A Sergeant’s Ruthless “Pep-Talk”

[Given the many depictions of overbearing and obnoxious drill sergeants throughout literature and film, it’s easy for those of us without military experience to think of some of the more extreme portrayals as exaggerated caricature. Based on the following journal entry about a session with a carbine instructor, it’s clear that truth can rival fiction. The ruthlessness of Sergeant Brown’s rant gives a sense of the killer mindset the Army hoped to instill in its recruits, as well as the strength of the anti-Japanese and anti-German sentiment common at the time. More broadly, it’s evidence that even “good” wars — if there is such a thing — can’t avoid exposing an ugly underside.]

June 14, 1943 (North Camp Hood, Tex.)

…Today we had an amazing tirade from Sergeant Brown, one of the instructors in the carbine. Instead of going into nomenclature, which was on the schedule, he gave us the most cold-blooded pep talk on record: “Today we’re putting in your hands the individual weapon of the soldier, an engine of death and destruction. Your schoolboy days are over. From now on, you’ll learn to be cold-blooded killers, learn to kill for the sheer love of killing. When you see a Jap lying there twitching, you won’t want to waste another slug on him. You’ll go up and sink a toe in his family jewels to finish him off. You’ll learn how to use a knife, twelve-inch blade, to slit a Jap’s throat just in the right place to cut the jugular. For me, the perfect ending of this war would be to see every Jap and German laying out stiff and cold.”

He hammered away on this theme with tremendous ferocity, often throwing out a twistedly humorous phrase, but never changing the expression on his face. From time to time he’d turn on us: “I hate you guys. I hate all recruits, and I’ve got my reasons. You’re the ugliest bunch of guys I’ve ever seen, even when you smile. The only reason I’m teaching you guys is because I’m a soldier, and that’s what the Army tells me to do.”

Then he’d mention the rifle records held by C and D companies. And to complete this strange mixture, he’d go on like an evangelist talking about the simple joys of average American life, and the imperativeness of getting this dirty job done so that we can return to that beautiful life – so increasingly beautiful now that we’ve lost it.

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“Dear John” Letter Ends an Engagement

[Although I’m primarily using this blog to post journal excerpts dealing with societal, political and other world-affairs-type topics, I decided the following personal entry also warrants inclusion. The entry was sparked by my father’s receipt of a “Dear John” letter from Dorothy “Dottie” Forsythe, with whom he had had an on-and-off relationship for about two years at Middlebury. After much back and forth, my father had given Dottie his fraternity pin in July 1942, and she had accepted it. Such “pinning” was essentially the equivalent of becoming engaged.

My father’s critique of “fickle” Dottie doesn’t make him sound particularly enlightened by today’s post-feminist standards. Despite his pain, however, he still acknowledges the good that came out of their relationship. He also admits to his own role in the relationship’s ultimate failure. In this sense, this entry is quite representative of many of the more-personal journal entries, in which my father never shied away from self-analysis and, sometimes brutal, self-criticism.

In the entry’s final paragraph, my father writes that he won’t be looking for a “good” girl the next time around. In large part that determination came from his frequent conflicts with Dottie on the subject of religion, with her fairly conservative and traditional faith often threatened by my father’s desire to discover and define a faith of his own.]

June 9, 1943 (North Camp Hood, Tex.)

… Yesterday was marked by the first letter from Dottie. It was to break off our engagement, such as it was. Tonight came a note saying that she was sending the pin parcel post, insured. So though I’m never a guy to call an end to something like this right off the bat, I’ll call this the end for the purposes of the story.

It’s quite a long story, too, in my young life. There’s enough of it in the pages of these journals to make this end not altogether surprising. I remember that I was fatefully predicting it as long ago as last fall. Though I’ve believed and hoped and dreamed the other way many times since then, it all looks now like a rear guard action to stave off final defeat.

The way she handled it is what really gigs me. A month ago I figured I saw my way clear to call the whole thing off. I wrote one letter and put it straight. But I’m too much of a sucker for any dame, and especially for one that I love. My cold and logical proposal to call it off, for stated reasons, brings a most unlooked for reaction. She throws herself at me, in her letters, and by the time I leave Devens, she’s saying she’ll marry me whenever I really think we’re ready.

