4. A Chaplain’s Day

During the course of an ordinary day a chaplain is called upon to render assistance in the solution of many varied and unusual problems. The book says that the chaplain is responsible for the religious and moral welfare of all personnel. When you get to thinking about it, that can mean just about anything you want it to mean. For instance, if a soldier doesn’t get the promotion he has worked so hard for and feels that he is entitled to, he may become discouraged. This discouragement may lead him to adopt a devil-may-care attitude. This attitude may lead him to get drunk—and right then morals enter the picture and the chaplain becomes involved. But to solve the problem, the chaplain must follow the line of cause and effect until he gets to the point that indicates that the soldier got drunk because he didn’t get a promotion that he deserved. Then the chaplain must work on that problem. And while working on that he may uncover a host of other problems that at first glance don’t seem to have much to do with the job of a chaplain. After a few months or years of experience with this sort of thing, any chaplain who is on his toes to protect his men and to guard their religious and moral welfare will be going around snooping into this and that, trying to locate situations or circumstances that may lead to trouble. If he finds them, he tries to squelch them right then and there, before they have a chance to cause any real trouble. But anyone (and there are a lot of officers in the Army who fall into this class) who doesn’t understand the chaplain’s job will probably come to the conclusion that the chaplain is just an old busybody who is trying to make life as miserable and unhappy as possible for all those who have authority. Leaves, furloughs, allotments, promotions, clashes with the top kick, K.P. duty, special details, supposed abuses by the commanding officer or the Medical Department, failure to get a P.X. ration card, loans, Red Cross assistance—all such problems, along with almost anything else you can think of that would disturb a soldier’s peace of mind, find their way into the chaplain’s office sooner or later. He is the only officer in the Army whose sole duty is to hear gripes and troubles and to try to do something to help both the abused and the abuser.

I had not been at Pinedale long before I was getting my share of the problem children we had around camp. Some of the more chronic cases were tagged “goldbricks.”

Now, a goldbrick is not an uncommon type in the Army. He is just a soldier who, in one manner or another, tries to avoid his duty. But, please, let us reject the false notion that all goldbricks are found in the Army. As a matter of fact, there are more in civilian life right now than there ever were in the Army. The soldiers who were goldbricks in the Army probably were goldbricks before they were drafted. In the Army they showed up more distinctly. In civilian life, as a rule, there is no one standing over you to see that you do your job. If you don’t put in a good day’s work, no one comes around calling you a goldbrick. You just get fired and start looking for another job. But you don’t get fired in the Army. And you will draw the same pay check whether you goldbrick or work your heart out. It works out then that the Army actually encourages men to goldbrick.

I ran across one of these goldbricks one day in this fashion. I was walking down the company street, when I came across a detachment of soldiers standing an inspection. I stopped, as usual, to see what was going on. The captain who was making the inspection went up and down the line of soldiers, making a careful check of their clothing, appearance, and posture. Near the end of one of the lines stood (I should say, slouched) a very tall soldier. That is, he would have been tall if he had unfolded his full length. When the captain came to this soldier, he gave him a rather disgusted look and said, “Straighten up, Thompson. Don’t hunch your shoulders over so much. Stand up like a man. You look like an anteater, all bent over like that.”

I didn’t pay much attention to this rebuke at the time, but I thought I saw a gleam come into Thompson’s eye. The whole incident probably would have slipped my mind if it hadn’t been for the fact that the very next day I was walking down this same company street with the master sergeant of that company. We came around the comer of a barracks building, and there was this Thompson. He was down on his hands and knees, his head lowered almost to the ground, crawling along near the wall of the barracks building. I looked at the sergeant and he looked at me, both of us wondering what was going on. We watched Thompson for a few minutes, but he continued to crawl around as if he were looking for something he had lost. Finally the sergeant could stand it no longer.

“Thompson, what in the name of—are you looking for?” demanded the sergeant Thompson stopped and looked up at the sergeant, bewilderment written all over his face. He looked as if he couldn’t believe what he had just heard.

“Haven’t you heard?” he asked the sergeant in an awed, incredulous tone.

“Heard what?” roared the sergeant.

