The point Johnny seemed to want to make in this section of this speech, his favorite speech, was never quite clear, but the story carried a powerful emotional impact to those whose lives had been touched by the tragedy of war. “At night while my spent, exhausted buddies slept,” he would croon into the platform microphone, “I would prop my eyes open with matchsticks and write home—to you—to the wives and the sweethearts and the blessed mothers of our gallant dead—night after night as the casualties mounted—to try to do just a little more than my part to ease the heartbreak which Mr. Roosevelt’s war had caused.”
The official records of the Signal Corps of the U.S. Army show that Johnny’s outfit (SCB-52310) had lost all together, during the entire tour outside the continental United States, one chaplain and one enlisted man, the former from a nervous breakdown and the latter from delirium tremens (a vitamin deficiency). The outfit, whose complement was a half-company of men, had been posted in northern Greenland as defenses for the comprehensive meteorological installations that predicted the weather for the military brass lower down on the globe, operating in mobile force far up on the ice cap, mostly between Prudhoe Land and the Lincoln Sea.
The enemy’s weather forecasting installations were mostly based somewhere above king Frederick VIII Land, on the other side of the subcontinent, below Independence Sea. Greenland is the largest island in the world. Both sides, although continually aware of each other, remained strictly aloof and upon those occasions where they found that they were working in sight of each other they would both move out of sight without acknowledgment, as people will act following a painful social misunderstanding. There was no question of shooting. Their work was far too important. It was essential that both sides maintain an unbroken flow of vital weather data, which was an extremely special contribution when compared to the basically uncomplicated work of fighting troops.
It just did not seem likely that even Johnny would send the families of those two casualties a different letter every night, harping on a nervous breakdown and the D.T.’s, and besides the mail pickup happened only once a month when the mail plane was lucky enough to be able to swoop low enough and at the right ground angle to be able to bring up the gibbeted mail sack on a lowered hook. If they missed after three passes they let it go until the next month, but they did bring the mail in, which was far more important, and did maintain a reasonably high average on getting it out, considering the conditions.
No citizen of the United States, including General MacArthur and those who enlisted from the film community of Los Angeles, California, entered World War II with more fanfare from the local press and radio than John Yerkes Iselin. When the jolly judge arrived at the State Capitol on June 6,1942, and announced to the massive communications complex that Raymond’s mother had assembled over a two-day period from all papers throughout the state, from Chicago, and three from Washington, at an incalculable cost in whisky and food, that he had seen his duty to join up as “a private, an officer, or anything else in the United States Marine Corps,” the newspapers and radio foamed with the news and the UP put the story on the main wire as a suggested boxed news feature because of Raymond’s mother’s angle, which had Johnny saying: “They need a judge in the Marines to judge whether they are the finest fighting men in the world, or in the universe.” The Marines naturally had gotten Raymond’s mother’s business because, she told Johnny, they had the biggest and fastest mimeographing machines and earmarked one combat correspondent for every two fighting men.
She started to run her husband for governor as of that day, and the first five or six publicity releases emphasized strongly how this man, whose position as a public servant demanded that he not march off to war but remain home as part of the civilian task force to safeguard Our Liberties, had chosen instead, had volunteered even, to make the same sacrifices which were the privileged lot of his fellow Americans and had therefore enlisted as a buck-private marine. She had only two objectives. One was to make sure Johnny got overseas somewhere near, but not too near, the combat zones. The second was that he be assigned to a safe, healthy, pleasant job.
It was at that point that something got screwed up. It was extremely embarrassing, but fortunately she was able to patch it up so that it looked as if Johnny was even more of a patriotic masochist, but it brought her anger she was careful not to lose, and because of what happened to outrage her, it spelled out her brother’s eventual ruin.
This is what happened. Through her brother, whom she had never hesitated to use, Raymond’s mother had decided to negotiate for a Marine Corps commission for Johnny. She would have preferred it if Johnny had enlisted as a private so that she could arrange for a field commission for him, following some well-publicized action, but Johnny got stubborn at the last minute and said he had agreed to go through all this rigmarole to please her but he wasn’t going to sit out any war as a goddam private when whisky was known to cost only ten cents a shot at all officers’ clubs.
Her brother was sitting on one of the most influential wartime government commissions that spring of 1942, and the son-of-a-bitch looked her right in the eye in his own office in the Pentagon in Washington and told her that Johnny could take his chances just like anybody else and that he didn’t believe in wire-pulling in wartime! That was that. Furthermore, she found out immediately that he wasn’t kidding. She had had to move fast and think up some other angle very quickly but she hung around her brother’s office long enough to explain to him that her turn would come someday and that when it came she was going to break him in two.
She rode back to the Carlton, shocked. She blamed herself. She had underestimated that mealy-mouthed bastard. She should have seen that he had been waiting for years to turn her out like a peasant. She concentrated upon preserving her anger.
Johnny was pretty drunk when she got back to the hotel, but not too bad. She was sweet and amiable, as usual. “What am I, hon?” he asked thickly, “a cappen?” She threw her hat away from her and walked to the small Directoire desk. “A cappency is good enough for me,” he said. She pulled a telephone book out of the desk drawer and began to flip through the pages. “Am I a cappen or ain’t I a cappen?” he asked.
“You ain’t a cappen.” She picked up the phone and gave the operator the number of the Senate Office Building.
“What am I, a major?”
“You’re gonna be a lousy draftee if something doesn’t give,” she said. “He turned us down.”
“He never liked me, honey.”
“What the hell has that got to do with anything. He’s my brother. He won’t lift a finger to help with the Marines and if we don’t get an understanding set in about forty-eight hours you’re going to be a draftee just like any other jerk.”
“Don’t worry, hon. You’ll straighten it out.”
“Shaddup! You hear? Shadd up!” She was pale with sickening bad temper. She spoke into the phone and asked for Senator Banstoffsen’s office, and when she got the office she asked to speak to the senator. “Tell him it’s Ellie Iselin. He’ll know.”
Johnny poured another drink, threw some ice into the glass, put some ginger ale on top of it, then shambled off toward the john, undoing his suspenders as he walked.
Raymond’s mother’s voice had suddenly gotten hot and sweet, although her eyes were bleak. “Ole, honey?” She paused to let those words make her point. “I mean—is this Senator Banstoffsen? Oh, Senator. Please forgive me. It was a slip. I mean, the only way I can explain is to say—is—I guess that’s the way I think of you all the time, I guess.” She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling in disgust and sighed silently. Her voice was all breath and lust. “I’d sure like to see you. Yes. Yes.” She rapped impatiently with the end of a pencil on the top of the desk. “Now. Yes. Now. Do you have a lock on that office door, lover? Yes. Ole. Yes. I’ll be right there.”