Nobody yet Knows Who I Am: A Personal History: 1943-1953

By Robert Ayres Carter

Nobody Yet Knows Who I Am: A Personal History: 1943 - 1953 is the second volume in Robert Ayres Carters memoir. The first volume, Sundays Child, was published in 2005 by Xlibris. This volume opens with the authors military service as an enlisted man in the United States Army in World War II, highlighted by a tour of duty in the China- Burma Theater. Returning to the States in 1946, Mr. Carters story then resumes with his career as a book salesman, a student in New York City, a Fulbright Scholar at the Sorbonne in Paris, and as an Instructor of French at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. The book closes in 1953, with Mr. Carter once again back in New York City, this time determined on a career as a professional writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 30, 2007
• ISBN: 9781469123981

Robert Ayres Carter

ROBERT AYRES CARTER is a widely published and versatile writer of fiction and non-fiction, as well as a poet and playwright. He has written several books on publishing topics, the novel Manhattan Primitive, and two mystery novels: Casual Slaughters and Final Edit. He is also the author of a biography, Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man Behind the Legend, and a two volumes of memoirs: Sunday’s Child: Memories of a Midwestern Boyhood; and Nobody Yet Knows Who I Am: A Personal History: 1943-1953. A native Midwesterner, he now lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife Reade Johnson and their mixed-breed rescue dog Rolfe.

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Copyright © 2007 by Robert Ayres Carter.

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To the memory of my father and mother,

George Whitfield Carter, Jr., and

Zeta Hart Carter, and my brother,

George Whitfield Carter, III,

this book is lovingly dedicated.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Kilroy was here.

—GI graffiti

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,

1884 Memorial Day Address

Contents

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Introduction

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Epilogue

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book is a continuation of my memoir Sunday’s Child: Memories of a Midwestern Boyhood, but the reader need not be acquainted with that first volume to read this one; it is complete in itself.

I wish to be as truthful and as explicit in my treatment of various episodes in my life as possible, yet without injuring any living person, or the descendants of a deceased person. I have therefore changed the names of my lovers. When it comes to my wives, however, I have of course used their actual names.

Some readers may find my preoccupation with carnal desire excessive, not to say prurient. So be it. It would be dishonest of me to deny that love, and its handmaiden, sexual desire, was one of the two main driving forces of my life. The other was work, especially creative work, which this personal history will, I hope, demonstrate beyond any doubt.

—Robert Ayres Carter

March 17, 2006

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful, as always, to my wife and faithful first reader, Reade Johnson, for her invaluable editorial assistance.

I must also once again acknowledge the contributions of Gerald A. Wadsworth, for the design of my jacket cover. His work, as always, has been exceptional. As she did with the first volume of my memoirs, Sunday’s Child, Joan Losen, Librarian of the Christian Children’s Fund in Richmond, Virginia, has gone over the manuscript with her eagle eye and fateful red pen; any errors to be found in the book cannot be attributed to her; the author takes full responsibility.

My good friend Dr. James Scanlon, Professor Emeritus of History, Randolph-Macon College, was most helpful to me, with his invaluable suggestions and corrections on the final manuscript

My thanks, too, to my late brother Bud (George Whitfield Carter III), my brother Harry, and my sister Jo Ann Carter Parker, for their assistance in putting together some of my family’s history. I am also indebted to my good friends George Richard and Aaron Frankel for their contributions.

The three Newsreels in this volume, to highlight various aspects of World War II, are a device I have borrowed from John Dos Passos’ monumental work, USA; I hope his publisher will not mind the liberties I have taken with this useful encapsulation. The material in them comes from Yank magazine, the favorite reading material of GIs during the war.

Of the many writers I used as source material for this book, I am most deeply indebted to the literary scholar and critic Paul Fussell, whose books Wartime and The Boys’ Crusade are far and away the most revealing and devastating books written about World War II; no one reading them could ever again think of war, any war, even and perhaps especially World War II, as ennobling or, least of all, good.

