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7
My Life as a Cardinal Man

 

 

In writing about this period I don't feel as if I am writing about myself; in fact, not about any real person at all. I think I know why. I was not a person. I was an enlisted man in the Army. An EM has no more individuality than the seventh egg in a box of a dozen. He is a unit quantity. He is not just a number, he is less than a number, because he does not even have that limited identity we sometimes give to certain numbers, like Third Base or the Year 1492. He has cardinality: if he is missing from a formation, the tally is one short. But he does not have ordinality: it Does not matter (except perhaps to him, but who cares what a cardinal number thinks?) whether he is the fifth or the fifty-fifth in the muster roll, any more than it matters whether the sheet of paper I take out of a ream was the first or the last to go in.

If a soldier were not a cardinal man, armies would not be possible. No person would allow himself to be restricted to his barracks because a quarter will not bounce off his bed, or would tolerate being refused admission to an "officers only" bar, or would stroll down to the Venetian Causeway, as I did on many evenings during basic training in Miami Beach, and gaze hungrily at the city lights across the bay, accepting the prohibition against walking across the bridge. A cardinal man in the uniform of the other side can be killed or maimed without penalty. A cardinal man on your own side can be ordered to storm a pillbox, or be shot for falling asleep, without consideration. A person would not put up with any of this crap for a minute.*

 

* There are a lot of cardinal people in the world, and not all of them are in armies. But that's a whole other discussion.

 

Since I was born a white male Protestant, and thus competitively advantaged in the American society in ways that kikes, niggers, girls, gooks, and wogs were not, it would be hard for me to understand all the passions that lie behind the liberation movements . . . if I had not been an enlisted man in the Army. Aw, sure, I know it's not the same, I knew it was only a game, and that when I got my discharge all the rules would change back again. But it was close enough while it lasted. An EM knows what it is like to be treated like a piece of meat. And he knows, too, the delicious advantages of accepting the status quo. You can let someone else do the worrying. Uncle Toms and cuddly girls learned this long before I did.

 

Since the game rules called for me to be a cuddly Tom, I played that game and, my God, I actually enjoyed it. All of it. Even the utterly revolting parts, like cleaning grease traps on KP and getting up at a quarter to five in the morning, with the stars still out. Basic training (at least for the Air Force, at least in Miami Beach at that time) was a lot like going back to Camp Fire Place Lodge and the age of twelve.

In 1943 the Miami Beach hotels were clustered south of Lincoln Road. They were relatively small and nearly vacant. The hotel owners had been torpedoed by the war as surely as the tankers whose oil washed up on the sand now and then, and so they struck a deal with the government. Almost all their hotels were used to house Air Force basic trainees. The owners were happy enough, and for us rookies it beat the hell out of sleeping in tents.

I drove through that part of Miami Beach a few weeks ago, and it is all shabby and down at the heel. Collins Avenue, which used to resound with the cadence count and singing of our marching platoons, is now filled with elderly retirees trying to get along on Social Security, sunshine, and canned pet food. The signs on the little hotels I barracked in are in Cuban Spanish. The beach itself has almost disappeared. But in 1943 it was a whole new thing to me. I had never been in Florida before, had never tasted a subtropical climate except when I was too tiny to notice it. I found the smell of rotting palm trees fascinating, was astonished at the luminous clarity of Biscayne Bay, observed with interest the number of GIs who fell over with heat prostration at the daily retreat ceremony. I quickly made friends, first and most permanently with WINTERS Joseph S, ASN 32879797. Joe and I, as the two tallest men in Flight O, were almost always together leading the files as we marched. In the quick swap of autobiographies we discovered we also had the two tallest IQs, but of course the Army didn't care much about that.

Joe and I spent a lot of time together. When we could make our own decisions we swam, or drank a little beer in the blacked-out bars, or listened to Sunday-afternoon record concerts on the lawn of the public library. What we mostly did was what the Army told us to do, sitting around in the sun while someone explained one more time the nomenclature of the carbine, or watching films on venereal disease, or going through the obstacle course. We fired a lot of guns. My summers in camp and on my uncle's farm paid off with a lot of marksmanship medals, and by and by they told us we were finished killers and sent us off in a thirty-car troop train to Chanute Field, Illinois, to become Air Force weathermen. Joe shipped out in the same batch. We snaked through every bypass in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, following the land-grant lines because that was the cheapest way for troops to go. At every siding there were Gray Ladies with coffee and cake, and on one short jump the engineer let me in the cab to drive the train for an omnipotent instant.

