Less Than Two Days: A Tale of an American Man and an English Woman Wanting to Love Each Other 1951–1957

By Lewis W. Heniford

A young American soldier stationed in Germany in 1952 meets a British girl in London. He romances her during their first day in a glorious pub crawl while accompanied by his army buddy. The next day, they enjoy the playing fields of Eton and a band concert for the queen at Windsor Castle. When they bid each other goodbye at Euston Station, they are already infatuated. They have seen each other for less than two days, never alone. She tries to visit him in Germany, but travel restrictions for the trip cause her to cancel. Angry over being stood up, the soldier and his buddy visit Ireland, Wales, and even London; and he does not call her. Returning to the barracks in Germany, he finds her telegram that had arrived too late. The two cannot meet before his being sent back to the states for separation from the military. They exchange letters for four years, trying to reunite either in England or America. But problems intervene, including a girl to whom the soldier had been engaged to before his London adventure and a conniving woman. He and the British girl struggle during his residency year at Stanford University to qualify for his PhD. Their greatest problem is pregnancy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984534903

Lewis W. Heniford

Lewis W. Heniford holds an AB degree from UNC, an MLS degree from San Jose State University, and a PhD from Stanford University. Currently, he writes poetry and spec feature-length film scripts. Heniford and his wife live in Visalia, California.

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Copyright © 2018 by Lewis W. Heniford.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2018906993

ISBN:                Hardcover                978-1-9845-3492-7

                          Softcover                   978-1-9845-3491-0

                          eBook                        978-1-9845-3490-3

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.

Less Than Two Days is a work of historical fiction inspired by true events. All incidents and dialog, except some letters and postcards, are products of the author’s memory and imagination. Although certain historical scenes, characters, names, public or private figures, businesses, places, events or incidents appear in the novel, they do not alter the entirely fictional nature of the book.

Rev. date: 07/12/2018

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Contents

Love’s Impunity

Dedication

Epigraphs

Foreword

Introduction: Breaking the Fourth Wall

Chapter 1951: Loving the Girl

Chapter 1952: Hello, Darlings

Chapter 2: Hello, Darlings

Chapter 3: The Rest of That Furlough

Chapter 1953: Two Women

Chapter 1954: Fighting a Fear

Chapter 1955: Calling London

Chapter 1956: Great in America

Chapter 1957: Gambling on the Future

Coda for Lovers

People in This Story

Gallery

About the Author

Also by Lewis W. Heniford

About the Foreword

About the Illustrator

Poem to Kay Before Her Death

Kay M. Heniford Obituary

Lewis W. Heniford Obituary

Memoir 1927: thoughts on my beginning and end

Poem: Floor Plan (Country)

The Author Thanks

Plot Synopsis

Tagline

Pleasemisterplease, a short film

A Teacher with Standards

Love’s Impunity

        In autumn’s warmly comfortable rests,

        Our recollections form a good deeds list,

        Discovering for thanks those thoughts we’ve missed

        In many earlier but hasty quests.

        We cannot hope to quiet doubting pests,

        For whose restricting, narrow gaze the gist

        Of love is lost. Their thinking would insist

        A love be this or that, fulfilling tests.

        We can but pity them their needless loss

        Of the unbounded areas this year

        Has brought to us. At last new-turned, our toss

        Bears no restraining tests, no cause to fear.

        When two are blessed with closest unity,

        Their hearts and minds are love’s impunity.

—November 25, 1956

449 Hawthorne Avenue

Palo Alto, California, U.S.A.

To Kay, my beloved

What a mystery life is, and love is a mystery within a mystery.

—Vincent van Gogh

Epigraphs

Love is all we have, the only way that each can help the other.

—Euripides, Orestes

Only with her could he find the solution of the riddle of his life.

—Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions, …

—T. S. Eliot, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

The past is a work in progress.

—Kurt Vonnegut, said somewhere to someone

Many songs mention crossing oceans for love; one of us has to.

—Lewis W. Heniford, letter to Kay, November 30, 1952

Foreword

So, my uncle wrote this memoir of a 7-year span of his life (1950-1957).

I can clarify something for you. The author’s nickname is Ig, short for Ignatz, a character in one of the best comic strips of all time, Krazy Kat. His older sister’s nickname, Cac, is derived from Kat. Picture older sister reading the comics to little brother in short pants, in the early 1930’s.

I have a photo, taken in 1953 by my mother with one of the ubiquitous Box Brownie cameras, of my uncle and myself. He is the handsome young man with the beautiful smile. I’m the one with the diaper, chubby knees, and quizzical expression. Obvious doting going on in both directions. He remains a handsome man with a beautiful smile, and I have retained the quizzical expression. The mutual doting continues to this very day and hour.

