Books for purchase & excerpts

    "Looking over the manuscript, I see no bright dawns or sunsets or first sexual experiences, but the first are the stuff of fiction and the rest is part of every life. I owe more than that to the girls, my successors and my family. The world is choking on words and books and people and if I had nothing better to reveal I'd keep my mouth shut. I always meant to tell it beyond ideology, hysteria, popular myth and hyperbole; like it was, is and everlastingly will be. 

It might be useful to someone else. You can't build the world that could be without a clue about the one you've got."  

                                                                                            Chapter 1

 
    I came in with Prohibition. It was November 10, 1920 in Tacoma, Washington. I was a difficult pregnancy for my mother and a harder birth; after 36 hours in labour I was finally born bone dry and backwards, prophetically as it's turned out. The doctor didn't think either of us was going to live but I'm still around for now and she lived to 84 notwithstanding the doctor's estimate and a better assessment from a gypsy fortune teller who short-changed her a year.  After I was born my mother went in for major surgery, but that had nothing to do with me. She had gall bladder trouble and all the years of my childhood there was a Mason jar full of gallstones in the cupboard. It was a conversation piece. I don't know which gave her the most trouble, me or the gallstones, but I can guess; the gallstones rested innocuously on the shelf while I bedeviled her for her entire life.

    She was a great hand at giving advice too. Relatives and neighbors all reaped the benefits of her wisdom and occasionally she would drag some poor vagrant home for dinner. For dessert they got to swallow their pride and bear long witness to her charity. Or she might take a pauper under her wing until they got sick of self-abasement on cue at which there would be an acrimonious parting of ways, an option I never had. 

 
. . . . After the disaster with the logging truck he tried running a blackboard. This is where you rent a store, sand down the walls, paint them black and charge people 25 cents a week to put up an advertisement. It was like a secondhand store without stock. It sounded good, but it went over like a lead balloon.  Then a fellow named Dickman said to my dad, "Smiley, why don't you and I go partners in the liquor business? I'll make the stuff and you peddle it." 

    My father had peddled a lot of liquor when he was in the taxicab business. There was a special door in the floor of the cab. . . .    Other times we had an old warehouse or some other run-down commercial premises and finally we had it in our own house. It was the two story place my dad had built with my grandfather Gordon's help. It had a big attic to make booze in and this was where my father was fatally injured on the day after Christmas, 1932. 

  . . . .It was January of 1933 and times were really rough. Our newish two story house with an attic, a two car garage, a barn, and four lots beside our own all went for two thousand dollars and she was damn glad to get it. There was also two thousand dollars from Dad's insurance and she decided we would pack up and go back to New York. 

                                                                                Chapter 3

 . . . . . We were there for two years and it finally became obvious there was no way we could make a living running a little grocery store and eating up our inventory with the help of the neighbors. . . . . . .. She sold out for exactly what she paid for the place and the only encore we could think of was to head for  Los Angeles. If we were going to starve to death, we would at least starve comfortably in the sunshine, which was a hell of a lot better than anything we could look forward to in New York. A lot of people were of like mind in those days. We pulled up stakes again and joined the flood of Okies, Arkies, Pikers and millions of other misfits and losers pouring in from everywhere to populate, define and flavor the great golden State of California.

                                                                                 Chapter 4 

. . . . We'd buy ten cents worth of baloney and spend another ten cents for a loaf of bread. That was our lunch. Then we'd load up the truck and start for L.A.  We'd get in around 5 o'clock in the morning. First we'd stop at the restaurants in the big central market and have ham and eggs for breakfast. Breakfast was our biggest expenditure and then we'd go around the market trying to sell our oranges.  It was over breakfast one morning he passed on a piece of wisdom that resonated in a way I never forgot.  "Harold," he said, "never, ever marry a Jewish girl. My wife, your mother; they're born fucking crazy and spend the rest of their lives working at it." 

