T-BONE AND THE JEEP
I started my 18-month Army hitch at the 564th MP Company in Massweiler, Germany as a tower guard, wearing a helmet and carrying an old M-14 rifle and two clips of past-use-date ammunition. But after a few months the CO, Captain “Jumpin’” Jimmy Fine (the “Jumpin'” adjective was because he kept all the troops doing just that), noticed that I’d gone to college, and he took me out of the towers and gave me a desk job. I was put in charge of keeping the post’s motor pool records: maintenance schedules, tables of organization and equipment, and the vehicle logs. Of course the CO assumed I knew how to drive.
Well, it had been awhile. I got my first driver’s license in San Mateo, California when I was sixteen, and I lost it exactly a month later, because I totaled the family car driving a girl back from a bad date in San Francisco. Nobody was hurt, but the State pulled my license for six months, not that it mattered, because I’d wrecked the only car my family had, and they’d grounded me for the foreseeable future.
I could have reapplied for my license after the suspension, but by then I was away full-time at prep-school and college, and didn’t really need to drive. I took trains and buses, got rides from friends who had cars, and hitchhiked when I had to. After college I moved to New York to try my luck at acting, and New Yorkers don’t drive unless they’re cabbies. So by the time I was drafted and sent to the 564th, I was a bit rusty behind the wheel. I was so happy to get out of the towers that I didn’t mention it to the CO. And it never occurred to him to ask. All red-blooded American lads had grown up with cars. It was the mid-century, and it was downright unpatriotic not to drive. Just a few years before, when Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States for the first time, the sight of a single superhighway full of big, bumptious, gleaming American cars shook him so much that he insisted the President had staged the spectacle, ordering all the new cars in America to be brought to that highway and driven past him, just to make him feel bad about the cruddy Zil limo which belched him around back in the Workers’ Paradise.
Jumpin’ Jimmy sent me to Baumholder for a few days to learn motor pool records protocol. It was an enormous base, home to an armored division whose M-60 tanks and mobile artillery units were supposed to stop the Russkies if the Big Red Balloon went up and their hordes of bigger, better armor (the Russkies were good at tanks) poured into West Germany. But we were short-handed when he cut my orders for Baumholder, so he told me to check out one of the unit’s Jeeps and drive myself to the base.
The 564th, although we supported an ordnance company which twiddled with the guidance systems of tactical nuclear weapons that might have done a better job at stopping a Soviet invasion than Baumholder’s tanks (at the expense of turning a good deal of central Europe into a radioactive wasteland and initiating Mutual Assured Destruction, but never mind), wasn’t exactly equipped with the latest in military vehicles. Like our weapons, our wheels were mostly of Korean War and even WWII vintage. We had deuce-and-a-half troop trucks with canvas tops, 3/4-ton utility vehicles, and Jeeps. Just as I arrived at the post, the 564th’s motor pool Sergeant had managed to wangle a couple of the new M-151 Jeeps, which were pretty zippy rides with four-wheel drive, but most of our Jeeps were M-38 models, the kind you see in flag-flapping History Channel documentaries about the Last Good War. State-of-the-1940s-art military automotive technology.
They were finally being phased out, so it was hard to find spare parts for them. And for a novice, the M-38 was a cranky bastard, with a manual choke, a clunky gear-box with a tall shift lever mounted on the floor and a clutch pedal you had to push down about a foot before you could change gears. It rode hard, cornered badly, and with rear-wheel drive and light weight over the rear axle, it tended to fishtail if you had to brake on a smooth road surface, especially if it had been raining. Or snowing, as it was on the morning I set out for Baumholder. And my only previous driving had been in a cushy 1958 Pontiac station-wagon with an automatic transmission. Which I’d wrecked.
I also have no sense of direction. I’d gotten through map-reading and orienteering in Basic and AIT because it was done overland, on foot, and I’d kept my nose glued to my map and compass. But finding third gear was tough enough for me without also having to find where I was. I knew Baumholder was only about an hour and a half from Massweiler, just off a major autobahn with clearly marked signs. Locating the autobahn was the problem. I had an Army map, but Massweiler was a tiny village in hilly country full of equally tiny villages that all looked exactly the same: central squares with 19th century memorials to the dead of the Franco-Prussian war, a small, plain 17th century Lutheran church, a bar or two, and a scattering of houses made of gray stone with gray slate roofs, surrounded by undulating potato fields. And they were connected by an intricate web of narrow roads, basically farm-tracks, some unpaved, none on my map. Signs were minimal. The farmers were a clannish, xenophobic lot who spoke a dialect even other Germans couldn’t understand, and their attitude was that if you didn’t know where you were, then you didn’t belong there.
