Shrapnel - William Wharton

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smiles at me. I wait until nobody is close by. Everybody’s in the latrine washing up. We’d just spent the day in a dusty field learning the difference between creep and crawl. You creep like a baby and crawl like a snake. I think, or it could be the other way round.

      I put my rifle in the rack. I’m covered with mud, a combination of dust and sweat.

      ‘So, what happened.’

      ‘I did it. I’m out. I’ve got a medical discharge, honourable. In three days I’ll be home. I’ll just have enough time to enrol in school on a late registration. I’ve got “enuresis”. The US Army can’t use me. Isn’t that too bad?’

      He smiles and jumps up to where he keeps his clock. ‘Here, take this. It’s a gift for keeping quiet and not giving me away. I’m sorry to have wakened you, and for the stink, but I don’t want to be dead. Bodies smell worse.’

      So, he gets out of the army. In a few days we have a replacement from another company named Gettinger. Gettinger goes down with us to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and we go through a lot together. He’s killed outside Metz. One thing I learn is it pays to have a university education.

      LOGAN

      About two weeks after the alarm clock business, we’re hanging around the bulletin board outside the orderly room. I’m with a fellow named Logan. He’s from Steubenville, Ohio, and is the only one of us who receives money from home in addition to his monthly pay.

      Logan receives one hundred and fifty dollars monthly. Logan has good reason to hate the army.

      He’d been an air cadet. He’d become battalion commander of his cadet class. They were preparing for graduation, after which they would all become Second Lieutenants. Logan was drilling his battalion in close order drill, marching, high stepping smartly, backward down the company street when he was hit by a jeep from the rear. He spent three weeks in the hospital with broken ribs and a cracked collarbone. When he came out, he was classified as unfit to be an air cadet and was transferred to the infantry.

      He still, illegally, has a complete Second Lieutenant’s uniform, tailor made, down to the gold bars. He’d had them ordered before he was clobbered. Officers, because they are officially gentlemen, need to buy their own uniforms. Even now, as an enlisted man, he still has his shirts and fatigues tailored. He has them dry cleaned and pressed, off post. Except for the missing bars he looks more like an officer than most of our real, so called, officers and gentlemen.

      One day there’s an announcement on the bulletin board telling about two openings as ‘cook’s helpers’ and asking for volunteers. ‘Cook’s helper’ is the army’s way of saying KP pusher. We’ve just had a miserable day in the field making a march wearing gas masks, through waves of tear gas. Anything looks better.

      Logan stuffs the notice in his tailored pocket. We go up the steps to the orderly room and officially volunteer our services to Reilly, the company clerk. He tells us we’re the first to volunteer; we know we’ll be the last. The next day, at roll call, we’re told to report to the orderly room.

      Lieutenant Gross, the executive officer, tells us we are taken off the regular roster and temporarily reassigned to Sergeant Mooney, the cook, as helpers. We are to report right away to the kitchen and Sergeant Mooney. We salute our way out and start to worry. It all seems too easy – generally, volunteering in the army is a dumb idea.

      But it turns out to be really great. Mooney is fat and sloppy. He likes to eat and likes to drink, but he doesn’t like to cook. Whenever I read the comic, Beetle Bailey, I think of Sergeant Mooney.

      Our job is to wake the KPs at four am, get them down to the kitchen, assign duties, and have things ready for breakfast at seven. Theoretically, we aren’t supposed to do anything ourselves, just make sure the KPs get the work done. We stay on at night until the kitchen is clean and the dining hall ready for the next day’s breakfast.

      The thing that makes it great is we’re on a day, and off a day, taking turns. If the company clerk and executive officer agree, we can even have passes to town on our days off. Also, even when we’re on duty, there’ll always be a few hours after lunch and before dinner when we can take turns going back to the barracks and resting. We’re living in luxury. That alarm clock Corbeil gave me in basic comes in handy.

      Now, in general, KP pushers are loved just about as much in the army as trusties are in jail. They’re considered finks. They’ve sold their souls to the devil. Logan and I decide to change this around. One of the prime power plays of KP pushers is the assignment of jobs. Those go all the way from the easiest, that is serving and setting tables, to the worst, ‘pots and pans’. We immediately let it be known that it will be first-come, first-serve from now on. Whoever gets there first gets the first choice of jobs. I even rent out my alarm clock a few times when I’m not on duty.

      Then we begin getting more and more done in the evening before we shut down the kitchen, so we can wake the KPs later in the morning. We have a good breakfast made for the KPs with eggs, scrambled or fried, four or five strips of bacon, orange juice, cereal, milk and coffee. Nobody else is eating like the KPs except us. It turns out that Logan, besides liking fine clothes, likes good food and can cook, a real Epicurean.

      As long as things get done in the kitchen, the cook couldn’t care less. He never comes in till O six hundred anyway. We begin waking KPs at O five hundred instead of O four hundred. Because neither of us is a particularly aggressive or hostile type, we gradually bring the KPs onto our side, or, maybe, we go over to the side of the KPs, whichever way you want to look at it. We’re friends to everybody.

      The cook is satisfied because we’re getting the work done, so he has hardly anything to do. We develop all kinds of short cuts, more efficient ways to do things, not a particularly difficult task.

      Logan and I work out a system to keep the stove burning overnight by feeding it just before lights-out and wrapping the coal in wet newspapers. So now the KPs come into a nice warm kitchen, with the tables set and most of the work already done. We begin to think being cooks would be great. The cook even recommends that we be sent to cook’s school. Also, our company is the only one where everybody is begging to be on KP. Logan figures if we can gain control of the KP lists, we can even charge!

      We gradually find out that the food being served is so terrible because of the way it’s cooked. Nobody in the country is eating the way we’re supposed to be being fed. It’s actually food fit for kings. These great big beautiful pork chops come in, at a time when meat rationing is tough for civilians, and this cook takes those hundreds of pork chops and dumps them in a big pot of boiling water. Then he pulls them out dripping wet and gives them a little frying on the griddle with greasy oil so they’ll look better, as if they’d been fried or roasted. But they taste like cardboard and are as tough as shoe leather. They only look like pork chops. We talk the cook into letting us do more and more of the cooking while he sinks slowly into his private stew, alcohol.

      Logan is teaching me how to cook. We start making things like Beef Stroganoff instead of stew, chipped beef in garlic sauce instead of ‘shit on a shingle’. We even get so we can do a fair job of broiling steaks, giving a choice: rare, medium or well done. That’s quite a trick with two hundred people to be fed in less than an hour. The KPs get into the spirit. The Captain promotes the cook from staff to tech.

      Around this time, some of us are given a chance to take our first furlough. I go home to California where my folks have moved from Philadelphia while I’ve been gone. Logan will take his furlough when I come back. He’ll double up and handle both ends of the job, do all the cooking. I have twelve days travel time. This plus the ten-day furlough comes to twenty-two days. With a little manoeuvring on the weekends at each end, I have twenty-four days altogether. I feel paroled. I’m going to be out of the army, on my own, after almost six months as a prisoner. It seems like a dream come true.

      For the first time I visit my parents in California. I meet the woman who becomes my wife six years later. We dance a lot. There are great bands, big swing bands in Southern California then. We dance at the Casa Manana and the Casino Ballroom. Jimmy Dorsey, Harry James, all the big ones

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