The Second Half of the Double Feature, page 10
“I’ll see that my men are there, Saryent Brittin.”
“I know that you will. I brought it up because I had a little trouble on this score with the previous station manager. He transferred back to the Air Force on the last chance regulation, and they deserve him. Except for the Stars and Stripes, which carries very little world news, the Information Hour is just about the only contact the company has with the outside world. And this is my responsibility.”
There was more shop talk, and Brittin managed to get across the idea that he was a conscientious NCO and that he was as good in his field as I was in mine. Nor was he self-conscious about it; he was merely efficient, and he took his job seriously. I appreciated these soldierly qualities, and I was reassured that we could work out a reasonably symbiotic relationship between us without the difference in grade making any valid difference. And it worked out that way.
Although Brittin didn’t have nearly as much service as I had, we had many other things in common. We had both fought in Europe, we had both been wounded twice and, when the war had ended, we had both been able to wangle three-month college courses at the post-war GI universities set up in Europe after V-E Day. He had attended the university in Florence, because of his interest in Byzantine mosaics, and I had gone to the Biarritz American University to study painting and playwriting.
I think it goes without saying that not many professional soldiers are keenly interested in the fine arts. Brittin was the first soldier I had been able to talk to about painting since I had arrived in Japan. It was our mutual interest in art, as much as anything else, that cemented our friendship. After I got to know Brittin better, I trusted him enough with my secret to give him a copy of my book of poetry, Proletarian Laughter, that had been issued a few months before by the Alicat Bookshop Press. He did not like the poetry (nobody did, as far as I know), but he told me that I was fortunate to have a John Edward Heliker cover illustration. He was familiar with Heliker’s painting, and I had never heard of the artist. I had been of the opinion that the publisher, Oscar Baron, had given the cover job to an unknown artist. Although Heliker is certainly a well-known painter today, he was not so well-known in 1948—outside of New York at any rate. I mention this to show that Brittin’s interest and knowledge of art were not confined to the Byzantine period.
In the weeks that followed, I found out how dedicated Brittin truly was to his Information & Education duties— but I cannot say, in all honesty, that his enthusiasm was contagious. I helped him when I could, of course. When he wrote a skit on the Bill of Rights for the Information Hour, I took an actor’s part in it, and I assigned him two of my radio announcers—an ex-trumpet player and an ex-percussion man—as alternating paragraph readers of the Bill of Rights. The captive audience that attended this Information Hour was bored stiff.
Brittin’s preparation for his weekly lectures was, in my opinion, ridiculous. The man-hours of labor that he put into preparation were certainly not justified by the results. The Army sent a good deal of informational material to the field, but none of it was inspirational. There were booklets called Army Talks, for example, which were written on such an infantile and boring level that they put the troops who audited them asleep. The booklets were not supposed to be read aloud; they were issued as guides. But most I&E NCOs at the company level, instead of extracting a paragraph here and there as a factual filler, read the book aloud in its entirety during the compulsory Information Hour instead. It was easier that way, much easier than to prepare an hour’s lecture. But the upshot of the monotone readings was that the auditing troops developed a deadly hatred of the entire I&E program.
With the help of Time (after he had extracted the factual data from the slanted propaganda, which was no mean task in itself) and surface editions of the Sunday New York Times— which was always a month or so old by the time it reached Kokura, Japan—as well as monitored notes culled from the Tokyo APRS radio station’s short-wave broadcasts, Army Talks and other special I&E material that came in from time to time, Brittin wrote out an organized full hour’s lecture every week. If he had been content to read this lecture aloud and let it go at that, he would have had the best weekly Information Hour in the entire Army. But he carried it a step farther: he memorized the script every week! Every week he memorized these slowly gathered, but swiftly typed, bits and pieces of news, facts and opinions. In the evenings, after chow, he sat on the edge of his bunk reading his lecture through again and again until he had his talk down verbatim.
“Why?” I asked him. “Nobody expects you to knock yourself out on this Information Hour crap.”
“There’s no other way, Will,” he told me. “I’ve tried reading the lecture, but when I read it, I couldn’t look the men straight in the eyes as I talked. This way nobody goes to sleep on me— and the word has got around that I memorize the lecture. The mere fact that I have taken the trouble to learn it by heart makes the troops listen with more attention. They figure it’s important, you see.”
I couldn’t quarrel with his logic, theoretically at any rate, except to say that it didn’t work out that way. The attention span of the average infantryman is as short as his memory. Brittin was a dynamic speaker, with a rurally free delivery, and he practiced his gestures in the latrine mirror when he ran through his speech for sound on Friday nights. All the same, he put some of the troops to sleep. But thanks to his memorization, they did not enjoy their slumbers very long. He was able to spot a sleeper almost instantaneously, including those experienced professional privates who had learned how to sleep through lectures and training films with their eyes open. Brittin would roar the sleeper to his feet, and the poor devil was forced to assume the position of a soldier at attention for the remainder of the hour. The opinion that I passed on to Brittin was that it was the fear of standing at attention more than the memorization of his lecture that caused the troops to be so attentive. But he did not agree and continued to learn his lectures by heart.