Chanute Field was more like real Army. You could smoke in the mess halls ("You're at an Air Base now, soldier!"), you could get weekend passes to go as far away as Chicago; I even think there was no bed check, although that seems more wildly indulgent than I can believe. As a special bonus particularly for me, Jack Williamson turned up at the weather school. Jack was a year or so ahead of me on the track. He had already done his basic, become a weather observer, and gone out for a year or two in the field; now he was back at Chanute for advanced training as a forecaster. He was a most welcome sight, and reminded me that ordinality was still not permanently beyond reach. Joe Winters's wife, Dorothy, came out from New York to spend the summer in the tiny town of Rantoul; they took a room, Joe got an off-base pass, and they introduced me to square dancing and the delights of string quartets. Tina stopped by on her way from her own basic training to a commission as a second lieutenant in the WACs. When I finally came in season for a weekend pass to Chicago, I spent it with the new editor of Amazing Stories, Raymond A. Palmer. I had read Ray's own stories as a kid, and his magazine (though under a prior editor) had actually printed the first words of mine that anyone paid money for. But we had never met. His appearance was a great surprise. Ray had suffered some sort of spinal damage and carried a conspicuous hump on his shoulders. He was twisted and tiny, not much more than four feet tall. I had not known! It was impossible not to notice it. I had often discussed him with mutual friends, and yet no one had ever mentioned that about him. I am sure the reason was Ray himself—bright, warmhearted, willing to put himself to immense trouble for a stray GI like me.

All this mingling with writers and other human beings made my typing fingers itch again.

I had asked my mother to ship down my lavender portable while still in basic training, as soon as I was sure there wasn't any rule against having it. But I had used it only for letters. Now I wanted to try a story.

The problem was finding a place to work. There were thirty thousand GIs in Chanute Field, and they occupied all the holes. I knew when I could write. Saturday nights were my own, and there was no reveille on Sunday mornings, so I could write until I couldn't stay awake any more and sleep late the next day. But where? The day rooms closed at midnight. The barracks lights went out at ten-thirty. The classrooms were locked.

But in all of Chanute Field there was one facility that never closed, day, night, or Sunday; moreover, it would disturb no one if I typed there, because there was no one sleeping there to disturb: the pro station.

So there I sat, rattling away on one story or another, while the soldiers who had expended their raunchiness in a doubtful place lurched in and stumbled out. They didn't bother me. And none of them lingered long enough for me to bother them.

I think one of the stories I wrote in the Chanute pro station was a detective short called "The Life of Riley." Oddly, I don't seem to have made any use of the surroundings for what I now perceive as interesting local color.

After Chanute I made corporal and shipped out to an operational air base in Enid, Oklahoma. I had made private first class as soon as I completed basic. That came to one rise in grade every sixty days or so, which meant that the war would only have to last another two years to see me a brigadier general, if nothing went wrong with the system.*

 

* Something did, and I wound up a buck sergeant.

 

Enid's weather station was a real working facility. Enid was a basic flying school. The kay-dets had to rely on what we told them about the weather, so there were real values at stake when we played at spotting synoptic maps and following pilot balloons through a theodolite. A nice touch was that several of the weather observers were WACs, notably a very fine-looking and highly smart blonde divorcee from Florida named Zenobia Qualls Grizzard. Zenobia and I were seriously misgraffed in respect of years, but we had a lot of fun, golfing together, bowling together, drinking three-point-two beer together in the Passion Pit of the Hotel Youngblood in town. Zenobia outclassed me in all those activities. She was a champion golfer, tournament type; fortunately for my ego, she had broken her ankle not long before and still couldn't put much muscle into her swing. So I always lost, but not always badly.