The motor-pool mechanics were loudly amused as I ground the gears of my Jeep and juddered out of the lot. I forgot to push down the clutch before braking at the main gate, killing the engine, and I almost flooded it trying to start up again with the choke pulled out too far. The MP pulling main gate duty was a Corporal from Tennessee who called himself T-Bone. He thought Yankees were the devil’s spawn, particularly Yankees who had gone to college and had wound up with office jobs instead of being stuck on 24/7/365 guard duty with the rest of the company.
The wet snow was already spatting down, and T-Bone stepped out of the unheated guard-shack in his full winter field gear, parka over his fatigues, a steel pot rammed down over the wool cap covering his ears, enormous black-rubber bulbous-toed winter-issue Mickey-Mouse boots, holstered pistol clipped to his web-harness, M-14 slung over his shoulder. He made an elaborate show of examining my TDY orders and the trip-ticket I’d cut myself, although I knew T-Bone could barely read the talk-balloons in his collection of comic books, because I’d already begun as the motor pool clerk before my orders for Baumholder had come through, and I’d seen him struggle trying to fill out forms.
I’d managed to start the Jeep and I’d adjusted the choke to a ragged idle which offended T-Bone’s ears. As NASCAR demonstrates, all white Southern country boys are born knowing everything there is to know about the internal combustion engine. He grinned. “Somethin’ wrong with that vee-hicle, Tompkins?” “Nope. Just, ah, running a little rich.” “Inspected her your own self?” “Of course.” “My ass. You ain’t never so much as changed a goddamn tahr¬ in your born days.” “I know how to change a tire, T-Bone.” “That’s Corporal to you, shithead.”
Well, he was right: I was a Specialist Fourth Class, same pay scale, but he ranked me because a Corporal is just barely a Non-Commissioned Officer. He leaned further into the window. “Betcha don’t even know whar the fuckin’ spare tahr is at. Cause you sure as shit don’t know how to drahve. Why the fuck they put some goddamnyankee pissant college boy don’t know one end of a fuckin’ vee-hicle from t’other in charge of the fuckin’ motor pool pure-dee beats the mothafuckin’ shit outta me.” “I’m not in charge of the motor-pool, Corporal. I’m just the records clerk. You know that.” “Fuck ‘f Ah do, on account of you act like you fuckin’ own the mothafuckah ever’ tahm you cut me a trip- tick.”
Well, T-Bone’s writing skills made his reading skills look good, and he wouldn’t admit it. So when he came in to get a vee-hicle he’d grumble and bitch and cuss trying to scrawl something on the form until I’d finally say, “C’mon, man, I’ll fill that out. You’re just checking out a three-quarter to take the laundry to P-town, right?” I had no idea I was stepping on his pride. I had no idea about a lot of important things then. I was 22, and I’d never even met someone older than seven who basically couldn’t read or write.
What gave T-Bone a permanent mad-on, though, was that he’d volunteered for the Army, like his forebears back to the original Scots-Irish who settled Appalachia in the early 18th century and had fought in every single one of America’s wars. He wanted to go to Vietnam and zap the gooks, whom he considered even lower than the niggers he wasn’t allowed to lynch any more. Instead, the Army had sent him to Germany, simply because some clerk like me, back in Washington, had noticed that the 564th MP Company was short a couple of warm bodies on its roster. And T-Bone wasn’t even assigned to a white-hat, squad-car outfit in a big city, where at least he’d be able to crack some AWOL heads with his baton and maybe even use his M1918A1 caliber .45 sidearm to blow away a perp. He was stuck standing pointless guard with useless weapons over an installation a single Russian tank could have taken out, instead of kicking ass and taking names as he was born to do. And all the senior NCOs were black.
T-Bone was shorter than I was, and rail-thin, except that he spent his off-shifts getting pig-drunk on the excellent German beer served by the company’s NCO club for less than what the one GI bar in Massweiler charged, so he’d developed a little cantaloupe of a belly which pooched against his web belt, even though the rest of his field uniform hung from his shoulders like a cheap suit from a coat-hanger. I was probably in better shape than he was, but he was a stone warrior itching for a fight, and I wasn’t about to provoke him.
