Impressions of Texas, Circa 1943

[The following is the last entry in my father’s third journal, and also his last before leaving Texas for another Army camp in Missouri. He uses the entry to reflect on his time in Texas, and on Texas itself. Nothing very consequential here, but a nice descriptive picture of the environs and of my dad’s passage through it. Judging from the last paragraph, some characteristics of present-day Texans were shared by their 1942 precursors.]

October 14, 1943 (Camp Fannin, Tex.)

Powerful circumstantial evidence has accumulated during the past two days which permits me to accept the conclusion that this is my last day in Texas. In the first place, I’m on orders to ship out of Fannin at 5 this afternoon, and in the second place, I’m shipping in OD’s [olive drabs]. OD’s are not yet worn in Texas. Those are the facts. The official rumor has us headed for Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. But that’s for the future. Right now I’m going to declare open season on all stray Texas memories and see how many I can rope in.

First impressions were unflattering. Dawn in railroad yards of Waco, the gray half-light giving hesitant shape to a drab neighborhood. Our train had stopped there sometime in the early morning. As soon as I was dressed, I walked out on the rear platform. “What place is this?” I yelled at a lone trainman up the tracks. I knew, and just wanted to hear him say it. “Waco,” he said, and swung along with his lantern without another word. Across the street a little eat-joint had a light showing through a dirty back window. A woman was in there, apparently washing dishes.

A couple of hours later the train chugged to a stop in what seemed to be a blank wilderness somewhere to the south and west of Waco, and then backed up onto a right angle spur. Five minutes later we slid into North Camp Hood. After four days on the train, I had that gritty feeling all over my body, and the reality of Hood there before me in the sun-baked valley put my mind in a similar condition…

I kept saying in my first letters to my friends and folks that I thought I’d make out OK with everything except the heat. I really didn’t know how I’d stand up under the Texas sun in midsummer, and the thought of it frightened me.

It got hot, all right, but I stood it, and with only a few bad days. I can remember only once that I hoped desperately that the sun actually would strike me down and put an end to the terrific burning. That was about the last week in June when we were practicing dry firing with the carbine just before going on the range. There were a couple of times when I got up from the prone position that things almost went black on me.

We began to learn something about going without water. It got so that the biggest moments in the day came for me at dinner and supper with the first swallows of the iced drink, no matter what it was. How we used to plead with the KP who was dishing it out. “Just a little more” or “Fill it up, chum” or “How about a piece of ice?” …

I’ve never yet gone on a real weekend binge, for the principal reason that such activity seemed to represent an expenditure of money, time, and body, without commensurate returns. This probably sounds too coldly calculated, but I have been on binges at other times, and, except in the unique case of fraternity beer parties, remember them as decidedly incomplete and unsatisfactory occasions. What I liked best at Hood was simply to stroll off a little way into the country with a congenial pal, preferably [Kal] Kaufer, and just doze or chat or read or write in the shade and breeze. This would be change enough after a tough week of basic. Kal was a good boy to talk with.

I spent a good many dreamy hours lying on a coal bin watching the night come on. There would always be brilliant stars in the clear purple sky, with usually a cool breeze, and, at the proper periods, a moon, slim retiring maiden in the west, or full bosomed matron striding up the east. It was a beautiful time to think thoughts not too profound, to muse, – and to fall asleep.

I liked the country around Hood, even though the unusually dry summer made it a little ragged and dusty by the end of July. There were a lot of flowers when we first came. I don’t know what they were, but they were for me a strong recommendation for the land that bore them. The wooded pasture land that had recently been farms was pleasant to wander through, though most of the time I spent in it was on night problems when opportunities for appreciation were at a minimum.

Here at Fannin my favorite spot is very definitely located. It’s the junction of four sturdy limbs near the top of a big walnut tree. These limbs have been my home for many hours during this last week. While reclining in their embrace, I’ve been able to see the troops go marching up and down the road, and to see them from a really detached position. This has been an escape from the Army without benefit of furlough… I’m really sorry to say goodbye to that tree.

I haven’t met many Texans, so I can’t declaim upon their mass characteristics, if any such exist. I hope that the two clergymen whom I observed in action aren’t representative, but I’m afraid they are. Texans apparently want plenty of blood and thunder with their religion, because that’s what they get. Their inordinate pride in their state is probably compounded about fifty-fifty of their ignorance of the rest of the country, and their state’s tangible assets, which are considerable. I’ve seen the cotton fields, and also had a look at the East Texas oil fields. If bigness counts, they’ve got plenty of it.

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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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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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