I still don’t know the answer to arousing the interest of troops in world and national affairs and issues of the day. The American soldier is, beyond a doubt, the most politically naive individual in the world— including, alas, general officers like MacArthur, Eisenhower and Dean (who led the 24th Infantry Division in its disastrous early days of the Korean War).
I have already gone into greater detail about the pre-Korean War overseas I&E setup than I intended, but when it is compared to the informational system of the Russian army—where a civilian politico well-grounded in ideology is assigned fulltime to every platoon-sized unit—our efforts to make our troops aware of the big outside world seem feeble indeed. Brittin, I fear, was well over the heads of the troops who listened to him. Few college students can deliver a lucid explanation of capitalism or discuss intelligently what is meant by the Hegelian dialectic; is it any wonder that an intellectual like Brittin—who ran into a stony-eyed wall of indifferent ignorance every week—became so bitter that we, his close friends, nicknamed him “Bitter” Brittin?
To be fair there were a few of us who appreciated his lectures, and I was one of them, although I did not admire his wooden, unrelated, Bea Lily-like gestures. His explanation of Lenin’s rise to power was a beautifully organized job of exposition, but from the comments I overheard afterwards, few troops were able to follow him because of the difficult Russian names (even though he wrote them on the blackboard as he went along). By the time a man is old enough to be a soldier, it is much too late to give him the historical background he needs to understand the ever-changing present.
Accidentally, although my conscience remains clear on this matter, I was instrumental in causing Brittin to be considered as a genius by the officers and men stationed in Kokura. I think that it may have hindered his work to some extent after the word got around he was the brainiest man in the entire United States Army, but perhaps it didn’t make any difference at all. But after the word got out, officers, as well as enlisted men, acted as though they were afraid to talk to him.
One afternoon Brittin visited me at the radio station wanting to know what I could do by way of spot announcements to get more soldiers to sign up for USAFI courses. The U.S. Armed Forces Institute is the best educational buy in the world. For only two dollars (at that time), a serviceman could take a course in almost anything. And if the Institute didn’t have the course the soldier wanted, they would find the college or trade school that did and pass along the information.
But there were a lot of girls in Japan and, for most of the year, the weather was pleasant on the island of Kyushu. It is one thing to take a correspondence course when a man is stationed in Newfoundland, but there are more interesting things to do with spare time when a man is stationed in Japan.
I broke out the office bottle, and we discussed the USAFI problem over a few straight ryes. The idea—a brilliant idea—came to me after only three drinks. Thanks to a publicity conscious club steward, the NCO Club gave WLKH four hundred dollars a month to use for a weekly quiz program, a program I MC’d via a remote hookup from the main ballroom at the Club. We had named the program The Money Bucket, and every week I filled an actual wooden, straw-lined bucket with a hundred dollars in small bills. By keeping the questions simple, I managed to give away the hundred dollars to four or five contestants during the allotted half hour the program was on the air, distributing it as equally as I could. The program was popular with the audience of NCO’s and their wives at the Club, although it must have sounded more than a little dull to those who listened to it in the barracks.
“We’ll put you on The Money Bucket,” I said, “during the first break at the end of fifteen minutes. As a member of I&E, you can’t appear as a contestant; but when the break comes, I pretend to spot you in the audience and invite you to come up on the stage where I can introduce you. Then I’ll ask you some tough questions, some impossible questions. But you’ll have the answers memorized in advance, you see, and you can rattle off the answers and amaze everybody by your erudition.”
“What’s the point? How will this help USAFI?”
“After we get through the questions, I can express my unbounded admiration for your vast store of knowledge and ask you how you learned all these things. All you have to do then is to say that yon learned them by taking USAFI courses in your spare time. If you want to, you can then give the audience the info on how to sign up for them at the Education office.”
Brittin was delighted. We went to the library and dug out some truly offbeat technical questions and answers from the encyclopedia. Brittin was able to memorize all the answers easily, of course. I don’t remember all four questions we decided upon, but one of them concerned the explanation of the steps it took blood to form a clot after a man was wounded. There were at least fifteen or twenty biological terms and chemical changes that took place in clotting, as I recall, and when Brittin glibly rattled these off on the night of the program, there was a rapt, open-mouthed silence from the audience of NCO’s and wives.
Brittin and I kept the secret, but the audience reaction after he finished delivering his brief spiel on USAFI courses was certainly unexpected. For one thing there was no applause, and when he descended the steps from the stage and threaded his way through the tables toward the bar in the back of the ballroom, there was a stunned, awed silence as every bulging eye marked his passage.
Of course this unsophisticated reaction was due largely to Brittin’s personality. He was a deadly serious man; he had never been known to laugh or smile, and no one who knew him would ever expect a man like him to pull a gag of this sort. But the fact he was willing to go along with the idea proves he had a sense of humor. To put the matter simply, the audience had believed him and in him. Apparently there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that, not only did he know the answers to the impossible questions I had sprung on him, but that he would have been able to answer any other difficult question put to him. (And remember, this was in 1948, several years before the quiz scandals came to light on network television.)