He finally opened the main gate, and he watched as I lurched the Jeep into first and immediately skidded on the slick new coating of wet snow, almost side-swiping one of the gate posts. I managed to get the vee-hicle on a straight course and slithered it down the road. But I knew that T-Bone had gotten on the horn in the guard-shack even before my stuttering tail-lights disappeared around the bend, to tell everyone in the 564th that Tompkins di’n’t know how to drahve.
And I got lost no more than twenty minutes into the trip. The snow was getting serious, splatting horizontally into my windshield, and the M-38 didn’t have automatic windshield wipers. You had to reach up to a lever mounted on the windshield-frame above the rear-view mirror to sweep them back and forth, which is a bit of a trick if both your hands are busy with the wheel and the gear-shift. Not a serious problem for an experienced driver, of course. But as my window caked over, I had to pull off the anonymous little road I seemed to be following in the wrong direction. I didn’t even bother consulting the useless map. But I had a radio I’d signed out to myself, entirely against procedure, because I knew I was going to get lost. I ¬had spotted an advertising sign a mile or so back promoting Schwartzkat, a brand of powerful schnapps which the more dedicated drinkers of our band of brothers mixed with their beer when they came off swing-shift and had only 12 hours to get hammered before going on days. I figured that the unit’s chief radio operator, who’d begun spending every waking hour drunk or stoned or both, might remember the sign for the stuff that made him fall down and puke.
He’d enlisted, like T-Bone, which meant a three-year active-duty hitch, and he’d recently found out that in a month or so he’d be spending his final year in Viet Nam. Unlike T-Bone, he’d signed up because the recruiting sergeant had promised to keep him out of combat. So he was just as unhappy as T-Bone, because of a different pack of lies.
He did remember the Schwartzkat billboard, and he was delighted to hear from me. Evidently it was a reefer day for him, and a slow day for radio traffic on Freedom’s Frontier. He told me, giggling, with a stoner’s obsessive details, exactly where I was and how to get to the autobahn. I didn’t find out until later that he’d patched our conversation onto the unit’s general frequency. Every guard tower and guard shack had a radio, and with nothing else to do, the troops kept the horn on, bullshitting about everything young men without women and with too much time on their hands have always bullshat about. People who think women are the gossiping gender have never spent much time with bored male soldiers. It can be said that all the trouble in The Iliad originated because the Greek army gossiped too much.
But I knew nothing about the broadcasting of my humiliation. I followed the radio-op’s directions, arrived in Baumholder only a little late, took my three-day course in Forms and Files, and drove my Jeep with confidence back to the 564th. Sailed through the main gate, coasted into the motor-pool, negative perspiration. Nobody said anything, but everyone from the gate-guard (not T-Bone) through the motor-pool mechanics wore wide grins. I didn’t pay much attention, because whatever was causing their happy mood, it matched my own. In Baumholder they’d not only showed me how to keep records, they’d also refined my Jeep-driving skills, taught me to drive three-quarters and deuce-and-a-halfs, and I’d even gotten a ride in a tank, though of course the tank commander kept me as far away from the tank’s controls as the cramped belly of the beast permitted. I felt solid, and there was a warm letter from my fiancée waiting for me when I got back. My elation only mounted when I found that in my absence I’d been moved out of the open bay of my barracks to one of the two rooms with actual doors that were reserved for members of the Headquarters Squad, who worked different hours than the tower guards. The room was tiny and the door didn’t have a lock. But I bunked with the Company Clerk, who liked peace and quiet as much as I did, and our door shut out some of the endless cacophony in the squad bay.
My high didn’t last long. Everyone in the unit knew I’d gotten lost, and T-Bone’s scathing account of my inability to drive ripped the final threads from my raveled reputation. And when I was assigned semi-private quarters, it was the last straw for my ex-comrades-in-obsolete-arms. Everyone knew that clerks got their preferential treatment by blowing the CO, or at least the First Sergeant. It didn’t matter that Captain Jumpin’ Jimmy Fine had been a semi-pro hockey player in civilian life, or that Master Sergeant Woodrow Big-Time Johnston was a combat veteran of the Korean War who still looked like a line-backer for the Green Bay Packers, or that both of them had wives and kids back in the Land of the Round Doorknobs, as well as little German schatzies in Pirmasens. Clerks were faggots, period. Especially Yankee pissant clerks who didn’t know how to drahve and couldn’t find their own asses with a map and both hands.
