Soldier, get over here. What do you do when you see an officer?
Salute him, sir.
And?
I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t see you.
Didn’t see me? Didn’t see me? You’d go to Korea and claim you didn’t see the gooks coming over the hill? Right, soldier?
I don’t know what to say to this lieutenant who’s my age and trying to grow a mustache with sad ginger hair. I want to tell him they’re sending me to company clerk school and isn’t that enough punishment for not saluting a thousand second lieutenants? I want to tell him about my six weeks with Ivan and my troubles back in Fort Dix when I had to bury my pass but there are dark clouds and I know I should be quiet, tell ’em nothing but your name, rank, serial number. I know I should be quiet but I’d like to tell this second lieutenant fuck off, kiss my ass with your miserable ginger mustache.
He tells me report to him in fatigues at twenty-one hundred hours sharp and he makes me pull weeds on the parade ground while other dog handlers pass by on their way to a beer in Lenggries.
When I’m finished I go to Ivan’s cage and remove his muzzle. I sit on the ground and talk to him and if he chews me to pieces I won’t have to go to company clerk school. But he growls a bit and licks my face and I’m glad there’s no one here to see how I feel.
Company clerk school is in the Lenggries caserne. We sit at desks while instructors come and go. We’re told the company clerk is the single most important soldier in an outfit. Officers get killed or move on, noncoms too, but an outfit without a clerk is doomed. The company clerk is the one in combat who knows when the outfit is under strength, who’s dead, who’s wounded, who’s missing, the one who takes over when the supply clerk gets his fuckin’ head blown off. The company clerk, men, is the one who delivers your mail when the mail clerk gets a bullet up his ass, the one who keeps you in touch with the folks back home.
After we’ve learned how important we are we learn to type. We have to type up a model of a daily attendance report with five carbon copies and if one mistake is made, one little stroke too much, an error in addition, a strikeover, the whole thing is to be retyped.
No erasures, goddammit. This is the United States Army and we don’t allow erasures. Allow erasures on a report and you invite sloppiness all along the front. We’re holding the line against the goddam Reds here, men. Can’t have sloppiness. Perfection, men, perfection. Now type, goddammit.
The clatter and rattle of thirty typewriters make the room sound like a combat zone with howls from soldier/typists hitting wrong keys and having to tear reports from machines and start all over. We punch our heads and shake our fists at heaven and tell the instructors we were almost finished, couldn’t we please, please erase this one little goddam mark.
No erasures, soldier, and watch your language. I have my mother’s picture in my pocket.
At the end of the course they give me a certificate with a rating of Excellent. The captain handing out the certificates says he’s proud of us and they’re proud of us all the way up to the Supreme Commander in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower himself. The captain is proud to say that only nine men washed out in the course and the twenty-one of us who passed are a credit to the folks back home. He hands us our certificates and chocolate chip cookies baked by his wife and two small daughters and we have permission to eat our cookies right here and now this being a special occasion. Behind me men are cursing and mumbling these cookies taste like cat shit and the captain smiles and gets ready to make another speech till a major whispers to him and what I hear later is that the major told him, Shaddap, you been drinking, and that’s true because the captain has the kind of face that never turned away from a whiskey bottle.
If Shemanski hadn’t been granted a furlough I’d still be up in the kennels with Ivan or down in a bierstube in Lenggries with the other dog handlers. Now I have to spend a week watching him by his desk in the orderly room typing reports and letters and telling me I should be thanking him for getting me away from dogs and into a good job that might be useful in civilian life. He says I should be happy I learned to type, I might write another Gone With the Wind some day, ha ha ha.
The night before his furlough there’s a party in a Lenggries beer hall. It’s Friday night and I have a weekend pass. Shemanski has to return to the caserne because his furlough doesn’t start till tomorrow and when he leaves his girlfriend, Ruth, asks me where I’m staying on my weekend pass. She tells me come to her place for a beer, Shemanski won’t be there, but the minute we’re in the door we’re in the bed going wild with ourselves. Oh, Mac, she says, oh, Mac, you’re so young. She’s old herself, thirty-one, but you’d never know it the way she carries on depriving me of any sleep and if this is the way she is with Shemanski all the time it’s no wonder he needs a long furlough in the U.S.A. Then it’s dawn and there’s a knock on the door downstairs and when she peeks out the window she lets out a little squeal, Oh, mein Gott, it’s Shemanski, go, go, go. I jump up and dress as fast as I can but there’s a problem when I put on my boots and then try to pull my pants over them and the legs are stuck and entangled and Ruth is hissing and squealing, Out ze window, oh, pliss, oh, pliss. I can’t leave by the front door with Shemanski standing there banging away, he’d surely kill me, so it’s out the window into three feet of snow which saves my life and I know Ruth is up there shutting the window and pulling the curtain so that Shemanski won’t see me trying to get my boots off so that I can slip on my pants, then boots again, so cold my dong is the size of a button, with snow everywhere, halfway up my belly, in my pants, filling my boots.
Now I have to sneak away from Ruth’s house and into Lenggries looking for hot coffee in a café where I can dry out but nothing is open yet and I wander back up to the caserne wondering, Did God put Shemanski on this earth to destroy me entirely?
Now that I’m company clerk I sit at Shemanski’s desk and the worst part of the day is typing up the attendance report every morning. Master Sergeant Burdick sits at the other desk drinking coffee and telling me how important this report is, that they’re waiting for it over at HQ so that they can add it to the other company reports that go to Stuttgart to Frankfurt to Eisenhower to Washington so that President Truman himself will know the strength of the United States Army in Europe in case of sudden attack by those goddam Russians who wouldn’t hesitate if we were short a man, one man, McCourt. They’re waiting, McCourt, so get that report done.
The thought of the world waiting for my report makes me so nervous I hit wrong keys and have to start all over. Every time I say, Shit, and pull the report from the typewriter. Sergeant Burdick’s eyebrows shoot to his hairline. He drinks his coffee, looks at his watch, loses control of his eyebrows, and I feel so desperate I’m afraid I’ll break down and weep. Burdick takes phone calls from HQ to say the colonel is waiting, the general, the chief of staff, the President. A messenger is sent to pick up the report. He waits by my desk and that makes it even worse and I wish I could be back in the Biltmore Hotel scouring toilets. When the report is finished without error he takes it away and Sergeant Burdick wipes his forehead with a green handkerchief. He tells me forget the other work, that I’m to stay at this desk all day and practice practice practice till I get these goddam reports down right. They’re gonna be talking up at HQ and wondering what kind of asshole he is for taking on a clerk that can’t even type a report. All the other clerks knock off that report in ten minutes and he doesn’t want Company C to be the laughingstock of the caserne.
So, McCourt, you go nowheres till you type perfect reports. Start typing.