Come Back, Willie and Joe - and Ralph and Larry
November 2002 Story, by Robert Sherrill
Robert Sherrill Hails Heroes, Famous and Otherwise
It may be I'm just not the hero-worshipping type. I've had a few, but most fade, like Jim Pearsall, who ran the bases backwards, and Germany Schaeffer, who stole first base. Perfect. Baseball players.
My grandmother, Mrs. Alma Burgin, rules my pantheon of heroes. She was omniscient. I loved Joseph Heller's Yossarian in Catch 22, and Gully Jimson in Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth. But they are fiction. There's Flannery O'Conner, who wrote it. General David Monroe Shoup easily makes the cut. The former Marine Corps commandant was brave enough to make a lot of noise against the Viet Nam war. (Remember Nam?) A different sort of courage, I guess, won him the Medal of Honor. Or was it?
A lot of World War 2 servicemen behaved for years, until that old debbil dotage crept up on them, and they began to think of themselves as heroes, strutting around at memorials, D-Days, V-Days, and Armistice Day parades and whatnot, strangling in VFW and Legion jackets, their fore-and-aft caps cocked high and low, gongs, patches, and other inscrutable garbage all over them. Some might have been heroes, who knows?
This disturbed me and got me to thinking about heroes, real ones - and after a long spell, I poked my head up and my hero ambushed me. He was not Sgt. York or Audie Murphy, he was the World War 2 dogface. While I wasn't looking, this elixir was bubbling in my mind, waiting to burble up. Your mind, you know, goes on working, even though you are not conscious of it. Good thing, too, in my case.
I knew some of the elements of this brew - Catch 22; Lee Kenelly's GI, just a book about the hardware and software that was part of a soldier; Ernie's War, David Nichol's collection of Ernie Pyle's World War 2 columns; James Jones's From Here to Eternity, a book about two romances, the lifers' (regulars') love affair with the Army and their he-she troubles.
Still, the real source and catalyst of this spirit was Bill Mauldin's Up Front and Back Home. In Up Front, Mauldin tells about his life as a doggie and the cartoons of two dogfaces, Willie and Joe, show it. It is a fine work - funny, grim, and sad, the only indispensable book, as the critics say, on World War 2. Though his reporting and invention of Willie and Joe was not a tin helmet or a bible in the pocket over the heart, or even a letter from a sweetheart, it was a desperate protection and sustenance and a smile for doggies and other Americans in Europe.
His Back Home continued Willie and Joe's life stateside, with often bitter, postwar editorial cartoons. I am still jolted by what I leached from his words and pictures, even to straight steals, like Mauldin's "horizontal foxhole" lines from one of his drawings. Some of his work became my convictions. If this makes me callow, then I am one callow daddy.
Mauldin, boy soldier, seems to have always been at war with himself. Conflicting feelings are, I feel, the surest crucible of art. His work stripped bare war and life, and himself, with humor and honesty. He was a strong, clear, and open writer. His anecdote about the 20-year-old staff sergeant who was shredded when a German dropped a potato masher in his hole is a little lesson in how to write. How to be. In a picture of him in the field, I noticed that he was left-handed. As he asked: Whoever heard of a left-handed artist? He led a somewhat privileged life, but don't be fooled; he was a doggie, a 45th Division doggie.
I can blame the story that follows this, then, on Mauldin, but I must say a couple of old dogfaces translated my abstract hero into flesh: the invincibly civilian John Ralph Cambron and Larry Frady, both old friends from Asheville. Ralph began his European career as a Bangalore torpedo man at the sands of Normandy, and Frady, a regular topkick, ended his at Anzio. He couldn't hug the beach tight enough, so a little Italian machinegun bullet pinked his right shoulder but left a hole you could put your fist in over his spine - the million-dollar wound. He recovered but gave up his career. I still owe him a C-note for a Florida trip he underwrote.
Recently a friend who scouts the internet plucked a story from it by Gordon Dillow, who writes columns for The Orange County (California) Register. He wrote that the old doggie had fallen on evil times. Mauldin, who is 80, had been severely burned in a household accident in California and was lying abed in an Orange County nursing home - not quite in this world. There is only one way to put this news: it hurt.
It might not help, but I throw these three guys - and all the doggies of that long-ago war - my first and only heartfelt salute.
(If you wish to send Mauldin a card, or whatever, contact Gordon Dillow at (714) 796-7953 or email at gldillow@aol.com. His address is: The Orange County Register, Box 11626, Santa Ana, CA 92711-1626.)
Tennis Anyone?