I should also note that much of my research was greatly aided by Google, Yahoo, and ABEbooks. What would we authors of today do without the Internet?

—Robert Ayres Carter

Richmond, Virginia

August 23, 2006

INTRODUCTION

May 29, 2004: Washington, D.C.

missing image file

The author and his wife Reade Johnson

at the World War II Memorial, May 29, 2004.

I was here at last, on the Mall, walking through the newly dedicated World War II Memorial. My wife Reade was with me, but she was not the only one. Memories came flooding back to me in waves, as though I was leafing through an old photograph album, or rereading newspaper clippings yellowed with age. The faces of friends long lost to me, the living and the dead, were there with me.

During the Second World War, I served in the United States Army for three years, and in two theaters: the American and the China-Burma-India. In that time I met dozens of fellow GIs, a number of whom became close friends, although I lost touch with most of them over the years. This day, however, as I walked through the Memorial, I thought of Bates Lowry, who died in March of 2004, and his wife Isabel Lowry, who died the previous December—both dead of pneumonia, which seems almost too much of a coincidence to be true. They were my friends for a good sixty years. Now neither Bates nor Isabel would ever see the Memorial, nor could I write and tell them about it. Yes, I especially miss Bates. In the premedical program at the University of Chicago, he was our Long Tall Papa. The woman who was to become his wife was then Isabel Barrett, and dating Bill Wainwright, our Willie, Dr. William Howard Wainwright, a psychiatrist later on.

And I thought of all the others who were close to me in the Army Specialized Training Program. Eddie Ed-Eye Bredenburg, who took a lover away from me without a by-your-leave. Nor could I forget Dick Muller. We all called him Mouse because of his diminutive statue, but none of us was smarter or harder working. Those were my University of Chicago friends.

When I got to China in 1945, there was John Brantner, the Technical Sergeant who befriended me, a newly arrived PFC, and who shared his private barracks room with me. John came from Minneapolis, and when I was back in St. Paul, we met more than once, but somehow, sad to say, the camaraderie was not the same in Minneapolis as it had been in Kunming.

All these faces and names came back to me as I strolled through the Memorial—and strolled is the right word. The huge crowd there that morning made it impossible to rush through, thought I would not have wanted to hurry. I wanted to take it all in: the bronze eagles clutching wreaths in their talons, the pillars bearing the names of our states, territories, and the District of Columbia, the stones recognizing battles and theaters of action, the many quotations carved in stone from leaders like FDR, Harry Truman, and General MacArthur—and in the center of it all, the Reflecting Pool, with fountains spraying glittering plumes of water high in the air.

I was touched to see that people had already begun to leave mementos here and there: photographs, clippings, flowers, acknowledging someone who was there, but could no longer be here. I was wearing my China-Burma-India Veterans Association cap, complete with ribbons. I was approached by other CBIers who wanted to know: Were in the CBI were you? What outfit? Did you know so-and-so? Young people also stopped me and I was moved because they wanted to say thank you, or shake my hand. I was also glad to see so many children, along with the aging veterans like me, and a wide cross section of people, young and old, not all of them Americans, I’m sure, but all paying homage in one way or another to those of us who wore the uniform in World War II . . .

It’s been a long time coming, I said to Reade.

Yes, it has.

But it’s worth it. I’m glad I made it.

And now to go back to the spring of 1943, when it all began . . .

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The author, Miami Beach 1943

ONE

See Here, Private Carter

April 28, 1943 was a Wednesday. The weather in Chicago was temperate, ranging from a high of 71 to a low of 39. The Second World War, or World War II, as it is now known, to distinguish it from The Great War of 1914-1918, had begun for America on December 7, 1941, and was now in its second full year. (Britain and its allies, of course, had been at war since September of 1939.) In the war news, which we followed closely in those days—listening to the radio, watching newsreels in the movie theaters, and reading the newspapers—we learned that the tide of battle was running against the Axis in Tunisia. Allied bombers struck hard at Italian airfields, while other squadrons attacked Sicily, Sardinia and Mediterranean shipping. The Russian Army reported heavy artillery and air attacks on selected German targets along the entire Eastern front.

