Shrapnel
Authors: William Wharton
Shrapnel
When we had little children, four of them, they always wanted me to tell them stories and I enjoyed the telling, but there were certain tales I never told. I'd developed the storytelling habit as a young boy, less than ten, making up scary stories for my younger sister.
Most of the tales I told to our children were about a fox named Franky Furbo. I told these stories from 1956, when our oldest daughter was four, until 1978 when our youngest was twelve. Mostly I told âget up' stories in the morning while they were fresh and so was I, not bedtime stories.
We were lucky because, through most of my adult life, I did not leave home to work a job,
and often, our children did not go to school. In a certain way, these stories were part of their schooling. Franky Furbo, among others, was a good teacher.
But sometimes our children wanted stories not about Franky Furbo but about other things, such as my childhood experiences, or fairy tales which ended with âand they lived happily ever after'. Our oldest daughter called these Ever After stories. Or occasionally, they wanted what they called âwar stories', tales about what happened to me during the course of World War II.
I generally didn't want to tell those tales and tried to divert them, but children can be awfully persistent, so when I did tell tales about the war, they would be relatively amusing incidents, different ways of foraging for food, or evading various regulations, unimportant events of that nature.
In my book
Birdy
, in the penultimate chapter, I develop an important war experience, one of the types of tales I didn't tell our children. The entire book
A Midnight Clear
revolves around another tale. I wrote
A Midnight Clear
because I thought we were about to re-establish the draft of young men, to send them off to kill or to be killed. I felt
an obligation to tell something about war as I knew it, in all its absurdity.
One evening in New York I had dinner with Kurt Vonnegut. He asked me, âHow was your war?' I flippantly responded by recounting the number of court martials in which I'd been involved. It was not a good answer. War for me, though brief, had been a soul-shaking trauma. I was scared, miserable, and I lost confidence in human beings, especially myself. It was a very unhappy experience.
It was not a pleasant experience writing this book either. When dug up, the buried guilts of youth smell of dirty rags and old blood. There are many things that happened to me, and because of me, of which I am not proud, events impossible to defend now; callousness, cowardice, cupidity, deception. I did not tell these stories to my children. My ego wasn't strong enough to handle it then, perhaps it isn't even now, when I'm over seventy years old. We shall see.
I did write out many of these unacceptable experiences just after I came home when the war was over. I was fifty per cent disabled, and a newly enrolled student at UCLA. I cried too easily, made few friends, and couldn't sleep. I'd stay up nights
when I couldn't sleep, trying to write the events, my feelings, my sense of loss, ineptitude. I had changed from an engineering major to an art major. I took a job as night watchman in a small notions store. I wanted to be a painter, but in the back of that store where I was night watchman, I was learning to be a writer and didn't know it. Each dawn I'd read over what I'd written, tear it into pieces, and flush it.
There is written into
Birdy
one of the first really negative experiences I had in the military. It involved shovelling coal outside Harrisburg on a cold December morning. I hit a man with a shovel and was threatened with a summary court martial. Actually it was so summary, my only punishment was that I was confined to quarters until they shipped me out for infantry basic at Fort Benning, Georgia. It was the first in a series of my personal reactions to the constrictions and expectations of the military.
The conditioning of soldiers, so they will respond to command without question, was an abomination to me. Also, the rigid hierarchy on vested authority was an insult to my personal sense of identity, of value. I fought the military mentality with my meagre resources but to no
avail. In the end they prevailed. They taught me to kill. They trained me to abandon my natural desire to live, survive, and to risk my life for reasons I often did not understand and sometimes did not accept.
Basic training in Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1944 was a minimum of twelve weeks. During this time we suffered through thirty mile long hikes, rifle range, infiltration courses, crawling under machine guns firing over us, all the nonsense and misery the army can think up.
There is a young man in our outfit called Birnbaum (his name means âa pear tree'.) He is Jewish and really wants to learn how to be a soldier so he can kill Germans. He's more aware of the horror and racism of Hitler's world than most of us.
Birnbaum is a great clod, a real
klutz
, a
zaftig
, a baby-faced fellow with two left hands and two left feet. It seems he can never do anything right, buttoning his clothes is a challenge for him. Even
with help, he can barely make his bunk up to pass inspection. He isn't a goof-off on purpose; he's really trying to do what's asked of him. It is absolutely pitiful. His inept concentration on the simplest of tasks could bring tears to your eyes. He just does things wrong somehow, no matter how much we all try to help him.
At each Saturday inspection, poor Birnbaum has something wrong, his webbing will be dirty or tangled, his entrenching tool dirty, his canteen or mess cup filthy, coated with sugar, stained brown by coffee, or something critical is missing from his full field pack. The military punishes not just the individual. Birnbaum is given additional KP or some messy job such as cleaning the latrines, and they cancel weekend passes into town for the whole squad or platoon.
On one general field inspection, our entire company has its weekend leave revoked. So, it isn't out of pure altruism that we all try to help Birnbaum â we're going stir crazy. The non-coms and officers in charge just can't seem to accept the obvious fact that Birnbaum is never going to be their kind of soldier. We do everything we can, but the more we try, the worse he gets.
For daily rifle inspection, we have an absolutely vicious Lieutenant. He's part of the regular training
group, called the
cadre
, pronounced not as one syllable as in the original French. Lieutenant Perkins is from Tennessee, a former member of the Tennessee National Guard, and he really takes it out on poor Birnbaum.
