Above the Thunder (12 page)

In 1942, soldiers didn't jet about the world in plush seats, waited on by lovely stewardesses. They carried their duffel bags up a gangplank and down into the dank depths of some ship that had been fitted out to accommodate the maximum number of men with minimum consideration of comfort, and that smelled like somebody's dirty socks. We spent about a week between Honolulu and San Francisco. While we cruised northeastward toward home, Marines were fighting a desperate battle against the enemy on Guadalcanal, Rommel was attacking El Alamein, Australians were holding against Japanese assaults at Milne Bay, Germans and Russians were locked in a tremendous battle for Stalingrad, and Churchill visited Stalin to discuss possibilities for a second front to ease pressure on the Soviet forces.

The trip itself has left little impression on my mind. I recall being at Fort McDowell on Angel Island, because I sent from there a wire to a certain girl asking if she would marry me.

And I recall being on a train that stopped in Lordsburg, New Mexico. An old Indian came alongside the train selling tamales at five cents each. Reaching their arms out the open windows, soldiers bought them by the handful and began eating. It was my first taste of a tamale, and my
immediate reaction was to ridicule those who had told me they were hot. But after about five minutes my mouth began to burn. I headed for the place at the rear of the car where you could get a weak trickle of tepid water in a thin paper cup that held about two tablespoonfuls. There was a long line and everyone was in a hurry, so there was much puffing and blowing and yelling for the guy at the spigot to move on. I learned about really hot tamales from that.

Suddenly, I was at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, home of the U.S. Field Artil lery.
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Off came all the insignia of grade and on went the OCS patch, sewn to the left breast pocket of our shirts. We moved into tar paper shacks, called “hutments,” built on concrete slabs in long rows. At the end of each two rows was a latrine building with showers. The hutments were numbered, of course, and each held six candidates, assigned alphabetically by last name. In my hutment were Everett Kelley, Donald Kellogg, Earl “Bud” Kelly, Howard Kenyon, and Bernard Kipley. Each of us had a steel cot with cotton mattress, a shelf with rod for hangers, and a few square feet of floor space to call our own. There were one or two bare bulbs hanging from overhead and a small oil heater.

Discipline was necessarily quite strict, because the amount of material to be covered made the OCS period a rather frantic thirteen weeks. The miracle of the “Ninety-Day Wonders,” it turned out, was that they survived. There was little time to be wasted. After First Call, played by a record over a very scratchy loudspeaker, we had fifteen minutes to be ready for our first formation. In that time we had to make it to the latrine—shave, brush teeth, and all that kind of thing—make bunks, sweep out the hutment, and be dressed in proper uniform of the day.

The first formation was a roll call followed, during part of the course, by “voice culture.” The latter consisted of repetition of commands in unison as directed by a senior candidate from another class. This was often varied by being made a “Simon Says” drill just to keep us awake, and sometimes individual candidates were called on to demonstrate the proper voice and inflection for various commands. After that was the
morning meal, for which, like all other meals, we were allotted thirty minutes. Those detailed for table waiter duty got no special consideration. They served the meal and ate, they hoped, before the half hour was gone. Food discipline was very strict, too. We were told: “Take all you want, but eat all you take.”

And then we hit the classroom or the range. We might be learning to fieldstrip different small arms (sometimes blindfolded) or driving six-by-six trucks cross-country or studying the dry regulations pertaining to supply or solving problems in gunnery or survey or adjusting fire out on the range. In the gunnery and survey problems, I came up against the challenge of which the OCS board at Schofield had warned me. I had to study a little more than most, I guess, to overcome my total ignorance of the methods of trigonometry, but I carried my tables of trigono metric functions and logarithms and I made out OK. The fun part was the classroom, when all twenty men in the section would be at blackboards working on the same problem. There were occasions when the instructor would come up behind me and begin, “Well, now, Kerns, you seem to be having a little trouble there. Let me . . . Well, you have the right answer there—but I don't see how you got it. How did you do that?”

I'd explain to him and he'd say it was OK, but he'd like for me to show on the board more of the reasoning process. I had to tell him I did not know how. Looking around at other boards, I was utterly mystified as to the reason for all the algebraic procedures that filled them. Using just simple arithmetic, supplemented with a lot of thinking that I didn't know how to show, I wrote much less. But I got the same results.

Out on the firing range, however, I was a champion. I don't suppose I was the best in the class, but I was certainly the best in our twenty-man section. During the five-week gunnery period, each student had to fire at least twelve problems of certain types, and he had to compute initial data for the 228 other problems fired by his section mates. So we sat out there on top of some barren ridges, swept by the icy winds of late November and December, at ease in our chilled steel folding chairs, each with a clipboard on his lap, gazing with teary eyes across a shallow valley or two at a shell-pocked area in which numerous nondescript pieces of obsolete materiel lay scattered about. In front of us, two BC-scopes—one
for the instructor, one for the students. Behind us, radio operators to relay our commands or sensings to the guns.

“All right, gentlemen, your target. Take as a reference point the Blockhouse on Signal Mountain.
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Go nine zero mils right and at a greater distance to a lone tree at the head of a small ravine. Two-zero mils farther right, at a still greater distance, is a piece of materiel in the middle of a beaten area. That is the target. Is there anyone who does not identify the target? Very well, compute your initial data.”

Twenty frozen students were hastily consulting maps, measuring angles by use of previously calibrated fingers and fists, making hasty calculations, writing down factors, sticking up hands to show when they were ready. At some point in this process, the instructor would designate a candidate to fire the target.

