A Fistful of Fig Newtons (17 page)

“Hey, Ernie, will you please march over on the other side of the platoon? I keep hearin’ your bones rattle and I get out of step.”

The platoon laughed at that, and so did Ernie, who was a good guy, although very quiet. Few of us at the time would have guessed at the fate that lay ahead of him.

He raised his long, white, boy face–he looked a little like a nineteen-year-old Uncle Sam with no beard–and repeated:

“Boy, I’m so damn thirsty I could could drink some of your crummy gravy.”

“Don’t worry, Ernie,” I said, “we only got about fifteen hours to go and we’ll be home free.”

I tried to pump as much sarcasm into my voice as I could manage without getting into trouble with the sergeant, who was listening to our exchange of pleasantries. The clank of many feet approaching cut short whatever Ernie was going to say. We went back into the trenches.

From time to time during the long hours I was switched to Jell-O, which I found was even trickier, if possible, than gravy. For one thing, it bounces around on the ladle and occasionally takes on a life of its own. GI Jell-O ranges in consistency from golf ball rubbery to a kind of oozy reddish gruel, and you never know what kind you’re going to get on any given ladle scoop. I learned to play the windage, rolling my Jell-O scoop from side to side in the manner of a Cessna 150 approaching a narrow grass runway in high, gusty crosswinds.

Your GI mess kit folds open like a clam and has a treacherous metal handle which can operate, or nonoperate, at its own will. Half of the clam shell is a shallow oval-shaped compartment. The other side, of equal size and also oval, has raised divisions which theoretically separate the Jell-O from the mashed potatoes or the beets from the ice cream. Like most theories, the actuality was very different. For one thing, the metal of the mess kit transmits heat better than platinum wire carries electric current. A dollop
of steaming mashed rutabagas in one compartment instantly turns the mess kit into an efficient hotplate. Ice cream ladled into another compartment instantly melts and is heated to the consistency of lukewarm pea soup, which is often what it tastes like after the peas have slopped over into the ice cream and the fish gravy has oozed over from the big dish. So naturally, all such old-fashioned concepts as specific tastes and conventional meal sequences are totally irrelevant when you’re dining tastefully out of a red-hot mess kit. For one thing, you usually eat your dessert first in the futile hope of getting at just a little unmelted ice cream before it’s too late.

Over the years I became quite fond of some specific mixtures. For example, vanilla ice cream goes surprisingly well when mixed with mashed salmon loaf. The ice cream makes a kind of sweetish coolish salmon salad out of it, a little like drugstore tuna salad. If the ice cream is chocolate, however, or maybe tutti-frutti, you’ve got problems.

Goldberg, the leading Company K chow hound, had a simple solution. He’d just take his big metal GI spoon and immediately mix everything in his mess kit together, forming a heavy brownish-pinkish paste in which floated chunks of, say, fried liver or maybe a pork chop or two, and just spoon it down between gulps of Kool-Aid or GI coffee or whatever we had to drink. It was all gone in maybe thirty or forty seconds. Goldberg would let out a shuddering belch and get back on the chow line for another go-round.

There were others, perhaps more fastidious, who would eat only one thing per serving, going through the line first for turnips, which they would devour, then getting back in the line for the steamed cauliflower, then finally, after three or four trips through the line, topping it off with the Jell-O or the canned pineapple.

Then there were those, and Gasser was a leading member of this group, who lived entirely on Butterfinger bars. It’s hard to say which group was right. I’ll say one thing. A stretch in any one of
the Armed Forces is a sure cure for what my aunt Clara always called “picky” eaters. It’s not that GI food wasn’t good. It was, in fact, better than most guys regularly got at home. It just had a tendency to get all mixed up and run together, so that in the end being picky was even more stupid in the Army than it is in real life.

The Army is also a sure cure for what is called “light sleepers.” After the first ninety days among the dogfaces you can sleep standing up, sitting down, going to the john, firing a rifle, making love, or swimming underwater with a pack on your back. In all my four years I never once ran into an insomniac. Insomnia is a civilian luxury, like credit cards and neurotic mistresses.

