In addition to our military training at Fort Sill we were taught how to drive, which leads to a funny but pretty scary story. (Funny for you, scary for me.) I learned how to drive on a two-and-a-half ton 6x6 big Army truck. As opposed to the automatic cars of today, it was an old-fashioned stick shift. There was a lot of what was called “double-clutching,” meaning that in order to go from one gear to another you couldn’t just use your clutch once, but twice. It was not easy, but finally I learned how to drive it.
Even though I learned how to drive it, I really didn’t know exactly how to turn it. It seems that when you’re driving a truck and you’re going to make a turn, you move out a little so that the back wheels of the truck follow the front wheels with plenty of nice room to complete the turn. So here I am, coming to a right turn around the headquarters building of the camp. Without thinking, I turn the wheel sharply to make the turn. The front of the truck is fine. The back of the truck—not so fine. It takes off the entire corner of the bungalow headquarters building. When I felt the jolt and heard the crash I stopped and looked back. There was a corporal, sitting at his typewriter at his headquarters desk looking around at the sudden revelation of blue skies above him and wondering where his walls went.
Obviously I finally learned to drive at Fort Sill or they wouldn’t have let me get behind the wheel of this jeep.
I shouted back at him, “Sorry! Sorry!”
He yelled back, “I don’t think sorry is going to do it!”
He was right. Right after I got the truck back to the motor pool, I got a visit from our first sergeant.
He said, “How do you like the Army?”
I said, “What do you mean?”
He said, “Well, I hope you like it because you’re going to be in it for the rest of your life! You caused about ten thousand dollars’ worth of military damage, and at a private’s salary I figure you could get it paid for in about a hundred years.”
He was joking but I didn’t know it, and my heart and my spirit sank down to my boots. A hundred years! I didn’t think I could make it. Anyway, I didn’t pay for that accident with time or with money. But I did a lot of extra guard duty and a lot of KP, which are initials for “Kitchen Police,” meaning peeling tons of potatoes and scrubbing out big pans to the point of exhaustion.
To this day, while I no longer drive a 6x6 truck, I still always move my vehicle out just a little wider than most when I’m making a turn, just in case a first sergeant shows up.
Every once in a while at Fort Sill, I would be struck with bouts of homesickness. Especially when I heard Bing Crosby on the radio. He would sing songs like “Moonlight Becomes You,” a sweet tune by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke that I remembered from a wonderful picture called Road to Morocco with Bing and Bob Hope and always their same love interest, Dorothy Lamour. I would think of my mother, singing along with Bing and dressing me in the morning under the covers when I was a little kid. I missed my brothers, I missed my friends in Williamsburg, and I even missed my strict teachers. I missed things like penny candy, egg creams, and charlotte russes. For those of you who are not worldly, a charlotte russe is a little round circle of yellow cake in a cardboard container liberally filled with a swirl of thick, sweet whipped cream and topped with a maraschino cherry. When I was on those long twenty-mile hikes at Fort Sill— Oh! How I would long for the good old days of egg creams and charlotte russes.
My Williamsburg pals (left to right): Bernie “Flappy” Rothman, Eddie Albert, and me in Brooklyn before I boarded a troopship to Europe.
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When I finished basic training at Fort Sill, I was shipped back to Fort Dix for overseas assignment. I was lucky to get a weekend in New York so I could see my mom, my grandma, my aunts and uncles, and the few friends that were also in the service but hadn’t shipped out yet. I stuffed as much of my mom’s delicious food as possible down my gullet, because I knew I’d be on Army chow for the foreseeable future. She made me things I loved like matzo ball soup, potato pancakes, and stuffed cabbage—things I knew were hardly ever served on an Army chow line.
And then one night, I think it was around February 15 or 16, 1945, together with three or four hundred other guys I boarded a troop transport at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The ship was called the Sea Owl and I was told it was a liberty ship. Regrettably, we were not lucky enough to get a voyage on a victory ship, which had more stabilizers and more spacious accommodations. I remember going down below to the third or fourth deck and I was greeted with the sight of rows and rows of stacked metal bunks. Each row was six beds high. It looked like hundreds of bunks. Unfortunately, in my row I got the third one, which was right square in the middle of the stack with what looked like a two-hundred-pound GI above me.
At the Bridge Plaza in Brooklyn, mimicking General MacArthur.
Things were fine until the ship got to the open sea. Nobody told me about the North Atlantic in February. Huge waves slammed us from side to side, and then like a corkscrew moved us way up and plunged us way down. And I realized there was no way to stop it. Soon the throwing up began. It quickly became a cacophony of puking that never stopped.
Happily, I found out the next day that there was a ship’s newspaper and volunteered to write a column for it. They graciously accepted and, taking the title from Eleanor Roosevelt’s daily column called “My Day,” I called my column “My Floating Day.” Here’s a gander at what went on day and night on the troopship Sea Owl fighting the waves and the weather on its way across the North Atlantic to war:
My Floating Day
The shrill blast of a whistle tore me from my girlfriend’s arms and opened my eyes to another day on the ocean. I crawled out of my bunk and put on my shoes. I went to the latrine to wash. All they offered to wash with was salt water. Using salt water you can’t get enough lather to shave the hair on a flea’s leg.
I ate chow, but my breakfast was not a military secret for long. The gentle, exotic sway of the boat continued. Soon I made a spectacular dash to the latrine, where the menu underwent a full-field layout.
After a police detail I was unchained and allowed on deck with the others. I really enjoy being on deck. The air was fresh and once in a while a refreshing spray of salt water slapped you in the face like an insulted girl. It was real democracy; once I even talked to a Real First Sergeant. I felt so big I bowed only twice when I left him.
After lolling on deck we’re called to chow. They chuckled, punched our TS cards, and another meal trickled down to my yawning stomach.
In the evening, the ship changed from a troop transport to one of the largest gambling houses afloat. There were so many card games you had to be an athlete to get back to your bunk. The boys were really dice happy.