Once, we do get Birnbaum through barracks inspection. We've already missed two weekend passes in a row so we all pitch in. We scrub his webbing clean, polish his shoes, make him practise his manual of arms until he's perfect, at least as perfect at that kind of dumb thing as Birnbaum is ever going to be. All that's left is rifle inspection out on the drill field.
My job is to make sure his rifle's clean. I break it down completely. I run rifle patch after rifle patch through the barrel until I've shined even the worst of the pits. I scrape out the ridge in the butt plate, oil the strap, even polish the firing pin. As a finale, I steal some steel wool from the mess hall kitchen. It's strictly forbidden to pull steel wool through an M1 rifle bore but I've found this to be a sure way to get that ultimate sheen when an inspecting non-com, using his thumbnail as a mirror, peers down the rifle barrel. He wants to see the pink of his nail reflected along its full length with only the thin, graceful line of rifling showing.
So now we're ready for the ultimate test. We closely examine Birnbaum for unbuttoned buttons, and set his field cap so it's exactly straight, two fingers width above his right eyebrow as the army insists. We give him a brief review on how not to get his butt plate dirty when he's at order arms or at ease. We review how he's to let go of his rifle as fast as possible on âpresent arms'. We're sure Perkins will pick on Birnbaum, he always does.
One of the crazy things about military inspection is the ritual of checking to see if our rifles are clean. We'll all be standing in a line with our rifles at our sides. An officer will yell âattention', then, âpresent arms', followed by, âinspection arms'. We all, in a prescribed manner, hold our rifles out in front of us and snap the bolt open with our thumbs. The inspection officer then strides casually in front of us, looking us over, looking for something wrong, a cap askew, a button unbuttoned, a speck of dirt, etc. Then, at whim, he'll stop in front of one soldier and stare at him. He can do anything, ask questions, comment on an article of clothing or a haircut, whatever.
Usually a non-com goes along behind taking notes on what the officer says and putting a soldier on report. Not good. When the officer in charge
stops in front of you, he's most likely going to inspect your rifle. That is, he's going to snap that rifle out of your hands. If he does it correctly, from his point of view, wrong from yours, the butt will swing in and crack you in the groin. Our aim is to practise so we can let go of the rifle as fast as possible, ideally, so fast he'll miss it, drop it.
We're watching his eyes and shoulder for signals. He's trying to fake us out. If we drop the rifle and he doesn't swing out for it, we're dead. We really only hope to let go in time so we won't be hurt. However, in the back of our evil hearts we pray for that miracle of miracles when he'll swing, miss, and drop the rifle. We've heard of it happening but have never seen it. The regimental rule is that if an officer drops a rifle it's his responsibility to clean it to the soldier's satisfaction.
Well, Birnbaum is never going to reach the point where an officer would drop a rifle. We work hard just to help him avoid instant emasculation. This I've seen often enough, the unfortunate soldier grovelling in the dirt, hands gripping groin, trying not to scream. Twice this has already happened to Birnbaum, once he vomited over Lieutenant Perkins' shoes. But this time he lets go of it fine. A wave of pleasure can be felt along
the entire squad. Perkins inspects the butt plate, the swivels, the action, and then he inserts his thumbnail in the bolt for barrel inspection. I'm feeling confident â I'd inspected that barrel just before putting it in the barracks' rifle rack, before lights out. It was perfect.
Lieutenant Perkins continues to stare down the barrel. He shifts to get better light on his thumbnail, he peers with his other eye. His face goes white. Then red. I'm two soldiers to the right, and wondering what can be wrong. Lieutenant Perkins looks down at the ground then up at the sky. He hands the rifle to Corporal Muller, just behind him. Muller sticks his nail bitten thumb in and almost gets his eyeball stuck in the end of the rifle barrel he stares so long and hard. Muller's hands start to shake. He looks over at Perkins, then down the barrel one more time. His jaw is stuck between hanging open and clamping shut in fury. He faces Birnbaum.
âPrivate Birnbaum, what the hell have you done to this rifle?'
âI cleaned it, Sir.'
Birnbaum squares his sloped shoulders. One should never call a non-com Sir, that's reserved for officers, but at this moment this indiscretion is being ignored.
Muller takes a deep breath and then looks down the barrel again. Lt Perkins takes it from Muller, stares down the barrel as if to verify his worst fears.
âSoldier, what the hell did you use to clean this rifle anyway, sulphuric acid?'
âSteel wool, steel wool, Sir, steel wool!'
The whole rank can hear Birnbaum, I feel sweat trickling down my back. Lt Perkins turns to Muller.
âPut this man on report, Corporal.'
He turns to Birnbaum.
âSoldier, you're confined to quarters until I can get together a court martial.'
For once our passes aren't cancelled, but poor Birnbaum is left alone in the barracks.
Before I leave for town, I ask him what the devil happened, I can't understand. It turns out, Birnbaum, in his eagerness, in his anxiety, his desire to please, had stayed awake all night, in the dark, running steel wool up and down inside that barrel.
Later, I get to peer down that now infamous rifle and it isn't like a rifle at all. Birnbaum has been so industrious he's worn out all the rifling and virtually converted it to a twelve or fourteen gauge shotgun. It's clean all right; however, any
ordinary thirty-calibre bullet would probably just fall or wobble out the end of that rifle when fired.
There's a summary court martial, Birnbaum must pay eighty-seven dollars to replace the rifle. All his gear is removed from our barracks and he's sent elsewhere. None of us ever sees him again. âSteel wool!' becomes the rallying call of our squad.
I hope Birnbaum survived the war. He'd probably have made a good soldier. If there is such a thing.