In China, a country whose war was far from my thoughts in 1943, the Japanese had reached Southeastern Shansi, and Chungking declared that poison gas had been used against Chinese troops in another sector. Meanwhile, Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell, commanding U.S. Army forces in the India-Burma-China Theater, and Major General Claire Chennault, leader of the Fourteenth U.S. Air Force in China, arrived in Washington to confer with General Marshall, Chief of Staff—a meeting that would determine the course of the war in China.

It was on that Wednesday, a day not much different from any other day during the Second World War, that I finally entered into active service in the United States Army, a tour of duty that would not end until exactly two years, eleven months, and 16 days later.

The war was more than a grisly duty, wrote Foreign Service Officer (and ex-GI) Curtis F. Jones, it was the most sweeping American learning experience since 1865. Uprooted from sheltered obscurity, millions eventually were tossed into the unforgiving military machine, a gigantic concrete mixer from which they emerged usually either smoothed or broken, but assuredly changed.

Continued Jones, "The first lesson driven home by military service was the staying power of stultifying tradition. From the democracy of civilian America, trainees were transported back into the rigidities of a caste system that replicated the medieval division between noble and serf. We collegians, steeped in the prewar view of the army as a refuge for lazy incompetents, felt the transition most keenly. A direct commission eased the shock of entry into the military, but for those denied officer status by bad luck, bad eyesight, or bad planning, the service offered no recompense other than the glow of patriotism and the exhilaration of the unknown.

"The indulgent cocoon of the fraternity house, the seductive pretexts for avoiding the books, the intoxicating camaraderie of other irresponsible activities—all this was abruptly exchanged for the obstacle course, close-order drill, Neanderthal platoon sergeants, and mind-deadening KP . . ."

In November 1942, I had joined the Army’s Enlisted Reserve Corps, a program for college freshmen and sophomores that had been designed to compete with the Navy’s V-12 program, which I had first hoped to enter. I knew little more about the Navy than I knew about the Army, but I thought being torpedoed at sea might give me a better chance of survival than being bayoneted by some Nazi, or beheaded by a Jap Samurai sword. Unfortunately, my nearsightedness debarred me from the Navy program.

The Enlisted Reserve Corps, the ERC, on the other hand, had no restrictions on eyesight, and allowed students to remain in college until graduation, following which they would go on active duty. The ERC, according to Louis E. Keefer, author of Scholars in Foxholes: The Story of the Army Specialized Training Program in World War II, "was the Army’s first attempt to get eligible young men to commit themselves to eventual Army service while still in high school or college… Army spokesmen explained that, barring unforeseen circumstances [italics mine], all eligible college students enrolling in the ERC could remain on inactive duty right through to graduation simply by making good grades and by passing a comprehensive examination in their sophomore year."

Many top-level Army officers, according to Keefer, helped maintain the fiction that college training was the first step toward an Army commission.

However, continued Keefer, "so many different Army men said so many different things at so many different times that the unfortunate ERCers never knew exactly what to expect… At times, it seemed almost as though the Army and the colleges were collaborating in selling eligible young men the equivalent of the Brooklyn Bridge: Sign up here, and you can probably stay in college, and probably get a commission unless (as was spelled out in very fine print at the bottom of the page) we need you sooner."

Predictably, the Army needed us sooner rather than later, and in my case, that was the spring of 1943.

After the war, Secretary of War Stimson explained his unpopular decision to call up ERC men as soon as they reached draft age, this way, in his autobiography:

As the demand for men increased, it became rapidly more difficult to justify the deferment of college students, either to the General Staff or to the general public. The program lacked justice in that it dealt kindly with men whose presence in college was the result largely of their happy choice of parents; there was no true answer to the charge that the deferment of such men was inconsistent with the Army’s policy of democratic selection of officers."