To me, the book describes his evolution from the rural deep South to shining California, from the bosom of the family to independence, youth to adulthood, obsession to genuine love, commitment and marriage.

The book starts with his Army service in Germany, but the journey started in Horry County, SC. It is hard to overstate the change of milieu. I was raised in the same area, a generation later. You have to imagine the place in the 1930’s, a great expanse of forest and swamp, with clear spots for towns and farms. Rural don’t hardly cover it.

I’ve visited the Heniford family farm. It is very. Quiet. Insects, birdsong. If your heart is in such a place, then you wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Ig’s heart was not there, and the family knew it. The book contains a scene in which Ig stands in a farm field and talks to his father. Doc Heniford speaks of the farm as a sort of beloved process. Ig speaks of leaving.

He begins his story already far away from that farm in one direction, and ends as far as he could go in the other direction and keep his feet dry, arriving with his pregnant English bride in Carmel, CA. The book conveys an optimism: Let us begin a new life. America in the 1950’s was an exceptional time to be young, handsome, smart, educated, and talented.

Ig’s letters to the woman who would become his wife are the backbone of the story. I find it fascinating that, of Ig’s siblings, his was the only marriage that worked the first time, and that after less than two days spent together with Kay, his wife-to-be. Ever so romantic. Happily ever after? As near as dammit, as my mother sometimes said.

Kay was not someone you could forget. Ig has a glamor photo of her taken when she lived in London. Yowzah! She remained a subject of Her Majesty the Queen, charming to the very end of her days. I can imagine her entrances, striking poses in the doorway.

I never knew Kay so well as I wanted, and Doc Heniford died when I was a child. But this book helps me know my uncle better, and I believe that you will find it interesting.

Columbia, South Carolina, U.S.A.

July 17, 2017

Introduction: Breaking the Fourth Wall

This I accept: one comes to regret life’s omissions more than commissions and many of my goals possible and impossible have already passed their use-by date. Memory becomes selective and contradictory, so forging into my tenth decade, I had better tell this story if it’s ever going to get told.

Walk in my shoes if you want to understand me. Be warned: one shoe is fact, one shoe fable. The reader may regard this book fiction, near-fiction, or nonfiction memoir. The narrative o’erleaps the fences of factual memoir to invent characters and conversations, to disguise certain identities, to tell realities though fictions.

After some of my family (especially my grandson Michael) asked me to tell about an American man and an English woman wanting to love each other, their encouragement brought me to write and publish this result.

The story draws on what I did, thought I did, or needed to do, at times succeeding, at times failing. This part of my life journey, during ages twenty-three to twenty-nine, 1951-57, conveyed me through an international wonderland. Often I had no clue how best to live those seven years. When clueless, I checked my inner compass and found it fixing on optimism.

The Great Depression of my 1930s childhood imbued in me the idea that each generation must exceed its parents’ achievements. Economic scarcity in that era encouraged Americans to envision a time of plenty ahead. Parents and children regarded deprivation as a short-term plight from which life would get better. Throughout that hardscrabble decade, folks thrived on hope. After 1950, with World War II over and its death toll and other costs recorded, a chance loomed to look ahead, to rebuild and unite countries, to make this world better, and to get on with the incidentals of living such as getting and begetting.

Armed with hope, I began a noble quest for education, love, a family, a chance to be a good citizen. My mother had promised that route would lead to a happy, productive life.

Was it easy to remember, research, and reveal here those seven years? Not really. But I had promised.

Chapter Epigraphs

Chapter 1951: Loving the Girl

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: Fool! said my muse to me, look in thy heart, and write.—Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

Chapter 1952: Hello, Darlings

The Essays, written by Michel de Montaigne between 1570 and 1592, held high the importance of singularity in writing. Montaigne commented that could I have assumed unto my selfe any other fashion, than mine owne accustomed, or more honourable and better forme, I would not have done it: For, al I seeke to reape by my writings is, they will naturally represent and to the life pourtray me to your remembrance.

Chapter 1953: Two Women

Thomas Wilson (1524-1581): Among all other lessons, this should be first learned, that wee never affect any straunge ynkehorne termes, but to speake as is commonly received: neither seeking to be over fine, nor yet living over-carelesse, using our speeche as most men doe, and ordering our wittes as the fewest have done.

Chapter 1954: Fighting a Fear

Don’t write about Man, write about a man.―E.B. White (1899-1985)

Chapter 1955: Calling London

Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.―Joyce Carol Oates (1938-)

Chapter 1956: Great in America

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because … you are the only you.—Neil Gaiman (1960-)

Chapter 1957: Gambling on the Future

Don’t forget—no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.—Charles de Lint (1951-)

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.—Rumi (1207-1273)

Chapter 1951: Loving the Girl

Germany, September 13, 1951

IF LIFE WERE A movie, here would start a love story.

