UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

Two more nights, and “a couple of Jerry planes came over to case our anti-aircraft fire. We all jumped in the ditch, but nothing came of it.” First hurdle: Harvard knew how to hit a ditch. The rest was not so easy. In training we had all been civilians turning soldier. Over here I was an untested recruit among veterans, and a raw one at that.

Along with the red-and-gold Thunderbird patch for my left shoulder came a lifesaving reclassification. No longer a rifleman (745) at the bottom of the Army’s pile, I was upgraded to scout (761) with the rest of the Platoon who weren’t drivers, evoking the image of a monosyllabic frontiersman combing through the still-warm campfire ashes in the forest primeval. Or more exactly, Scout: One sent out to obtain and bring back information, as about the position and movements of an enemy.

How to go about such a daunting mission, I had no idea. There being neither field manual nor any hands-on instruction in the vineyards of Piedimonte, I inferred what I could from the anecdotes of my new platoonmates. This was going to be on-the-job training. I was struck by their independence from the rest of an informally held together Regimental Headquarters Company that was responsible directly to Colonel Church and his staff. Here was a freedom to come and go that was of necessity restricted in the rifle companies and undreamed of deep in the bully-brass chickenshit we’d left behind in the States.

A clique of smart individualists noisily loosened by Zapiecki and laconically led by Pullman, these Ironheads struck me as a laid-back, anti-military fraternity of scruffy, often outrageously funny, or strangely quiet and introspective free-wheelers, which I came to learn was the whole idea behind Intelligence and Reconnaissance, whatever that was meant to be. In short, good scouts. And after the departure of Lieutenant “Let’s Get Foolish” Farley for the hospital, uniquely and thankfully brassless, though I suppose most all of us were qualified.

For all, however, the Italian campaign just begun was already a strange and otherworldly experience shot through with irony, compassion, frustration, embarrassment, tragedy, mystery and fear. Fresh on the scene and perplexed, I was already overloaded with a kaleidoscope of images since we jeered the surrendered Italian submarine in Bizerte harbor and hiked blinkingly through Naples in the wake of the rampaging Hermann Goering Division. Now I was in the countryside amidst the rubble of our gang’s turn at trashing, journaling my first taste of the side of the ancient civilization that would be most ravaged by the war.

Every Italian field has a jackass, and there is nothing quite so plaintive as the braying hee-haw of the sturdy little eunuch. As different from the ancient Roman is the modern “Dago” as the puling jackass from the snorting charger that drew a racing chariot into battle. How a nation can degenerate! From a roaring, battling celestially-minded empire that was the very revolving point of the universe Italy has turned into a collection—I hate to call it nation—of tourist accommodators, balcony worshippers who have lost all self-respect and seem to be held together by a common spirit of opportunism. The price of an apple went from one tenth of a lira to two liras in two days. Walk down the street, and four out of five people you pass beg “cigaretta? [sic]” Yet mention Mussolini and they give you the slit-throat sign.