The Camp Follower

By John Reilly Taylor

The Camp Follower recounts the life of the author John Reilly Taylor, who grew up in the aftermath of World War II as the son of a US Army Officer. In his travels, he witnessed the reconstruction effort in post-war Europe, and the US support of pre-war South Vietnam. His father retained his position as a US Army officer after the war, and was assigned several assignments including SHAPE which became NATO. These assignments required that the family relocate to countries all over Europe. John shares his adventures travelling around Europe, as well as later when his father was assigned to Viet Nam. During that period, he travelled throughout Asia by himself in his teenage years. John's experiences through his adolescence were spent in strange environments far from home, lands harrowed by the aftermath of the most horrendous war in history. In his last assignment before retirement, his father became the Comptroller for the US Military assistance group in South Vietnam. This is the background for John Reilly Taylor's youth, in which he chronicles his autobiography, The Camp Follower.

During the Second World War, approximately 71 million people died on all sides of the conflict, entire cities were flattened, their populaces decimated and dispossessed. Taylor grew up in this environment, as the child of a US military officer; he bore witness of the reconstruction efforts in postwar Europe as his father was posted in NATO bases across the continent. He would also see firsthand America's support of the South Vietnamese government before the Southeast Asian region was plunged in war once more. His youth was a pseudo-nomadic one, as he hopped from city to city, continent to continent. He would continue this pattern in his adulthood, becoming a Comptroller for the US military assistance group in South Vietnam. It would be no exaggeration to say that his life was one of adventure, a firsthand account of exotic locales from a seasoned traveler who began journeying at an early age. Taylor was able to travel throughout Asia by himself in his teens, in a time before backpacking became fashionable, before the age of satellite phones, GPS and the internet.

The Camp Follower is a sophisticated book that recounts the experience of a traveler, the sights of the European reconstruction, and the affairs of a military family sent overseas due to a father's duty to his nation. Those seeking not only to venture into another place, but also another time, will find Taylor's true story to be an engaging reading experience full of insights into issues that would shape the modern world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469159089

John Reilly Taylor

7th Infantry 6th Army SHAPE 18th Airborne MAAG Division Corps Viet Nam Combat Units Imagine growing up into your late teenage years thrown into a strange environment surrounded by the aftermath of the most horrendous war in history. Approximately seventy one million people died on all sides and the war caused the largest historical property damage. John Taylor grew up in that environment. He was an eyewitness to the rebuilding effort in postwar Europe; and the US support of the government of South Viet Nam in pre-war Viet Nam. He also lived in different areas in the US. In Europe he and his family lived in five cities in three countries in four years. His father, an Army officer, had assignments originating from some of the financial procedures for the establishment of NATO in Mediterranean countries, as well as acting as the Comptroller for the US military assistance group in Viet Nam. His father was the first Finance Officer to be qualified as an airborne parachutist. This story follows the life of John during his adventures travelling around the world and is a biographical account of his family including his father’s career. In John’s later teenage years he had the experience of travelling throughout Asia by himself. His last experiences in the story were his experiences on John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row in Monterey California during the late fifties.

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Copyright © 2012 by John Reilly Taylor.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012901612

ISBN: Hardcover: 978-1-4691-5907-2

Softcover: 978-1-4691-4631-7

Ebook: 978-1-4691-5908-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Table of Contents

The Beginning

Seventh Infantry Division

Ashford Army General Hospital

Sixth Army

Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe

Army Audit Agency

Eighteenth Airborne Corps

MAAG Viet-Nam

Going Home

At Home

The Return to Monterey

Dedicated to:

My parents

Edward W. and Kathleen E. Taylor

whose participation in my life made this possible

and

Margaret Martin and Chez Fonseca

Whose dogged participation made me get off my ass and write it.

THE BEGINNING

It was 2002, I was sixty-one years old, lying on a gurney in the local hospital’s intensive care unit, after riding in an ambulance, with a doctor telling me that I had twenty minutes to live unless I was injected with a blood thinner called a clot buster; and it was successful. Of course, he also pointed out that the clot buster could dissolve the clot and still cause my death. Well, it looked like I had twenty minutes or less to live. I agreed to have the clot buster and here I am, still breathing. I spent the next four days connected to a bunch of tubes unable to get out of bed. Eventually the hospital had its own TV station because I could only get one station with a movie. They played the war movie Midway continuously 24 hours a day for the four days I was incarcerated in that bed. I finally got to the point where I was rooting for the Japanese because nobody could be as stupid as Charlton Heston crashing into the edge of the aircraft carrier over and over, approximately forty-eight times during my incarceration. I don’t even understand why he wanted to save that busted up plane after it had been shot up that badly. While I was lying in bed I was thinking what a unique youth I had. This was, of course, intensified by the war movie playing 24 hours a day in the background. I’m an army brat who spent most of his childhood and formative years living in foreign places for short periods of time.

Being an army brat in itself is not that detrimental to your growing into a useful member of society. In my case, I was exposed to further unusual circumstances because of the nature of my father’s job. It seems that dad was always on temporary duty assignments in various parts of the world. I can’t say that dad and I ever really got along, he was always the colonel and I was always the private. That wasn’t just my situation; it seemed to be relevant with my friends too. One of my peers whose father was a Brigadier General got treated no better than his father’s enlisted orderly. I don’t even think that these men were aware that they were doing this because the military code was so prevalent in their lives. I don’t think that dad and I had any idea that we had warm feelings for each other until he was retired and in the latter part of his life.

I’m kind of fatalistic about life since I’ve faced death at least four other times during my lifetime. That being said, I have never been to war, or even a soldier; although the first eighteen years of my life were centered about living in war zones either after a major conflict, or before one.

This story is about the unseen people who have special personal relationships with the countries warriors and who remain outside of the public eye, but do contribute to the health of the armed forces. In other words, we are the Camp Followers. I’m sure that since the time of the ancient Greeks and the Roman Empire things have been the same. Now I’m sure that the camp followers of yesteryear had more problems then we have today considering their modes of transportation. In ancient times, the biggest problem is that we, the women and children, were considered expendable. I can just imagine myself trying to keep up behind the column of the Roman Legions in the dust and dirt and getting scraps of food from the soldiers after they had finished their meal. I was much better off.

With the modern day camp follower, we really don’t have to follow that much, although we did follow my father moving to France, Italy and Vietnam. That was probably because peace had just broken out and things were still being organized. Most people would think of this as a romantic lifestyle. Well I guess it would be if you considered moving every couple of years to places outside your culture with the inherent problems of a new language, changing schools and moving into another house that you have never seen. You are not even sure if the house is even adequate for your needs. That combined with the fact that you are commandeering someone else’s property, who probably had nothing to do with the war or politics seems irresponsible.

Living conditions have improved in the U.S. forces since I was growing up. Military pay is much better than it was during the forties and fifties, which gives at least the officers the opportunity to find decent housing on a base or in the adjoining community. Outside the U.S. American dependent communities have grown around unit headquarters and contain the American environment. In the final analysis there is a special aura surrounding a military brat that’s hard to get away from.

My family lived a fantastic life from the end of the Second World War to 1960. Not only did we travel and live in two-thirds of the world but dad worked for all of the top military leaders that the U.S. produced during the Second World War years. If there were bombed out buildings or guerrilla skirmishes, we probably lived there. This story is of my youth and the unusual experiences I have had, coupled with my father’s biographical experiences after dedicating twenty years of his life to the military and the country.

During my adult life I have told anecdotal stories to my friends during conversations and they all responded to the stories telling me that I should write a book. My mother was told the same thing when she was alive. My father didn’t have to consider writing because he was the lead actor in our family’s saga. Dad stayed in the service after the Second World War and had the most unusual assignments, which kept him traveling. The normal army officer gets a peacetime assignment and stays there for approximately three years as a natural rotation, not us. My father was always on temporary duty assignment during the years he worked for SHAPE and its client NATO. He was either in Paris, or London, or Heidelberg, or Athens, or Istanbul, or Naples, or toward the end of his career before retirement, Vietnam. We, the rest of the family lived in Germany, France, Italy and Vietnam, as well as the US. We did stay in Europe for over three years just like a normal assignment, but we hardly ever saw dad. After the European experience came Vietnam before that war started. Since Vietnam was considered in harms way the tour assignments were limited to twelve months. Dad spent two tours there.

