Whistle (49 page)

The physical jobs the 3516th would be performing in combat were loading and unloading five-gallon gas cans from high-bedded two-and-a-half-ton GI Army trucks. The beds of the two-and-a-half-tonners were about the height of an average man’s shoulder. Each truck carried one “bay” of 125 cans. Speed in loading or unloading was considered essential. For two men to load or unload a bay of empty cans was not a difficult physical feat. But for four men to load and unload a full bay of 125 cans full of gas (or water, during their first practice sessions) was no mean feat at all. And to do it all day long, six times, eight, ten, twelve times, was more than most well men could handle. To think the hospital cripples who had been siphoned off to this outfit could do it was ridiculous. Most of the men who had come down from the infantry division after its physical exam found it just about impossible. To send all these same men through the infantry training exercises of basic training was doubly ridiculous. No one knew where the order originated.

The complaints about the basic training came to a kind of a head near the end of Landers’ third week in it. It was a night training exercise. And of course it was raining. Not a hard rain, but a steady uncomfortable cold drizzle. Landers could imagine some Plans & Training colonel with a nice big Scotch and soda in hand sitting at his warm desk in his warm office, and saying in his deep, manly, tough voice what a good thing it would be for the men, the rain. Teach them more about what it would be like in France.

The exercise was the old live-fire exercise. It was designed to show green men what it was really like to be under fire. To this end seven or eight machineguns were set up on a small bluff, their barrel ends wedged between stakes and two-by-four crosspieces so they could neither elevate nor depress nor traverse. Behind these, machinegun crews were to fire tracer ammo off across a low area. The trainees (that was Landers and company) were to crawl across the valley to the bluff, the MG fire sparkling with tracers every five rounds four feet over their heads.

Landers did not know who began the protest. But ten yards from the bluff, where they were supposed to stop, the man on Landers’ right leaned toward him in the rain and shouted at his ear in the racket of fire pouring over their heads, “Look at here!” In his right hand was a rock, about the size and heft of a hand grenade.

In the near dark, lit eerily and unevenly by the burning tracers overhead, Landers after a moment recognized him as the man from Italy with the ruined calf. His face and uniform were covered with the mud, and the piece cradled in his arms was going to take hours of cleaning. The man from Italy grinned and made a gesture with the rock as if chucking a grenade at the MGs.

They had arrived at the end line among the first, and had nothing to do until those behind crawled up to them. Landers looked around him and saw that the ground was strewn with the grenadelike rocks. Plenty for all. Landers did not know whether the idea had come from the right of the line, or the man from Italy had thought of it. He seized a rock for himself and shouted at the man on his left, made the same gesture of chucking a grenade. The man nodded happily and turned to pass the word.

In two minutes each man of the forward end line was lobbing his grenade-like rock over and up at the bluff line of firing MGs. As men crawled up singly through the mud of the little valley in the dark, they were incited to join in.

At first there was no appreciable effect from the line of machine-guns. Then the throwers began to repeat, concentrating their lobs on the seven or eight MG positions. They were easy enough to see in the dark, with the tracers spouting from them. There were some squawks of dismay from the little bluff, and strings of cursing which could be heard but were not readable in the noise of the fire. In the pauses in the firing a clank or two was heard, as if a rock had hit metal: an MG receiver or a helmet. Then there was one loud shout of consternation from the bluff, and in half a minute three loud blasts of a whistle came from behind the crawlers where the officer commanding them was placed with his radio. The exercise was over, called off before half of the men had completed the crawl. When they climbed up the bluff, they found one of the machinegunners had had his jaw broken when hit in the face with a rock. There was a lot of cursing and grumbling and complaining up on the little hill.

For Landers it had been a wild, bizarre, eerie scene: the crippled, muddy veterans of the Pacific from Lae, Guadalcanal, New Georgia, the European vets and survivors of Sicily, Salerno, Naples, lobbing grenade-sized rocks into the line of their own fixed machineguns manned by their own green men. Landers had not expected or thought about someone getting seriously hurt. He was not so sure about some of the others. When he climbed muddily up the bluff in the cold drizzle, shaking with cold, and watched the injured man for all the world like an injury in a football game being walked away by medics with flashlights, Landers had already made up his mind about applying to the new orderly room for an assistant clerk’s job. Any job.

