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24 Eisenhower's BiOgrapher ' HE DARKNESS LENGTHENS, the weather worsens while I make my way west. These November days bring a new sense of urgency to all I do, and homesickness too, especially as Thanksgiving nears. Everything seems more acute now, the stops, the time, my emotions, everything that is except the vast stretches of highway that still lie ahead. I blitz through Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania, where I was first introduced to the Army at ROTC summer camp. The clus, ter of white clapboard buildings, our barracks, our mess hall, sits deserted at this time of year, but I can still hear echoes of 1968, that summer of tumult and discontent. Robert Kennedy had been mur, dered, students were marching in the streets around the world-and I was suddenly in uniform, my Mustang consigned to a distant park, ing lot, the bumper still wearing a Eugene McCarthy sticker. Indian: town Gap was my boot camp. I had fired every individual weapon in the Army arsenal, thrown a hand grenade, taken off my protective mask in a tent filled with tear gas, peeled potatoes on K. P. I had done fairly well, all things considered, even won an overblown com' mendation for a platoon newspaper that another student editor and I had produced. But at Indiantown Gap, I also felt the first stirrings of disquiet over the role I was soon supposed to play. I race into Carlisle, Pennsylvania, intent on finishing my work here in the day and a half before Thanksgiving. This is the last archive I must search, the U.S. Army Military History Institute, the last place to discover S. L. A. Marshall's missing field notebooks. The 254 EISENHOWER'S BIOGRAPHER 255 institute's bibliography describes its Marshall holdings: "For World War II ... numerous notes of interviews and correspondence with participants are available concerning operations of the 82nd and 191st Airborne Divisions in Normandy and the Ardennes." I rush through eleven boxes of Marshall material at Carlisle, but no such notes are to be found. There are plenty of field notebooks all right, but all from later wars, Korea, Israel. Vietnam. And I am left feeling the same disappointment that I felt in Washington when I had visited the Office of the Army's Chief of Military History , carrying a copy of Marshall's 1958 letter saying he donated his field notebooks to that office. Marshall's section in the card catalog there seemed so promising, with individual cards for his field notes from the Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaigns in the Pacific, the 82nd Airborne's operations in Normandy and General Omar Bradley 's campaigns in II Corps. But the librarian came back and said that all these catalog cards had absolutely nothing to back them up in the stacks. I tried to be polite, but I still said how incredible it was that such important historical documents could be misplaced or lost. Perhaps, she offered, they were shipped to Carlisle. But that is not the case, I now confirm. And the Carlisle archivists point fingers of blame back at Washington. The Office of the Chief of Military History was shunted about that city during the mid-1970s, its vast holdings moved to three different locations. Carlisle 's archivists have long suspected that materials were lost during the moves. David Keough, one of the archivists, even brings forth a transmittal slip for a "Combat Interview Index, Dept. of the Army, Adjutant General's Office, 2 Sept. 48" that is said to contain "2,000 combat interviews" with "the testimony of 8,000 front-line officers and soldiers." I look up at Keough and exclaim, "This is it! This may not be Marshall's field notebooks, but it's the next best thing-all the interviews he would have done himself or probably read when he was theater historian. These are the interviews on which he drew his conclusions for Men Against Fire and they're far more extensive than anyone has reported." "There's only one problem," Keough responds. "What's that?" "This came to the archives from Washington by itself. You no- 256 RECONCILIATION ROAD ticed it mentions 244 pages of supporting materials. Well, not a page of those supporting materials ever arrived here." "What happened to them?" "We have no idea." I encounter other disappointments at Carlisle. A massive two· volume interview with Marshall is included in the materials, part of an Army program of "oral history" debriefings of general...

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