A Midnight Clear: A Novel Read online

  There are many peculiar things about our squad. I’ll start out with a few. First, we almost never call the Germans KRAUT or JERRY or HUN or NAZIS, any of the usual army names. At the most, they’re “the enemy.” Only Stan Shutzer, our professional Jew, calls them anything he wants. Father Paul Mundy gave him a special dispensation. Yes, we have a squad father, too; Mother Wilkins, Father Mundy. But that isn’t the second squad’s second peculiarity, it’s only an accident.

  Father Mundy invented our squad “no obscenity” rule. We want to make it clear we are not actually part of this army. We’re princely orphans left on the wrong doorstep, maybe bastards of the blood. It helps. This might well be one of Father’s greatest coups. For a guy who acts so dumb sometimes, he can be shrewd. Mundy’s twenty-six, a dropout —but not fallen—almost priest. He and Mother are the old men in the squad now, the rest of us are under twenty.

  We pick up our equipment at the edge of the forest and are back in our dirt dent before the next guard comes on. Mother’s got himself fairly well in hand. It’ll be Bud Miller, our mechanical genius, crossword-puzzle inventor and child poet, along with Stan Shutzer, Jewish avenger and aspiring millionaire advertising executive. Both Bud and Stan have jewelers for fathers, but I think it’s about the only thing they have in common, except being smart and at the same time dumb enough to be in an infantry I and R squad. They’re on the next four, from two to six. Edwards’s squad’s got the night part but then there’re twelve of them so they can keep it two hours each, and it shouldn’t be bad. After the ball is over, the musicians will take their usual guard duty again.

  Mother and I straggle back to our bivouac. He and I are tenting together now. Before the Saar, he was with Jim Freize. Jim was definitely a close second to Mother in the neatness competition. They’d fuss around getting their area cleaned up, everything neatly packed away; then they’d meander down to the motor pool to wipe and shine their jeep. Neither of them knew the first thing about how to keep a jeep running, but theirs was always spic and span, even in the damned Metz mud. Miller, the mad mechanic, won’t let the motor pool jocks near any of our squad jeeps, but he’d only laugh at Jim and Mother puttering around.

  I crawl into my sloppy side of our tent and pull out the book we’re reading right now. It’s called A Farewell to Arms. I have pages 215 to 310. Wilkins is ahead of me and Shutzer behind. Shutzer’s been hounding me all day to hurry it up; Wilkins finished last night. It’s just my luck being caught between two of the fastest readers on our side of the Siegfried Line. We rip books apart so we can read them together.

  The book before this was All Quiet on the Western Front. We talked it over and voted as a squad to quit the war first chance we got. We were still together then, outside Saarbrücken. Father Mundy didn’t realize, until we told him, the characters in the book were German. But he might have gotten skipped over with some pages. We usually leave Father until last; he reads each word as if he’s licking it.

  I finish my pages and put them at the opening of our tent for Shutzer.

  This chapter is called briefing. There is a typical military briefing coming up soon but I think I should give our real briefing here while I’m supposed to be drifting off to sleep.

  Briefing, in the army, means explaining. The army mind wants everything short and simple, except wars. Maybe that’s why they call it briefing. But sometimes it’s hard to be short and simple. Probably, in a certain way, this whole book, not just this chapter, is a briefing; but I’m not quite sure for or about what.

  Our squad is half of the I and R platoon, the second half. The I is for intelligence, the R for reconnaissance. The I and R platoon is part of the regimental headquarters company of the Umpty-eleventh Regiment, of the Eighty-tenth Infantry Division. A regimental headquarters company is basically a lot of nothing.

  To give an idea. We have a bird colonel, his adjutant and assistant; all and each with orderlies. There’s the S1, S2, S3, S4, S5 and so on, each a major, each with an assistant, all with orderlies. An orderly in the army is a low-paid military servant.

  Then, we have cooks, cooks’ helpers, cooks’ assistants, permanent KPs, supply clerks, mail clerks, file clerks, typists, messengers; a plethora of personnel people, plus the motor pool crowd. The motor pool is where they park the vehicles, almost exclusively jeeps, staff cars or two-and-a-half-ton trucks; nothing very warlike. Actually these vehicles mostly only carry people and their junk from one place to another. The drivers of this hauling fleet are T4s and T5s; that is, sergeants and corporals who aren’t expected to shoot anybody on purpose.