“I’m an anteater. I’m looking for ants.”

He said it simply and gently, like a father telling his son the facts of life. Indeed, he said it so sincerely that the sergeant just grunted “Oh,” as if he were a fool for not knowing. But that state of affairs didn’t last long. He grabbed Thompson by the collar and hustled him off to the orderly room.

A few days later I read an order that Private Thompson had been discharged from the Army because of inadaptability of military life.

Not all the goldbricks got off that easy, however. Some off them really worked hard and professionally over long periods of time, sometimes for months, to get out of the Army. I remarked to one of them that it seemed to me he spent more time and effort trying to get out of the Army than he would if he buckled down and tried to be a good soldier. He replied that doing what he did provided him with a safe job, but to be a good soldier and run the risk of being sent overseas was dangerous. One might even get hurt in battle.

One soldier who really worked hard at the job of gold- bricking was a fellow named Angelli. Angelli had been in the Army eighteen months before he came to Pinedale, and up to that time had been a good soldier. But because Pinedale was a base from which men were sent overseas, he started developing strange aches and pains soon after he came to our camp. After a while his pains became localized in his feet. That, I suppose, was because his feet were the largest parts of his body. To hear Angelli tell it, he had bad feet, very bad feet. To hear the medics tell it, there was nothing wrong with his feet. They examined them, X-rayed them, soaked them in solutions, gave them heat treatments, and did about everything else that could be done to improve his feet. But it did no good. Angelli came on sick call every day. The more the medics did for him, the worse he got. He was slowly driving the Medical Department insane. That was how things stood when they sent Angelli to me. I loved those medics. They never sent a soldier to me unless he had already driven them mad. They were too considerate to bother the chaplain with minor cases, such as moral cases.

Anyway, Angelli came up to my office. He was in a bad way. I happened to be looking out the window and saw him coming. He could hardly make it. He shuffled along extremely slowly, barely able to put one foot in front of the other. It took him almost five minutes to cross the street. Finally he got into my office. He fell into a chair. After a few casual remarks he got down to relating his troubles. He didn’t need any encouragement from me to help him tell his story. He poured it all out, going back to say that his foot trouble was inherited. His great-grandfather had walked all the way from Ohio to California in 1860. That had ruined his greatgrandfather’s feet. And all his children and grandchildren had had those same bad feet. He said that he had seen the medics. They wouldn’t do a thing for him—just gave him pills and sent him back to duty. (By the way, that is what all goldbricks say.) I listened patiently and politely to his story and then assured him that I would do all I could to help him.

After Angelli had struggled painfully from my office, I watched him limp away. I continued watching him for a week. Not once did I see him change his pace or in any way give the slightest indication that his foot trouble was not real. I questioned the medics and his company officers dnd learned that for four months Angelli had been acting this same way. There wasn’t a thing wrong with him as far as the medics could determine, yet for four long months he had been behaving like this. I had a long talk with the psychiatrist on our base and we agreed that the soldier could not be reclaimed. He was certainly no good to the Army and the best thing for all concerned was to discharge him. The machinery then got under way to have Angelli released from the service as a neuropsychiatric case. A few weeks later the papers were all completed and the time had come for Angelli to depart from our field as a civilian.

Considerate friends helped Angelli pack his belongings into a duffel bag and then carried the bag, which was rather heavy, over to the orderly room. There Angelli was to come to receive his discharge. After a while he came in, still limping and shuffling along. He finally got before the commanding officer, who had his papers. His face was drawn with pain and suffering. The officer made a few remarks about how he hated to see him go and then wished him luck as a civilian. Angelli thanked him. Then the officer gave him his papers, declaring that he was now a civilian. Angelli took the discharge papers, looked at them for a moment, and then asked the officer, “Does this mean that I am now out of the Army?”

“Yes,” replied the officer.

“And it means that the Army can no longer tell me where to go, what to do, and so on?”

“That is right,” agreed the officer.