Now I can’t figure it out. I don’t think that Dottie is an out and out liar. Perhaps the big mistake was in my coming as far away from her as Texas. But that wasn’t my fault. Anyway, within the space of a week she undergoes a complete metamorphosis. Jack, the childhood sweetheart, comes home on a five-day furlough, and she decides to marry him. Which is what I call really bouncing around.

Hell, I can’t argue. I tried to argue with Gloria once, for about half a year. It just kept me a sad boy, with no results.

Now be calm, my boy, and admit that two years ago the past May you set out deliberately to construct a romance around the innocent and unsuspecting person of Dorothy Forsythe. Innocent was the word for her, too. A sweet and pretty girl, but I can’t say that I loved her at first sight.

Listen, I can’t talk this way any more now, because I do love her, and it makes me weak through the chest and arms to talk about her this way. Whatever misery I caused her that first year, I’ve had it dished back this second year. I started out as Jonathon Swift, roping in my Stella. I end up a poor boob, cut through the heart. Dottie was a little too old to be made over into a second Stella. She did have some ideas of her own, though to me they seldom seemed the same from one day to the other.

 I learned a lot with Dottie. She drilled some respect for the social graces into me. She made me reconsider my attitude towards religion, and thereby opened up a great two months for me. We learned a lot about loving, though I think that she learned more than I did, for I was a little ahead of her when we started. I think I learned a little about getting along with a fickle woman, though I suppose there’s no guarantee on that. Not that Dottie was maliciously fickle, but, at this stage of her life, inherently so.

 I guess that a guy develops a habit for a girl after he’s been with her long enough. It cuts and burns a lot when that habit is exploded, especially when the girl does it. But there are other girls, and probably one, somewhere, who will love me for the simple reason of me as I am. Gloria couldn’t do that, and though Dottie came a lot closer, she couldn’t, either. Which is neither her fault, nor mine. We certainly gave it a good try.

Here’s a couple of things I know, anyway. The next girl mustn’t be a “good” girl because she was brought up that way. She ought to know something about drink, and, preferably, really enjoy her beer. I hope she doesn’t smoke, but if she does, so what. She should have once been very cynical about religion, and now have developed a real religion to meet her own needs. Some girl! But I’ll find her somewhere…

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Army Life Begins: A Snapshot of North Camp Hood, Texas

[In April 1943, my father was called to report to Ft. Devens, Massachusetts on May 17 for his induction into the Army. On May 23, he received his shipping orders and was sent with many other inductees by rail to North Camp Hood, Texas for basic training. The following entry is one of his first from North Camp Hood.

My father would spend the next four years in the Army, and his journal entries from this period span nine bound volumes. For most of his enlisted time, my father was based stateside, although he was sent to Okinawa in August 1945. That month was the same month in which the U.S. dropped its atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in which Japan subsequently announced its surrender. As a result, my father faced no combat action during his South Pacific deployment. Nonetheless, his vantage point from within the Army gave him many opportunities to observe and reflect upon life in the service — and in America — during wartime.]

May 30, 1943 (North Camp Hood, Tex.)

Fourth day in North Camp Hood, Texas. Sunday. Peace, if not quiet, after a seventeen hour detail on KP yesterday. This is one of the Army’s most hellish holes. No doubt of that. We’re a new camp on the plains about 40 miles north of Waco, wherever that is. I haven’t had time to look up a map yet.

Apparently grass will grow in these parts, but it hasn’t had a chance to get started yet here, except in isolated areas. Most of the company yards are baked clay under the sun, and sticky goo in the rain. I had an unusual chance to examine the goo yesterday when it got tracked into the mess hall, which I was in charge of cleaning, as dining room orderly. We got it clean three times.

Around the camp area there are plenty of trees, thus far inaccessible. There are also hills of a kind. Mesa is probably the correct term. Flat table formations, with trees on top. When the sun comes out, it’s too hot for me, and this is only the end of May. I expect that I’ll somehow be able to stand it thru the summer, but I hate the thought of it.

Sunday afternoon in the barracks:

Continuous murmur of conversation, all pitches, with about as wide a variation of dialect and drawl as the US can produce. Now and then a raised voice, cursing, or pressing home a point. A few fellows dozing through it all. Three soldiers left in an industrious and quiet poker game, with one looking on. The lucky boys reading the mail, which has just come in, and unlucky Kovacs handing out food from his package. Washing hanging from the rafters. Sunday papers littering the floor. A few soldiers still writing letters.