There was a minimal investigation of the incident. But nothing came of it. The men looked at each other with wide, innocent eyes. No one knew who had thrown any rocks. No one had seen any rocks thrown. Nobody was prosecuted. The investigation died of malnutrition. The basic training schedule continued. The next time a live-fire exercise was laid on, it was placed in a terrain where no rocks or stones or other debris littered the ground. Just mud and grass.

Landers applied for the job by presenting himself at the orderly room and asking for it. “My God!” Prevor said, overhearing, and coming to his own office door, “do you know something about clerking?” Landers nodded. He said he had run an entire infantry company on New Georgia. “Service records? Morning report? Sick book?” Prevor asked. Landers nodded. “Come on in here,” Prevor said, and shut the door to his office behind them. Outside, his acting 1st/sgt and clerk were sitting with their heads down.

A batch of morning reports had come back from Second Army Hq as unacceptable. They had been improperly completed and would have to be done over. Prevor grimaced. “My damned 1st/sgt doesn’t know what’s wrong with them.” The sheaf comprised the first two weeks of the company’s existence and that meant almost certainly that other batches would be following them, to be done over also. The sick book was in a like state, perhaps worse. It was being sent back almost every day, though the doctors were actually taking care of the men who reported sick. “They more or less have to,” Prevor said. “We’ve got more men on sick report almost, than we have for duty.”

The service records were a different matter. Prevor launched into that. None of them had been completed with the remarks of transfer. The 1st/sgt and the clerk were both afraid to touch them. One mistaken entry on a service record could require a week’s work to straighten out. “And the first payroll is coming up soon,” Prevor said. “Without properly completed service records we can’t make out the payroll.”

Landers nodded. Then after a moment he thought to rub his hands together briskly, like a man ready to go to work. The office was pleasantly warm, and a pot of coffee was heating on a hot plate in the corner. It was one hell of a lot better than going through old-hat basic training exercises out in the cold rain.

“Have you got enough experience?” Prevor said. “To straighten these things out?”

Landers nodded. “Yes, sir.” A picture of Winch’s long thin leather morning report book on New Georgia came into his mind. Winch always had it with him in his musette, up on the line. The mahogany leather cover was smeared with mud and so were some of the pages. But it was always correctly filled out and the drills Winch had put him through on it, so Winch would not have to do the job when they were back in bivouac, had been many and harsh. A sick book was about the simplest form there was, only a moron could fuck it up. Service record remarks he had been trained in by both Winch and the regimental S-1 sgt/maj. “Yes, sir. I can do them all. But I’ve never done a first payroll off the service records.”

“Never mind that,” Prevor snapped. “If you can do the others, there’s a sergeancy in it for you.”

It took a week. Landers asked for a new book of blank morning report forms and a new sick book. He got up in the freezing dark with the troops, but while they were bitching and getting into cold field uniforms, he dressed in his garrison ODs. He ate in the freezing cold kitchen messhall with them, but when they went off to freezing training formations, he reported to the warm orderly room, with its pot of coffee on the hot plate. It seemed the greatest of luxuries.

While he was working on the old morning reports, others came in from Second Army to be redone also. When he had time to spare from that, he worked on the unacceptable sick book sheets bringing them up to date, and at the same time doing each day’s new sick book entry correctly for the clerk. When he had a spare moment, and in the evenings when he could be alone, he worked on the service records remarks, which required such absolute accuracy. After supper he worked alone in the lighted orderly room, which was the only warm place in the company area anyhow. Landers didn’t mind it at all. Every so often Prevor would stop by late, to compliment him and see how he was coming along.

By the time ten days had passed he was running the company for Prevor. Just as he had run the old company. (God love them, God help them, wherever they were, he added quickly with a pang of guilt.) Except that now he was functioning as 1st/sgt too, doing the 1st/sgt’s fatigue rosters, and training rosters, and plotting out the basic training schedules for the various sections.

“Do you think you could handle the payroll, too?” Prevor asked him one night. “We’ve got to have it in in three days’ time, or they’ll redline the entire payroll. And nobody will get paid.”