Angelli looked at the papers again. Then he lifted them up and reverently kissed them. He tucked them carefully in his coat pocket. Then he reached down, picked up the heavy duffel bag, threw it over his shoulder, turned on his heel, and walked rapidly and easily from the room. All of us stood there dumbfounded. The last we saw of Angelli, he was walking down the street to the bus, a big grin on his face and a light spring in his step. None of us spoke for a moment. Finally the commanding officer said, “Well, he worked hard enough for it. I guess he had it coming.”

One of the more important duties of the chaplain is to make frequent calls at the hospital. Many times he is called in by the medical officers of the hospital to be with a dying soldier during his last hours. Such occasions are not pleasant, but they are necessary and no good chaplain will allow anything to prevent his being with his men at these crucial times. However, there are many times when the chaplain goes to the hospital on less serious matters. He goes sometimes just for the sake of being with the men and doing what he can to cheer them up and make their hours of confinement less boring. It turns out many times that the chaplain is cheered by the men more than he cheers them. I know this was my experience more than a few times. You must remember, of course, that not every man in an Army hospital is critically ill. At Camp Pinedale, for instance, we had only a small hospital unit and did not keep the more serious cases. Some patients had colds which they could not cure while they were on duty. Some had minor skin infections.

And some were in the hospital for purposes of observation only. In any case, all of them were able to be up and around the hospital, and the chaplain did not go to see them with the idea that he was going to see men who were dangerously ill. I always went to the hospital with the idea of having as much fun with the men as possible. And it usually turned out that we had a wonderful time together during these visits.

One morning the work in the office was light, so I decided to amble down to the hospital to see if there was anything going on there. I walked in, and after exchanging a few quips with the men in general, I sat down by the bed of a soldier named Ben Morgan to have a talk with him. (This incident took place while I was stationed at Charleston, South Carolina. I have, for convenience, included it with this group of hospital experiences.) I recognized him immediately, for the day before there had been considerable excitement in camp about him. He and a buddy had been to the beach, swimming in the ocean. The report had come back that Ben had been drowned. But, as in the case of Mark Twain, the report had been greatly exaggerated.

“Hello, Ben,” I greeted him as I sat down in a chair near his bed. “Got all the water out of your ears?”

He chuckled, “What little there was in there is out by now, I suppose. You know, Chaplain, it gives me a funny feeling to lie up here and think that yesterday all my buddies thought I was dead.”

“Well, you are acting like an eavesdropper,” I reminded him. “You get everybody thinking you are dead, and let them start saying all kind of nice things about you. Then up you pop, live as can be, and hear everything that has been said about you.”

“It isn’t quite fair,” Ben admitted with mock seriousness. “Maybe I should have stayed dead—if I ever had been.” “Just what did happen, Ben?” I asked. “I have heard several different accounts of what took place. Maybe you can give me the correct version of your own death.”

Ben took a deep breath and started this yam: “Jack— that’s my byddy—and I decided to go over to the beach yesterday morning. When we got there and got dressed for swimming, there were! only three or four people on the beach. Jack and I swam out about a hundred and fifty yards to a place where the water gets shallow. Out there the water is usually only four or five feet deep. Well, we swam around for a while. Then Jack decided to go back to the bathhouse for some cigarettes. I told him to go ahead; I would swim around for a while and then come in and meet him on the beach. By this time the other people on the beach had gone.

“Jack came on in, and in about ten minutes I did too. After I got to the beach I walked back a little way to a sand dune and climbed on top of it. On the other side of the sand dunes there is a road that runs parallel to the beach. I had just reached the top of the sand dune when I saw a girl having trouble with her car on the road. It looked like she couldn’t get it started. She looked right pretty, so of course I felt I had to go over and help her. I tinkered with the motor a little and got it started. But the girl hadn’t driven more than a hundred yards when the motor quit again. I walked on down to where the girl was stalled and worked on the car motor again. All this must have taken an hour or more. When I finally got the car going for sure, I went back to the bathhouse to find Jack. But he was gone.

