Plain of Jars: and Other Stories

Moogerman

$ 83 $ Moogerman Moogerman was holding forth again. He was standing with his back to a wall locker, facing three or four guys in partial stages of undress, his loud abrasive voice carrying as usual throughout the barracks like a radio turned up much too loud for comfort. I noticed Hepworth among the bunch and that he seemed to be hurrying with his dressing, either in an effort to make it to early chow, just as I hoped to do, or more likely, doing his damnedest to get away from Moogerman. I squeezed past the group—the passageway between the racks being very narrow—hoping I was giving off the impression that I was in a hurry myself while making a beeline for my locker. I wanted to dress, make chow early enough so that I might be in time for the first showing of the flick at the base theater. Lucky for me, no one seemed to pay any attention to me as I scooted by. “Yeah, well, them Nazis always go after the Jewish guy. You can count on it! You can count on it!” Moogerman was on one of his favorite topics, the persecution of the Jews. Not that all of us in the barracks weren’t sympathetic to Moogerman’s theme. We all knew about World War Two and the Holocaust, and if we didn’t before coming into the Corps as green teenagers, we damned well surely did by now because of Moogerman’s constant harping on the subject. Moogerman had made it an incredibly tiresome topic, had “run it in the ground and broken it off,” as my mother would say. He just didn’t know when or where to stop. Morning, noon, and night, as the 84 $ geary hobson expression goes, he lectured us on the atrocities of the Nazis. Of course, none of us felt in the least inclined to argue with him about it, but that wouldn’t stop him. He had an irritating way of making each discussion a highly argumentative and contentious ordeal. One of his more objectionable ways was his labeling as Nazi every German in existence, even Americans with German last names, linking them to Hitler and his thugs of well over a generation before. Along with his loudmouthedness, Moogerman had a way about him. He was big and bulky, with dark red and very thick hair, a face always in various stages of tension and contortion, with full and swollen-looking, always open lips, and an overly blaring voice that not only proclaimed his “Noo Yoo-woauk” superiority to all of us hicks. It had quickly become tiresome when he first came into the outfit. Certain topics of his would take centerstage and for a while that would be all he’d lecture about. His “all Germans are Nazis” routine, which seemed to play nonstop, probably only lasted about two weeks, but it seemed like years. Hell, we knew that Private Kretschmer and PFC Melsch weren’t Nazis—just Midwestern farmboys who happened to have German surnames—but Moogerman had singled them out almost from the beginning. Melsch’s German language knowledge, I happen to know, was limited to “sauerkraut” and “Volkswagen.” Kretschmer, on the other hand, caught more of Moogerman’s wrath, I believe, because he was physically smaller than Melsch, and certainly much smaller than Moogerman himself. Watching Moogerman intimidate Kretschmer was like watching a Great Dane lording it over a cowering Chihuahua. But I don’t think even Great Danes indulge a similar proclivity toward bullying as Moogerman did. Right after PFC Morris Moogerman had come into the outfit, he clued us all in on what oppression was all about. As a Jew, he was the firsthand expert. And this, you need to keep in mind, was in a barracks where more than half of us guys were either Black or Mexican, and a couple even Indian, like me. Or poor country white. And I am that, too. But more Indian than PCW. I’ve always thought that PCWs represent in many ways a pissed-on portion of American society. However, these distinctions were not considerations for Moogerman, and certainly they were not at all commenserate to “The Six Million” that he generally found a way of injecting into all his lectures. Once, I tried talking, albeit one-sidedly, to him about such matters as the Trail of Tears, smallpox-ridden blankets, and the real story behind so-called cavalry victories over Indians, but...