                                                                                Chapter 7

    He laughed. "Alright boy. If you have a war, you can go without giving me notice." . . . . .  And on December 8th, 1941, I didn't go to work. I was part of a queue at the enlistment office and transferred from the Guard to the U.S. Army. The queue didn't last for long. Perhaps a hundred thousand men volunteered across the entire United States. The country needed millions but they didn't enlist.  The regular U.S. Army was all volunteers but it was small, so in '39 the Selective Service Act was passed to create the Army of the United States for draftees. When the war came in Dec. '41, so few men enlisted that as of Feb.1, 1942, the volunteer U.S. Army ceased to exist as a separate entity and everything became the (draft) Army of the United States including my own commission later. 

                                                                                Chapter 12

 He hit the beach just alongside our bow doors, waded up onto the beach and looked around every which way. To his disappointment there was no-one there except us. Everybody was throwing things at him and spitting, yelling, whooping and whistling. He paid no attention, just walked back to his Higgins boat and sent fat little General Willoughby scuttling off up the beach. And then he pulled off and stayed out by our stern.

. . . . .  Fox Movietone News, Pathe`, all the relevant press photographers and radiomen, all laden down with equipment and fat little General Willoughby striding purposefully in the lead. They set up just outside our bow doors and Mac came rolling in on his Higgins Boat, straight up the sand. He waded through about eight inches of water and got his feet wet, but that didn't bother him any more than our abuse.  He always put on the act of being one of the people. He had his trademark unbuttoned shirt, crummy old pipe and famous 'fifty mission crush.' He raised his arm; "I have returned! Rally to me!"  

     The hat was dirty; it looked like it had never been cleaned.  

                                                                                Chapter 14

 
    The infantryman's experience of battle is almost unrecognizable in terms of the broader epic as planned by generals or propounded by historians. Those of us who do the fighting know only what goes on a few feet away unless we can pause on some height of land, gaze out over a larger prospect and be convinced for a brief moment that we are part of something larger than ourselves.  On Dec. 7, 1944, during the climax of the battle for Leyte, I made my way down from the height of Hill 918, crossed the Palanas River and began the ascent of Hill 479 which was to be assaulted by E and F Co. of the 17th Infantry. Our objective is one of a complex of knolls and ridges called Hill 380 on our maps, just south of Ipil, a small sugar mill town on the island's west coast. North of Ipil is Ormoc, through which the 1st Cavalry (we are told) is coming south and the 7th Division, which I am part of, is moving north to link up with them, which will crush the last of the Jap defenses on the island. Hill 380 is the 7th's objective, squarely in our path.  

    This is a most extra-ordinary day. It still stands out crystal clear from the rest of the diffuse snippets that pepper my memory. Beside the very unusual events that were to occur during the assault that would later be to my advantage, it is the third anniversary of Pearl Harbour and I have that rare opportunity to gaze out on the bigger picture. This is how it really was.  The day is clear, the sun warm, Hill 918 is at our backs, the ocean on our left, the Japs on the high ground and all is not well with the world. As forward observer for the 81 mm. mortars I am as useless as tits on a boar. As usual I cannot fire because my commanding officer has his six mortars back about 3000 yards (the extreme range of the guns). He is hanging back out of concern that his guns might come under flat trajectory fire which leaves me unable to drop shells the required few hundred yards out to my front and then bring subsequent rounds in to inundate the enemy front line 100 yards away.  

     Perhaps my commander also feels more comfortable personally so far in the rear. Perhaps hell, I know he does, but it is more complicated than cowardice. My commanding officer is Lt. O'Neill for whom caution and indecision are virtues, the essential elements of competence and the basis of his self-esteem and he has told me as much during one of our many confrontations. But it doesn't augur well for the men up front preparing for the assault; the 81mm. mortar is our main support weapon. 

     The enemy, occupying the summit of 479, is doubtlessly nervous as he watches our preparations but far more comfortable than he should be. By rights I should be overseeing an awful pounding, softening up his position and forcing him underground. But a couple of short rounds have fallen amongst our troops and overshots disappear into the jungle on the north side of his hill.  So I have radioed back to cease fire and the entire land war seems to have halted for a brief moment as the big picture of the 77th Division landing unrolls on our left with the destroyers racing in to the landing beaches at Ipil.