FADE IN:

EXT. GERMANY – MAP OF EUROPEAN THEATRE DURING KOREAN WAR - ESTABLISHING/SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1951

EXT. GERMANY - HIGHWAY TO FLIEGERHORST KASERNE - DAY

An American military convoy drives along the German road into a kaserne.

EXT. GERMANY - HIGHWAY TO FLIEGERHORST KASERNE – FOLLOWING

Germany has become the center of the European theater during the United Nations’ Korean War in 1951. On a foggy morning, an American military convoy motors along a German highway to Fliegerhorst Kaserne, outside of Mannheim.

EXT. GERMANY - FLIEGERHORST KASERNE – FOLLOWING

Before newly-constructed Coleman Barracks, a FORMATION OF AMERICAN SOLDIERS hurriedly arranges duffel bags to look orderly. Some succeed, some do not. Each soldier then stands in front of his bag.

NON-COM (O.C.)

’Ten-shun!

The soldiers snap to attention.

CAPTAIN PONT, his ego surging forward a little too much, emerges from the building onto a portable platform, with his first lieutenant, a drummer, and a flag bearer nearby.

DRUM ROLL.

CAPTAIN PONT

Men, we’re here. This is quite a moment. You won’t forget September, 1951, Germany. Look around you, take it in.

(expansively indicating vicinity)

Men, Fliegerhorst Kaserne, Flying Horse Barracks, is now home to—95th AAA!

Pont always gives visual and vocal cues for a ritual response.

The soldiers SHOUT.

PAN OVER THE SURROUNDINGS AND MEN WITH EMPHASIS ON IG AND HIS BUDDIES, SANDE AND BABE.

CAPTAIN PONT

It’s a long way from our training base in the State of Washington. You’ve traveled weeks by train and ship, and now you stand at the ready on a base initially built for Hermann Goering’s German Air Force in 1937. Story goes that in World War II, the Germans built a dike around this place and flooded the runways every day to make them look like a lake. They drained the area at night and brought planes from underground hangers nearby. Our ordnance men warn that some booby traps may not have been cleared. Take heed.

CLOSEUP OF IG, SANDE and BABE, WHO SCAN THE NEW SURROUNDINGS)

CAPTAIN PONT

That war ended in 1945, six years ago. But we have our own war now. While folks at home focus on the battles in Korea, our mission is here—to check the Russian advance in Europe. We can expect the Russians to make trouble. You men settle in so we’ll be ready.

Pont’s hand slides ostentatiously onto the automatic pistol in his holster.

CAPTAIN PONT

Our artillery has not arrived from Fort Lewis, so for the time being, you will be issued sidearms, and our battalion will be on alert. This year, you’ll be sleeping in German forests more than you will be sleeping in this building.

                    (points to barracks)

Indoors is warm, comfortable. Outdoors is miserable. But that’s where the action is, so that’s where we will be. You’re Americans. You’re warriors. And remember, you’re winners. You are … 95th AAA!

The soldiers SHOUT.

DRUM ROLL.

CLOSEUP - IG, SANDE AND BABE.

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Ig Heniford, West Germany, 1952

LEWIS W. HENIFORD, 24, known as Ig, became a draftee whose butt became a possession of Uncle Sam on Friday, July 6, 1951, courtesy of a North Carolina draft board. He wears corporal stripes below the shoulder insignia of the American Seventh Army. The only college graduate among the enlistees and draftees in the unit, articulate, handsome, generally admired, he possesses a sardonic curiosity toward life and altruism toward people. He is nebbish and naïve about the walks of life from which the men in his unit have come as well as about their military savvy. His current buddies accept him as an odd but enjoyable egghead, so he plays that role. He deeply resents the Army and his loss of personal control. He obsesses about regaining the love of his life whose photograph he cherishes: she could save him from his darker self. He wants to regain control of his destiny, which means surviving the Army, winning back the Girl, reassembling his life as a teacher, and assimilating an Easter adventure at his university in Chapel Hill. Most recently from Missoula, Montana, he grew up in a truly small town, Loris, in South Carolina.

REUBEN SANDE, JR., 25, known as Snookie in his family but not in the Army, wears sergeant stripes below insignia of the American Seventh Army. Friendly, clean-cut, curious about others, self-effacing, he hails from Guilford, a plains town near Havre, in Montana. He inclines toward following established standards in order not to attract attention. Unwilling to reveal himself, he dreads displays of affection from others. He wonders about and fears sexual expression. A true citizen soldier, he wants to fulfill his duty and then return to the normalcy of civilian life in his hometown. He suffers from allergies and carries tissues for nose drip.