It must have been about the tenth or fifteenth hour that I became conscious, dimly through the hullabaloo and the scorching heat, that somebody in my immediate vicinity was snoring fitfully. Every time I glanced around it stopped. Who the hell was it? Again the snoring commenced. After fifteen or twenty minutes of this irritating phlegmy sound, I realized that it was me. It has been said that the human mind is capable of only one act at any given instant, but I can’t see how this can be since on numerous occasions I have found myself soundly asleep and still doing other things.

As I ladled on, flipping Jell-O over my left shoulder occasionally, for luck, I thought of these things. An extended stretch of KP is good for your philosophical side. The mind wanders aimlessly to and fro like a blind earthworm burrowing in total darkness amid buried tree roots and dead snails. There is a certain basic soul-satisfaction in low down, mindless menial labor. The body completely takes over. A mess kit swims into view; your arm flips Jell-O at it without thought or understanding. The pores are open. Your entire physical being is now functioning without a controlling mind, like the heart and the liver, which go about their work without conscious control.

Down the long line of KPs ladles rose and fell, feet in heavy GI boots clanked by. Gravy, mashed potatoes, turnips, beets, scrambled
eggs, all became one. Once a voice snapped me out of my restful reverie.

“How’r y’all makin’ it?”

I glanced up from the brown sea of gravy, or Jell-O, or whatever I was scooping at the time.

“Uh … what? You talking to me?”

It was Lieutenant Cherry.

“Uh … yeah, I guess so. Sir.”

“Just thought I’d drop by. See how you guys were makin’ out.”

The steam clouded up the lieutenant’s glasses. Even his gleaming silver bars were misty. He moved down past Gasser, who waved at him with his ladle, and we toiled on.

During the next break, one of the other KPs, a short Mexican Pfc from an Engineering company joined our little group. His name was Gomez and he had the smell of Regular Army about him, crafty and laconic.

“Hey, Gomez,” Gasser said between mouthfuls of powdered scrambled eggs, “what do you guys do in your outfit?”

“We’re Engineers.”

Gomez was one of those guys whom you have to prod continually to get anything at all out of.

“Yeah, but what do you
do?”
Gasser kept on prodding.

“What the hell do you think we do? What do you think the Engineers do?”

Gasser thought about this solemnly for a moment. Finally Ernie chipped in with his two cents:

“I almost got assigned to the Engineers out of Basic. But I got the Signal Corps instead.”

Gomez, sensing a slur, shot back: “Well, y’can’t win ’em all. Some guys are lucky; other guys are just dumb.”

We rocked back and forth on our haunches in the steady rumbling silence for a while, until Gasser, swabbing out his mess kit with a chunk of bread, continued our listless investigation of the life and times of Pfc Gomez, Engineer Corps, USA.

“Gomez, I don’t like to pry but I am very curious about what your unit does. Now take me and my sweaty friends here. We are in Radar. By that I mean we are in a unit that gets no promotions, no stripes whatsoever. We just get a lot of shocks, and fool around with soldering irons and crap like that. And …”

Gasser knew what he was doing. Radar men were universally looked upon by the great mass of real soldiers about the same way that the Detroit Lions evaluated George Plimpton.

“Shee-it,” Gomez said, “don’t tell me about Radar. I got a cousin in it, a goddamn fairy. He has to squat to piss.”

Ernie cleared his throat and counterattacked: “Listen, Gomez, we had nine guys in the hospital last month alone, all with the clap.”

Gomez picked his teeth casually with a kitchen match. “Probably give it to each other,” he muttered.

God, I thought, would I like to turn Zynzmeister loose on this bird.

“Okay, you guys, let’s get movin’. Here they come.” The sergeant banged a spoon loudly on the stainless steel as once again the devouring swarm of human locusts engulfed us, eating everything in their path, leaving behind desolation and bread crusts.

By now all of us had broken through that mysterious invisible pane of glass that separates dog fatigue from what is called “the second wind.” A curious elation, a lightheaded sense of infinite boundless strength filled me. I whistled “Three Blind Mice” over and over as I maniacally ladled my beloved gravy. Me, the Gravy King.

