Harry S. Truman dropped the Atom bomb on Hiroshima about two weeks after I was drafted near the end of WWII. By so-doing, he saved countless thousands of American lives. (There is little cavil, by those who have really studied the issue, over what the cost-in-lives would have been to invade the Japanese homeland...). To those of a latter-day “...gentler, kinder America” I, and my peers, say (as has been said so well before): “If there had not been a Pearl Harbor, there never would have been a Hiroshima.” Many of us are here now simply because Truman called the ultimate shot - not Hirohito.

Nonetheless, in the mid-August heat of that long ago summer, the juggernaut of American military training rolled unstoppably on: honed to perfection by years of War, it could not just be turned on and off like a valve. The next (and as it was to prove, the last) “cycle” of recruits and draftees was already committed to combat training: our host – the final contingent of all those who had gone before.

This is my tale of what it was all like...

We were neither the best nor the worst of the lot. But ironically, one sometimes hears that “America was hard pressed in those final days.” "Running out of manpower." "Running out of cannon fodder." The nation was having to (gulp!) “...scrape the bottom of the barrel.”

Nonsense! We were no more the “bottom scrapings” than the very first of the draftee Army. It is just that a draftee army is inherently different from one whose members volunteer for Service, or are driven to it by economic or other causes. A trained soldier is a trained soldier, and America will always owe a debt to its civilian draftee armies. Nonetheless, and with sort of tongue in cheek, I have chosen to title these short vignettes, anecdotes or whatever they are here, in deference to the barrel metaphor. (The italicized allusions to same in copy are – or will be – obvious).

This is my story of what it was all like – to be trained for a combat which was no longer (necessitating twice as much effort in the Government’s eyes, to “...quickly burn up all the surplus ammo, mortar shells, bazooka rounds, and napalm stored at the many Infantry training camps throughout the Southeastern States, - and toss the stockpiled grenades at imaginary foes in real (we dug them!) foxholes...”). To be trained, I say, to take a Japanese City, but finally to be sent in the opposite direction – to a sullen, conquered Germany instead (occasioned by want of big enough boots for Size 14 feet...Sigh!) as sort of “neither fish nor fowl” intermediates between the true combat veterans now headed back home, and the true Occupation Forces (of such dubious press PR at a later date), who nonetheless were better trained as Resident Occupying Police and Rehabilitation Forces (and “fraternization” protocols, including not a few marriages and other domestic accommodations along the way).

When I came home then finally, the “war” was long since old hat and no one wanted to hear any more “war stories.” Enough to all that. So I never told any. Not even to my family. They never asked. I never said. (My father, true it should be noted, did opine on occasion of my (new) habit of always polishing my fork with my tie (worn tucked into my shirt front – another new habit) whenever I sat down to dinner, with his considered observation that about all the Army had done for me was to worsen my already questionable table manners).

By the time I had family of my own, Vietnam was in full cry. My children never asked me once “What did you do in the War, Daddy?” – since wars were a dime a dozen now and the Peacenik Era was hard upon us.

Thus matters have stood as the years rolled by. I buried two wives, raised two children, (unsuccessfully attempting to favorably “influence” step-children, as well...), changed jobs, changed homes, move around, retired, now live with my lady friend – you know your usual ho-hum life as it were.

But now in my insomnia-racked later years, as I lie awake nights and think of all the “families” behind me that have unaccountably just melted away, or so it seems at times to me, I thought of still one other “family” I once knew. Was once going to join permanently as my life-career, but never did. But it, too, my Infantry Squad, was a “family” of sorts long ago ... indeed; we draftees often said that in the Army, we had “...found a home away from home.” This ironically, because back then none of us believed it. None of us really thought so.

"They were like a family. They were the tightest squad I've ever seen." *

-Capt. Christopher Toland, platoon commander

But strange thoughts now come to spend the long night hours with me anymore. And I wonder if my story holds a message or moral somewhere - even as "theirs"...? And maybe there was (is) a sort of family of some kind out there? (Among other things I have a tremendous sense of guilt over missing D-Day by only months, as it were). Shoulda been there. You can't imagine the anguish... Let my homeboys down!

Scrape...Scrape...

Could this be it? Maybe? When I "landed" in La Belle France I was 18 years old, 18 miles overshot (to the east), and 18 months (past due) on my "Time Line" - as the physicist George Gamow used to call it (I heard him lecture once: got him to sign my copy of "One-Two- Three...Infinity!" - when I got home and looked at the flyleaf it said (says!) "Stolen from me! - G. Gamow" Another story another time...). Was big for my age – could have lied about my age and maybe gotten in at 16. Everyone knew someone somewhere who had done that. But at 16 I was a high school wool-gatherer and dreamer, hardly conscious of the War. ( I'm still useless, but at least I am now out of high school). Two years later, I was inducted into the AUS.... just 6 weeks past my 18th birthday. My education then began in earnest.

They say our peer group now is dying at the rate of 1000 per day... If I am to have any chance at getting all this down, I best be getting at it then, and not lollygagging around here. Anyhow, somewhere I hear Sgt. Depp calling out yet once again:

"When you crimnul Yankees get yore asses out of my barracks for the last time, will the last sonabich put out the light?"

"Reaching for the pull chain, Sarge, reaching for the pull chain... "

Pfc Bernie Powell,
AUS 314#####

* See Item 1

I had largely finished my stories here, when a chance re-reading of poems by a favorite author (Rudyard Kipling) struck me with the many "parallels" (as to military life in the Infantry in his own day) to that of my own time. It may be "high camp", comedy, or tragi-comedy for all I know (the individual reader and his/her own experiences providing the missing ingredient to interpret one way or another) ... but Kipling's pithy stanzas, in his equally pithy lower-class English dialect(s), penned in memory of troops who served in a bygone time a world away, catch so well the very essence of military life, that I have used them quite freely here... rather like salt-and-pepper as it were, on some favored dish. I have tried to give source credits in every instance...

While Kipling carries the day, I have also drawn freely on other literary "greats" here, and a couple of redneck songs (and artists) tossed in, where it all came swimming back in an eclectic memory rush as I wrote. Joined by citation of at least one historical object: George Armstrong Custer's "last note," now enshrined at West Point Museum on the Hudson.

Scrape Here for more 'Barrel...'