There is one other person that I am writing this for and that is my longtime friend Kalisa of Cannery Row fame. I made her a promise that I would write about my experiences on Cannery Row during the years of the late fifties and the early sixties. I agreed to do this at the celebration of her restaurant’s fiftieth anniversary on Cannery Row. I really don’t know how she stayed in business that long. She never reached any great economic success in those fifty years, but she did survive. In the late fifties Cannery Row had not really changed since the days when John Steinbeck had written about it and it was far from being commercialized. Unfortunately, Kalisa passed away in 2009, but I do want to fulfill my promise to her.

My mother can’t be forgotten; she was the anchor point of the family and had to put up with all the crap that dad’s career dished out. Mom was a middle class housewife who was satisfied with cooking and the other housework. She was a bit self-conscious which limited her comfort level when it came to things she was expected to do as a field grade officer’s wife in the Army. She hated receiving lines, woman’s clubs’, playing bridge and almost anything else that she was expected to do commensurate with dad’s rank. She loved to entertain the people she considered friends. If she didn’t like you, you simply didn’t exist. I remember once in Paris when she was angry the day after a party because she had to accompany dad to a cocktail party given by Field Marshall Montgomery. Montgomery was not the most likeable person; as a matter of fact he was an asshole. Just ask Patton, who was probably an asshole too. Now Montgomery was a teetotaler, so he served ice cream instead of booze at his parties. So here was mom riding across Paris with dad driving while she was trying to think of an acceptable excuse so dad could turn the car around and go home. Then she had to put up with the torture of the receiving line, chatting with people she didn’t know and couldn’t even get a goddamn drink.

Mom had an iron will. Her lifestyle included loneliness, single parenting, constantly moving, long distance friendships, the lack of family close by, a very limited budget and the effects of life in various foreign cultures. She began to rely on alcohol as an escape. A great many military wives take that route to dull the pain of their environment. She also smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, which was normal for the times. After dad retired from the service, she quit her 50-year-old habit of smoking cigarettes cold turkey, and moderated her drinking to the point where she would only have one screwdriver at social functions. The amazing thing is that she did not rely on supplements or outside influences to do those things. She did it cold turkey. I remember one instance before I quit smoking that we were sitting together after a dinner. It had been thirty years since she quit smoking and she looked at me and said that cigarette smells so goddamn good. Mom and her mom only swore if it was a last resort to get their point across during the conversation.

Dad’s specialty was finance, which is one of the smallest corps in the Army, so there was a continuing need for this specialty. The finance corps would not be a good choice for someone with the ambition of reaching the General’s Corps. One of the potential advantages of finance is that when you became a field grade officer, Major or above, you were always in a staff position and more than likely report to the commanding general or his executive officer. The infantry and the other specialties, on the other hand, had a surplus of manpower for the standing army after the war, so the Army rotated most of the men back into civilian life. The small size of the Finance Corps also insured that dad would graduate into more responsible positions as his experience increased. It also meant that peacetime promotions would be slow in coming since the officers of the corps were approximately the same age. Army promotions are kind of like baseball, three strikes and you’re out. Dad was passed over twice for promotion to Brigadier General and since he had twenty years of service, he was retired. Throughout his career his assignments ranged from finance officer for the Seventh Infantry Division during the Pacific Campaign of the Second World War to the Comptroller of the Military Assistance Advisory Group, Vietnam; prior to the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

One of the things that I found out from dad was that the Army was on a cash basis. Once a month accompanied by military police several millions of dollars in cash were deposited in the paymaster’s safe, which was a lot of money in the forties and fifties. In the case of the Presidio of San Francisco, home of the Sixth Army, in the late forties, it was six million dollars a month. It was then handed out to the troops and I suppose the vendors under contract with the military base. Of course this didn’t apply to capital expenditures.

Our family background is nothing unusual. I’m half Irish, a quarter Portuguese and a quarter mutt. As with most families there was half of the family that we were very close to and the other half not so much. My paternal grandmother was Portuguese; her parents had a ranch in the San Francisco Bay Area in what is now known as the City of San Leandro. Her father jumped ship in San Francisco Bay in 1896 or around there, so I guess you would have to consider him an illegal alien by today’s standards. I never met him. Anyway he acquired land in what is now San Leandro and built it into a ranch. As a matter of fact one of my distant relatives lives in the ranch house today. Of course it had to be moved and renovated sometime in the past. I think her mother emigrated from the Azores. Hard to tell, she never learned English and I could never understand what she was saying. My paternal grandfather was Pennsylvania Dutch, which