Subjects of conversation: food, mail, weekend passes, cigarettes, matches. Not much of anything about the war, or even about training. The small personal things of camp life are what count. There’s an awful lot of swearing and dirty language, with “fuck” and its variations the heavy favorite. But it doesn’t mean a thing.

These soldiers are mostly all good boys. They’re generous and willing to work and help each other. I’d call this the general rule. I’ll probably get to know the exceptions after I’ve been around here a while.

It’s clearing off now, after a cloudy, rainy weekend, and will probably be hot as hell tomorrow, which is my first day of basic. Undoubtedly most of these boys figure that this is the damndest spot  they’ve ever been in their lives. But I haven’t heard much of any serious bitching.

From all I hear, we’re driven as near to death as we can stand in the training. But there’s no comeback. Once the basic necessity of the war is accepted, you have to learn how to fight and kill just as beastly as your enemy. Which, from all accounts, is plenty beastly. You more or less forget, I suppose, that most of the enemy is made up of young fellows in barracks, chiefly concerned with the small personal things or camp life – and home, way back somewhere.

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A Lynching in the Jim Crow South

[In this brief excerpt, my rather recounts a chilling tale of a southern lynching, as related by one of his Middlebury professors (“Prentice,” whom I believe was James S. Prentice, an assistant professor of economics). Of note, in addition to the racism and violence at the core of the story, is the professor’s characterization of black people as being little concerned about the “white man’s war,” World War II.  From a purely semantic perspective, I find it interesting that my father used both the then-common term “Negro” in his writing, as well as the “black man” descriptor. Perhaps the second was in broader use in the 1940s than I realized.]

February 12, 1943 (Middlebury College)

… I was chiefly interested, however, in [Prentice’s] stories of his recent trip around the US. The Negroes in the South are stirring as they’ve never stirred before. Lynchings are increasing. The black people are little concerned with the war – “It’s a white man’s war. What’s it got to do with us?” – Except they hope it’ll last a good long time, so that maybe “their” country at long last will have to call on them for help.

[Prentice] told of one lynching, – how a certain man went down from Birmingham on the train. The Jim Crow car was jam-packed, people standing in the aisle. The white car was almost empty. “Conductor,” said this man, “wouldn’t it be possible to fix up that other car like a trolley-car, with some of the seats in the back for black people?” The conductor stared, then went away and did nothing.

Once again the man asked if seats could be arranged for the Negroes. And again the conductor stared, turned away, and did nothing. But he came back soon and took the man’s ticket from his hatband. “Why?” the man asked the conductor. “Just checking up,” he said.

So at the next station they delivered the black man up to the police, who cursed and beat him. Then they gave him to the mob, and he was lynched.

Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.

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Modern World Threats to Creativity and Culture

[This journal excerpt revisits the theme of individual creativity, which my father saw as being threatened by many of the conveniences and distractions of the “modern” world in 1942. After all, how could the average person be creative when they were so easily drawn into passive activities such as listening to the radio, watching movies, or driving their automobiles through the countryside? Plus, people’s association with culture was fast becoming one of paying to experience its expression by others, rather than one of contributing to culture themselves.

My father, of course, would eventually see television eclipse all other forms of passive entertainment, and lived long enough to witness the emerging role of the Internet as a huge time sink. One can make a case that the Internet cuts two ways — both as a vehicle for endless browsing and superficial exchanges, and as a platform on which individuals can create and disseminate creative works with an ease unparalleled in history. On balance, though, I think the warnings my father raised in 1942 are much more apparent, and dire, today.]

January 28, 1943 (Middlebury College)

A central point in the arguments for socialism is the increased leisure time that will redound to the working classes, which they will be able to use in “a new burst of cultural feeling,” as E.C. Lindeman puts it. More efficient organization and utilization of the means of production will make comparatively short that part of the day which each individual must spend in physical labor. In other words, we put the machine in the proper place, as our slave, or, at least, as a subordinate partner, and then use our leisure time to participate in a great revival of the arts.