LLOYD B. NICHWANDER, 25, known as Babe, wears corporal stripes below the American Seventh Army insignia. The nickname comes from his being a doppelgänger [lookalike] for Babe Ruth, the baseball star. Ready for action, innovative, he easily befriends his peers and often shows gruff affection. Disdainful of formal education, he has street smarts. Before service, he worked as a taxi driver in Helena, in Montana, and developed addictions to cigarettes and women. He seeks to get laid frequently, but he tries to find a serious relationship in which he would honor and satisfy one woman. He soldiers well through this two-year military stint. He ardently believes he can read the future. His dog tags and his crucifix share the chain around his neck.

FOR ALL THAT, LIFE is not a movie of a love story replaying with precision. It permutes and offers more.

Montana, August, 1950

ON AUGUST 1, 1950, the Selective Service System classified Lewis Williams Heniford 1A and numbered him 31-42-28-131. He began active service in Butte, Montana.

Washington State, December, 1950

IG’S INITIAL INTERVIEW, CONDUCTED by Sgt. Harold B. Mobbley on December 1, 1950, assigned him to Battery D, 95th AAA Gun Battalion as a trainee. He learned then that his Army tenure would last twenty-four months (it lasted twenty-two months and twenty-two days).

December days in the upper left corner of the lower forty-eight states always meant cold. Fort Lewis in 1950 lived at the lower end of the thermometer. The military’s efforts to evoke Santa Claus for its new men fell flat.

Washington State, January, 1951

FOREIGN EVENTS MORE THAN national events underlay his military adventure, so through it all, Ig followed the news. He eavesdropped on officers discussing the Korean Intervention, an oh-so bland term identifying the United Nations action to halt Communist aggression against South Korea.

He already grasped much of the current realpolitik [practical political affairs]. The idea that an all-embracing body like the United Nations could ensure peace for all mankind appealed to him; even so, he would not have volunteered for a U.N. military force.

He understood that the peace settlement in 1945 had left Korea effectively split in two. By the end of 1948, both Koreas had formed separate states. Communistic Russia and China supported the North. The American coalition that had won World War II supported the South. Both sides claimed the right to govern the whole peninsula.

Actual invasion of the South by the North occurred on June twenty-fifth in 1950. The Security Council of the U. N. convened immediately. The Russian delegation boycotted the meeting; hence, it could not veto a call to action.

American Ambassador Stettinius led the Security Council to demand North Korean withdrawal to the 38th Parallel. Two days following the invasion, America asked the U.N. to force the North Koreans out and got a commitment.

President Harry Truman brooded that other countries around China might turn Communist, even Japan.

In the spring of the following year, Rhee supported reunifying Korea under his leadership and strongly supported MacArthur’s call for going all-out against China, even at the risk of provoking a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The U.N. heeded Truman’s policy, and its coalition of multinational troops under the U.N. banner engaged North Korea. America drafted young men, even school teachers, to regain world peace.

Ig saw the American-led strikes as necessary, but he never thought he might be drafted to become a foot soldier. Teaching was his career; surely officials would see the logic and value of that. But their logic and his differed.

The military was a round hole in the international game board and Ig a square peg, but during basic training, he earned grade PVT-2, with the MOS (military occupational specialty) 3510, ground aircraft observer.

Washington State, February, 1951

THE FOLLOWING MONTH, A 95th AAA Company C sortie presented a week of isolation in beautiful hills around Yakima, Washington. A new friend, Lowell Baker, joined Ig late one Sunday afternoon in setting up their tent a deliberate distance away from everyone else.

Their remote riparian environment supported great horned owls and a variety of ducks. The lowland fields that they could see provided excellent foraging and nesting for red-tailed hawks, sharp-shinned hawks, and northern harriers.

Lowell gestured in the direction of a hovering northern harrier while they were pegging their pup tent into the earth. Look! He pointed skyward toward the slim, long-tailed hawk gliding low over the fern-odored green hillside. The V-shaped wings and the white patch on the base of its tail identify it. That owlish face helps it hear mice and voles hiding under vegetation.

Ig responded, We have mountains in the western Carolinas but nothing like these. Toward our coast we have no mountains, only sandhills, lowcountry, coastal swamps and slashes.

Lowell added, We might see elk in this area. Or deer and coyote. He pointed to Cowiche Mountain. That’s about thirty-four hundred feet high. From up there westward you can see Mount Adams and Mount Rainier and eastward you can see this area near Yakima.