And my new life of privilege came with a hook. I’d had to set up my desk and files in the supply room, since there was no motor pool office. And the supply Sergeant hated having to share his tiny fiefdom. Sergeant First Class Holcomb was a prickly, finicky black man who had his own obsessive-compulsive system of organization. And he was a lifer who’d already put in eighteen years without ever having heard a shot fired in anger, and was hoping to finish his twenty as a Master Sergeant, without being sent to the unpleasantness in Southeast Asia, and retire with full pension and benefits. My mere presence upset his applecart, and he let me know that it wasn’t that he didn’t like white boys (“Tompkins, my Army had been color-blind since Dubya-Dubya-Two.”) He just didn’t like draftees. He knew we hated the Army, and it was his home “There’s a right way, a wrong way, and an Army way, Tompkins, and as long as you’re working in my house, you will learn the Army way.”
The Army way, for its lowest ranks, dictates that if it moves, salute it, and if it doesn’t, paint it. In November the unit had been alerted about a possible visit by the Commanding General of US Army Europe, and Jumpin’ Jimmy got upset because the grass around Company Headquarters had taken on its usual grayish, sere late-fall hue. We were ordered to spray-paint it green. General Haig (yeah, that guy) never showed up, and of course the paint killed the grass forever. But to SFC Holcomb the incident was an admirable example of the Army way. It only seemed idiotic to civilian conscripts who didn’t understand that soldiers have to be kept busy.
So in December he decided that the supply-room floor had to be repainted. Strictly speaking, my immediate superior was the motor pool Sergeant, but I barely knew him. For all intents and purposes Holcomb was my lord and master. One evening after I’d finished my work for the day and was on my way out, Holcomb said, “Stop right there, Tompkins. Place is gettin’ a little shabby, might could use a little new paint on the floor.” “Uh, Sergeant, I can see my face in the paint that’s already on the floor.” “It’s the wrong color.” “Sergeant, it’s gray. Standard Army-issue glossy enamel gray paint, I can look up the specs for you.” “Are you gettin’ up in my face, young soldier? Don’t even think of gettin’ up in my face, or I will bring smoke on your sorry ass so bad you’ll wish your daddy had jacked off instead of makin’ you. You read me?” “Loud and clear, Sergeant!”
So I stayed up all that night applying another coat of the same goddamn gray paint to the floor. When I was done I locked the supply room door and stumbled out into the dawn of another winter Massweiler day, pretty much the same color as the floor, but less glossy. But it was a Sunday, and Holcomb had given me permission to sleep until noon. He spent his Sunday mornings at an American Southern Baptist Mission Church in Pirmasens, maybe apologizing to Jesus for using coarse language to his underlings.
T-Bone rousted me out of my bunk at around eight. Jumpin’ Jimmy had noticed his fiery combative spirit, something the Captain admired because he himself was dying to go to Viet Nam, since he’d never make Major without a combat tour. He’d put in for T-Bone’s transfer to the war and meanwhile he’d taken the warrior out of the towers and made him his personal driver. Of course the Captain’s Jeep was one of the two new M-151s, and T-Bone regarded it as his personal ride. He and Jumpin’ Jimmy ramped around with the windshield laid down over the hood, combat-style, in full field gear, heavily armed, even if T-Bone was only driving the Captain to the Officers’ Club in Pirmasens, which is where Jumpin’ Jimmy had suddenly decided to go that Sunday morning, because his schatzie tended bar there, and he hadn’t seen her in awhile.
T-Bone was already rip-shit because he’d had to climb back up the hill after he found the supply-room door locked. “What the fuck you doin’ in bed, Tompkins? ’Case you ain’t heard, this is a highly sensitive mothafuckin’ vital outpost. Cap’n Fine says eternal vigilance is the mothafuckin’ price of liberty! He wants his vee-hicle yesterday, you copy, asshole? So you will drop your cock and grab your socks and proceed with me in a military manner, immediately if not sooner, down the hill, where you will open up your office which ain’t ought to be closed nohow, and give me my mothafuckin’ JEEP! READ ME, FAGGOT?”
