Salinger (11 page)

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By late 1943, the war in Europe had been raging for more than four years. The Allied community, fearing that the war would drag on much longer,
moved to coordinate their efforts more closely.

On November 28, 1943, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin met in Teheran, Iran, in the first of their “Big Three” conferences, to arrive
at decisions about the strategies Allied troops should undertake to accomplish the goal of liberating France. On January 12, 1944, those discussions were continued when the Big Three arrived at a
general plan for invading France through the English Channel. The troop buildup began right away—the reason soldiers like Salinger had been shipped to England in the first place. By the late
spring of 1944, some five thousand Allied ships waited in ports throughout England to transport approximately two million men across the Channel from England to France. To protect the invading
troops, the Allied forces gathered twelve thousand airplanes in England to be used in bombing missions over northern France. In late May, all forces—the troops, the ships, the
airplanes—were in place, ready for an Allied assault. Because of various factors, among them the weather, it was determined that the invasion, whose code name was “D-Day,” would
take place on June 6.

On the morning of D-Day, Salinger awoke knowing that he, like so many of the other ground troops, was about to go into battle. The assault began early, and word spread quickly among the troops
back on the British shore that—even though the Germans had been taken off guard by the massive Allied assault—they were putting up a surprisingly strong resistance. Even so, on
amphibian troop movers, the Allied forces sent line after line of troops from England to France, securing a sixty-mile-long section of the French shore. As the first hours passed, Salinger, along
with the other men in the Twelfth
Infantry Regiment, waited for the Fourth Division’s turn to move forward as part of the invasion. Soon it became known that both sides had
already sustained considerable casualties.

Four hours or so into the invasion, Salinger’s regiment boarded an amphibian troop mover that would take them across the English Channel. The hour it took for the troop mover to cross the
Channel from England to Utah Beach in Normandy must have been the longest hour of Salinger’s life. In the sky overhead, anti-artillery shells were exploding. As the troop mover approached the
French shore, soldiers could hear the deadly real-life soundtrack—bomb blasts mixed with the constant litany of gunfire. Regardless of all their training, there was no way these invading
soldiers could have prepared themselves for the earthquake-like rumblings, the constant barrage of shelling. It was even worse when the door to the troop mover opened and the men on board, Salinger
among them, rushed out into the cold water, heading for the beach. On shore, they found cover. Digging in, they started to fire back at the enemy.

By the end of the first night, Salinger’s regiment had progressed two miles into France. For Salinger, it was the beginning of a tour of Europe that would last for the next four
months.

Over the next several days, Salinger’s regiment advanced from Utah Beach to Cherbourg. As a counterintelligence agent, Salinger was a part of an operation that destroyed
avenues of communication. Agents did this by shutting down telephone lines and taking over
post offices as soon as Allied troops arrived in a new town or village. It was also
the duty of these agents to uncover Gestapo agents by interrogating French locals and German prisoners of war. On June 12, not a week after D-Day, Salinger revealed his general feeling about what
he was doing when he wrote Burnett a brief postcard in which he mentioned conducting interrogation work. Most citizens, he said, were anxious about the shelling but thrilled the Allied troops had
come to defeat the Germans. He had not had time to work on fiction, he added. Still, always the writer, Salinger wanted to know if Olding had sent Burnett some new stories she was supposed to show
him.

Two weeks later, Salinger was feeling the effects of the war. His June 28 letter to Burnett was written in a new—and unmistakably somber—tone. For the better part of the month,
Salinger had been in a war zone where, as he witnessed mass death and destruction, he knew he, too, could be killed at any moment. As a result, the light-hearted, jovial tone he had affected in
many of his past letters was gone, replaced by a solemnity usually foreign to Salinger. In fact, in his letter, Salinger told Burnett he simply could not describe the events of the last three or
four weeks. What he had witnessed was too horrendous to put into words. Yet even as he was making this gut-wrenching and dramatic revelation, Salinger still felt compelled to discuss, of all
things, business. Apparently, Burnett had last written Salinger to suggest Salinger publish his novel
before
his story collection. In response, Salinger agreed, adding that he could be
finished with the novel in six months once he returned to the States. That’s how Salinger left it with Burnett before he thanked him for accepting
“Elaine,”
the story the
New Yorker
had rejected. “Elaine,” which centers on a mildly retarded girl with few prospects for happiness, was a longish, informal-feeling piece written before
Salinger’s experiences in late 1944. But it was a story about the end of beauty, Salinger said, just as war is about the end of beauty. This was why it was so meaningful to Salinger that
Burnett accepted the story at this time.

On July 15, as Salinger remained in the middle of the fighting in France, the
Saturday Evening Post
published “The Last Day of the Last Furlough,” the third of the three
stories the magazine had bought from Salinger at the beginning of the year. The story had a feel of ambition to it, as if its author knew that by writing it he was attempting a serious piece of
literature. Beyond this, the story marked the first time Salinger used John F. (“Babe”) Gladwaller, a character with personal traits strikingly similar to Salinger’s. Like
Salinger, Babe had an adoring mother who doted on her son unabashedly. Like Salinger, Babe loved to read, especially the Russian novelists and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Babe even had the same dog-tag
number as Salinger, one undeniable clue that the story—or at least elements of it—was autobiographical.