For the first time in my life I really looked at gravy. In the Hemingway sense, gravy was true and real. My gravy was the most beautiful gravy ever seen on this planet, brown as the rich delta land of the Mississippi basin; life-bringer, source of primal energy. How lovely was my gravy. It made such sensual, swirling
patterns as it dripped down over the snowy mashed potatoes and engulfed the golden pound cake with its rich tide of life force. I wondered why no one had ever seen this glory before. Was I on the verge of an original discovery involving gravy as the universal healer, a healer which could bind mankind together once they had discovered that the one thing that they had in common was my lovely, lovely gravy? Maybe I should wander the earth, bearing the glad tidings.
Salvation through gravy. Gravy is love. God created gravy, hence gravy is the Word of God. More gravy, more gravy is what we all need!

Yes, it is such thoughts as these that surface when the mind sags with fatigue and reason flees.

“Hey, you on the gravy.”

It was the mess sergeant yelling from the other end of the car.

“Yes?” I heard myself replying. “I am the Gravy King.”

“Not any more you’re not, Mack. You and your buddies are going into the other car to take over Pots and Pans. Now get movin’, let’s keep it movin’.”

With sorrow in my heart I laid down my trusty gravy ladle and the three of us, trailing sweat, struggled into the next car. It was like leaving purgatory and entering hell. Murky, writhing figures, moaning piteously, stirred great vats of bubbling food. Others squatted in the muck, peeling great mounds of reeking onions. The heat was so enormous that I could actually hear it, a low pulsating hum. A buck sergeant wearing skintight fatigues cut off just below the hips herded the three of us through the uproar to the far end of the car. Three guys armed with hoses spewing scalding water and cakes of taffy-brown GI soap capable of dissolving fingernails at thirty paces and long-handled GI brushes struggled to clean what looked like four or five hundred GI pots. The buck hollered at the three:

“You guys are relieved. Get back to the other car, on the double. You’re gonna relieve these guys on the serving line.”

The three pot-scrubbers, all with the look in their eyes of damned souls out for a dip in the River Styx, dropped their
brushes and swabs and without a sound rushed out of hell, unexpectedly pardoned.

“Oh, Mother of God,” Gasser mumbled as two sweating GIs appeared carrying more dirty pots, which they hurled on top of the pile.

Thus began a period of my existence which has haunted me to this day. From time to time, when driving late at night, my car radio will inadvertently pick up Fundamentalist preachers who thunder warnings of mankind’s approaching doom and hold out promises of indescribable hells. I clutch the wheel in sudden fear, because I have been there.

The oatmeal pots are the worst. GI oatmeal is cooked in huge vats which become lined with thick burnt-concrete encrustations of immovable oatmeal matter. Oatmeal is even worse than powdered egg scabs, which are matched only by the vats used to concoct mutton stew.

Through the long hours Ernie, Gasser, and myself struggled against the tide of endless pots. The GI soap had shriveled my hands into tiny crab-claws, and my body was now beyond sweat. Even Gasser had fallen silent. Ernie, poor Ernie, had entered the last and crucial phase of his approaching ordeal.

Curious thing about the truly deadening menial tasks: great stretches of time pass almost instantly. When you approach the animal state you also begin to lose the one characteristic that sets us apart from the rest of the earth’s creatures, the blessed (or cursed) sense of Time. Anthropologists tell us that truly primitive man had no sense, to speak of, of the passing moments. The more civilized one becomes, the more conscious and fearful of the passage of time. Maybe that’s why the simple peasants live to enormous ages of a hundred and thirty years or more, while astronauts and nuclear physicists die in their forties. To the three of us, amid the scalding water and searing soap, there was no Time.

It is for this reason that I cannot honestly say how long our trial lasted. For all I know, it might have been a century or two. Maybe ten minutes. But I guess it to be more on the order of forty
years. It ended suddenly and totally without warning. The buck brought in three more victims, and we were sprung.

Like our predecessors, like hunted rats, we scurried out, back to the serving car, which now seemed incredibly cool and civilized. The car stood empty for the first time. Only the mess sergeant, alone, lounged casually against his stainless-steel rack, smoking a Camel. All that remained of the torrent of food was a simple aluminum colander piled high with apples. The sergeant blew a thin stream of Camel smoke through his nostrils as he smiled in benevolence upon us.

“You guys did good, real good. You kept ’em movin’. How ’bout an apple?”

I grabbed an apple with my crab-claw and bit into its heavenly crisp coolness, its glorious moistness, its …