Knowledge is a strange and peculiar power. It is a power even if one does not have it yet people think that one has it. And the NCO’s thought that Brittin had it. They were all afraid to get into an argument with him. But when an argument arose in the bar—usually a stupid one like who was the best fighter, Joe Louis or Jack Dempsey—Brittin was appealed to for the decision, and his decision was accepted without question. It is to his credit that most of the time he refused to make a judgment. In most cases he merely shook his head and signaled the bartender to bring him another whiskey sour, his favorite drink.
Brittin was a sad, unhappy man, but why he was so unhappy, I do not know. I knew very little about his pre-service personal life except that he was born in New Jersey and had moved with his family to Philadelphia. One day while I was in his office, the company commander telephoned and ordered him to report to Hq & Hq Orderly Room. I walked over with him, and the captain told Brittin he had a letter from the Pentagon with umpteen indorsements on it wanting to know why he (Brittin) had not written to his mother. “. . . and I have to answer this today telling them that you have written home.”
“No, sir,” Brittin said, “I’m not writing anybody. Just indorse it back stating that the soldier does not desire to write his mother.”
“I can’t say that,” the captain said unhappily.
“Give me the correspondence.” Brittin held out his hand. “I’ll type the indorsement for you.”
“That isn’t what I mean. I’d still have to sign it.”
“Yes, sir. Say anything you like, then, but I’m not writing anybody.”
“But you have been told. Officially.”
“Yes, sir.” Brittin saluted, and so did I.
After we got outside, I asked him what the trouble was between him and his family. It was none of my business, but I was curious about family relationships having no family of my own.
“No trouble,” he replied. “It’s just that I’ve given up that way of living for this way, and I don’t want to be reminded of it.”
He had been raised by his mother and two sisters. Before he was drafted for World War II, he had been a banker in Philadelphia, and he had returned to the bank as soon as he was demobilized. Walking to the bank one day, he told me, he had passed under the big blue recruiting flag and realized he had liked the Army better than he had ever liked working in the bank. He took off his Homburg, threw his hat and briefcase under a parked car, climbed the stairs and re-enlisted in the Regular Army. This was on January 7, 1948, and after a short course in Information and Education work, he had been posted to Japan.
It had taken his family several months to find out what happened to him because he had never written or told them that he had re-enlisted. Whether Brittin ever wrote home or not I do not know. I like to think that he did—it makes me feel better to think so—but I doubt it. Brittin needed someone to love him, and I believe that his family loved him but took him for granted. I saw it happen many times: “Welcome home, the war’s over, hurry down in the morning and get your old job back and start supporting us again.” Some ex-soldiers can make this readjustment to civilian life without any trouble, but others join the American Legion where they can pretend that they are soldiers again— and they never miss a meeting.
No, Brittin was not, by any stretch of the understanding, a sentimentalist. He was, however, like most Regulars, a man without any “religious preference,” to use the military jargon. No professional fighting man who has devoted a large portion of his life to becoming a competent soldier can believe that a personal or impersonal god is taking sides in anything as nasty as war. To do so would destroy his combat effectiveness and relieve him from the strong sense of responsibility he must have for the soldiers under his command and protection. I hesitated to mention here that Brittin was an atheist because so many Americans have the peculiar notion that atheism and immorality are synonymous. Brittin was the most highly moral individual I have ever known. And anybody who ever suggests to me that he was immoral because he was an atheist has discovered an indirect but foolproof way of finding himself with an upper lip full of teeth.
As New Year’s Eve 1948-49 approached, Brittin got a little excited about the big costume ball the NCO Club was going to have. A new Club had just been constructed, and the members were going to celebrate New Year’s and the new Club at the same time. Brittin liked the idea of wearing a costume, although he couldn’t think of what kind of costume he wanted to wear for several days before the event; that is to say, he couldn’t decide what he wanted to be. He had a dozen new ideas a day, discarding them one by one.
We had to improvise our costumes, of course, and I decided to go as Superman. Long olive-drab underwear, GI combat boots, a makeshift letter “S” sewed to the front of my drab sweatshirt and a dirty OD towel as a cape, and I was ready.
I had a hunch, however, that the costume ball was going to be a flop. We had hired an excellent ten-piece band, but there were not going to be enough women. Because of the puritanical attitude of the American dependent wives, single NCO’s were not allowed to bring their Japanese girlfriends. It was to be a night of free whiskey as well, and I had a premonition that those NCO’s who did have their wives in Japan with them would not risk bringing them to what might turn out to be a drunken brawl.
To some extent I was right, although there were about twenty-five dependent women present in the beginning. When the dance began to get a little rough around 2200, most of those wives—who were well into the spirits themselves—were taken home by their husbands whether they wanted to leave or not. But that was all right. There were at least two hundred NCO’s present, and we danced with each other. The music was excellent, and a dance is a dance. The trick is to find a partner who will let you lead, and these were at a premium.