Maybe. We might remember, however, that our leisure life is as completely mechanized as our working life, – the automobile, radio, motion picture machine, and mass production printing presses. So we wonder if our machines really can give us new leisure, to be used creatively, or do they simply force us to live at such a whirlwind pace that we shall never really have the time for a “new burst of cultural energy.” We get our culture in such fitful and varied snatches that each one of these snatches becomes practically meaningless to us. We cram our lives up with incidentals in which we ourselves have no creative part – listening to the radio, watching sports contests, going to the movies and the theatre, driving through the countryside.

All these activities are supposedly part of the “broader, fuller life” which our machines have made possible for us. I don’t agree. If anything, the life of the common man today is narrower, even than that of the pioneer on our Western frontier a century and a half ago. Then a man was forced to produce the essentials of his own life. Though this was admittedly hard labor, it furnished a wide range in which he might exercise his creative powers. Today we don’t build; we buy. Our vaunted division of labor has been carried so far that we learn to spend our days as assembly lines, performing the simplest single operation in the manufacture of a product which we shall probably never use ourselves. For this degradation into an automaton we learn to be satisfied with a wage with which we can buy the essentials of life, and perhaps have enough left over to buy a little culture. Is it any wonder that men who find their lives crammed into such a narrow orbit sometimes go on strike. Wages aren’t their primary objective, no matter what they are told. Way down in deep they have a yearning to be men. Of course they are fighting against the feeling of insecurity, but behind this feeling is the caged fury of wild creative beings who have grown up in a society that has made the cramping of their native powers a prerequisite of existence.

No malevolent “ruling class” has consciously willed this situation. We grow up learning to listen to the radio, to watch movies, to ride in automobiles. Most of us never have a chance to be born, in any creative sense. We become culturally lazy by learning to admire the cultural activities of a few outstandingly creative, or skilled, persons in our society, and worse than this, we learn to look upon this admiration as a privilege, by often being forced to pay for it. We become hero-worshippers, and forget that we ourselves might have become heroes.

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Wendell Willkie, Liberal Republican, Backs the Liberal Arts

[Throughout his adult life, my father was a card-carrying Democrat and an unapologetic political liberal. Not surprisingly, as a college student in the 1940s, he was taken with the promise of “democratic socialism,” a subject that his journals of this period address several times. Nonetheless, he also found much to like in the ideas and speeches of a prominent Republican of the times — Wendell Willkie. Willkie, the Republican nominee for the 1940 Presidential election, lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected to an historic third term. FDR later brought the philosophically compatible Willkie into his administration as a special ambassador-at-large, promoting “One World” internationalism and an end to imperialism and colonialism.

The following journal excerpt, which quotes Willkie extensively from a speech he delivered at Duke University (presumably reported in The New York Times), is an interesting window into the mind of a “liberal” Republican of the era. Not only are such Republicans an extinct breed today, also all-but extinct are politicians of any party who can articulate moral and philosophic ideas — rather than slogans and sound bites — with the sophistication and intelligence Willkie demonstrated. Even then, however, being a liberal Republican carried significant liability; Willkie dropped out of the 1944 Presidential race because his liberalism lost him the support of the GOP establishment.

As reported by my father, much of the content of Willkie’s speech involved the benefits of a liberal arts education, a conviction shared by my father throughout his life. Willkie’s proposal to defer some men from Army service so they could remain in college and meet future American needs, not surprisingly, finds a sympathetic ear in my father. Despite the ambivalence  about military service that he states in this entry, however, my father would go on to enlist in the Army several months later. One note about the end of this entry, where my father’s personal commentary is interspersed among various Willkie quotes. All of Willkie’s quotes, even if not so identified, are bracketed by quotation marks. ]

January 15, 1943 (Middlebury College)

… Last night Wendell Willkie spoke at Duke in defence[sic] of the liberal arts education. It was a most encouraging talk, and added considerable cement to my conviction that Willkie is the man who must be elected next president of the United States. He himself, of course, reiterated his previous statement that there must be no indispensable man in a democracy. And certainly I won’t go around calling him indispensable. When lined up against all other known aspirants to the presidential office, however, I will gladly call him invaluable.

His ideas were so well phrased that I shall quote some of them here, perhaps as handy material for the Emerson paper, certainly as invaluable material for any man who believes in democracy. “I am speaking of education for its own sake: to know for the sheer joy of understanding; to speculate; to analyze; to compare and to imagine.” He lists the conventional frivolous objections to the liberal arts: “When such arguments gain acceptance, that is the end of us as a civilized nation.”