At any rate, I was not altogether surprised to get my marching orders before I’d even completed a year at the University of Chicago—only keenly disappointed; so much for my plans to go on studying in the liberal arts! With what was beginning to look like a ten-year-long war on their hands, the Army needed men, and found a rich source of unlikely and hardly eager warriors in the Enlisted Reserve Corps.

My first troop train as an Army private, though hardly luxurious, was in its own way festive, because its passengers included all the University of Chicago Enlisted Reserve Corps personnel. There must have been three or four dozen of us, I did not make an exact count—but we decided to turn the trip into a lark. What else could we do? Our numbers had come up; we might as well make the best of it. So, on the train from Chicago’s Union Station, we bantered and joked, most of it gallows humor, touching on such army miseries as KP and latrine duty, which all of us had heard about from friends or relatives who had preceded us into uniform.

Our destination was Camp Kellogg in Battle Creek, Michigan. Battle Creek? Wasn’t that the home of—of course! Snap, crackle, and pop! Rice Krispies! Camp Kellogg, we knew, was an induction center and not an active base; we would be suited up there and sent off somewhere else within a week or two.

Naturally, we all wondered where we might ultimately wind up. On one point we were unanimous; none of us wanted any part of the infantry. Fresh in our minds were all those war movies: Bataan, with Robert Taylor and George Murphy fighting the Japs, and Sahara, with Sergeant Humphrey Bogart in a tank leading a stranded British-American unit and outmaneuvering the Nazis in the desert. And of course, there was the most chilling war movie of them all: Wake Island, where nobody survived the last attack of the Japanese, nobody. No, none of us wanted the infantry.

In the interest of historical accuracy, I must go back to Wake Island, and revise my memory of the movie. This is what historian Gerhard L. Weinberg says, in his magisterial book A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II: Wake Island, a key position in the central Pacific, had been defended, successfully beating off the first Japanese landing attempt with heavy (enemy) losses; but a relief attempt from Hawaii was bungled, and a second Japanese assault on December 22 succeeded in overwhelming and capturing the island.

That doesn’t say much about the fate of the defenders, does it? As it happens, I recently saw an excellent documentary on the History Channel called Wake Island: Alamo in the Pacific. A nice touch, that Alamo subtitle.

Anyway, the documentary contained a lot of wartime film and many dramatized scenes, as well as appearances by a number of survivors who were on the Island for a 60th year reunion. Wait a minute! What survivors? Didn’t we see the defenders wiped out to the last man? And wasn’t the movie billed as a True Account?

As it turns out, according to the History Channel documentary, which did not star William Bendix and Robert Preston, after the first Japanese invasion was turned back with heavy enemy losses, the enemy forces launched a second attack on December 23, in which 90 Japanese and 10 Americans died. The final Japanese invasion force, which included 400 planes, proved to be too much for the defenders, and Commander Cunningham of the Navy and Major Devereaux of the Marines decided to surrender—the first Marine unit ever to surrender in wartime. Service men numbering 476 and 1,107 civilians were made prisoner.

The Japs then forced 250 of the civilian contractors to stay on the island and build fortifications for the Japanese defense of what they were certain would be a return visit by the Americans. The 476 Marines on Wake Island who surrendered to the Japanese, after narrowly escaping execution, wound up in a Japanese prison camp in Shanghai, China, where they were beaten, starved, and worked nearly to death. It is possible they may at times have wished they had been wiped out to the last man. There was, however, a mass execution of 98 civilian workers, after they had finished building bunkers for the Japs, and for that a Japanese officer was hanged after the war’s end.

So, it turns out that the movie Wake Island, though claiming to portray what happened there, was actually in large part fiction—propaganda designed to whip up American youth to a frenzy, so they would storm Marine Corps recruiting offices to revenge the defenders of Wake. Is it any wonder we find it hard to believe Hollywood when it comes to history?

