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1. Back to School
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
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1 BACK TO SCHOOL Our appearance is hardly likely to inspire confidence, embraced as we are by dust, dirt, and mud, our inseparable companions . The habit of cleanliness, only a recent development in human history, is quickly lost in the combat zone because it is dependent on the availability of water. Here water is a precious substance we keep under guard, transport in our olive drab truck, purify, and use almost entirely for cooking and drinking. There is not enough for showering or bathing. One of the first truths I learned in the Army was that survival was not contingent on washing more than once a day. Here, each morning, we transform our helmets into washbasins-the "baths." Shaving is a hardship to be postponed whenever possible . But my addiction to concepts of antisepsis still compels me to rub a few drops of heavily chlorinated water over my hands whenever they become unbearably sticky. Sometimes weeks or months would pass before someorie would chance upon laundering or bathing facilities and it was expedient to make use of them. Last week, in an almost completely deserted French village close to the German border, one of our enterprising men negotiated an agreement with a withered widow who gratefully scrubbed everyone's clothes in return for several bars of soap and boxes of C rations. We carefully packed the clothes into our musette bags. Then two days ago, we heard of a shower room in a power plant converted into a commercial venture by a resourceful elderly German couple. We took turns, gamboling noisily beneath the beautiful hot water, then luxuriated in our still-fragrant clean clothes. As we were leaving, four gaunt, bedraggled, weary, menacing-looking men-displaced persons-entered the grounds. The obese German lady waddled over to us. I 3 "Please," she whispered. "Please. Stay a little longer. They are Russians and will take everything." We paid for the showers. I climbed into a jeep with the company CO and two of the men. The CO ordered the driver to leave. No one turned to watch. As the war continues, more of these homeless wanderers abandon their hiding places in desolate hills, dismal caves, and gutted cities. Going somewhere, trudging slowly, they carry packs and bundles, or push small carts and baby carriages. They roam nervously through the countryside like suspicious dogs alert to the presence of enemies, sniffing for food smells, evaluating the terrain for potential shelter. There is a sameness to their appearance: I can guess their nationalities only from their languages, not from their facial features or clothing. They are thin, pale, hungry, tired, and dirty, probably as dirty as we are, and for the same reasons. They ask for food and cigarettes. Unhappy , morose people. I find it difficult to realize that they were once loved, indispensable to their families; that our parents, wives, and friends would look and behave the same way if they had been the dispossessed , if they had just emerged from years of drudgery in slave labor camps. Sometimes German civilians ask us to protect them from the wanderers, but we cannot help them, and the enlisted men make the routine response: "They are your problem. You brought them here." Tonight I am sitting in a blacked-out room illuminated by a Coleman lamp. I am again dust covered and mud splattered, but unaware of my appearance. Nor am I thinking about the plight of civilians. My attention is on stud poker, a game that is almost always in progress when business slackens in the "Station," as it has today. The Station, the treatment room for the sick and wounded, is the heart of the medical collecting company, open twenty-four hours a day-except when we pack and move to a new location . A medical officer and a cadre of medical corpsmen are on constant duty. I am the medical officer of the day. The room is jammed with medical and surgical equipment. I 4 I The Beginning am so used to the stench that I do not notice the sweet wintergreen scent of methyl salicylate that the sergeant has recently used to rub down a soldier's aching back, nor the extramedical smell of French fries floating in from the adjacent kitchen, nor the chronic locker-room odor of unwashed soldiers. Only three patients since noon. The first soldier was dead on arrival; he had been playing with a German bazooka, and his legs and half his face were blown...