  We’ve also got the regimental band: thirty of the most unlikely soldiers to be found on the wrong side of division. As I said, they usually stand perimeter guard for the company. I’ve never heard them play, but then there haven’t been many parades. We liberated a violin at Rouen and Mel Gordon wanted a tryout but was told there’s no room for violins in a military band. But wouldn’t it be great, hearing taps or reveille—better yet, retreat—played on a violin?

  Last and least comes the I and R platoon. There are twelve in a squad; squad leader’s buck sergeant, assistant corporal; no orderlies. Our squad is down to six. Mel Gordon became corporal to our squad the same time I made sergeant. It wasn’t for much we did except stay alive. He hasn’t sewn on his stripes yet, either.

  I and R is the eyes and ears for S2. S2 is regimental intelligence. Our S2 is Major Love, both name and job gruesomely inappropriate. Love was a mortician in civilian life. He’s “eyes and ears” to Colonel Douglas Sugger, regimental commander, usually referred to as “the Dug Sucker.” The Dug’s a past master at war costumes and heroic jaw thrusting. Major Love has a slight talent for jaw thrusting, too.

  Love’s main passion is generating business for his professional colleagues, the grave registrars. His most available target has been the I and R platoon, with which he has had some sporadic but notable success. Whistle Tompkins always claimed that any living, moving human body was an insult to Love’s sense of propriety.

  It’s thanks to Love and his military-mortuary skills I’ve made my recent headlong leap to three stripes. We lost half our squad in the Saar, attempting one of his map-inspired, illconceived, so-called “recon” patrols. You can’t imagine how meaningless and stupid this was. It’s so bad I won’t tell about it; I hope.

  When I say lost, I mean killed. Nobody in the army ever admits someone on our side is killed. They’re either lost, like Christopher Robin; hit, as in batter hit by a pitched ball, take your base, or they get “it,” as in hide-and-seek, or, maybe, “get it,” as with an ambiguous joke.

  Our squad leader was Max Lewis, twenty. His assistant, Louis Corrollo, nineteen. We called them “the Louie [like Louie, Louie, You Gotta Go] twins.” The other four of us who got “it” that day were Morrie Margolis, Whistle Tompkins, Fred Brandt and Jim Freize.

  Morrie was my tentmate. We shared shelter halfs, buttoned them together to make a pup tent, shared other things, too. Not one of those six had an AGCT (AGCT is another in-built military paradox, an army intelligence test) score of under 150; each, intellectually, one in ten thousand. But that’s all another story, a story even more stupid than Love’s patrol. I’m liable to tell that one.

  I have a penchant for telling true stories no one can believe.

  My being squad leader is also another story. It’s another story the way Peter Rabbit is another story from Crime and Punishment.

  Our division took a mauling outside Saarbrücken. We gained a few miles of European real estate and lost the beginnings to untolled (much more than untold) generations of very bright people. I think the U.S. Army considered this a good deal.

  So now we’ve been moved north into the Ardennes Forest to rest and wait replacements. This is supposed to be a sector where nothing’s ever happened and nothing is ever going to happen, a kind of high-class halfway house; a front-line position for adjusting makeup, straightening out nerves and general refurbishing.

  I’m not sure if
I myself am recuperable. I’m scared all the time and can’t sleep, not even on a long guard. I’ve already had two crying fits but nobody saw me and I gave them every chance. I hung around Mel Gordon, our unofficial squad doctor and psychiatrist, moaning, but he didn’t even notice. Nobody wants to look.

  My biggest immediate trouble is an absolutely historic case of GIs. Thank God for olive drab underwear.

  The medics here have marked me down as a paregoric addict and won’t give me any more. Yesterday I walked to my old company, Company L, and begged two doses from Brenner, third platoon medic.