Our drinking was somewhat affected, if not really handicapped, by Oklahoma's quaint image of itself as a dry state. Only three-point-two was legal, but you could get anything you cared to name from the bellboys at the Youngblood. At least they said you could; I never heard them turn down a request, but every bottle came with the seal broken, and I have my suspicions about where and how they were filled.

After six months at Enid it 'peared to me that I could hear the step of the Fool-Killer coming up behind me. It seemed time to move on. The trouble with Oklahoma was that there weren't very many Nazis there to fight. I wanted action. My 201 file bulged with applications to be transferred to a combat theater. None of them seemed to move anyone to action, and the war was moving on. Then a circular came through, soliciting volunteers for Arctic training. I signed up at once.

In the fullness of time my orders came through. I was sent to Lowry Field, Colorado, for cold-weather instruction, they pulled all the fillings out of my teeth and replaced them with freezeproof North Pole models, and then they sent me to Italy.

The troopship Cristobal steamed into the Bay of Naples and moored, not at your usual New York or London variety of pier, but next to a bombed-out, belly-up freighter. The Bay of Naples had been hit very hard by bombers, everybody's bombers. First the Americans and the British had stamped it bloody; then, when the city changed hands, the Luftwaffe finished up what was left. Nobody cared about bombing the city, but the port was big business; so in order to get ashore we had to march on catwalks across those capsized ships.

I was not quite prepared for the reality of war—I don't mean the fighting itself (I had read all about that, and seen it in a hundred Hollywood movies), but the open wounds that were left behind when a war moved on. We went by truck to a repple-depple on the Caserta Road, and it took me time to realize that those buildings with holes in them had not been marked for urban renewal by a demolition crew but were the inadvertent targets of bombs or shells aimed at something else. In the evenings the women pressed up against the fence of the replacement depot, offering, in their soft, hoarse peasant voices, laundry services, home-cooked meals, and themselves. We spare parts lay in the bin for a week or so while the scoops came through and shoveled us out to our stations. I wound up with the 456th Bomb Group—"Colonel Steed's Flying Colts," for God's sake—in a place called Stornara, surrounded by walnut groves, a few miles from the Adriatic on the Foggia plain.

The 456th flew B-24s, clumsy four-engine bombers that rumbled out to Romanian oil installations and Yugoslavian marshaling yards every day they could fly. They did not always come back. Sometimes they didn't even get out of sight of the field. We lost a few on takeoff—blam! and a pillar of smoke at the end of the runway—and one awful night, at the time of the invasion of southern France, two pairs of B-24s collided as they were forming up and another was ignited by a scrap of debris, so that five of them were burning in the air at once over the field. The equation

5 B24 = 50 0+EM

solved itself in all our minds, and we ground crew stood staring while those fifty human beings died. Some of them jumped, but none of them lived, because the parachutes were on fire.

Shortly after I reached the 456th, I got a lawyer's letter from Florida to tell me that Doë had brought suit for divorce. As I was a soldier and therefore divorce-proof for the duration, I could have stopped it. But I deduced she had something in mind, and so I signed the paper and sent it back. A little while later I heard through mutual friends that she had married Tommy Owens, a neighborhood kid who had known Doë longer than I had, now a B-25 navigator in the States.

And about that time my mother's letters became shorter and less frequent. I knew she was ill. She never talked about her illness in her letters, but when two weeks went by with no mail at all, I realized she was sicker than I had thought.

Well, I knew what to do about that. It was in all the magazines. When our brave soldier boys at the fighting fronts had a problem, the Red Cross was always there. They would know how to help.

So I went looking for the 456th's own Red Cross man. The Red Cross had communications facilities denied to the rest of us; he could send a cable to the hospital in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and get an answer back in hours. He could even arrange compassionate leave, a quick trip back to the States on a courier plane via Dakar and Natal. He could do a lot. And I really think he might have, at that. If I had ever been able to find him. Unfortunately his schedule did not permit him to be in his little office very often, and for a solid week, every time I went looking for him, he was out playing golf. And then I did get a cable and the issue became moot. My mother had died of bone cancer in Allentown.

