It was one of our longest bivouacs. It had taken us about two days to march into this remote area of the Reservation. We were to take Tokyamachee in a day or so they said – the simulated Jap city the engineers had built somewhere back in these woods, complete in every detail even to pagodas and long-curled-up, overhanging roof eaves (more anon).
It was November now, and the hot sun of summer had changed to a weaker version of itself now in the chill Georgia skies, and the nights were actually quite cold. We had gone on K-rations for the past several days – but were told that we would get “one last hot meal some time tomorrow” before the eventual surrounding of Tokyamachee or however it was spelled… It all seemed rather ominous, even if…simulated. (The K-rations weren’t simulated though…Ugh!).
By evening, we were camped along the edge of a small ridge of loblolly pines. Southern pitch pines. The variety they used to get turpentine and tar from years ago before everything got created out of a test tube. These trees are like candles: every part of them burns with fierce yellow flame when just touched by a match: needles, sap, bark or splintered cores (called “fatwood” by the rednecks). With lots of black, greasy smoke…
Redding and I had pitched our “pup tent” (our buttoned together shelter halves). The rest of the Squad was dug in around us; there was no “Company Street” tonight… those days were slipping behind us now… we were being turned into field troops now, and steadily steered toward greater and greater self-reliance. Spit-and-polish was on the way out... Redding had found his plates once again among the pine needles and litter and popped them back into his mouth, where they would chatter in sync with the falling temperatures as he snored away all night long.
He was from Pittsburgh as I recall. Kind of a sandy-haired, thin-boned dude. He was actually the Squad Leader, but used me sort of like Don Cortelone (Marlon Brando, the Mafia boss in “The Godfather” series), used Robert Devol... his “Consigliore”.. for advice on the side and counsel when no one was looking. It was a happy symbiosis: when I screwed up (quite frequently), Redding stood to the mast and took the knocks for us both from Sgt. Depp. In this fashion, as painlessly as possible, my education continued to grow as Redding’s hide grew scar-covered and dense, and none were the wiser. The Squad had mainly taken on a universal hangdog-ism and waited only for someone – anyone – to twitch the reins lightly anymore and they would move instantly out...
I don’t know much else, or I have forgotten if I ever knew in the first place, what Redding had done before the Draft picked him up, or if he had any family or what. I do remember him telling me, as we lay on our backs in our shelter at night, that when he was a small boy (again, during the “Great Depression Years” so-called) that his father had been a bootlegger. As his contribution to the family enterprise, it had been Redding’s job at the tender age of 7 or 8 to cruise the alleys and backyards of his native slums in the search for empty bottles for Pop’s packaging needs. Nights when we sat around in the PX “Beer Garden”, drinking “Barbarossa Red” (for some reason the name of that locally-bottled obscure Georgia 3.2 comes back to me out of the past here – or seems to – so much these days is wrapped in obscurity it seems...) you’d have to almost talk “old” Redding out of bringing the empty bottles back to the barracks with us, and squirreling them away in his footlocker. Old habits die hard, I guess. (Now me, these days, I have this “thing” you see for tin “Altoid” boxes for screws, small parts, and shop miscellany, etc....guess there’s a “screw” loose in all of us somewhere, and I don’t necessarily mean in an Altoid box here either...).
We had eaten our cold K-Rations which were okay I guess as far as they went but they didn’t go that far. I was feeling somewhat disgruntled, cold and damp and sure wanted something hot. I had saved a packet of dehydrated chicken-and-noodle soup from some march somewhere and dug it out of my pack.
I had an inspiration. “Listen, Redding! What if I make a little fire here – a real tiny one right in front of the shelter – and I mix this here soup with some water in my helmet and heat it up? That’d be pretty good, wouldn’t it?”
Redding only grunted. His teeth were hurting him bad, and hot soup was not uppermost in his mind. He pulled his blanket over his head and rolled over...