On the trip to Battle Creek, I rode in a coach with my two best friends from the University, Abe Freyman and Homer Goldberg. Both were Jewish, but quite dissimilar. Abe was a slender, soft-spoken Southerner with bright red hair; we all called him Pinky, a nickname he didn’t seem to mind—at least not at the time. If I had known then what I later learned, I would have described Abe as effeminate. As it was, I attributed his elfin mannerisms and gentle demeanor to his Southern roots. Homer, on the other hand, was stocky, with dark, tightly curled hair and a swarthy complexion; his eyes were large, dark brown, beautiful in a way, and rather sad, wistful perhaps, or so they appeared to me. Homer was a native Chicagoan, and planned ultimately to take his doctorate in English, and teach. He had already chosen his subject for a thesis: the novels of Evelyn Waugh. Knowing little about Waugh at the time, I considered him, as authors go, a lightweight.

On the train, I said to my two friends: If I have a choice in the matter, I’ll pick the Coast Artillery.

Yeah, why? asked Homer.

Well, it means I’ll have to defend the coast, one coast or another, either one will do. The last I knew, there weren’t any Japs or Nazis near either coast.

(If my persistent use of the word Jap or Japs is considered politically incorrect, just remember that it was April of 1943, and we were at war with, if you prefer—the Japanese. As I look back on the war now, I cannot help but reflect on how differently both GIs and civilians regarded our enemies. The Japanese were evil incarnate, the ancient Yellow Peril, small and monkey-like in appearance for the most part, slant-eyes, we thought them; the Germans were Aryan; they looked like us, and with a change of uniform, could have been us. Moreover, we had a feeling that FDR had expected to be drawn into a war with Germany, but not into one with Japan; and that Germany had only declared war on us because of their alliance with Japan! Otherwise, it would have been to Hitler’s advantage to let the Japanese deal with us, while he tended to everyone else.)

My friend Homer doubted that any of us would have a choice, but if we did, he would pick the Air Corps. I’d much rather fly than walk, he said.

Abe had no preference; he wanted no part of the whole business, but would take whatever he was handed. (As it turned out, he spent most of the war in Rapid City, South Dakota, in the shadow of Mount Rushmore. I’m not sure what he was doing there.)

I will not exhaust anyone’s patience or interest by describing at length what happened to us when we arrived at Camp Kellogg. We were inducted, with all the regimentation that word implies. We were checked for venereal disease, which meant we were subjected to what the Army called a short-arm inspection; issued uniforms, blankets, toilet articles, etc., and directed to a barracks that would be our home until we shipped out. A great deal of paperwork was involved in this, as proved to be the case throughout my military service. Without reams of paper, the war would almost certainly have been lost.

We were hurried along and snapped at by various non-coms, and possibly even by a private or two who had been in the army only a few weeks longer than we had, but who, by that narrow margin, outranked us.

This is the Army, Mister Jones, sang Homer.

I chimed in: No private rooms or telephones…

And we both sang: You had your breakfast in bed before… but you won’t have it there anymore!

The first thing that one must realize about the Army is that you give up most of the privacy you have been accustomed to. You are almost never alone. When you need to relieve yourself, you sit on a commode next to half-a-dozen or a dozen other commodes, with no partitions between them. You shower communally, just as you would if you were in prison and, as in prison, you are advised to be careful if you drop a bar of soap and have to bend over to pick it up. Modesty is virtually out of the question. As one who was circumcised in infancy—for hygiene, not for religious reasons—I was astonished to see how many men in the Army still had foreskins or prepuces. I often wondered if the possession of a foreskin enhanced or suppressed the intensity of intercourse, but I was too shy ever to ask anyone.

(A personal observation: I was struck, at times, during my Army service, by how many men took inordinate pride in the size of their organs. Possession of a large penis apparently gave its owner greater sexual prowess. I was reminded of a remark made by John Barrymore about penis pride: Why should I take pride in something at which every chimpanzee is my equal, and every jackass my superior?)