“You see, Jack came back to the beach just after I had gone to help the girl with her car. He looked around the beach but didn’t see me. So he thought that I must still be out in the water, hiding from him. He swam out to where we had been, looking for me. Now it just happened that the tide had changed and a pretty strong undertow was developing. Jack looked all around, but he couldn’t find me, naturally. Then he got scared and decided that the undertow had carried me away and I had been drowned. He hurried back to the bathhouse, dressed, and rushed to the nearest telephone to report my disappearance. Being scared and excited like he was, he reported me as being drowned. He had reported all this to headquarters, so the Old Man sent out a general alarm. He called the Navy base and asked them to send out a boat to the place where we had been swimming, to search for my body. And he told Jack to come on back to the camp.

“By the time I had finished with that girl’s car, all this had taken place. My drowning had been properly reported and searchers had been sent to locate my body. Isn’t that gruesome?

“When I went to the bathhouse to look for Jack, he was gone. I couldn’t understand why he should have pulled out like that. But I decided to take one more dip in the ocean to wash off the sand, and then to come on back to camp myself.

“I was just going into the water when I saw the Navy search boat coming along. I stopped to watch them and was surprised to see them stop, then start circling around right where we had been swimming. The men on the boat were all looking over the sides like they had lost something. My curiosity got the better of me, so I swam out to see what it was all about. When I got to the boat I asked the sailors what they were looking for. You can imagine my surprise when they said they were looking for a man who had drowned. Naturally, I wanted to help, so I climbed aboard the boat and all of us started looking for the poor guy who had drowned.

“We looked and looked, but couldn’t find any trace of the fellow. Finally, as we continued the search, I casually asked if anyone knew the guy who had drowned. One of the sailors said, ‘Yeah it was a soldier from Camp Pinedale … a fellow named Morgan, Ben Morgan/

“I almost fell out of the boat.

“‘Ben Morgan?’ I screamed. ‘Why, he isn’t drowned!’

“ ‘How do you know so much about it?’ asks this sailor.

“ ‘Why, I know because I’m Ben Morgan.’ I stammered, still confused.

“I finally convinced the sailors that I really was Ben Morgan, and that I wasn’t dead, in spite of what their orders said. But they were pretty hard to convince. I think some of them were sore at me because I wasn’t drowned and they had done all that work for nothing.”

Ben paused then, as if he were through with his story. But I had another question for him. “What puts you in the hospital now, since you aren’t really drowned?”

Ben grunted cynically. “You know how some of these commanding officers are. See, the Old Man asked the Navy to help the Army find a drowned man, and the report got out that I really was dead. But if the truth became known, the C.O. thinks he would look pretty silly. So the official report is that I almost drowned. And it will be that or else . . . I’m in the hospital recovering from the terrible effects of an official drowning.”

Not all the men I visited in the hospital were as cheerful about their sickness as Ben Morgan. As I said before, some of the men were in there for observation only. I visited one such man once, and when I asked him how he was feeling, he replied bitterly, “I’m not feeling good at all.”

I asked him gently, “What seems to be your trouble?” “Well, I’m lying here practically dying and these medics won’t do anything for me. I’ve been trying to tell them for three days now that I am sick, but they won’t do a thing for me but shove pills at me and tell me I’m not sick.”

“Maybe you aren’t,” I ventured.

“Oh—yes—I—am—too,” he declared with feeling. “I tell you I am near death. If you had a headache as bad as mine, you would think that you were dying too. But not these medics. ‘It’s all in your head,’ they say. I know that. I’ve got a headache. Sure it’s in my head. Where else would it be?”

I tried to explain, “Maybe they mean that you just imagine you have these aches and pains—that they don’t really exist.” But the soldier wouldn’t be calmed. “I know that’s what they mean. But when I’ve got a headache, I don’t need no doctor to tell me I just think I have. My head hurts. My back hurts. I hurt all over. But they don’t do anything for me here . . . just give me pills and tell me there is nothing wrong with me.”

I answered him gently. “You seem to be rather determined to have something wrong.”

“I know there’s something wrong. What is more, I know what it is. I’ve been coming on sick call for a long time now, but I never could get much help from the medics. I decided to go to a civilian doctor and find out what was wrong for myself. And I found out plenty.”

“Did you give this information to the Medical Department here?”

“Sure I did. But that don’t mean nothing to them. I even brought them the X rays this civilian doctor made.”