In the story, Babe, who is visiting his parents’ home in Valdosta, New York, plays host to an Army buddy, Vincent Caulfield, who, on a recent trip home to Manhattan, discovers his brother,
Holden, is missing in action. “He wasn’t even twenty, Babe,” Vincent says to his friend later that night. “Not till next month. I want to kill so badly I can’t sit
still. Isn’t that funny. I’m notoriously yellow. All my life I’ve even avoided fist fights. Now I want to shoot it out with people.”

Much later, when Babe can’t sleep, he goes into his younger sister Mattie’s bedroom, wakes her up, and, in his own way, tells her good-bye. “Babe,
don’t you get hurt!” Mattie says anxiously. “Don’t get hurt.”

Finally, the story ends after Babe returns to his bedroom, only to be joined there by his mother who comes in to say good night. As they talk, it becomes clear from their short conversation that
both she and her son know she may never see him again after this night, the night of the last day of the last furlough.

During July and on into August, Salinger continued his job with the Fourth Division. The high point of what he had seen so far occurred on August 25, when Salinger was a part
of the Allied troops who marched into Paris and liberated the city from the Germans. When they saw the Americans, Salinger wrote to Burnett, the Parisians jammed the streets of the city. They
cried. They laughed. They held their babies up for the Americans to kiss. There was the shooting of guns in the air throughout the city in celebration. There was the general sense of relief and
jubilation. There was the unbridled elation Parisians felt over their lives being given back to them. For Salinger, it was a profoundly memorable scene—a joyous moment in a war experience
that, since D-Day, had had very little joy in it.

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A newspaper correspondent during the war, Ernest Hemingway was in Paris on Liberation Day. As soon as he set up headquarters
at the Ritz Hotel, many soldiers heard he was staying there. At that time, Salinger was intrigued by the prospect of meeting a writer as renowned as Hemingway. So, armed with a copy of
the
Saturday Evening Post
that contained “Last Day of the Last Furlough,” Salinger set out for the Ritz to meet Hemingway.

Once he got to the hotel, Salinger saw to it that he had an audience with Hemingway. In an aggressive move, Salinger, who would later shun this type of self-assertion, gave Hemingway the
Post
so he could read “Last Day of the Last Furlough.” Telling Salinger he was not only familiar with his fiction but had even seen a picture of him in
Esquire,
Hemingway read “Last Day of the Last Furlough” at once. Not surprisingly, since it was a well-written story about two families caught up in the horrors of war, just the kind of subject
matter about which Hemingway himself had written, Hemingway loved it. “Jesus, he has a helluva talent,” Hemingway later said about Salinger. For his part, after meeting Hemingway,
Salinger wrote in a letter to a friend that the “
Farewell to Arms
man” was “modest” and “not big-shotty,” which, Salinger said, made him appealing.

On a subsequent occasion, Hemingway dropped in on Salinger’s infantry unit and, according to published reports, got into a discussion with someone—perhaps Salinger—about which
gun was more preferable, a U.S. .45 or a German Luger. Hemingway liked the latter, he said. To prove the Luger was better, Hemingway pulled his out and, taking aim at a chicken that happened to be
nearby, shot the chicken’s head off. Considering Hemingway’s history, with all of the bullfighting and boxing and big-game hunting, this demonstration of
unbridled male machismo certainly would have been in character for him. At the same time, considering Salinger’s background, with the Park Avenue address and the prep-school
education and his father’s social aspirations, shooting the head off a chicken would not have been an action Salinger could have understood, much less condoned. Salinger was horrified.

At this point in the war, however, Salinger had other atrocities to cope with. During the next four months—from early September until the end of December—the Fourth Division’s
Twelfth Infantry—Salinger’s unit—was directly involved in a significant part of some of the most savagely contested fighting in World War II. Salinger was still trying to cling to
a patriotic, almost romantic view of war and the military, but after these four months his view of both would change forever.

Leaving Paris, the Fourth Division was deployed, along with several other divisions, to the Hurtgen Forest, a treacherous, heavily wooded piece of terrain a good distance from
the city. In the Hurtgen Forest, the American forces encountered a surprisingly strong resistance from a much larger number of German troops than the Americans had expected. In the forest the
fighting was bitter, intense. What should have been a relatively quick campaign turned into a terrible—and deadly—conflict that stretched into November. One companion unit to the
Fourth, the Twenty-eighth Division, a National Guard unit from Pennsylvania whose shoulder insignia was a red keystone, sustained so many casualties its insignia became known as “the bucket
of blood.”
The Fourth Division amassed similar casualties, perhaps even more. The battle in the Hurtgen Forest would go down in history with the nickname “bloody
Hurtgen.”