As for bedding down in a barracks, I can only say that it too was a revelation. Nothing had really prepared me for the experience of sleeping with forty other young males, not even Boy Scout camp, where you might have bunked with three other kids at most.

That first night in Camp Kellogg, and for many nights thereafter, I slept only fitfully, but lay there listening to a new kind of night music, quite unlike the Mozart, Bach and Brahms I had listened to in my tiny fourth-floor room in the Unitarian Manse in Chicago. What I heard now was a grand opera of snoring, a full chorus of voices: the deep growl of a basso profundo; the fluted whistle of a tenor; and in between, the occasional croaking baritone. Now and then came a sharp report or a robust boom!—someone breaking wind in the watches of the night. All in all, it was a veritable symphonic orchestra of night noises—inescapable even if you stuffed cotton in your ears.

However, as time passed, I found that I slept every bit as well as I had in civilian life, either because I got used to the snoring of my fellow GIs, or because I was so tired after a day of training, that I couldn’t stay awake long enough to hear them.

At Camp Kellogg, we had few duties. We were waiting only to be assigned to a branch of the U.S. Army, a process that required ten days to two weeks of tests, physical and mental. The Army IQ test was known as the AGCT—Army General Classification Test, if memory serves me. (At one point, a helpful clerk revealed my score, which was supposed to remain a secret from me. It was 146, not genius, but quite close to it. The average score required for Officer Candidate School was 100. At any rate, it was good enough to save my life, or so I have always believed—because it kept me from a combat unit. More about that later in this account.)

The most important ordeal, from my point of view, was the eye test. I knew that I had done badly—just how badly I would soon learn. I had worn glasses for most of my life, but until I joined the Army, I had thought that my vision was within the normal range. I made every effort to read every line on the eye chart I possibly could, but my score, if I’m not mistaken, was 20/100 in one eye and—this astonished even the technician who gave me the test—20/?, yes, that’s 20/Question Mark! in the other eye. (After all this time has passed, I’m not sure which eye was worse. It doesn’t really matter. Neither eye would pass muster.)

To keep us busy while we were waiting to ship out, the officers and noncoms of Camp Kellogg assigned us to various tasks. KP or Kitchen Police was the worst. If you were assigned to night KP, you reported at 6 o’clock in the evening and worked until 6 o’clock the following morning, with only an occasional break for a bite to eat, a cup of coffee and a smoke. (Cigarette smoking in the U.S. Army was a given, and I mean the word literally: we were given cigarettes galore.)

The worst of our KP was the dreaded graveyard shift, which I was to suffer more than once. On one occasion, I was ordered to prepare a dozen gross of eggs to be scrambled for breakfast. For those of you who may be weak on their arithmetic, that’s twelve times 144, or a total of 1,728 eggs, which had to be broken and their contents emptied into a huge vat. As the night wore on, with me sitting there cracking egg after egg after egg, ad nauseum, I must admit that I sometimes failed to separate the eggs from their shells. As a consequence, more than a few shells found their way into the mix along with the whites and the yolks. No matter, I thought, it’s only calcium and can’t hurt anybody.

One of the more pleasant chores we were given at Kellogg was wrapping bandages for the local hospital. We—my U of Chicago buddies and I—made light of this in our own way. One of our fellow students was Beardsley Ruml, Jr., whose father, Beardsley Ruml, Sr., was a former treasurer of Macy’s department store, and an expert on installment plans. Ruml was now chairman of the New York Federal Reserve. He persuaded the government, hard-put to finance the war’s staggering costs, to inaugurate a pay-as-you-go income tax. Employers withheld a minimum of 20 percent in taxes from each employee’s paycheck beginning in 1943, thus providing Uncle Sam with a steady, year-round source of income. Ruml had also devised a brilliant war production plan—named after himself, of course. Neither his name nor the name of his agency have any resonance now, but, at the time, both were regularly in the news. At any rate, we decided that our friend young Ruml ought to be appointed head of the Office of Bandage Wrapping, and so it came to pass. We deferred to him in all matters that had to do with the wrapping of bandages. We wrapped bandages only according to The Ruml Plan.