Right over the Bluebird Ice Cream Parlor on Pack Square in the middle of Asheville, North Carolina, there was a night club (honky-tonk?) called the Casa Loma, where a bunch of boys sat around with their dates, danced a little, drank a lot, and listened to the ricky-ticky of a three-and- a-half-piece band (the drummer never kept the beat, so he didn't count as a full piece). The boys were an odd but not uncharming lot, from those who looked middle aged to dewy youths who could skip the ritual matinal face-scraping every day but Sunday, if they got up that day.
At the time, few if any of them were suited for nice, everyday life in their little city. Most of this shifting and more or less shiftless band hated anything resembling the uniforms they'd worn for the past few years, yet some wore battle jackets, leather flight jackets, or those new green GI field jackets - they could afford little else. They hung around Wilkins Corner, Bix Brown's "soda shop," the Brunswick Billiard Parlor, Margaret's Supper Club, Pig On' Whistle, Biltmore Plaza, The Patio, Bon Ton, Sunset Villa, and other sumptuous fonts of culture. Here the quondam guardians of democracy whiled away their languid afternoons and evenings and washed away that 20 dollars their former custodian gave them each week for a year.
Well, c'est la vie, they all said, but some of their girls and mamas and daddies grew impatient with their heroes who wouldn't wear their Purple Heart or Good-Conduct lapel pins, or even their Ruptured Ducks, the gold pin symbolic of their graduation into civilian life at Fort Jackson, Bragg, Dix, Camp Croft, Parris Island, Norfolk, Jefferson Barracks, and other war-fat billets. Almost to the man, they wanted to forget the past few years. They had been on both sides of the tattered old globe and nearly everywhere between for longer than they'd wanted during the second World War. They had become something else for a time. They had learned a special language they would not be able to shake entirely for the rest of their lives. They loved each other and their girls dearly and in their own way were thanking God, or Whomever, that they were around to celebrate.
They were once dogfaces, flyboys, jarheads, swabbies, and so on. To have called them warriors would have stretched the limits of their risibles, but, Lord, what they had not seen! Well, the hell with that. They were training hard to forget, ducking "readjustment," and keeping their heads down over their beers and trying to come up with something to take the place of those sweet lives before that dreadful war interrupted them. Or, it could be, they were just hanging about fitting things back together, making them the same, knowing they couldn't and fighting off the pesky spirits of those who were not there, lurking in the dark corners of their messed-up minds.
The Casa Loma was not a tough joint, but you wouldn't think "classy" when you reached the top of the stairs and looked around. You could often get a drink there or at another, classier place across the Square. Good old Asheville, where whiskey was fiercely illegal and the flow of it just as fiercely unimpeded.
I was sitting in the Loma one night taking long, satisfying pulls off my Blue and talking with my friend, John R. Cambron - known better as Ralph - who was doing likewise. Ralph was right on the edge of getting serious, I could see, so I waited quietly for him to spill it. Ordinarily, Ralph was a funny, talky fellow who had an unquenchable sense of irony (hillbilly style), deepened by recent experience, and easily detected in his favorite reading < the works of Evelyn Waugh, from Decline and Fall to A Handful of Dust. He was tall and skinny, and, though he was not athletic looking, he had been a fine tennis player. Ralph's war stories were not usually like a lot of those grisly, gory tales, some of which were - shall we say? - embellished. The notion of heroism, counting himself one, would have put a malicious little smile on his face.
Ralph had led a Bangalore torpedo squad ashore at Normandy on D-Day. Each member of the squad carried a heavy length of pipe, one of which was loaded with explosives. These were fitted together to make the long "torpedo," shoved under enemy wire and detonated, cutting it. His boys lost most of the torpedo and were scattered in the roiling Channel waters as they struggled ashore. So they just kept going, attending to the usual business of doggies. I don't remember how long after he went ashore a German machine bullet hit him just above his left knee. He was sent back to a hospital in England and after a few weeks returned to the fight. It hadn't been the "million-dollar" wound, the sort that took you out of combat but left you more or less whole. Not long after he resumed business, he was leading his troops across a field being mortared, fitfully, by the Germans when he stepped on a Schu mine, which blew, lifting him up in the air (he thought rather majestically) and dropping him abruptly to earth. He was dazed, but took off his belt and tied a tourniquet above his knee to keep from leaking to death from his mangled foot until he got help.
This night at the Loma, those Blues cut through his defense of irony to his memory and his feelings. Although I never did get straight whether his thoughts came at the time he contemplated the bloody mess where his foot had been, or were the kind that haunt you and revisit you from time to time and won't let go.
He fixed me with his clear, blue-green, intensely angry eyes and said, "You know, old friend, you know what really pisses me off? I could never play tennis again. I could never play again."