  I shat five times going and only three coming back so it must’ve helped. I’m eating K ration biscuits and K lunch cheese almost exclusively; but I’m too gut scared for processing food. Making me squad (try squat) leader might be one of the greatest impractical jokes of the war.

  With this jolly thought, I end our briefing and drift off into what passes for sleep these days; Mother is snoring beside me.

  In the morning, Lieutenant Ware pulls open our tent flap; the pages are gone; Shutzer got them, I hope.

  “Sergeant Knott, Major Love wants us at the S2 tent. You chow up, then I’ll come by at o-nine-hundred.”

  He waits to make sure I’m awake, then he’s gone. I lie back and try to think of some appropriate non-obscene word to express my feelings. I’m not awake enough. “Shit!” is all that comes. Father says we are succumbing internally if we think in their terms. I admit it; inside, I’ve succumbed. Maybe that’s why they made me squad leader. Maybe that’s why I have the GIs, too; I’m polluted.

  But it’s better this morning. I can even lean over to lace my boots without feeling I’m squeezing a balloon filled with sewer water in my stomach.

  While I’m getting dressed, wriggling in a pup tent, trying not to wake Wilkins, I should explain something about my name; more briefing. Our family name is Knott. My parents wanted to call me Bill or Billy, but because there’s no Saint Bill or Billy, I was named William. They insist no joke was intended.

  By third grade at school, I was Will Knott. I learned to live with it, my private martyrdom. So I was more or less prepared to grit it out again in the army, Willingly or Knott (Ha!). What I wasn’t ready for was the conglomeration of certified wise guys and punsters called the I and R platoon. They decided my nickname must be Wont or Won’t; only the spelling was contended.

  All through basic, the controversy raged. Max Lewis was leader of the apostrophe group, claiming I’m a natural radical, troublemaker and guardhouse lawyer who Won’t do anything I’m told. Mel Gordon headed the no-apostrophe crowd, insisting I’m too nice, and W ont to do anything I’m asked.

  They called themselves “the apostates” and “the antiapostates.” Father Mundy says it’s all in the mind of the beholder.

  So everybody calls me Won’t or Wont and it’s up to me. That is, all except Max, who called me W-O-N-apostrophe-T right up till he got IT.

  I’m dressed now and sliding out of the tent, mess kit and cup in hand. I see Mother Wilkins has cleaned out the bottom of my cup again. I wonder what he leaves for his wife to do at home?

  I mention all the above nonsense about my name to give some idea of the wheel spinning that can go on when you have too much brain power concentrated in too small a place. Our squad has one hell of a lot of intelligence but not much reconnaissance. We’re a covey of nit-picking Talmudic Jesuit Sophists continuously elaborating one unending bead game.

  I decide to take the big risk and eat some regular, scrambled hot eggs and one sausage. I know better than to try coffee. Coffee works like castor oil on me. I’m not sure if it’s coffee itself or all the coffee I’ve drunk scared; but the smell, the taste, the feel of coffee makes me jumpy, shattery, scared shitless, to be precise. It still does today.

  I take my mess kit and climb into one of the communications trucks, slink down and try to eat carefully, quietly, in peace, chewing each mouthful twenty times and swallowing slowly.

  I’m almost finished when Lieutenant Ware finds me. He’s standing looking over the tailgate, his helmet pushed back on his head. He’s Van Heflin playing Van Johnson in a war movie with Marlene Dietrich as the Nazi spy.

  A word here about Ware while I’m trying to get down the last two forkfuls and mediating my stomach into some kind of operational order.

  Ware was in the Aleutian campaign. After that, he was reassigned to the Eighty-tenth Infantry Division, and more or less retired from the army. As Mel Gordon puts it, “He says he’ll do anything and then does nothing he says.” Stan claims that when he starts his Shutzer Surefire Advertising Agency after the war, he’s going to hire Ware; talent like his shouldn’t be wasted.

  Colonel Sugger brought Ware into headquarters company to form the I and R platoon. Ware caught the I part. He had the regimental records sifted until he came up with the twenty-four people in the regiment with the highest AGCT scores. This was a wild idea in itself, but what made it even more bizarre is the way this goofy division was put together in the first place.