The stay at Camp Kellogg passed quickly enough, not because we were having fun, although we did our best, but because everything was so new, and each discovery had to be recorded in our letters home. I wrote hundreds of letters while I was in the service, to a variety of correspondents. I had as my role model Marion Hargrove, Jr., the author of the best-selling book See Here, Private Hargrove. The book consisted of a series of letters he wrote home from basic training. His letters, of course, were written to a newspaper in North Carolina, for which he had worked before he was drafted; they were later published in book form.

I have had occasion recently to reread See Here, Private Hargrove. Most of the book is taken up with Hargrove’s attempts to muster up as a GI through basic training and cook and baker’s training. Later in the book, he reflects:

"I checked back through some old clippings of my column, written during the first weeks I was here. Then I checked them with more recent columns. The early ones, I found, were harmless enough at first glance, but they carried throughout them a certain undertone of genuine dislike for the work. There were little sarcastic digs between the lines, weary and ironic sighs.

Then the little digs began to grow weaker and weaker. They were replaced by a more tolerant attitude when I discussed something I didn’t like, hearty growls. Real old growls, bellyachers. It is an accepted theory in the Army that the more a man gripes and the louder he gripes the better he likes the Army.

Toward the end of the war, when I was overseas, Marion Hargrove showed up at my base in China. By this time, he was a sergeant. I might add that those of us who had occasion to talk with him found the man quite full of himself, as the saying goes.

My letters had no such cachet as Private Hargrove’s. They fell into three categories:

One: Love letters to Beth Deering, the girl I had left behind me, and still loved dearly. In the last year of my college life, Beth and I became lovers in fact as well as in fancy, and I missed her terribly, sexually, physically, at times desperately. She was the object of more than one masturbation or wet dream, as I lay on my cot in an Army barracks late at night, when all around me slept, or indulged their own sexual fantasies.

Drop your cocks and grab your socks! the barracks sergeant would shout when rousing us out of bed for reveille. And then the rallying cry: Hubba, hubba!

Two: Letters to good friends. Margie Malmberg, the Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, librarian, my confidante in all things while I was in college, got most of these. When I left for the Army, she assured me that if I wrote her faithfully, she would faithfully keep all my correspondence and give it to me after the war was over. I did my best to keep my part of the bargain; I’m not sure what happened, but I never saw those letters again. That might have been my fault; perhaps I didn’t ask for them. Too bad; I could have used them for this chronicle. Paul Martin, my closest friend at the Quadrangle Club in Chicago, where I worked as a waiter before the Army, was another friend to whom I wrote. I also did my best to keep in occasional touch with Abe Freyman and Homer Goldberg, after we went our separate ways. There were also a few friends in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, my hometown, who got cards or the occasional note—Jack Pangborn, who had joined the Marines, and Bill Rodiger among them—but that was about all.

Three: Letters to the family. I am sorry to say that those were really obligatory, which means they weren’t as interesting as they might have been. I’m sorry about that: like any budding writer I wanted always to burn with a hard gemlike flame, but I often fell short of achieving that intensity, and when it came to letters to my father and stepmother Doris, I always fell short. Letters to my parents were mostly matter-of-fact and quotidian in detail: i.e., what the food was like, what kind of accommodations we had—that sort of thing. My brothers and sisters and I had never been much in the habit of writing, but we did correspond from time to time, just to let each other know where we were and that we were thinking of each other.

Of all these letters, only those to Beth Deering and Margie Malmberg might have truly expressed my deepest thoughts and feelings, my hopes and dreams, and of course, my love for Beth and my affection for Margie.