Take Five; Smoke, if You Got 'Em
It is quiet, almost. The distant thump of artillery, the delicate pecking, popping, and sputtering have, for some reason, ceased to trouble this late summer's morning. There is a faint grumbling, like a thunderstorm far away.
Over there, across the rubble-strewn cobblestone street that runs the length of this grave little crop of Norman houses, a fabulous creature has dropped from somewhere. He is sort of sitting and hunkering on a threshold stone and leaning up against the broken memory of a door frame he and his fellow creatures helped refashion just now, along with others up and down the narrow lane. The houses are pocked with sunbursts, crescents, ugly gashes, and discrete little pits and holes punched through the walls that frame jumbles of splintered, whiskery timbers, some of them smoking, windows gone. No one is at home.
The stranger is profoundly dirty and fragrant. His boots are cut and cracked, and the collar of one of them is held together by a strip of leather ready to tear loose from a skewed buckle. His trousers are a rich blend of grime and the grease of his own humanity. Angular tongues of cloth flap from his knees. His shirt begs for a decent burial. He is held together by a bandoleer, slung sashlike over his shoulder, and harness decorated with grenades and a leather-handled knife. A dark, mossy mat covers most of his furrowed face. Way back up under the brim of the battered pot on his head, his red-stitched eyes are frozen, empty. No. They are out.
For 20 months someone has been trying to kill him, and he has killed some of those who tried. He has been showered with every manner of metal known to man and caught a few scraps of it. It hurt. He contemplated his own raw, seeping flesh, and, thus, his own mortality. The terror and the arrow flieth day and night. He has walked epic distances in savage, desert scrub, through eerily silent woods, across grassy pastures, where dead cows and men are scattered haphazardly about (he had once been spattered with a buddy's blood in one of those fields), in sucking mud and up hills so steep he dug horizontal foxholes in them for shelter - and, in those hills, he thanked God for creating mules, with a little help from man. He has waded armpit deep in a couple of oceans and tried to flatten himself to micrometer thickness as the air above him sang. He has slept - where has he not slept? - on a gravel mattress in a dry creek bed and in a hole full of water during an aerial bombing. He slept heroically and bitched heroically - about K and C rations, and the ample helpings of chicken dealt by downy-faced 90-day wonders and garritroopers. In this, he somehow found comic irony that took the edge off the unbearable, and somewhere along the way, he lost his innocence.
In this brief respite from his daily chores, the stranger is not thinking about how swell his old lady smelled after she took a bath or how good a tall, tinkling glass of his mama's sweet ice tea would taste just now, or of the thrill of slipping between crisp, clean sheets. He is not remembering the last fiery pull off a jug of grappa or calvados, and he wouldn't even wince at that stricken helplessness that jolts him when the faces of his ever-diminishing cadre of friends slip by his guard and into his ken. He is not even afraid. His mind has seized up. He is played out from the soles of his soggy feet to the matted, infested mop under his helmet. His own mother would send him round to the back door. He is 22, a child.
A silvery ribbon of smoke ripples up from the limp Lucky in his left hand. The fingers of the other hold, with surprising daintiness, his heavy M1, the blunt and sometimes pesky tool of his trade. Black smoke puffs and scuds down the street. His eyes stir. He scratches, unsticks himself. He takes a deep drag off his butt, drops it beside him. Directly, his mind will turn on again, and he will gather his motley friends together, and they will go do what they have to do. He will (they all will) do it against his most compelling desire < to survive. He means to live, go home. His mama didn't raise her boy for a gold star in her front window. He is neither coward nor hero < why, he is, as he and his buddies would say with heavy doggie irony, out there on the farflung frontiers of democracy fighting for the oppressed.
He emerges wearily from his hunker, stands up, turns my way. He sees me. I am a reproach to him. I am clean, well fed, and ... I try. "Hey, buddy!" I holler. He doesn't answer. He fades and drifts down the street with the smoke. Gone forever.
***
The headline on the old doggie's obituary in the Greensboro Daily News several years ago read: War Hero John Ralph Cambron dies at 70.
The obit said he had won a Silver Star medal, and a story in another newspaper said he had won the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Hearts. I knew he had been hit more than once, but he never told me about the other stuff. That "hero" line and the hardware do not shake what I had learned from him, and from war cartoonist Bill Mauldin, and other sources and memory: The dogface (or, if you like, GI, infantryman, foot soldier, troops) was the true hero of World War 2, precisely because he was not a hero.
And then ...
"Our friends and relatives knew not to call us heroes. They knew we were American citizens who did the best we could." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., author, World War 2 prisoner of war.
Robert Sherrill was born in Biltmore, N.C., and resides in Durham. He writes regularly for the Urban Hiker.