What the hell, I thought. I had seen them do that in the movies. John Wayne, maybe – Lloyd Nolan for sure – in all those Grade B “frontline” war movies they turned out back in the Forties... Nothing to it. After all a helmet was just like a kettle anyhow, in a way.
I scratched around in the needles and piles and picked up a few sticks of some “fatwood” splinters I found lying around. I poured some water out of my canteen into my helmet and mixed in the Chicken-and-Noodles dust. With my trusty Zippo (does anyone nowadays remember Zippos?), I lit my small pile of fuel and it instantly burst into flame. I nudged my helmet right up alongside it...
Soon, an odor just like Mother’s kitchen assailed my nostrils. Chicken Soup! How ya’ gonna lose? As soon as it was even moderately warm, I picked up my helmet and drank it all down. Redding never stirred. His loss was my gain I thought. He had had his chance and blown it. I stamped out my miniscule fire and scattered the ashes.
Then I, too, crept beneath my blanket, savoring the warmth radiating out in my belly.
Dawn came with a light mist and overcast skies. The loblollies dripped steadily upon us. I was hungry (again) and kinda miserable at the thought of another round of K-Rations. I crawled out of the shelter. And what did I see: a Miracle I saw – for sure! About fifty yards or so away through the trees, a mobile kitchen had appeared from somewhere last night and a chow tent and field kitchen had been set up – and there were lights there and troops moving about! I grabbed my mess kit I remember and I was so eager, I forgot to put on my glasses (which was then and is now, totally out of character for me!). It was a mark of how hungry I was!
I stumbled into the Mess Tent kinda like Mr. Magoo in one of those awful cartoons years ago that were nothing but making fun of near-sighted people... Hey! All you Newthink and Liberal zipperheads: how come we never hear it from you in protest for the Near-sighted who are thus regularly offended in such ways.. and only for aliens and deviants of far different “persuasions”?...Fie upon you, I say!
Anyhow, next thing I knew a fuzzy-outlined KP conscript was ladling fuzzy-looking scrambled eggs and bacon into my fuzzy-appearing kit and a couple of biscuits and coffee – real hot coffee! – into my canteen cup. I scrambled back to the shelter half. “Redding! Redding! Get up, goddamit! They got hot chow over at the Mess Tent. This must be the “last hot meal” we were promised yesterday”.
He stirred and then sprang upright outside the shelter, grabbing his mess kit off a tree branch and left on the run. Never even said “Good Morning to You!”
About 45 minutes later, Depp was blowing his tin whistle and the platoon was ordered to fall in with full field gear. Most had “discovered” the Mess Tent by now and eaten and grumbling was only at a moderate pitch I would say. Depp surveyed us... then dressed us up, and dressed-right-dress – and then he dressed us down too – a bit (grin). Then “At Ease!” – all the while running his beady little eyes up and down the ranks and over us... stopping a bit too frequently I felt in my vicinity. An atavistic ripple ran down my spine...
Then Depp began:
“Well, if’n yall’s aren’t one of the sorriest looking outfits I have ever had to train, then ah’m a stomped-on toad-frog shur ‘nuff.” He let this sink in a bit while he assembled his thoughts for his next observation., “But y’alls got one man here who takes the rag off’n the bush.” And here (my luck again!) he riveted me with those beady eyes of his.
“Powell!” he barked. “Front and Center!” I stepped out in front of the ranks. “About Face!” Obediently, I whirled and now stood facing my fellows.
Depp resumed:
“Powell! WHAT in hell is wrong with your helmet?”
“Wrong, Sergeant? "Wrong how?”
“How?,” he said. “I will tell you how. Here I got a nice platoon of so’jers in front of me, all with helmets on nice and straight and all – some even got their nets on (these were for sticking-in leaves and “camo” if you wanted) and all of them nice and O.D. colored and all – and I look-see down the First Squad here and what do I see but one man – you! – got a soup bucket on his haid – and it all burned black and crispy-like near the top...”
I was (obviously) undone. “Outed” as they might say nowadays. Sigh.
