The Athenians had their “sacred academy in a grove” (inter silvas Academi, as their later Latin conquerors put it – and one of whose boorish number – Sulla - put it all to the axe in 89 B.C., as we are told).

And just so did we draftees that long ago summer at Camp Wheeler have our “sacred grove,” too – the “Pecan Grove.” Since Wheeler had been founded back in WWI, it is not altogether clear to me how a very large, and mature orchard of producing pecan trees came to be included within the camp precincts. Most likely, during rapid expansion with the start of WWII, some local farmer’s orchard was seized and made part of the Reservation...

Stuff like that.

The heat was unbearable. Newly dredged up from air-conditioned civilian surroundings, we alternately nodded and dozed ‘neath the leafy pecan canopy over our heads.

Scrape.... Scrape....

Sgt. Depp patrolled ceaselessly behind our backs, ferreting out whoever was most on the verge of dozing off. When he spied such miscreant, he would approach softly through the grass, ever so softly, and then “Thwack!” he would come down hard on the offender’s helmet liner with his “pointer stick,” – a wooden baton all the noncoms carried at all times. At the same time he might shout out the offender’s name: “Jones! Wake the hell UP!”

I tell you, you do not know what means “the crack of doom,” if you have never been pulled back from the brink of oblivion by a smart rap on the noodle with Sgt. Depp’s baton... First, to get a crack on a helmet liner is kinda like having a saucepan jammed down over your ears, say, and then someone swats it with a small bat or stick... The resultant “crack” seems to come from inside your head and all directions at once. Surely your hour has come, you think, and it is God calling. This is reinforced by the sound of your name being bellowed out loud as the reverberations die away.

But your senses return and your vision clears and God is only Sgt. Depp standing there in his sweat-free, tidy suntans, the white glistening “skunk stripe” on his never-thwacked liner shining in the sun as you look up at him. And turn your attention dutifully to the matter at hand.

If you were forced to sit there long enough (some of the officers down front were real windbags) you were sure to get a dose of chiggers. Mosquitoes in summer in Georgia, too, are active at all hours.

"If your officer's dead and the sergeants look white,
Remember it's ruin to run from a fight:
So take open order, lie down, and sit tight,
And wait for supports like a soldier....

The Young British Soldier... (R. Kipling)

Eventually (perhaps like the ancient Athenians?) we came to “know” our Academe better and better. The lucky ones among us sometimes got tree trunks to lean back against. Gazing up into the leafy canopy overhead, one day we made an exciting discovery: the branches were loaded - not with sacred olives – but almost ready-to-fall pecans! Zillions of them! (We were expressly forbidden to eat any of the nuts we found on the ground beneath us as the cracking of the shells “disturbed” the officers’ in their lectures. Sigh). But we could secret them away in our pockets and eat them back in the barracks...

And so as these trainees from everywhere else, learned about pecan culture in central Georgia, so did their appetites for the tasty nuts expand likewise. A sort of sub rosa scouring of the ground and grasses about went on surreptiously during these lectures. We ostensibly paid attention to what was going on, but in reality most were conniving over ways to get more nuts...

But on the sly, of course.

A not-so-sly technique soon evolved, if you were bold enough to risk it. If you were in the rear ranks and sat way in the rear of your group, the line of sight perhaps partly obscured between you and the presentation up front, and if you marked well where Depp was at any given moment, presumably in front of you with his back to you – you might quickly take off your helmet and toss it at the low-lying branches overhead, where it would – with luck – knock down a dozen or so ripe nuts which would fall conveniently in your lap!

But this was risky business.

Risky indeed.

As I was soon to find out....

For one afternoon, I happened to be in the rear ranks for once and sitting way in back and on the edge of the group. The lieutenant was head down in his clipboard up front, and Depp was engaged elsewhere... it was my chance! I whipped off my helmet liner and tossed it overhead...

Damn! Would you believe? It lodged in the overhead branches and stuck fast!

The lieutenant resumed his lecture. Depp resumed his patrol... I slouched lower and lower lest my near-bald, sweaty, shaved head send out an attracting gleam or two...

Eventually, the lieutenant finished and turned the platoon back over to Depp. “Third Platoon!” he shouted... “Fall IN!” My heart sank as I assumed my place in the First Squad. I couldn’t have felt more exposed if I had been standing there stark naked...

A familiar twang cut the air:

“Well, now lookee here. What we got here? Well, would you look at that! Why we have a man here with no helmet liner!” He said this in the same tone of voice he might have said of a man with no soul.

Only a short pause – and then he added, “I know no one here will be surprised that it is Private Powell. Private! Can you please tell us WHERE is your helmet liner?”

The jig was up. That was for sure.

“It’s up in the pecan tree, Sergeant!”

“Up in the pecan tree? Whatever is it doing “up in a tree,” Private? Did it ‘climb’ up in the tree, Private?”

“It got stuck there, Sergeant.”

“Stuck? What you mean stuck? Did you hang your helmet liner in the tree, Private?”

“No, Sergeant.”

“Well how did it get there, then?

“I threw it there, Sergeant!”

“You “threw” it there? Yes, well I see. (pause) And here is what else’s I see, I see you were trying to knock down nuts is what I see. And I have told you dag-gone men a hundred times no knocking down nuts in the Pecan Grove!”

“Yes, Sergeant!”

“Now, Battalion has been out on the machine gun range all day, Powell. And they got a whole hall over there full of units to dissemble and barrels to clean, and everything. Including barrels that has froze to their jackets and all the rest. (When you over-fired or overheated the air-cooled 30-cal. machine guns we had, their muzzles sometimes “stuck” fast to their jackets with baked-on powder residue... Beginners were especially prone to cause this sin – by ignoring the caveat to constantly repeat ‘fire-a-burst-of-six’... ‘fire-a-burst-of-six’, as the small pauses between saying this refrain were just enough to break the overheating...).

“And so”, Depp continued, “soon as we have chowed down this evening, and everyone else is off to the Beer Garden or the Post movies – YOU are going to get your tail over to Battalion and help clean weapons.”

Well, it wasn’t so bad after all, I guess. I had already seen the movie (twice!) anyhow. As to the nuts – the Army is funny: we were forbidden, as you have just seen, to pick them up or eat them during lectures in the “Grove.” But an order came down not long after that anyone could “gather” them to heart’s content on Sundays off. Thereafter, there were always five or six guys first thing every Sunday morning out there with pillow cases – gathering up the pecan harvest while it lasted. Some even sent boxes of the nuts home.....

("Atque inter silvas Academi quaerere verum . . ." And seek truth in the groves of Academe .....Horace).

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