The headquarters squadron facilities at Stornara had been improvised out of tents, barns, and wineries, but there was one building that was solid and new: the enlisted men's club down the hill. Square, empty cinder-block building, it had been someone's fantasy of Red Cross dances and film showings, but in practice it seldom held anything more than the all-weather, all-group crap games. I claimed a corner of it and set up my typewriter.

Because I was a little homesick about New York, I decided to write about it. A novel—why not? I meditated on the plot and decided that the most interesting thing in New York was the advertising business, and so, page by page, I began to hammer out a long, complicated, and very bad novel called For Some We Loved.* The Italian civilian who cleaned up the EM club respected what I was doing immensely, guarded my privacy, and gave me a picture of himself which I still have, taken while he was in Mussolini's army in Ethiopia. It shows him brandishing an immense revolver and looking exactly like the reason the Italians lost the war: a gentle man with a great sense of humor; it is impossible to imagine him ever firing that gun at a human being.

 

* The novel was never published and no longer exists, because one night years later I burned it. But it wasn't a total waste. For Some We Loved led directly to writing The Space Merchants.

 

 

There wasn't really a lot to do. For a few hours before the group took off on a mission we were all busy; the rest of the time we played chess or wrote letters or talked during our duty hours. Donovan Bess was there, perhaps the best chess player I've ever encountered; he had the curious idiosyncrasy of calling a knight a horse, but his country-boy dialogue covered up grand-master play. The station commander was an apple-cheeked second lieutenant named Jack Adler, who had just discovered T. S. Eliot, and for a solid week we went over the imagery in Prufrock to make sure we knew what the man was talking about.

The weather wing picked up all the high-IQ oddballs in the Air Force, and we had among us a tithing fundamentalist from Ohio, a Polish halfback from Hamtramck and the first admitted homosexual I had ever known on a social basis; he was out of action for the duration, he said, because that was grounds for court-martial and a dishonorable discharge, but he enjoyed telling everyone who would listen what his preferences and plans were.

When the resources of the air base ran thin, I borrowed a jeep and went to visit Foggia, Cerignola, or Barletta. There wasn't much in Foggia, because it had been bombed flat. There wasn't a lot in Cerignola, either, because there never had been; sleepy farm town with a huge new cathedral that smelled like a latrine, it was the kind of community that the Italians used to say Christ never bothered to visit. But Barletta lay on the lovely, limpid Adriatic, not yet a septic tank, and you could swim and lie on the beach and gaze speculatively at the beautiful fifteen-year-old Whore of Barletta, rejecting commercial offers in the afternoon for the sake of improving her suntan, and even meet civilians of a different kind. One was a former Italian Army artillery captain named Ugo Vittorini, whose brother, Elio, was one of Italy's finest novelists. Ugo had served in Yugoslavia. A fierce anti-Fascist, he had managed to persuade his entire battery to desert to the partisans there, while his wife, Maria, was operating a "safe house" for partigiani between the lines in northern Italy. Now they were a quiet professorial couple with children and a pleasant apartment on a courtyard, and they impressed me very much.

Twenty-two years after the war my wife, Carol, and I attended the Science Fiction Film Festival in Trieste and arranged to meet our two older daughters (then at school in England) in Naples as soon as their term ended. We had a week to spare, and we spent it driving a rented Fiat through my war. I don't know what it did for Carol, except a little heat prostration here and there, but I found it fascinating. Foggia! In 1944 there had been almost nothing standing except the beat-up tower of the church; in 1967 it was all pastel stucco high-rises, and I couldn't even find the church in the towers around it. Barletta, too, was all high-rise pink and blue apartment buildings and a whole new battery of hotels and restaurants. But in Cerignola time had stopped. Not a building had been added, none taken away, and the church still smelled like a latrine, while all the rest of the area had risen from the grave and turned into Miami Beach.

Around the same time I found the solution to a minor mystery that dated back to Stornara. A bomb wing was made up of four groups, but our wing had only three: the 455th, 456th, and 458th. I always wondered where that last group had got to, and then in a casual conversation with Hal Clement, he supplied the answer. The 457th had been detached to fill a hole in the AAF in England, and he had been in it. Pity it worked out like that. I would have been thrilled to meet Hal Clement in Italy.