    These are converted WW1 four-stacker destroyers and are being used as landing ships, which has never been done before. Previously troops were landed from craft expressly designed for the task; Higgins boats, Amtracs, LCI.s or LST.s.  And the shrinking Japanese empire has prompted a new desperate measure, another first that materialized during the battle for Leyte; the kamikaze, and I am counting. There are at least thirty five of them peeling off, sliding sideways, down into a sky full of tracers and bursting anti-aircraft fire.  The 'Divine Wind' are very young and have not been long in the service of their country. Each chooses his ship, but their inexperience tells in the face of bursting AA and a logical unfamiliarity with the aircraft in a final power dive. One after another they lose control and plunge futilely into the drink. 

     It seems utterly ineffectual and as I watch I feel mildly amused and superior, also somewhat unsettled. We regularly take risks in connection with our duties, but suicide isn't part of the pact. As General Patton said, "You're not here to die for your country, your job is to make the other son of a bitch die for his."  Only the enigmatic oriental mind (we supposed) could imagine suicide to be profitable in military terms and watching them drop to their deaths we marvelled at their fearless resolve.  

     Half a century on I realize the 'fearless' was a ridiculous supposition on our part. Whatever they were sweating on, losing their nerve or something trivial in their last moments like bowel control, they were suffering the numb and awful anguish of the condemned. They were young, patriotic and stupid enough to have volunteered to die for emperor and homeland on the face of it or the regard of superiors, peers, girlfriends or families beneath it all and face is the only thing left to save. They haven't sorted it out, and never will.

     Looking back on my own youthful recklessness after a lifetime's experience or taking the critic's place on the sidelines there is a temptation to discredit youthful intelligence; it cannot imagine personal extinction hence neither dwells on nor fears the possibility. But it was worse than that. I could imagine being dead but I thought I was special and that nothing could happen to me in particular. I was arrogant in my normal state and as a commander, albeit of a very small group of men, I had too many other concerns.  And there is a feeling before the assault, an exhilaration that wells up with the adrenalin. Like lust it blanks out all reflection on the manifold unsettling possibilities and consequences. It is a focused state of mind, a certainty like nothing else; certainly nothing so superficial as religious belief as professed by Lt. Petrovitch, who sweats over his rosary, desperately calling on the Virgin now and in the hour of our death.  

     Petrovitch and I were regularly at each other's throats and my friend Jesse Odom once remarked, "Petrovitch, you're big enough to hunt bears with a switch and you don't have the guts of a worm."

     The fear of death unmanned a lot more people than Lt. Petrovitch but they were usually cunning enough to avoid becoming infantry officers.

     And back to that moment overlooking the sparkling ocean with the destroyers zigzagging madly, throwing everything but the mess tables skyward, which is rapidly emptying of planes with no attending let-up in the volume of exploding hardware. Only one wins his Hero of Nippon medal; the destroyer Warden (I found the name out later) goes up in a great burst of flame and smoke.  Then there are no more kamikazes. But for the sinking Warden it is as if they had never been and the ships disappear under the line of small hills lying between us and the farther shore. They will run aground on the beaches, ramps will drop from their bows from which the men of the 77th will race through the surf. But from our vantage point the show is over and our myopic attentions refocus on the task at hand; we have received the order to attack.  

     We are about halfway up the hill; E Company is on my left, F Company on the right. I am with E Company, Captain Delmer E. Paugh commanding, close to me Lt. Petrovitch, leader of 1st platoon, E Company. Above and now firing down on us the Japanese, organization unknown and who the hell cares; we have to kill them and take the hill whatever outfit they belong to. Bullets are flying everywhere.  

     Non-combatants have an endless fascination for the vicarious experience of battle. There is an almost pornographic frisson at the finer details of blood-letting, accompanied by a marvelling at how men can do these things, for the reader suspects that he himself would almost certainly be cowering somewhere behind a rock. The first part explains the overwriting common to popular literature and the detailed self-analyses with which WW 2 literature is fashionably adorned. In fact the competent participants don't waste time on any of these things. Under fire, introspection is the last thing on anybody's mind.  And for the second part, odds are that the reader's instincts are entirely correct. Most of our boys spent the war in hiding. So there it is, the conspiracy of silence, the final taboo in the pornography of violence and military history broken, the great American illusion violated, and nobody can feel good about it. 