Redline. A red line of ink through a soldier’s name on the payroll, because of a mistake in his line on the roll, or in the remarks under his name, was just about the cardinal sin in the Army. It meant the soldier did not get his pay that month.

“I’ll try it for you,” Landers said. “But I told you, I’ve never done a payroll directly off the service records. I always had a previous payroll roster to work from.”

“If you can do it, by God,” Prevor said fervently, “you’ll have your sergeancy before the next month is out. And as soon as I can swing it on the T.O., I’ll get you a rocker and staff sergeancy to go with it. If I have to put you down as a section leader, by God.”

“Frankly, I don’t want any goddamned rating, Lieutenant,” Landers said, and stared at him. “Quite frankly, I’ve made up my mind that I don’t ever want another rating in this shitty miserable Army.”

Prevor stared back at him a moment. “Well,” he said, “
I
want it. And
I’m
going to give it to you. So you’re going to have to take it.”

Landers looked away, back at the service record he was working on. “Well, you had better understand that I don’t believe in this Army any more, and I don’t believe in this country any more, either, and I don’t believe in this race that you and I happen to have been born members of. Fucking
human
race. I don’t like it, and I don’t give a shit for it, and I don’t believe in it.”

Prevor did not answer for a long moment. Then he said, “Never mind that. You get this payroll out for me, and you’re a staff sergeant. I don’t want to break my cadre. I can’t do that to them. They care too much, and it would ruin them. Anyway they’ll be all right, after they get worked in.”

Landers nodded, in support of the sentiment. “I respect that.” But then he shook his head, against the opinion. “But they won’t be all right. Unless I teach them. I could teach them, if you want. I know a pretty good bit about supply and about mess. I could work with them all, if you want me to.”

Prevor’s Mongolian eyes opened wide. “Would you really do that?”

Landers nodded. “Sure. Anyway I don’t want their fucking jobs. I just don’t want to go through basic training, and I don’t want to be cold.”

“I can certainly promise you both of those,” Prevor said, with a grin. “But you’re also going to have that rating, Landers. If I have to run shorthanded a section sergeant in one section.”

Landers smiled. “Besides, it would make you look bad up at Second Army Command, if you fired your cadre.”

Prevor gave him a peculiar look. “Yes, it would,” he said simply. He turned away, but then, with a spur-of-the-moment gesture, turned back. “The truth is, I
can’t
fire them. They’re Second Army Command men. I fire them, I lose this company. Like a shot.”

“You’ll have to give me a place where I can work around the clock, and not be disturbed,” Landers said. “I won’t be able to do the daily sick book and morning report.”

“We’ll take care of that. And you can have my office here,” Prevor said. Then, hesitantly, he stuck out his hand.

Landers took it, without much enthusiasm. “It looks to me like somebody up at Second Army is trying especially hard to do you in. Is it because you’re a Jew?”

Prevor didn’t answer for a moment, and it looked as if he wasn’t going to answer. He made a shrug, a very Jewish shrug, and then a rueful grin. “That’s what it is, all right,” he said finally.

“Well, we’ll see,” Landers said. “But I won’t guarantee that a few men won’t get redlined.”

It took the full three days to do it. Landers worked two whole nights and the three full days without sleep, to get it done, and on the third night between half-hour snatches of sleep spent most of the night going over it and proofreading. The next morning he submitted it, all properly signed and initialed by Prevor. Two days later it was back, all properly okayed, and the company was paid. Not one man was redlined.

You could walk out anywhere on any parade-ground street and stop a soldier and tell him you had just completed a forty-page first payroll directly off the service records without getting a man red-lined, and the soldier would nod without comprehension and give you a nervous, puzzled smile. The only words he would really hear would be the words
no redlines.
Very few people knew the amount of work that went into even an ordinary everyday payroll. The Finance Office allowed not even the slightest deviation. No strikeovers, no erasures, even a bad smudge of a single letter or serial number numeral would cause the unfortunate soldier whose name it appeared in, or after, to be redlined. And Landers had been working with blocks of six to eight lines of remarks under each entry’s name, taken directly from the service record.