“Loud and clear, Corporal,” I said, dragging on my fatigues and boots. T-Bone railed at me all the way down the hill. He had a piercing, nasal voice, and he went on and on about my inadequacies as a soldier and as a man. By the time we got to the basement of the Admin Building and I was struggling with the balky lock on the supply room door, he’d started in on my mother. I was still trying to stay cool, so I just told him about the wet paint, and asked him to stay outside in the corridor while I went in and wrote his trip-ticket, figuring that way I’d only have to paint over my own set of tracks. He barged in right behind me. “Wet paint, huh? Well ain’t that a mothafuckin’ shame.” He pushed past me and stomped all over the room. Combat boots have deep treads, and I knew it would take me the rest of the day to smooth over the impressions they left and apply another coat. Holcomb would not be pleased. But I kept my mouth shut, walked to my desk (trying to stick to the tracks T-Bone had already made), and began filling out the form as fast as I could.
Then T-Bone got on my fiancée. She was an actress, and she’d sent me one of her sexier publicity photos while I was still bunking in the squad bay. I’d taped it on the inside of the door to my standing locker, in place of the Playboy centerfolds most of the other guys favored. She was prettier than Hef’s babes, I thought, and although she certainly wasn’t naked in the photo, she had on her dance-workout leotard and tights.
“You heard anything recently from that whoo-er in the pitcher, Tompkins?” T-Bone said. “You really think she ain’t been fuckin’ every swingin’ dick has come along since you been gone? Man, she’s beggin’ for it. Like to have me a piece of that my damn self. Fuck her till she screams, which is more than you ever…..”
I don’t remember how I got across my desk. I hadn’t been in a fight since sixth grade (and I lost that one), but suddenly I found myself on top of T-Bone, grappling with him on the wet paint. I had one hand around his throat and I was smashing him in the face with my free fist. His legs had spraddled as he fell, and some memory of my hand-to-hand combat training kicked through my blind red rage. I jacked my knee into his crotch as hard as I could. He tried to scream, but I was still throttling him and bashing away at his face. Blood spurted from his nose suddenly and the sight of it shocked me for a second. That was all it took for the fight to change course. We were both slick with paint, and T-Bone managed to writhe out from under me and get up. I rose too, but I didn’t know what to do next. He was still half-crouched and gasping from the knee to the balls, but he knew how to fight, and after my berserk rage disappeared as quickly as it had come on, I knew I didn’t. He caught me high on the cheekbone with a fist I didn’t see coming, and followed up with a punch to the gut which knocked the wind out of me. I didn’t fall, but he bulled me back against a file cabinet and proceeded to get to work on me methodically. The blood from his nose poured down over his fixed grin and painted his teeth. I had a moment out of time to think that I’d lucked out of getting killed by the VC, and now an American soldier was going to do the job. But he took a step back to swing at my face, slipped on the wet paint and fell hard, banging his head on the concrete floor. I knew I couldn’t let him get up again, so I kicked him in the ribs. But I was reeling and dizzy from his blows, and the kick was weak. He grabbed my foot and pulled me down with him, and we got into the rolling, gouging, clawing part of real fights which they don’t show in war-movies or westerns.
And I suddenly saw a pair of immaculately spit-shined shoes right next to my face. Sergeant First Class Holcomb was back from church.
I wish I could say that T-Bone and I became friends after the fight, shaking hands like warriors who had tested each other’s mettle and settled their differences man-to-man. Nah. The unit medic patched us up in the tiny sick bay, and T-Bone never stopped ranking on me. We were confined to quarters for the night, and next morning Jumpin’ Jimmy, furious because he’d missed some afternoon delight with his schatzie, convened an administrative court-martial under Article 15 of the UCMJ. The panel busted us one grade in rank, we lost pay for the next month, and were restricted to base for the same length of time. We wound up penniless PFCs, and Jumpin’ Jimmy fired T-Bone as his personal driver, not because he’d been in a fight, but because at the Article 15 hearing Holcomb testified that from what he could tell as he walked in, T-Bone seemed to be losing it.
So T-Bone hated me worse than ever, and every time we crossed paths during that month he tried to taunt me into a rematch. But I knew he really would kill me the second time around. I shrugged off his insults and just tried to avoid him. Jumpin’ Jimmy pulled some strings and rammed through T-Bone’s transfer to Viet Nam. He was gone before the month was over. I don’t know what happened to him in the war, and I don’t care. I served out the rest of my hitch very quietly. The only nasty, ignoble little satisfaction I got out of my single taste of serious fighting during my military service was that Holcomb decided the combined motor-pool-supply-office needed a full-time Jeep. Jumpin’ Jimmy had a new driver who liked the other M-151, so I wound up driving T-Bone’s ride for the rest of my tour. The M-151 really was a sweet vee-hicle. Every civilian Jeep on the road today is based on it.