 

An observed fact of my life is that I have almost always gotten everything I wanted, sooner or later. Another observed fact is that sometimes by the time I get it I don't want it any more. For Christmas the Army gave me that thing I had been scheming and contriving for, for a year and a half, a chance to transfer to the Infantry, go to OCS, and become an expendable second lieutenant with the Fifth Army as it crawled up the mountains toward the Po.

Catch-22 was that in order to take advantage of this boon, one had to re-up for two more years, and it was clear to everyone who looked at a map that the war wouldn't stretch that long. It was annoying that the Germans didn't seem to perceive this fact. Indeed, they had just launched the Ardennes attack, perplexingly as if they thought they were still a viable military force. But the Russians were grinding bloodily west, and the Fifth Army was creeping north up the Apennines; even the Japanese were being pushed off one island after another, and there was no doubt in my mind that the European part of the war would run out in a few months and the rest of it not long after.

But still—

A third of a century later, with Vietnam so huge in the recent past, it is hard for me to remember how righteously most of us viewed our cause. But we did. The Nazis had done terrible things. How terrible we were being reminded every day, as the Americans and British liberated one concentration camp after another. It was a moral obligation to stop them, even at risk—maybe especially if at risk, to prove, well, something to, well, somebody.

So I stewed over this problem for a while, doing arithmetic in my head. Allow a month for the papers to be processed; that brings us into January. Add ten weeks for the OCS course, and say another two to hang around a replacement depot waiting for an assignment. That brought us to early April at best before I would be handed my platoon to lead into combat, and where would the combat be? Surely not in Europe any more. And the war against Japan seemed mostly a matter of Air Force and Navy, even if it managed to stay in business long enough to get me there.

As it turned out, my arithmetic was a little wrong. The Germans managed to hold out until May, plenty of time for me to get my head blown off if I had really wanted it. But in the event it was taken out of my hands, anyway. Someone in AAF/MTO headquarters in Caserta had his eye on me. They had discovered that I had been a writer and an editor as a civilian, and decided I would be more use with words than with weapons or weather instruments. So in January, 1945, I packed up and headed west across the peninsula.

 

U.S. Army Air Forces/Mediterranean Theater of Operations was headquartered in the King's Palace in the town of Caserta, a few miles inland from Naples: immense rectangular tenement of a building that reminded me a lot of Knickerbocker Village. It wasn't just Air Force, or even just Americans. The whole allied Mediterranean war effort was directed from there. People like Eisenhower and Churchill passed through from time to time, causing much pain to the headquarters troops who were required to shine themselves up for ceremonial parades. (We Weather Squadron people were never involved in that sort of thing, fortunately for the good name of the service.) The place was full of foreigners. There was a big RAF unit, and I became friendly with some of them on a bridge-playing and beer-drinking basis. There were French troops, including black colonials; co-belligerent Italians; and quite a few former members of the Wehrmacht, now working in the mess halls as KPs to feed us conquerors. There I met my longtime friend Eddie Cope, the sage of Houston, Texas, who passed on to me all he had learned at the University of Texas's drama department. ("There are only three reasons for any line: to show character, advance the action, or get a laugh," "If you show a gun on the stage, you have to fire it." Etc. They are all good rules, tolerant about being broken when necessary.)

What I was supposed to be doing was public relations and editing the squadron newspaper. Public relations wasn't hard. I prepared a standard form, and was given a clerk-typist to pound them out and mail them off to local newspapers whenever any of our number did anything interesting, like getting promoted from Pfc to Corporal, Editing the newspaper was a little less straightforward, since I didn't know anything about newspapers. I solved it by converting it to a magazine, borrowed a mimeograph, found a civilian printer to do the covers, and put out one of the nicest fanzines you ever saw.

It was an undemanding way to spend time in Italy, but in the familiar environment of typewriters and layouts ordinality was seeping back. I didn't seem to be doing much, and I began to hear the step of the Fool-Killer catching up behind me.