I must admit that the case was beginning to sound more interesting and I wanted to know what had happened.

“Who was this civilian doctor?” I inquired.

The soldier answered proudly. “He is Dr. Taylor (This is not the doctor’s actual name, of course), the best man in town. When you go to him with some ailment, he guarantees to find out what it is.”

I happened to know about Dr. Taylor myself. He was one of the best-known quacks in town. He put on a big advertising campaign to draw the suffering into his office. His big drawing card went something like this: X-ray, fluoroscope, cardiograph, and complete metabolism for $1.50. The cause of your sickness found or your money back.

Needless to say, he always found the cause of the sickness. This soldier had been his victim.

The soldier continued, “Dr. Taylor took X rays, then pointed out on these X ray plates just what my trouble is. Here, I’ll show you. I brought these along with me so I could prove to the medics just how sick I am.”

He reached under his bed and pulled out a large envelope, from which he took several X ray plates of his back and neck.

“See, right here,” the soldier said, pointing to a picture of his back, showing a normal curvature of the spine. “See here, where my spine curves in? Well, right there a vertebra is missing.”

I looked at the soldier to see if he were joking. He wasn’t. He was in dead earnest. I decided to play along with him.

“A vertebra gone, huh? Say, that is bad. Did Dr. Taylor say where it had gone?”

“No.”

I shook my head in wonderment. “That is surely a new one for medical science. A whole vertebra from the back just picks itself up ‘and walks off. I wonder where it could be. Perhaps it is just wandering around over your body, looking for a likely place to settle. Did Dr. Taylor say he could locate it for you and get it back in place?”

The soldier shook his head. “No, he didn’t say just that. But he did say that he could fix my back so I wouldn’t have these pains, with just a few treatments.”

“At how much a treatment?”

“Five dollars.”

“And how many treatments?”

“Ten.”

“Well, it seems to me,” I mused, “that fifty dollars is a lot of money to pay for one wandering vertebra. After all, once it was located and put back in place, it might decide to get up and walk off again. Would the doctor make any kind of promise that he could make the vertebra stay put?”

The soldier would not be discouraged in his faith in Dr. Taylor. He answered, “No, but it would be worth it for the relief I would get. You see, that is what is causing all my trouble. My spinal cord has come out where that vertebra is missing, and the other vertebrae are pressing down on it. That is what causes my head to hurt. And my back, too.”

I shook my head in sympathy. “I’m sure it must be painful. What did the medics say when you showed them these pictures and told them what Dr. Taylor said?”

The soldier laughed sourly at the question. “These guys here? They just laughed and said that I had better come to the hospital for observation.”

And my respect for the medics rose another step.

Just before Christmas our guardhouse was moved to a new building. The prisoners had been staying in an old building that wasn’t any too comfortable. The new quarters were very nice. They had new beds, a few chairs, and even two writing tables. The roof had been ceiled in, thus creating a sort of attic between the ceiling and the roof of the building. Down in one corner of the room the carpenters had cut a hole in the ceiling so that a person could climb into the attic. And thereby hangs a tale.

Whenever the prisoners were brought back to the barracks after their day’s work around camp, they were always searched by a guard before they were readmitted to their quarters. Sometimes the men picked up things around the camp that they were not allowed to have in the guardhouse. The guards had to take these things away from them before they came in for the night.

A few of the prisoners managed to slip a large twenty-gallon crock into the guardhouse one evening. How they got past the guards with that will always be a mystery; nevertheless they did it. They took this crock into the attic above their quarters. Then they began the slow process of slipping in raisins, sugar, prunes, and vanilla extract from the mess hall, and I think even a few bottles of shaving lotion and hair tonic. All these ingredients they put into the crock, and then added water. Then they sat back and waited for the mixture to ferment. And what a brew it turned out to be. … I don’t know how long they let it sit before they thought it was ripe, but on New Year’s Eve they broke it out for serving.

