You’re In The Army Now

You’re In The Army Now

By John Sherman

We sarcastically called ourselves the “Fighting 29th.” As in the 29th Base Post Office in Orleans, France. The only pistol that wan’t in a safe was an old .45 the guard carried on our nightly mail run to Paris.

Fresh from New York, a newly minted second lieutenant, I reported in to my new commanding officer with my snappiest salute. It was April, 1965, the beginning of the Vietnam buildup.

It was customary in those days to get your hair cut every two weeks, or thereabouts.

On my first visit, I took a seat along with four or five enlisted men from the unit. The barber was French, America’s effort to make friends with the locals. The first couple of men got the traditional GI butchering.

I took the chair. In an act of arrogance, narcissicism and gross stupidity, I requested a coup razoir. I had spent a month in Normandy the previous summer, giving me a certain savoir faire in matters of this kind.

The barber, in an instant, became a stylist. He beamed that one of these lumpen had some culture. As my waiting troops looked on with fascination, the U.S. Army barber took out a straight razor, gave it a few passes on the strop, and began teasing my hair before beginning the coup.

As he shaped my head with meticulous care— as given to, Jean-Paul Belmondo—-I became increasingly uncomfortable, as the men took it in. Satisfied with his work, he began the last stage, the blow drying. I was stricken, having forgotten the ending, as he produced a hairnet and carefully covered my new coup razoir.

As I dismounted, I nodded to the men as if this performance were perfectly normal, and headed for the door. Then I heard it.

“See that? Lieutenant’s a fag.”

•••••••••••••••••••••••••

President Charles de Gaulle gave U.S. forces until spring of 1967 to clear France, as he was having a spat with NATO. My whole tour of duty in country was shadowed by a sense that we really weren’t in the army, we were Mayflower Movers. It’s not as if we all wanted to see some action in Vietnam, it was just that the day to day starch, the discipline and the esprit de corps were missing.

I soon fell in with two lieutenants who felt, as I did, that we were trudging through a waste of two years. The group included John Hepper from North Dakota and Bernie Silver from New York. Also, there was Peter Luttropp whose infantry company stood ready to repel any Russian advance.

John, who had charge of all the payroll cash on the base, really loathed the army. When we weren’t saluting one another as I loaded the monthly pay satchel into the jeep, we mounted a self-guided assault on France’s wine caves.

The rest of the installation was happy drinking Bud and vodka (some of my boys developed what they called the “sling shot”—-a nasty cocktail of red wine and scotch).

We worked our way up and down the nearby Loire River, then moved east into Burgundy where we rode from Chablis in the north, right through the middle of Beaune, and out the bottom into the Rhône Valley. We particularly put our backs in a ‘59 Pomard Les Noizons. Back then it ran about seven dollars a bottle. At our pay of $225 a month, it was a bit of a splurge; today a case would be worth well into the thousands.

Over one of our seances, John drew me close. “You ever wonder why I’m not around on weekends? I drive to Geneva.” (John drove a very fast British racing green Triumph.)

No nonsense, he announced, “I’m going to steal a million dollars, drive to Geneva, get on a jet and fly to São Paulo, where they have no extradition laws. Every weekend I take a different route to measure the fastest.” Well, that called for another bottle of Pomard.

I knew John was smart, very serious and sly, but a million dollars? I wasn’t sure that he hated the army enough to face decades in the stockade. He went on to confess that on three nights he’d stack a million in his trunk, and drive carefully around Orleans in the middle of the night—gently returning the stash to his vault by morning.

In the end, John did his time and went on to work for the Rand Corporation.

Bernie Silver ran the commissary, the base supermarket. When filling our glasses, Bernie always had the funniest stories to tell about the absurdities, the inefficiency, the pettiness that were leveled on us each day. He had a deep voice, and when he laughed, his eyes closed.

Although Bernie denies it, his swan song came one morning. He had been taking constant calls from housewives. “Do you have this? Do you have that?” The tenth call came in and Bernie couldn’t help himself. He grabbed the phone, and in full voice sang, “Yes we have no bananas. We have no bananas today."

It was a general's wife.

To this day he swears that such silliness had nothing to do with his orders to pack up and report to Fort Huachuca, Arizona. His first postcard was brief. “Rocks, rocks and more rocks,” he wrote.

He later joined a New York law firm. •••••••••••••••••••••••••

Bernie was dating Leslie, the daughter of an army civilian who lived in a grand chateau, and drove a gold Rolls Royce. She finally gave up and went to bed, leaving the few of us you wouldn’t want hanging around after midnight. By about 1 a.m., John, who claimed to be part Arikara nation, had us stomping around the table with a “Hey-yeh-ya ya.” He got quite emotional.

Bernie called us into the ample living room and gave us a eulogy about old friends moving on. He explained that his future father-in-law was so broken up about his departure that he begged Bernie to “take anything you want. I want you to have it. And in the same spirit of remembrance, John, I’d like you to take this stereo set.”

John protested, “I don’t know what to say.” To me, he presented a Purdy shotgun. “Oh, come on, Bernie. I couldn’t.” Pretty hammered, we gave long hugs to Bernie. Friend for life. And we all made it home.

The next morning at six, it was Leslie.

“Bring back my father’s shotgun.” Plus a trailing end of obscenities. I didn’t see Bernie for some years.

I mustered out and went on to the Hartford Courant writing obits at $100 a week. It would have been $95, but they threw in an extra five because I was married.