  Two years ago, that original National Guard division Love worked out with between funerals, was spruced up and prepared for combat. But before it was shipped overseas, a maneuver with two similar divisions was held across the states of Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana. This was an overwhelming catastrophe. How can all three divisions lose in a war game? They did.

  In the aftermath, someone realized that somehow the average AGCT for these particular divisions was in the mideighties. When it came to brains, they were on the down side of the second standard deviation to the left. Everybody with ability had been picked off by the air corps, the signal corps, the tank people, artillery and so forth. This was the sludge.

  The military solution was shipping off to the South Pacific, as replacements, all the privates in these three divisions. This left cadres of not very bright officers and noncoms.

  Meanwhile, back in civilization, another scenario was being played out. In the year 1943, most U.S. male graduating-high-school seniors were tested for entrance into what were called the A12 and V12 programs. Those selected would be sent to universities and trained in engineering or medicine. A12 was army. Their idea was to train us and rebuild our world after the nasty war.

  Several thousand were selected and, upon duly enlisting, sent to universities. Since many of us had in the course of our scholastic careers been double promoted once or twice, we were too young for enlisting. At that time, the accepted age limit for being allowed to kill or be killed in a war was eighteen. So we were placed in the ASTPR, or Army Specialized Training Program Reserve. We were sent directly to universities, and were to be given our basic training when we came of age, then sent back to the university. It was sort of an early kindergarten arrangement.

  However, while we were in infantry basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, the ASTPR and most of the ASTP were disbanded; taken off the drawing boards by the powers that be. We were sent to various infantry divisions to play at being real soldiers. It was like being super promoted from nursery school to grad school.

  We ASTPRers have many outrageous theories about what actually happened. We’re strong on suspicion. The theories go all the way from selective genocide (to make the mediocre feel superior) to the idea that the whole ploy was a rather clever recruiting device.

  Many of us were plugged in as replacements for those privates of the National Guard divisions who had been sent off to die in the South Pacific. This did boost the average AGCT and so solved that slight quantitative problem.

  A large group of very young, arrogant almost soldiers unwillingly joined the Eighty-tenth Division in Camp Shelby, Mississippi, to help form a strange topsy-turvy organization: moron officers and noncoms trying to lead a disgruntled group of smart-ass privates. In retrospect, it wasn’t actually such an unusual situation.

  So when Lieutenant Ware pulled us from the regimental records, he was wittingly, or unwittingly (if he had a whit of wit), tiptoeing through the tulips, culling the calle
d, the chosen. Except for Father Mundy and Mother Wilkins, all our squad is, or was, ex-ASTPR, all with impressive AGCT scores.

  ASTP is an unpronounceable acronym. However, Whistle Tompkins insisted it was easily pronounced; that the TP was a Babylonian diphthong pronounced as “S.” Shutzer counterclaimed that the TP went with the AS for wiping purposes.

  That’s a lot to squeeze around two bites and some stomach settling, with Ware standing there tilt-hatted, watching me. I either chew exceptionally slowly, or I think very fast.

  “Come on, let’s go, Knott! Love’s waiting.”

  He looks at his watch.

  Everything in the army is run by the clock, o-five-hundred and all, but they don’t issue watches. In our squad there are now three watches; there were once five. I don’t have one myself. In the world I come from, having a watch or a telephone is a privilege of the upper classes.

  We move off toward the S2 tent. I do the usual thing, like an old-time Japanese wife, or a dog well-trained to heel, walk beside and about a step behind Ware; it’s part of the conditioning. He stops and looks around at me.

  “Jesus Christ, Knott! Haven’t you gotten those fucking stripes sewn on yet? ”

  “The supply sergeant says he doesn’t have any buck stripes in right now, sir. They’re waiting for a new shipment.”

  “Hell, get some staff stripes and cut off the rocker.”

  “That’d be destruction of government property, sir. I suggested it to Sergeant Lucas.”

  I’m hoping that’s ambiguous enough. What happened was Lucas tried to push off staff stripes on me to be cut up and I suggested it would be destroying government property and we’d need to make out a Statement of Charges. This scared Lucas; he’s from the original division and somewhat slow.