I was also in love. Dorothy LesTina and I had been heating up the Army Postal Service with an awful lot of correspondence. Now she was in Germany, a first lieutenant, whose principal job was to stand up on a platform in front of ten thousand troops while some GI crooner sang "Darling, je vous aime beaucoup" to her. (Of many odd individual contributions is a war effort made.) Germany was on the same side of the Atlantic as I was, which was tantalizing, and it was my deep belief that if any GI was going to sing love songs to my girl, it should be me. I could not see any way to arrange that, and frankly, the war was beginning to seem a bore. The Germans had been pushed back out of the Bulge, and it was all just mopping up. And not very interesting.

What I didn't know about the Bulge was that two of my best friends were receiving their death sentences there. Neither of them was wounded. But Dirk Wylie hurt his back jumping out of an Army truck; it got worse, turned into tuberculosis of the spine, and he died of it in 1948. While Cyril Kornbluth strained his heart lugging a .50-caliber machine gun around the Ardennes Forest, and died of essential hypertension a few years later.

What I did know was that the Bulge was the last real effort the Germans could possibly make, and the war was winding down. So I cast about for some more interesting way to spend the time until I would get back to civilian reality, and found it on Mount Vesuvius.

The 12th Weather Squadron had requisitioned a former Cook's Tours hotel there. It was called the Eremo, which means "hermit," and it was isolated enough for the name to fit.

As a headquarters flunky, I had the use of it any time I could borrow a jeep to get there, which was often. The Eremo made it quite a comfortable war. We had kept on the civilian staff—not all of them, and without spit and polish; but they cooked much more interesting meals than I had had anywhere else in Italy at that time, trading Army Spam for civilian fresh vegetables, and they were perfectly willing to make our beds and shine our shoes and bring us drinks on the terrace. It was a quiet place to write, I perceived at once. There was also a writing job which needed to be done—preparing the Squadron History—and I began to scheme to transfer myself to the Hill. About the time the war in Europe ground to an end, I got my druthers.

Living on the side of a volcano is not like being in your average Mamaroneck split-level. This was the same mountain that had creamed Pompeii in a.d. 79. It hadn't done anything quite that spectacular since. But you never knew. It had voided some pretty substantial lava flows a year or so before I arrived, while the Eremo was the pleasant fringe benefit of some Luftwaffe unit. You could still feel the warmth of the rock, just inches below the surface, and now and then there would be a little shudder.

What mashed Pompeii, of course, was not lava but airborne ash. When time permitted, I drove to the excavations and poked around in the interrupted life of the Roman city, and it was quite a contrast to look up from the yards-high ash-fall to the peaceful top of the mountain, gently steaming a couple of miles away, and realize that that came from that. But in the hotel we were safe enough. Ash would be windblown away.

Lava would come down the side of the mountain, in unpredictable directions and possibly very fast, but the Eremo was on a little bulge, with the Italian government volcanological observatory just above it. One felt a certain reassurance from that. Any likely lava flow would probably divide around the bulge, and anyway, the volcanologists would know what was happening. Until they started running, there was no need to worry.

The most adventurous thing about the Eremo was the drive up the narrow, winding mountain road that led to it. I learned to drive a truck on that road, the night of V-E Day. We had to get back to Caserta. We were all drunk, but I was less so than the others, so I drove the six-by-six down those hairpin, guardrail-less curves, over the shifting pumice roadway, and somehow survived. But that was a small price to pay for living on the Hill, among the beautiful slopes where Spartacus held off all the Roman legions, looking out over Capri. Living on the Hill entitled one to a few little extras, such as Red Cross girls. Normally they were officers' issue and knew it, but a private hotel halfway up a volcano was a powerful inducement to some.

Most of all, the Eremo was a peaceful place for writing—not necessarily on the history of the 12th Weather Squadron. I did do a little of that, from time to time. But I also wrote the first draft of "Donovan Had a Dream" * there, still one of my favorite early action-adventure stories. I also wrote a large number of perfectly lousy New Yorkerish stories about Army life, some of which still survive in my sin file and none of which have ever been published. I was beginning to feel like a writer again.

 

* Published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, October, 1947.