Ig heard a sharp-shinned hawk’s alarm call, an intoned, frantic kik-kik-kik.

Baker spoke of seeing God’s handiwork in the stunning bird.

Ig thought, Euripides held that some wise man had originated the idea of God. That thought slipped its skin like a snake to emerge afresh as apostasy that he hoped to discuss with his new friend.

While the sun descended beyond the horizon, the dyad of recruits settled into their olive-drab tent and opened field rations.

A sunset like that is unknowable, … yet it is charged with symbolism, mused Ig.

Baker quietly observed, What is seen is temporary and what is unseen is eternal.

If so, I can see only the impermanent.

The eternal is more important than the temporal. Mormonism focuses on the everlasting.

Ig nudged cellophane from a piece of chocolate fudge with a tiny can opener on his neck chain. "My dog tags say none for my religious preference."

None?

Ig nodded. The idea of faith intrigues me. But when I reach toward it, the whole thing slips away.

God will tell you when to accept.

My folks are Southern Baptist—I gave up that at age twelve—so my sparse religious background hardly prepares me to understand your faith.

Let me help you.

I try to keep an open mind. I want a church. I’ve investigated Catholicism, Presbyterianism, and now I’ve come to you to learn about Mormonism.

Nobody can shop around for a religion. Belief is a gift from God.

I try to understand your religion, but the idea that God lived on another planet—come on, that is a strange idea.

"Not strange when you consider the enduring truth. God was once a mortal man on another planet who progressed by living in obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel there. Then he died and became a resurrected man on Earth and evolved to become a god. He has just simply progressed ahead of us.

What about Jesus?

He was begotten by physical union of God and Mary.

God slept with Mary!

Since God has a body of flesh and bones, yes, he had literal sex with Mary and begot Jesus, part man and part God. Jesus received a physical body like ours. His body was special, though, because his male parent was a god. The rest of us have only human fathers.

How do you know what you’re saying is true?

We believe we know the truth by our good feelings after prayer.

What do you mean?

I have good feelings after praying that others, living and dead, choose salvation.

Corpses can’t choose anything. Ig softened his tone, trying to avoid coming across as smug. He crumpled the cellophane from the chocolate fudge and stowed it in the jacket breast pocket under his name plate to bury later.

We baptize dead people by proxy so they can become Mormons.

Baptizing dead people. That’s weird. Ig moved to the factual. You went on a mission to proselytize?

We send all our young men from nineteen-to-twenty-two on missions throughout the world to spread our gospel.

How could Lowell be so sure? What if your religion is wrong?

Lowell beamed. The Devil always fights the truth. But we’re protected. God will forgive us anything because we are believers and labor for Christ.

During your two-year mission, what seemed hardest to get people to accept?

Our ancient history. We teach our received knowledge of peoples who populated the Americas for over twenty-six hundred years from around 2200 B.C. to 420 A.D. We believe that a second group of people who occupied the Americas were Jewish and spoke Hebrew and kept their records in reformed Egyptian.

Ig struggled between tact and honesty. Putting all that aside, perhaps, just perhaps, there is no God after all.

Lowell laughed self-confidently.

Ig spoke calmly, I approached God in desperate need and found only silence and darkness. I was asking exactly what Jesus asked on the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

Baker smiled encouragement. The road to redemption passes directly through Christ’s suffering. His uncertainty was not lack of faith, just a sign of his being human. There is solace in joining a Christian community that offers love, compassion, and self-giving. Our church is not built on sand but on rock. He offered his scarred hand. Will you pray with me and seek acceptance?

Ig declined the offer as tactfully as he could. Is it arrogant to bargain with God the way polytheistic Greeks haggled with their divinitie?

Lowell closed his eyes in prayer.

Ig left the tent and wandered a distance. He heard somewhere a high-pitched, frantic kik-kik-kik. It was the call of a bird, not of a spirit. He looked toward the sky. God, speak to me! Really speak and I’ll believe.

No answer.

Till then, I’ll take care of my own soul.

A little sigh like a puff of whispering wind came from his core. Ancient Greek shades would forgive my arrogant bargaining, but they sleep in Hades, free of worries and lamentations and considerations of my soul.

Lowell ended his prayer when he heard rain falling on the pup tent. He stepped outside and called, You’ll get soaked. Better come in.

Yeah. All right. Ig returned and sat beside his friend. No more talk about religion, huh?

Listening to the heavy drops pelting the canvas fabric, he scribbled two lines to save for a poem, Many people long for Eternity who are lonesome on a rainy afternoon / Murmurous with the sad, hushed sounds of solitude.