     We had a saying that "Patriotism runs proportional to distance from the front."  But however every soldier conducted himself, it is the fact of having been tested that divides forever the civilian who waves the flag, identifies with 'our brave boys,' and nurses his impotent rage at the enemy from the veteran who knows just who he is and who we all are and unlike me is wise enough not to speak thereof.  So the boys on Hill 479 know exactly who they are, what the score is and they are not advancing resolutely on the enemy except in the imaginations of the folks back home. E and F Companies are not going anywhere; they are on the ground, hiding behind rocks, plastered flat behind any small hummock or contour that offers even a modicum of cover while an enemy machine gun sweeps out an arc only inches above them. At this moment there is no shame in that. Our superiority to the enemy is that we are not required to throw our lives away in a demonstration of spirit, patriotism and obedience to unbending military discipline.  

     At the beginning of the battle we easily repelled regular nightly Banzai attacks on our defense perimeter, killing everyone who came at us at little cost to ourselves. If progress is to be made, it will not be by a concerted charge against an entrenched enemy. On the other hand our boys could be doing a lot better; very few are even returning fire. As is normally the case in these situations, everyone is waiting for somebody else to do something and it is not as hopeless as it might appear. Success comes of considered acts of initiative by a few qualified individuals. Like me, who grew up poor in hard times, fought his way up on the streets, and in the words of Lt. Colonel Smith, is the stupidest S.O.B. he has ever seen and certain to get himself killed.  I look about to my right. On top of the hill a Jap machine gunner in a clump of brush is firing straight down at point blank range into F Co. The men of F Co. know he's there but they can't see him. I can see him, but I am armed with an M1 carbine which means I can shoot anyone who passes the range requirement, which is to clobber him first with the gun butt. The gunner must be 200 feet up the hill and showing very little of himself.  

     To my left I spot a young soldier with a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle). He is busy contracting his sphincter so as not to embarrass himself or his friends and keeping his head down so close to the ground he can hardly breathe let alone look for enemy machine guns. I yell at him "You with the BAR, crawl over here, I want it!"

     I can almost see the surprise and relief on his face at the prospect of getting rid of that damn gun and the responsibility of engaging an enemy similarly armed. This is more than he had ever hoped for. He leaps to his feet to dash over to me, but is immediately hit and drops with several bullet holes in his armpit. I crawl over to him to get the BAR.

     Petrovitch is now aroused. "You son of a bitch! Don't you give orders to my men! Who the hell do you think you are!"

    "Fuck yourself asshole, I want that gun!"

     Now I have it and I crawl back to my vantage point, lay the gun across a small hummock of grass, take careful aim and at full automatic fire blast the machine gunner off the hill. Dirt and shrubbery is flying in all directions.

    Someone in F Co., seeing their nemesis is out of the game, jumps up, screams "F Co., lets go!"

    I leap to my feet, yell "E Co., lets go!" and we charge up the hill.

    Petrovitch is now beside himself and abreast of me, racing forward yelling "You don't command here!"

    "Up yours!" I yell; "Let's go! Let's go, E Company!"  

     Petrovitch would rather be somewhere else but he is advancing toward the enemy with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. This is totally contrary to all his usual instincts but I have caused a serious casualty and taken his platoon away from him and he is outraged, following me up the hill screaming abuse. Two of his sergeants are on his left, my radioman on my right, F Company further to the right.  And then we are on the crest of the hill and firing down into the Japanese foxholes. The Japanese are chanting. It is something mournful that I have never heard from them before or since, perhaps a death chant. Whatever they're singing, they are dying under our fire. I am standing and my radioman is kneeling as we fire down on them.

     He is one of the boys who helped load my ship in Pearl Harbour when I was made a temporary Transport Quartermaster. He had liked my style and asked if I could help get him out of the Quartermasters. He wanted to be in my platoon and had to take a break from sergeant to private but he did it anyway. If someone volunteers like that, he is a good man and it's worth pulling strings to get him.