Just a few minutes after midnight on January first, the guards in the guardhouse were brought suddenly to their feet by unusual and loud noises coming from the prisoners’ quarters. They rushed out—to behold the prisoners shouting, cursing, throwing chairs through the windows, breaking light bulbs, tearing the stove apart and throwing out thq pieces, heaving beds around, knocking each other on the head, leaping, yelling, dancing, and in general having quite a celebration. The prison officer sent in a rush call to the provost marshal for reinforcements, and then sent a call to the camp commander. It seemed as if a riot had started in the guardhouse. The situation was bad.

The guards went into the enclosure around the prisoners’ quarters and surrounded the building. A few of the prisoners themselves had been thrown through the windows and doors during the scrap, and were wandering around in the dark in a very dazed state. These the guards quickly took in hand and got out of the theater of operations. The provost marshal arrived with a twelve-gauge shotgun, not to shoot the prisoners but to give his words added meaning. He went to the door of the prisoners’ quarters, and at the top of his voice, called out an order for the prisoners to fall out and line up along the fence. His voice carried about as far as a whisper in a storm. The prisoners were making so much noise in their celebration that it was impossible to hear him. Then the provost marshal fired his gun into the air twice, thinking that the loud noise would momentarily quiet the men and they could hear his command to fall out. But he might as well have been shooting a peashooter, for all the effect it had on those prisoners.

All other measures failing, the provost marshal ordered his guards to arm themselves with night sticks and to go into the barracks and bring the prisoners out, using whatever force was necessary. Fifteen guards went in with the purpose of bringing out about thirty prisoners. Much happened in the next few moments. Many heads were cracked by night sticks. One man broke his arm when he hit a guard with much force. He did little damage to the guard, who promptly cracked the prisoner’s head with his night stick. Some of the guards had their night sticks taken away from them and were knocked on the head by the prisoners. But after about fifteen minutes the guards got the upper hand and brought the situation under control. The prisoners were marched out and lined up along the fence.

Soon all was quiet. The celebrating prisoners were subdued. Those with injuries were sent off to the hospital under guard. Those who were still in good health received twenty minutes of stiff double drill. Then they were given a cold shower and

sent back to their barracks. By this time they were completely whipped. There was no talking from them, no beefing. They were sober now, and they were thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Humbly they went to bed. A guard was kept around their quarters for the rest of the night, but there was no more violence.

The next morning the investigation got under way. It was only then that they found the crock, still about half full of its stinking contents. None of the investigating authorities would volunteer to taste the brew to see what its strength was, so they had to send it to a laboratory to have it tested. When the report came back everyone was surprised that those who had drunk the stuff were still alive. Needless to say, it was a very potent brew. Small wonder it caused such rioting.

One of the men in the guardhouse was a man named Ponchelli. It so happened that I witnessed the event that had led to his imprisonment. Ponchelli was a very rough-and-ready soldier. He was jailed on a charge of misuse and abuse of government property. And the government had a good case. I don’t think I ever met a man who had a readier supply of curse words than he. However, I must add, out of respect for Ponchelli (and he did deserve some respect), that his cursing was so natural, so much a part of his speech and so completely unaffected, that one hardly noticed that he was cursing. I often thought that he must have been bom cursing and then took a postgraduate course.

It happened one day, as I was returning in a staff car from one of my weekly trips to the mountains, that I saw a jeep coming up the mountain toward me. The driver of the jeep was taking the curves a little too fast. I was afraid he would take a curve so fast that he would run off the road and tumble down the side of the mountain. And that did happen, except that he didn’t tumble very far. It was just plain luck that at the place where the jeep went off the road, the mountain was not steep, nor was it far to a level spot. The jeep rolled over and over, finally coming to a stop about twenty-five feet below the level of the road. It landed right side up. I stopped my car and leaped out, fully expecting to find the driver of the jeep smashed beyond recognition. But he wasn’t. As a matter of fact, he already had gotten out of the well-smashed-up jeep and was climbing back toward the road when I ran up to him. I recognized him as Ponchelli.

“Thank God you are safe, Ponchelli!” I exclaimed “The Lord was certainly with you that time.”

Unflustered by his narrow escape from death, Ponchelli answered dryly, “Well, if He was, Chaplain, He sure had one hell of a ride!”