Camp Kellogg, like virtually every other military base I was assigned to during the war, was a world unto itself, completely self-sufficient, and all male. We passed from our barracks to reveille, where we stood shivering in line in the early morning mist while the roll was called. In April, the snow and ice had barely melted from the drill fields. From reveille we proceeded to the mess hall, where we ate scrambled eggs and bacon (sometimes) and creamed chipped beef on toast (frequently), which everyone called shit on a shingle, SOS for short. (I will deal with other GI terminology later.) From the mess hall we went either to a field where we were put through calisthenics, or to our duty assignments.

As for recreation at Kellogg, there was a theater that showed regular first-run Hollywood features, and a PX or Post Exchange, where we could buy anything from beer and cigarettes to toothpaste and magazines. Cigarettes were a dime a pack, as I remember.

What else can I say about Camp Kellogg? It was an interlude, a way station between civilian life and the routine of Army life. It passed quickly and was quickly forgotten, as was the army base itself. (When I recently logged on to Google and entered Camp Kellogg, I got a music camp of some kind, but no military base, and in the entry on Battle Creek there was no mention of the camp at all. It is gone, then, thrown up virtually overnight during the war to serve a certain purpose, and then torn down at war’s end, absorbed into the community where it had once hummed with activity.)

That’s probably just as well. Before I had the chance to take away any lasting memories of Camp Kellogg, I was on my way to the next stop on my World War II adventure.

As for Battle Creek itself, I have no memories of the city because we were never allowed to visit it. I saw only what was visible from the window of the troop train that carried me away from it. Anywhere in America I could have seen the same dreary warehouses, factories, the occasional filling station and diner—and then farms and open fields in the last harsh grip of winter, which hangs on well into May in the North Country. And then only the telephone poles, the grade crossings, and the whistle stops flashing by as our train headed due south.

TWO

Destination Unknown

With rare exceptions, troop movements during the Second World War, both in the United States and overseas, were conducted in complete secrecy. The troop train that took me out of Camp Kellogg was no exception to this rule. My fellow passengers and I had no idea whatever where we were going or how long it would take to reach our destination. As always in the service, it was ours not to reason why.

If I remember correctly, the trip took three days and four nights. If this seems to be a long journey, consider this: We passed through Ohio, and the cities of Toledo, Bowling Green, Akron and Youngstown. We passed through Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and the cities of Pittsburgh, Uniontown and Morgantown. We crossed the Allegheny Mountains into West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina. And still the train rolled on…

On the evening of our second day in transit, just as the setting sun’s rays fell on the Appalachians, we passed a station sign that read ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA. I felt almost overwhelmed with memories of the hours I had spent reading Thomas Wolfe back in Chippewa Falls, years ago. Here was Wolfe’s hometown, which he called Altamont. In his books. Wolfe describes the high plateau on which the town of Altamont was built in this fashion: "In the haunting eternity of these mountains, rimmed in their enormous cup, he [Oliver Gant, Eugene Gant’s father] found sprawled out on its hundred hills and hollows a town of four thousand people.

"This town of Altamont had been settled soon after the Revolutionary War. It had been a convenient stopping-off place for cattle-drovers and farmers in their swing eastward from Tennessee into South Carolina. And, for several decades after the Civil War, it had enjoyed the summer patronage of fashionable people from Charleston and the plantations of the hot South . . . Several rich men from the North had established hunting lodges in the hills, and one of them had bought huge areas of mountain land, and with an army of imported architects, carpenters and masons, was planning the greatest country estate in America—something in limestone, with pitched slate roofs, and one hundred and eighty-three rooms. It was modeled on the chateau at Blois."

This vast estate, of course, was Biltmore, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s castle in the mountains. I would see it one day, and I would also walk through the white frame house in Ashville that Wolfe called Dixieland, Eliza Gant’s boarding house, where Eugene Gant (Thomas Wolfe) spent his boyhood. But that was in the future; now I knew Altamont, or Asheville, only from the pages of Wolfe’s books.

As our train pulled out of the station, darkness set in and a gibbous moon shone in the night sky, and I thought again of those magical words, "O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come