Depp warmed to his soliloquy and turned to address my (now former) buddies:
“This man here, he continued, “ were y’all’s in combat, could have cost you your lives! All of you,” he quickly added.
This was heavy-stuff, HOW could my slight char on my steel helmet do us all in so – seemingly sort of in a flash, as Depp was implying. All eyes (and ears) – including mine - were upon Depp to learn how this was possible. He relished the moment. Center stage and all that.
“Do you idiots realize that when you heat soup, boil your socks, or shave in hot water heated in your helmets, you have likely changed the mag-NEE-tism (he lingered on the syllables of this word) of that helmet and that ever after anyone wearing a formerly heated helmet cannot get near a compass as it will make it point the wrong way? And since Powell here is always in the thick of disputes over compass bearings and map co-or-DIN-ates where all y’all’s are marching, too – he might just be the case of y’all’s marching right over the edge of the Earth!” (I guess Depp kinda had an idea that outside Georgia and his native North Carolina, the land maybe just stopped somewhere someday and you went right over the edge of it – like when the Vikings sailed over it and dropped into Niffleheim...).
Whatever.
“This is what comes,” he continued, “of too much reading”. (In general, Depp frowned on “readers” in his platoon). “Like them ‘Joe and Willie’ cartoons y’all’s always posting on MY Bulletin Board.” (Bill Maudlin’s cartoons of Joe and Willie in their fire-blackened helmets as the archetypical draftee miscreants who marched all over Europe, were wildly popular everywhere back in those days).
But not with Depp.
“So naow, Powell, he said, “you dag-gone Yankee (I grew up in Texas but was drafted from Connecticut – so to Depp I was a blue-belly through and through forever), what you have done is a crime under Army R&R (Rules and Regulations). You have deliberately destroyed gov’mint property! (He paused to let this sink in on his listeners – and me). Then, “And so you are going to have to sign a ‘Statement-of-Charges’!”
I had visions of wasting away forever in the Stockade now... my buddies maybe (only maybe) coming surreptiously by now and then and slipping me Mars Bars from the PX through the barbed wire. If I was lucky.
For they're hangin' Danny Deever, you can hear the Dead March play,
The regiment's in 'ollow square -- they're hangin' him to-day;
They've taken of his buttons off an' cut his stripes away,
And for the time being, that ended it. I was ordered to fall back in ranks, but expressly forbidden to scrub off any of the offending soot or char. And I was not to put my helmet net on or try to cover up the burned spot with grass or leaves either. I was condemned to be a walking, visual reminder to all who saw me of the dangers of heating water in a helmet and how whole battalions (I suppose) had vanished outright in various sectors of the Reservation in times past, not to mention the ETO perhaps, as result of such derelictions.
About a week later after we had returned, I was summoned up to Headquarters – by the First Sergeant. Depp was there when I went inside – looking as solemn as a pallbearer. The First Sergeant, however, yawned, and shoved a piece of paper toward me: “Paymaster says you got to sign this here,” he said. “Before you can get paid this month.” (When I went in the Service, we still got just $21-a-month, which I believe had prevailed ever since WWI days!) Not long after however, pay schedules were raised and Privates I think then got maybe $30 or maybe $35-a-month. I honestly don’t remember).
He continued, “Says here you damaged Government property.... Your helmet,” he added, reading on aloud to anyone who cared to listen..
“Gonna cost you 98 cents.” I must have looked surprised. He looked at me and repeated himself: “You burned your helmet on maneuvers,” Depp tells me. “So you got to pay for the damages, don’t you understand? Ninety-eight cents. Paymaster going to dock your pay envelope .98. Sign here, will you? Then get the hell on back to your outfit. I got work to do”.
I signed. And turned and nodded to Depp. He nodded back.
The issue was closed.
"...how in his haste he had left the rammer in his gun; it had been fired straight into the Clara's side, and Mr Dashwood, seeing it sticking there, has spoken quite sharp and sarcastic - "It shall be stopped from your pay, Bolt," says he, 'you wicked dog.' p.491
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