“Kerns, take the target under fire.”

It was my twelfth and last required problem, and it was of the most difficult kind, the “Large-T,” in which, because of the large angle between the gun-target line and the observer-target line, a range error was seen by the observer as a deflection error, and deflection was observed as range, thus involving factors not present in computing data for other conditions of observation. But I had never failed to do well, and I got up to the BC-scope without one twinge of nervousness. I surpassed even my own high expectations, and when I sat down the instructor said, “Now, gentlemen, that's the way a Large-T problem should be fired.” I swelled with pride and confidence but was happy to realize that I'd completed the course requirement and didn't have to risk my reputation again.

He designated another target. I computed initial data for it and stuck up my hand, at the same time noting to myself that I was first to do so. Without hesitating for a second, the instructor said, “Kerns, take the target under fire.”

I was surprised, since I had just fired, but again I lay my clipboard on my chair and walked to the BC-scope. I'm sure my voice sounded firm and confident as I called out to the radio operator, and I soon heard him report, “On the way.” I watched the target area to catch the burst.

I watched and I watched. And I watched. And I saw nothing. Must
be down in that swale in front of the target area, I thought, and I gave it some more range. Still no burst. Well—must be on the other side of the ridge, I said to myself, and I knocked off twice as much range as I'd added before. No burst. Well, shucks! Where the devil was it? Maybe it was off to the left, mixed in with the bursts where another section was firing. I sent a deflection change but the instructor called “Cease fire” and told me to be seated.

“Do you know where your rounds were?” he asked.

As I sat down, I picked up my clipboard on which I had noted my initial data, and I knew then where my rounds had gone. I had remembered the base point elevation wrong by 100 mils, and my rounds had gone far beyond the target area. In fact, the instructor said, I had almost hit the reservation boundary. It was my thirteenth mission and my first “U” for Unsatisfactory. I was thoroughly embarrassed, to say the least. It was the classic “hundred mil error” that is the dread of all artillerymen.

Field Artillery OCS candidates at Fort Sill received only two grades: “S” for Satisfactory, “U” for Unsatisfactory. In addition to that miserable fire mission, I got one “U” on a pop quiz based on a very long, boring reading assignment in supply regulations. The only man in our hutment who had any serious trouble was Howard Kenyon, a good old country boy from Nebraska who had come down from Alaska as a corporal. When Howard got something through his head, he never forgot it, but he was slow to learn. He worked very hard, and some of us, especially Kellogg and Kipley, helped him each night until lights out at 2100 hours. Then Kenyon would go to the study hall and remain there until 2300, every night. Nevertheless, with only three weeks left to go before graduation, he was put back into an OCS preparatory course. Long after the rest of us had gone on to our first assignments as second lieutenants, Kenyon was still there, finishing the prep course and going all the way through OCS again. He graduated, he was commissioned, and as a second lieutenant he was killed in action in Belgium.

There was a demerit system in effect at OCS, and I suppose there was some limit on the number of demerits a candidate could get and survive. I got a few, all out of two incidents, neither of which I could reasonably have avoided. In one case, I was the hutment orderly, responsible for
being certain all was secure, lights out, heater turned off, floor clean, all in spic-and-span order, before we left for the day's activities. Kenyon, having joined another class but still living in our hutment, asked me to leave the heater on for him, since he had another half hour to study before his first class. He forgot to turn it off, and I got some demerits. In the other case, I got a standard GI haircut on Saturday afternoon, and on Monday morning a tactical (administrative) officer coming through our classroom gigged me for needing a haircut. I think the trouble was that I just didn't look handsome enough to be a lieutenant.

There was never any doubt about my academically passing the course, but I did manage to almost get kicked out, which certainly would have changed the course of my life. Dorie, who is now my wife and who then was the girl who had answered yes to my telegraphic proposal, came out to Sill to visit me. She arrived on a Tuesday and would have to leave within a day or two, back to Ohio and her job repairing radios at a plant in Columbus. There was no possibility for me to spend any time with her off the post, since OCS men could get passes only on Saturday evenings—until 0100 hours on Sunday morning. There was nothing to do on the post except to sit in the midst of hundreds of soldiers at the enlisted men's club and drink Coke or beer. So, in desperation, I took the OCS patch off of one of my shirts and sewed on my staff sergeant chevrons and, after duty on Tuesday, off to Lawton I went to see my betrothed.

All went well. No one questioned me, since NCOs were normally able to get passes on Tuesday night. Some of them even had quarters in town and commuted. So about 2330 hours I got a taxi and started back to the post, allowing plenty of time before the 0100 pass deadline.

As the cab approached the Military Police (MP) post at the main gate, the taxi driver said, “You're going to be in trouble, aren't you, Sergeant?”

“I don't think so, why?”

“Well, it's a little bit late for you to be getting in.”

“Oh, no, I have plenty of time before one o'clock.”

“Remember, though, this is Tuesday, not Saturday. You should have been in by eleven o'clock if you were coming in at all.”

“Oh, hell! You're right. Take me back to town.”

He made a U-turn right in front of the gate and took me back to the historic old Keegan Hotel, the yellow-painted, weather-boarded inn where Dorie had a room. I knocked on her door, explained the situation, and told her I needed a place to stay until I could safely return to post in the morning. Dorie was rightly skeptical, but after a great deal of hesitation on her part and earnest reassurance on mine, she agreed to let me sleep in the chair in her room, where I remained a perfect, if uncomfortable, gentleman. (Today, over sixty-five years later, Dorie is still shy about my telling that story.)