“… there should be some provision in the manpower program for leaving a nucleus in the colleges of men when aptitudes qualify them as definitely for our long-range needs as, let us say, other men are obviously qualified for medicine.” This statement drew a light blast from the Times editorial, which was otherwise commendatory. The Times maintained that these specially qualified youths still ought to stand the test of fire, to be able to understand and speak the language of the returning veterans. I stick with Willkie. It’s not a matter of courage. Probably it would take more courage to stay in college. It’s a matter of waste. Why throw tomorrow’s leaders into the gamble of physical combat? God knows they are preparing themselves to enter an arena of conflict as demanding on the man as any Libyan battlefield. I feel it myself; certainly I could go into battle of arms, but I am not happy at the risk of losing my chance to fight in the realm that I am much better fitted for, the realm of ideas.

I’m looking for a lifetime battle. Today I can say that I believe. Democracy and Christianity are more than words. They are ideas planted deep in my mind, and now coming to first flower. I am happy in the thought of living for them, not of dying for them. My death on the point of a bayonet would contribute very little to the life of these ideas in the world, and I have the confidence to hope that in a lifetime of study, writing, and teaching, I can make a much greater contribution to these ideas that I love, one that might rank with Emerson’s.

There must be many like me, – eager boys who feel the electric shock of this new age zipping through their nerves, and long to be among its prophets, as I do. Is it timidity that holds us back from asserting what we want to do for our fellow men? Will we accept meekly the grasp of the hand that is drawing us into the Army? With me there is a balance of opinion in this problem that keeps me from declaring openly on Willkie’s side. I imagine that valuable experience will derive from service as a soldier in a great Army, though the few reports I’ve heard don’t lead me to expect too much here. Probably it means entrance into some technical training, which probably wouldn’t hurt any, but would it help? Meanwhile, as the deadline approaches, I have these last three months of college to push as far ahead as possible.

Willkie went on to a discussion of freedom: “It is true that a man cannot be free unless he has a job and a decent income. But this job and this income are not the source of his freedom. They only implement it. Freedom is of the mind.”

…Willkie speaks of the damaging influences of the German universities. “It has encouraged the sacrifice of methods that make for wide intelligence to those who are concerned only with highly specified knowledge; it has held that the subject is more important than the student; that knowledge is more important than understanding; that science, in itself, can satisfy the soul of man; and that intelligent men should not be allowed to concern themselves with politics and the administration of state. Such matters should be left to trained politicians.”

That’s a damning indictment… But on one thing I insist. That science is nothing new in the world, and that it is no more adequate by itself for man today than it has been in the past. Science is generally description and analysis of the workings of natural laws in the material and human worlds. The continued expansion of scientific knowledge can be tremendously valuable for our society, but only when applied to the problems of society by morally sound men. Such men are more than scientists; they are religious men.

“If the humanities, or the humanistic temper which they promote, are permitted to lapse now, we shall have lost the peace before we have gained it, and the real victory after the war will be to the way of life, inhuman, tyrannical, mechanical, of those whom we shall outwardly have conquered.”

Speaking of our trend towards leadership, “hero-worship,” “indispensable men,” he says: “Had we more faith in liberal institutions, we would have, I believe, more faith in ourselves – more faith in the great leavening processes of democracy, which forever pushes new men to the top.” The new men! Emerson yesterday. Willkie today. Tomorrow? I’m trying. “Education is the mother of leadership.”

“More and more the doctrine of telling us what we should know is being adopted… And what has won out In the long battle. Always the truth.” The greatest prize for which man may strive. Each discovery leads one to higher truth, and there is never an end for him who dares to pursue. Melville was one of these, until the climb became too steep even for him.

“We have seen the devolution of human aspiration. It is a tragedy as great as men have ever witnessed.” But men are aspiring even at the darkest hour. Aspiration? It’s becoming the keynote of my life.

“Too many of the planners, I feel, are trying to look ahead by looking backward. Too many are seeking the future in the past.” It is neither in the past nor in the future, but it is now! and not in other men, but in you! Let a man first discover those moral laws that are completely independent of time, and then he will know what his society demands of him.

“Open the books, if you wish to be free.” Better to say, open the books, that they may open your mind. 

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