towns and outposts along our path. Our job was to flush out the Germans,
either fighting house to house against the remaining Germans or by taking them prisoner. We did this in town after town. We checked each house from top to bottom, and once we were sure the house was clean and abandoned, wed bunk for the night in the cellar, first checking around for any traps the enemy might have left for us. One particularly terrifying incident happened to me shortly before the fighting stopped. We were moving through a small German town. On our first day checking out a house I was standing in front of a window when one of the older soldiers tackled me. I had no idea why, until he told me that to even walk in front of a window could mean instant death; there might be a German sniper watching, waiting to pick you off.

G Company’s numbers had been severely depleted, and there were only myself and a few other men left when we were passing through a town on our way to meet up with the rest of the 63rd Division. One of the remaining men was Herbert Black, a fellow I’d met when I joined G Company and with whom I became fast friends. Suddenly a German tank came out of nowhere, and we were under attack. “Blackie,” as we called him, was the only man among us with any sort of usable ammunition left. He was in charge of the bazooka, and as he was getting ready to fire it, he yelled, “You’d better get down, Tony because I’m going to let this thing fly, and it’s gonna be either us or them!” With that he fired the missile, scoring a direct hit and disabling the German tank and saving our lives. It all happened in an instant. Blackie was awarded the Silver Star for his quick thinking and bravery, and I’ll forever be in his debt for saving my life.