     Suddenly I am flat on my back, head downhill. My chest feels as though I had been hit with a sledgehammer, my shirt is torn like I've fallen on a chainsaw, my suspenders and cartridge belt are off to my right. More than anything I am utterly surprised and bewildered. I look over to my left; Petrovitch is dead. There is a small hole in his brow and a much larger one in the back of his head.  The two sergeants are down and my radioman is on his knees in agony. A burst of machine gun fire from the next hill has swept us from the ridgetop and we are sitting or lying stunned and bloody behind the cover of the crest. But the others are in the Japanese foxholes now, the hill is ours and the machine gun on the next hill will soon be silenced by some other guy with a BAR.

     I pull open my shirt to ascertain the damages. I am untouched. While I am dazedly examining myself and wondering what happened to me, I glance down at my left hand hanging from its sleeve, covered with blood. I take my shirt off and there in my arm is the bullet and two pieces of steel. Now I know. The bits of steel are the previously folded plate that held my suspender strap to the riser from my cartridge belt. The bullet has been deflected from my chest by this tiny scrap of steel. It's one of those miracles an atheist like me has no right to expect, especially since I have been giving Petrovitch hell for weeks over his bead counting and instructions to God on  running His business. Now both our instincts have been vindicated.  

     A few twists and I have the two bloody pieces of steel out of my arm and am working on the bullet which is all splayed out beneath several veins with only the tail of the slug sticking out. As I carefully work away at it here comes my friend Lt. Hoech. He pauses, looks at Petrovitch, looks at me (Lt. Hoech is H Company machine gun commander).  "What the hell are you doing?"

     "I am trying to get this slug out of my arm, sais tu."

     "Well why don't you go back to the aid station you stupid bastard?"  By now he is vomiting on account of me or Petrovitch.  

     "Because this thing bothers me and when I get it out I'll put my shirt back on and retire."

     I walked back to the aid station and was in the field hospital for five days. The rest of the wounded were carried off; the kid with the BAR was sent way back, he lived. My radioman was sent way back too. I later learned that a bullet had entered his shoulder and came out over his hip, taking out several ribs on the way and I never saw him again. I never found out what became of him. There were no facilities for finding them; when they were gone, they were gone; it was all part of the game. I don't even remember his name. 

Ed. note: My father was a lucky and contrary man. Some of the above action sounds highly unlikely; then again the kind of men who lived these stories and survived are the few who came home in one piece which magnifies the probabilities considerably. I have heard these same stories a dozen times, seen the little rosebud of protruding flesh on his upper arm, the scars and Silver Stars, (only one with an oak leaf cluster) and the other medals. And to clinch it he never wore them nor did we ever have camo gear nor a machine gun in the closet like your Walter Mittys, much less fry bacon on it like  your political dirtbags.
   I shall leave the excerpts with that. Before Leyte he spent two years on garrison duty in the Aleutians as a private in a scumbag first draft regiment gambling, looting cargoes, and doing k.p. for the airforce. Still to come: (you will have to buy the book) he took Petrovich's platoon into the bloodbath on Okinawa where it turned over three times in as many months, with 12  dead. Wounded on Tanabaru, he was hit by a knee mortar battling a large contingent of Japanese behind American lines after an embarrassing infiltration; three hundred of the enemy marched brazenly through the U.S. lines and took up positions above the motor pool in a suicidal standoff.

    At the end of the battle his E company cleaned up the caves on the coast up to Yonabaru with white  phosphorous grenades, napalm and cigarettes helped by loudhailers from the navy offshore. His formal war ends in a hospital on Saipan, expecting to shortly land on the home islands. But with Hiroshima and the Japanese surrender he was demobilized.
   Even if he had survived he would never have met my mother. Our unlikely and  exorbitant lives, each and every one are predicated on impossible co-incidence and chains of events going back to tree shrews with the dinosaurs, themselves wiped out by a single event, far greater than the atom bomb. For both of which the descendants of those self-same shrews, we 'Riders on the Storm' -  give special thanks.
 Then  the rest of his life - the political campaigns, commercial and environmental battles, regrets, a last word, all mostly bloodless but ever up against the world.  Hit 'Subscribe' to be notified of the book launch shortly. It will be in e-book form to begin with and it may be free on Amazon initially.

 GS