Washington State, March, 1951

THE NEW MOON ON Wednesday the seventh of March provided Ig a doable experiment with a camera purchased from the Post Exchange. Ig had studied best-buy ratings in various photography magazines and put his money on the Contax II. His PX-discounted camera had a series of lenses imitating renowned Zeiss lenses in competently-executed Japanese plagiarism. American journalists were using knockoffs of the Zeiss lenses in battles on the Korean Peninsula. Pictures taken with them won the approval of experienced picture editors. With the Zeiss lens he planned to use Anscochrome, a color negative film for still photography. He had not used that brand before. It had a good reputation: emulsions formed three differently colored images simultaneously that layered for the final picture. He went to a nearby drill field and set up a shoot, framing his view between two firs. Everything fell into place and he exposed the whole roll. In the rec photo lab, he processed and printed the shots with free equipment and materials. The best of the assortment won him second-place in the military post exhibition.

Washington State, April 16, 1951

ON AN OVERCAST DAY, Sully, the 95th AAA clerical unit master sergeant for Company C, sorted through old magazines always handy in the lowest drawer of his desk. The eight clerks—Beck the flatulent, Carson obsessed with Heep, Heep obsessed with Carson, Heniford the birthday boy, Nichwander the ribber, Sande the neatnik, Smith the lonely, and White the newcomer—all separately burning daylight, had lost themselves inwardly, except Carson and Heep, who almost soundlessly floated their confidences in a private ebb and flow.

It was a disappointing way for Ig to spend April sixteenth.

He reminisced about the small community of his youth. A protective uniformity in the lifeway of the twelve hundred or so townspeople made people in Loris safe but ultimately dull. The community’s sameness had few exceptions: two Jewish families who rarely spoke one to the other, a Roman Catholic family, a dozen Presbyterians. The Negroes, all servants one way of the other, when they were not working for the Whites lived in a set apart place called the Hill.

In our town, folks vote their conscience without making a fuss of it set the tone. Politics were a matter of conscience, but almost everyone believed Democrat. The one Republican family never discussed voting.

News of Truman’s recent sacking of MacArthur brought politics to mind.

When Ig had escaped hometown confines eight years ago by entering University at fifteen, political topics hardly appeared on his to-do list. Voting Democrat had always been a given, but on campus his interest in political labels paled to near-invisibility.

Ig’s thoughts roamed to the present. After lunch he would dole out his sister’s fruitcake cookies to his buddies.

ON APRIL TWENTY-SEVENTH, UPSTAIRS command alerted the battalion for shipment to EUCOM, the U.S. European Command. Stateside staff developed plans for the journey. Troop preparation started immediately. The men knew nothing of the upstairs strategy, but they had agonized over rumors predicting shipment to Korea. Meanwhile, they had seen body bags—bejesus-frightening sacks of human remains from fighting in the Iron Triangle for a pair of hills that had been dubbed Jane Russell.

Washington State May, 1951

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THE 1951 DESK CALENDAR beside the typewriter still showed the month of May. A sealed letter to the Girl with the postage stamp upside down leaned against the typewriter. Ig studied his picture of her.

fantasy in a frame, crowned with teased light auburn hair toned with nut-brown streaks, enticing ear-shells, comely neck, guileless forehead almost free of frown lines, dark auburn eyebrows, innocent caramel eyes, high-boned cheeks, aquiline nose, perky philtrum, piquant full lips, shining teeth, quiet chin, comely breasts, swimmer’s physique with muscular midriff, skin down that gleamed in candlelight or morning sunlight, a marquee of pubis fur bespeaking openness and womanly vulnerability

Babe leaned over Ig’s typewriter and picked up the letter. You gotta fuckin’ be kidding me. Gimme that. I’ll mail it for you. He saw the address and reacted, My take, ol’ bud? It won’t happen.

Washington State, June, 1951

IG RIPPED A PAGE from the calendar beside his typewriter, and June appeared. A package had arrived for him. Word rippled and shortly fellows dropped by his desk to eye the newly-arrived open canister. More fruitcake cookies from your sister? they asked, because the shape of the mail parcel meant food. He had grown wise enough to save some of the cookies under his pillow before setting the open tin beside his typewriter.

He always made sure to save one for PFC Baker, his chum from Burley, Idaho, who had few other friends.

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PFC Lowell Baker

Babe collected Ig’s letter addressed to his father. Gimme that, Ig, old buddy. He read the Loris, South Carolina, address. My swinging wild-ass guess? I hope your dad can pull enough political strings to get you that compassionate leave. Or, you could find jack-off sense enough to see it won’t happen and just live with it.