 

Altogether, I was in Italy less than two years. It does not now seem very far away—it is a trip I've made over a long weekend since—but it seemed like voyaging to intergalactic space then. It stays in my mind as an unending flicker of kaleidoscopic impressions. Playing ping-pong among Roman ruins, strolling in the Borghese Gardens. Italian music, the canzone they sang in the streets. The opera. An afternoon in Milan, just after the war was over. La Scala had been bombed out and the opera was being performed in a movie theater a few blocks away, and there I saw the most tenderly comic performance of La Bohème I had ever seen or ever hope to see; the mind-blowing Mimi turned out to be Renata Tebaldi, dewily fresh at the beginning of her astonishing career. And at the other end of a career, a few weeks later in Naples, Toti del Monte singing the same role, the voice still beautiful but the weight of ages in the way she moved and looked.

Hitchhiking in a British truck in Barletta, and finding myself surrounded by soldiers in a uniform I had never seen, speaking a language I could not recognize; they were Yugoslav partisans, wounded out of the gorges, recuperating in an Italian hospital before being smuggled back to fight again. Giving a lift to a Rothschild baron, from Naples to Rome; he was of the Parisian branch of the family, sent to ride out the war in the lesser holocaust of Italy. Racing a Mercedes in my jeep all the way up the Apennines. Standing in the ruins of Catullus's summer home, at the tip of the Sirmione peninsula in Lake Garda, with defeated Germans blowing up their ammunition dumps and preparing to surrender all around the shores of the lake. Drinking cherry liqueur con selz in Naples's galleria (and, years later, finding John Home Burns's magnificent, tortured novel about that wartime Stew). The stench of Neapolitan alleys. The warm salt idleness of Adriatic beaches. The rotting hemp all along the road to Caserta. Lacrimae Cristi and raw wartime grappa with, it was said, one hundred-octane gasoline added to give it authority. The streams of tracers over the Bay of Naples as a Luftwaffe photo-reccy pilot tried to steal a shot of the harbor. The curate who led me through the Roman catacombs with a skinny taper timed to burn out just before the end of the tour, so that we walked the last ten yards among the walls of bones in darkness. American jeeps and German feldwagens waiting in the same mile-long line for their turn at the one surviving brewery in the foothills of the Alps. RAF sergeants, their eyes streaming with tears, on the day that FDR died. In memory it is all one bright flash after another.

And yet I remember very well that what I mostly felt at the time was boredom. Especially after the war in Europe ended, there was very little reason for me to be there that I could see.

And I was still in love, and Tina was in Paris.

I wanted to see her. I knew there had to be a way to cross that invisible barrier between her T/O and mine, and I looked for it. And I found, surprise! there was a way. Somewhere in the regulations it said that if what we wanted to do was get married, permission to cross the theater boundaries could be obtained.

We were married in Paris on the third of August, 1945.

The ceremony was conducted in French. I didn't understand a word of it. My "best man" was a French WAC lieutenant, and she nudged me when it was time to say oui.

The Army gave us a room in a very Parisian honeymoon hotel just a block or two from the Place de 1'Étoile. They also gave us tsoris. Tina was a first lieutenant, and I was an enlisted man. As we were not supposed to "fraternize," except presumably in bed, we were not allowed to eat in either the officers' or the enlisted men's mess. Since there were no civilian restaurants, except for the scarce and high-priced black-market establishments, it seemed we were not meant to take any meals together. But Tina had a friend, and the friend had both intelligence and influence. We wound up in a private dining room of the mess for major generals and up. The generals ate very well, and we ate better than they.

And on the last day of our week together I went to get a haircut in a little barbershop just off the Champs Élysées and, waiting my turn, tried to puzzle out the headline in the newspaper of the man next to me. It said something about le bombe atomique. I laughed to myself, careful not to offend my neighbor. These crazy French and their crazy, sensation-seeking newspapers, I told myself. What won't they print next?

But it was all true, and a couple of days later the Japanese surrendered.

Six months later Tina and I were back in New York, looking at each other in our hotel room off Times Square. Not only were we civilians again, but that lark in Paris had taken effect and we were married.

 

 

 

 

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