The Hunting Trip (3 page)

His mother was married to Keyes J. Michaels, M.D. Dr. Michaels was a psychiatrist she had met professionally when she was in the process of seeking a divorce from Phil's father, P. Wallingford Williams, Jr.

Once she had married Dr. Michaels, which she did two days after
her divorce became final, she prevailed upon him to “help” Phil, who even then was having trouble accepting authority figures such as teachers, guidance counselors, and headmasters of schools named after saints.

Phil knew that if he went home to South Orange, he would shortly thereafter find himself prone on Dr. Michaels's couch, and the exchange between them would go something like this, as the good doctor sucked noisily on his pipe:

And from there it would go downhill.

Phil knew this because this would not be the first time his mother had asked the man she called “My Own Sigmund Freud” to help her only son.

He thought again about joining the Army, leaving his shame and the painful wrath of his family behind him for all time. He knew what was involved with that. He had thought of joining the Army twice before, first when he'd been booted from St. Charles's School (for smoking in his room) and again when he'd been sent home from St. Timothy's (for selling beer and cigarettes in his room during the poker game he was running).

He hadn't had to go through with signing up then—although the first time he'd gotten as far as changing the date on his birth certificate to make him a year older than was the case—because other schools had given him a second chance. But he'd run out of schools willing to give him a second chance.

This time it was the Army!

When he got off the train in New York, he caught another to Newark, New Jersey. He went from Pennsylvania Station to the Public Service Building. That was sort of a misnomer for the latter. The Public Service Company was a for-profit business enterprise that did very well, indeed, selling electricity, gas, and bus and trolley service to the public of New Jersey. They had a monopoly on all four services.

He knew this because his mother's father was vice president, legal, of the Public Service Company. He also knew that in his grandfather's secretary's desk was an embossing device that punched the fact that she was a Notary Public of the State of New Jersey into sheets of paper.

Phil “borrowed” the Notary Public stamping tool and a dozen or so sheets of paper and returned to Manhattan. He went to his father's apartment at 590 Park Avenue, got the doorman to admit him, and once inside wrote two letters on his father's typewriter.

One was to his father, in which he said he realized he had shamed the family more than enough, and was going to join the Army to
spare the family any further pain. The second was To Whom This May Concern.

The second said the undersigned had no objection to the enlistment of his son Philip W. Williams III in the Army. He signed the letter P. Wallingford Williams, Jr., and Marjorie B. Alexander, Notary Public of the State of New Jersey, and applied the stamp to it.

It took him three tries to get it right, but finally it looked legitimate.

He took the letter and the previously altered birth certificate from where he'd hidden it in a copy of
War and Peace
on his father's bookshelves, and went back to Newark, this time to the Recruiting Office in the Post Office Building.

He didn't get to join the Army that day. But the Army put him up overnight, and the next morning, after a physical examination, swore him in and put him on a bus for Fort Dix, New Jersey.

It wasn't until his father returned to Manhattan three days later that his family learned what he had done. A family conference was held on how to get him out of the Army—“My God, he's only sixteen!”—and then what to do with him when he came home.

His grandfather, who was after all a lawyer, offered a suggestion:

For the time being, do nothing. Give him a week or so's taste of Army life, having barrel-chested sergeants yelling at him, marching, et cetera, and he'll be begging for us to get him out of the Army. And maybe when he's learned his lesson, he'll behave.

Every once in a while, despite what they would have you believe, lawyers are wrong. And this was the case here. Phil took to the Army like a duckling to water.

[ FOUR ]

U.S. Army Reception Center

Fort Dix, New Jersey

Monday morning, October 7, 1946

O
n Phil's first day in the Army, he was issued about fifty pounds of uniforms and given inoculations against every disease known to medical science. In the morning of his second day, he was given the Army General Classification Test, known as the AGCT, to see where he would best fit into the nation's war machine.

In the afternoon, he faced a Classification Specialist, who took one look at Phil, his AGCT score, and then arranged for him to take the test again.

“Secondary school dropouts” are not supposed to score 144 on the AGCT test. All it took to get into Officer Candidate School was an AGCT score of 110. The second time Phil took the test, this time under supervision to make sure no one was slipping him the answers, he scored 146.

The next morning, he faced another Classification Specialist, this one an officer, who explained to him the doors his amazing AGCT score had opened for him in the nation's war machine. Heading the list of these, the captain told Phil, was that he could apply for competitive entrance to the United States Military Academy at West Point. If accepted, he would be assigned to the USMA Preparatory School, and on graduation therefrom be appointed to the Corps of Cadets at West Point.

That suggested to Phil that he was being offered the privilege of jumping from the frying pan into the fire. He had had experience with a military academy, specifically the Bordentown Military
Academy, and it had not been pleasant. He had been sent home after seven weeks of military service, so to speak, after having been found guilty of having talked a fellow cadet, PFC Edwin W. Bitter, into stuffing three unrolled rolls of toilet tissue down the muzzle of the saluting cannon. When the cannon had fired at the next morning's reveille formation, it looked for a minute or so as if Southern New Jersey was experiencing a blizzard in early October.

On the Greyhound bus back to north New Jersey later that October day, ex–Cadet Private P. W. Williams had been enormously relieved that his military service was over.