Washington State, July, 1951

ON JULY SECOND, IG made private-first-class (paying $95.55 per month), being assigned as headquarters battery clerk; four days later he made corporal ($117.60 per month) in the same job. The military had its own mysterious manner in such matters. As long as his pay increased with each promotion, Ig did not question. He rewarded himself by manipulating the surge of his body’s blood and breath.

IN THE DAYROOM JULY fourth morning, the AFN played a quarter-hour of patriotic tunes then presented a news analysis, such as would have had Ig’s attention were he not so fixed on the problem with the Girl.

"Structural damage is still being assessed from Hurricane Able two months ago. Moving over the Gulf Stream, the initial depression intensified into a tropical storm. The disturbance turned to the south, and strengthened to hurricane status off the coast of Florida. Along the coast, winds produced high tides but little damage.

"Next. According to a report in The New York Times, a Communist court in Czechoslovakia has sentenced Associated Press correspondent journalist William N. Oatis to ten years in prison on charges of espionage. Arrested two months ago in Prague, Mr. Oatis, 37, was subjected to a show trial and sentenced to ten years in prison.

Next. American physicist and inventor, William Shockley, has announced the design of a junction transistor. He and a colleague previously had helped invent a nuclear device independent of the Manhattan Project scientists at Los Alamos. A true polymath and frequently-named contender for the Nobel Prize, he analyzed the effects of aerial bombing and may have even contributed to the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan.

NICHWANDER INTERRUPTED WHEN HE strode into the dayroom to collect mail. He spotted a letter by Ig’s portable typewriter. Gimme that. He reacted to the Girl’s name and the High Point, North Carolina, address. Listen to Nich on this. Cut your losses. My take? It ain’t in the cards.

IG SO FREQUENTLY ENJOYED the Armed Forces Network newscasts that he suggested to his roommates a way they could have their own a radio in their bunkroom. That noon the eight pooled $14.95 to buy a Silvertone brown plastic table model from the PX.

In first program they heard, a BBC commentator described in polished Oxonian accent the last of the original trams runs in London and reported how the citizens of London had turned out in force to say farewell.

"After nearly a century of service the tram has made its final appearance in the British capital. The final tram arrived at south-east London’s New Cross depot in the early hours of this morning. It was driven by John Cliff, deputy chairman of London Transport Executive, who began his career as a tram driver.

"Trams have carried banners all week proclaiming ‘Last Tram Week’ and special tickets carrying the same message have been produced.

"Conductors punched souvenir tickets and enthusiasts drove or cycled alongside the tram—car number 1951—for the duration of the journey. The tram’s journey time was extended by almost three hours by crowds of cheering Londoners who surrounded it along the route from Woolwich to New Cross.

"At New Cross depot the tram was greeted by LTE chairman Lord Latham. ‘In the name of Londoners I say goodbye, old tram,’ Lord Latham declared as the vehicle entered the tram shed.

"Some of these old trams are being sent to Leeds if anyone wants to relive their days.

This is the BBC, London.

Babe expressed amusement, Gotta admit, those fuckwit Londoners know how to make a parade out of any shit.

Washington State, August, 1951

MASTER SERGEANT SULLY, OF course, early on got wind of important orders affecting the 95th. Rumors in the ranks had the unit (a) shipping to Korea or (b) removing to Texas for artillery practice or (c) heading for Alaska. Even when the unit climbed aboard a special troop train, the grunts did not learn the destination.

Leaving Washington state, the 95th crossed into Canada somewhere and out at Toronto and on to the newly-reactivated embarkation site at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey.

THE HIATUS IN KILMER lasted long enough for Ig to visit Times Square, where he encountered a Chapel Hill roommate.

Why, Ig! Ig Heniford, what the hell are you doing here.

Murray! Murray McCain, oh my god, this can’t be real!

McCain, who worked as an NBC studio usher, took him up the Empire State Building and back to his coldwater one-bedroom. Murray, a IIKA sponsored for membership by Ig, offered a homosexual overnight. Ig, who had suspected from Chapel Hill days that Murray was queer, thanked him just the same and returned to Kilmer.

ON ANOTHER SORTIE FROM Kilmer, he treated his father, stepmother, and sister to box seats at a matinee of South Pacific at Broadway’s Majestic Theatre when they came to see him before his departure for Europe.

In a restaurant after the show, Ig asked his father, Remember when you shipped out for ambulance duty in France?

I remember. June, 1917. We all hope you won’t be in any fighting.

OFFICERS COMMANDING THE SHIPLOAD of soldiers going from Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, to Germany allowed troops to loll on the open deck; however, Ig spent much of his time seasick in a saltwater shower. His ship docked eight days later within the British zone of northern Germany.

Command staff there assigned most transient US military units and their personnel for a time to the local Carl Schurz Kaserne, which housed an Amerikanischer Soldatensender, AFN Bremerhaven, a U.S. military radio and TV station.

The 95th AAA, instead, went directly south to Mannheim.

Germany, September, 1951

ON A FOGGY MORNING, Thursday, September thirteenth, an American military convoy motored along a German highway to Fliegerhorst Kaserne, outside of Mannheim, where the men settled in. These facing rows of handsome stuccoed barracks looked more permanent than those back at Fort Lewis. Army procedure demanded that anything standing still for more than five minutes on a post be whitewashed or painted. During the weeks of boot in the States, recruits whitewashed. At Fliegerhorst, German workers painted. American brass had learned that the German psyche admired Oberherren (overlords). Captain Pont had discretionary funds to give locals the menial jobs at the kaserne.

LATER THAT DAY, IG, Babe, and Sande walked the hall of Coleman Barracks, found their newly-assigned bunkroom, picked their bunks, and started to unload personal belongings from duffel bags into foot lockers.

Babe, alluding to Ig’s scholarly vocabulary, razzed, Hey, college man, about our captain, is it Captain Pont or Captain Pontificate?

Ig smiled and disregarded him, instead intent on tracing his hand over the chestnut hair in his large photo of the eighteen-year-old Girl. She had been almost this beautiful three years back when he had met her and before it had even occurred to him that she might somehow become pivotal in his life. He slid the image under his bunk pillow.

Babe, fondling his pendant crucifix, tilted his head for cigarette smoke to whorl upward; he fanned a deck of Bicycle playing cards and placed the deck under his pillow. The deck was not for gambling, Babe did not gamble with these cards; he used them to tell fortunes.

Sande obsessively straightened items as he unpacked. Everything aligned precisely. When the entire array satisfied him, his smile was broad enough to allow a glint of gold from his top left incisor.

Ig situated his green portable Smith-Corona typewriter on a table by the barracks window to create a comfortable writing station. He placed at hand The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk. The few pages left of the bestseller he was hoarding for later. Not knowing what to do just then, he toyed with his dog tags. His index finger read the raised lettering, US 56 092 525, blood type A. The finger lingered on the indent in the edge designed to hook into the upper front teeth of a dead soldier on the battlefield. Memento mori, remember that you have to die.

Eldon Durham came in to check on his buddy. The twenty-one-year-old, proudly wore a private first class stripe beneath American Seventh Army insignia. His admiration for Ig had no bounds. This naïf of severely-limited education and farm background insisted on performing many of Ig’s menial tasks and depended on this pal’s letter-writing skills. Durham asked. Can we send a letter to my folks?

Sure. Right now, before they have us fall out again?

Eldon eagerly nodded.

The two settled at the typewriter. Ig from memory addressed an envelope and spoke the words to be typed. Mr. and Mrs. C. C. Durham, Rt. 4, Flathead, Montana, U.S.A. He and Eldon laughed that he knew them by heart. Then he inserted a page in the typewriter, and his fingers begat words. Thursday, September 13, 1951, Dear Ma and Pa.

Durham put in, You tell Sis to read this to ’em before morning milking, so they can think over it all day.

Right. Ig carefully employed Eldon’s rural vernacular.

Dear Ma and Pa—oh, you got that already. He squinted to think. We got here from Camp Kilmer near New York City, where we shipped out September 1 to Germany and got to Bremerhaven September 9. But we just got to here where we are today. There was eight days on the ocean. Ig got seasick, ha ha, but I didn’t, so I took care of him, except when he just was so bad off he sat down on the floor in the showers, ha ha. He’s right as rain now. When we got here, you know, where we are today, I got to settle in and get him all set up. I live down the hall. It’s not like when everybody was all together in that big room at Fort Lewis. Just eight guys to each room here. I’m down the hall from my buddy, but we can still look after each other. Don’t you worry none. He tapped Ig’s shoulder. Tell Sis to tell me about whether my bull’s doing his job.

Ig typed swiftly. Durham smiled, deciding what to say next. He liked to send long letters because his family would read and reread each one until a new one arrived.

A WEEK OR SO later, Captain Pont summoned Corporal Heniford to his Headquarters office.

Ig peered in. Sir? He saluted when the officer looked up from his paper-laden desk.

At ease. I have here a request for your teaching services. Twenty-eight officers of this Brigade must meet specific military mandates each quarter. A requirement within the current three months requires certified improvement of their public speaking skills. Your 201 file shows that you have taught courses on speech.

Yes, sir.

"Master Sergeant Sullivan