Another option, the captain explained, was for Phil to apply for the Army Security Agency. The ASA was charged with listening to enemy radio communications, copying them down, and if necessary, decrypting them. Personnel selected to be “Intercept Operators,” the captain said, had to have the same intellectual qualifications as officer candidates, that is to say an AGCT score of 110 or better.

Reasoning that places where radio receivers were located were probably going to be inside, and that Intercept Operators would probably work sitting down, Phil selected the ASA for his career in the nation's war machine.

He was given yet another long form to fill out, this one asking for a list of his residences in the last twenty years, and other personal information. He had no way of knowing of course that ASA Intercept Operators were required to have Top Secret security clearances, or that the form was the first step in what was known as the “Full Background Investigation Procedure,” which was necessary to get one.

The next day, Phil was transferred from the Reception Center to a basic training company.

There he and two hundred fellow recruits were issued blankets, sheets, a pillow and pillowcase, a small brown book titled
TM9-1275 M-1 Garand Manual
, and an actual U.S. Rifle, Cal. 30, M-1 Garand.

They were told that until graduation day, when they actually became soldiers, they would live with their Garands. And yes, that meant sleeping with it. And memorizing its serial number.

The idea was for the recruits to become accustomed to the weapon. They wouldn't actually fire it until the sixth week of their training. Until then, they would in their spare time, after memorizing the serial number, read
TM9-1275
and learn how the weapon functioned.

The first indication that Phil had empathy for Mr. Garand's invention—or vice versa—came that very evening at 8:55 p.m., or, as the Army says that, twenty fifty-five hours.

At that hour, Sergeant Andrew Jackson McCullhay, one of Phil's instructors, walked down the barracks aisle en route to the switch that would turn off the lights at twenty-one hundred.

As he passed the bunk to which PVT WILLIAMS P had been assigned, he saw something that both surprised and distressed him. PVT WILLIAMS P had somehow managed to completely disassemble his U.S. Rifle, Cal. 30, M-1 Garand. All of its many parts were spread out over his bunk.

In the gentle, paternal tone of voice for which Basic Training Instructors are so well known, Sergeant McCullhay inquired, “
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
head, what the
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
have you done to your
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
rifle?”

“Sergeant, sir,” PVT WILLIAMS P replied, “I have disassembled it.”

“So I see,” Sergeant McCullhay replied. “Now show me,
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
head, how you're going to get your
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
Garand back together before I turn the
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
lights off in four minutes and fifteen
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
seconds.”

“Yes, sir, Sergeant,” PVT WILLIAMS P replied, and proceeded to do so with two minutes and five seconds to spare.

“I'll be a
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
,” Sergeant McCullhay said. “
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head, you're a
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genius!”

“Yes, sir, Sergeant,” PVT WILLIAMS P said.

He had already learned the most important rule of all in the Army:
Never Argue with a Sergeant.

Sergeant McCullhay was genuinely impressed with the speed with which PVT WILLIAMS P had reassembled his stripped Garand, especially after he timed himself at the task. When, that same night, he told his buddies at the sergeants' club what he had seen, they didn't believe him.

One of his fellow noncommissioned officers made a challenge: “I've got ten
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
dollars that says your kid can't completely disassemble and reassemble a
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
Garand in less than five minutes.”

As a result of this challenge—it was a challenge, not a “bet” or a “wager,” as betting and wagering are violations of Army Regulations and those who do so are subject to court-martial—PVT WILLIAMS P was awakened after midnight by Sergeant McCullhay.

He and the Garand rifle with which he had been sleeping were taken to McCullhay's room in the barracks, where five noncommissioned officers were waiting to challenge Sergeant McCullhay's assertions
vis-à-vis
the speed with which PVT WILLIAMS P could dis- and re-assemble a Garand.

After PVT WILLIAMS P had done so, which made Sergeant McCullhay fifty dollars richer than he had been earlier in the evening, the sergeant was in a very good mood.

“You can get in your bunk now,
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
head,” he said. “And you can skip the Zero Five Hundred Roll Call and Physical Training. I wouldn't want you to hurt your beautiful
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
hands doing
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push-ups.”

[ FIVE ]

U.S. Army Reception Center

Fort Dix, New Jersey

Monday, November 18, 1946

D
uring the next five weeks, whenever and wherever Sergeant McCullhay could find gullible souls wishing to challenge what he claimed for PVT WILLIAMS P's dis- and re-assemble times for the Garand, PVT WILLIAMS P did so.

On the side of three different roads during fifteen-mile hikes. Half a dozen times in the Regimental Mess Hall. Once in the back of the Regimental Chapel while the chaplain was warning the trainees about loose women. And once while wearing a gas mask in the tear gas chamber.

But then it was actually time for the trainees to fire the U.S. Rifle, Cal. 30, M-1 Garand.

This took place on one of the one-hundred-yard KD ranges. Some weeks later, PVT WILLIAMS P learned that KD stood for “Known Distance.”

There were twenty firing positions on the range and, one hundred yards distant from them, twenty bull's-eye targets. The targets were on frames that rose and fell on command from behind an earthen berm.

The procedure was explained in detail before the trainees were issued the one round of ammunition,
Cartridge,
Rifle, Cal. .30, Anti-Personnel
,
w/168 grain projectile
, with which they would fire their first shot.

Once twenty shooters were in the prone position, with a
Strap, Leather, Rifle
attaching them firmly to their rifles, and had a
cadre-man lying beside them, the range officer would issue over a loudspeaker several commands: