A Man Called Milo Morai

VI

Almost overnight, the training regiment became a training division. With the overall size more than quadrupled while the available numbers of cadre remained almost static, new and exalted ranks fell like so much confetti. The captain of Milo’s company became a light colonel and took James Lewis along with him to be his captain-adjutant in his new battalion command. The company exec should then have advanced to company commander save for the fact that he had already been bumped up to major and was serving on the staff of the division. Two of their three second lieutenants were also bumped up and shipped out, leaving only the newest officer, Second Lieutenant Muse, to become a first lieutenant and take over the company. As Lewis had long planned, this frantic shuffling left Jethro Stiles in the position of first sergeant and Milo, bumped to tech sergeant, as field first.

By the time they had managed to get the first class of draftees through their mill and off to advanced basic training, there were none of the original cadre contingent remaining at a rank lower than sergeant, and the resultant situation was so critical as to lead to the virtual shanghaiing of trainees showing even the bare minimum of needed talents or of prior military experience to fill empty cadre slots in the company Table of Organization and Equipment (TO&E). Nor were they alone in this practice; from division down it was the same story. The general preference was for enlistees, but they would take draftees, too, figuring—rightly, as it turned out—that all of the men would be around for however long the war lasted.

The world continued to turn, and the new training division and many another like it continued to painfully remold their quotas of soft civilian levies into reasonable facsimiles of soldiers. Class after class after class of them passed through the hands of Lieutenant Muse, First Sergeant Stiles and Sergeant Moray on the initial steps along a path that would lead, for some, to death or dismemberment.

Elsewhere on that same world, II Duce, Benito Mussolini, launched the Italian army on an offensive against the small, weak army of Greece, moving out of already occupied Albania. The Greek forces of General Alexander Papagos not only stopped the numerically superior, vastly better-supplied and -armed Italian army, they launched two ferocious counterattacks that drove the invaders in full rout back over the Albanian border. Papagos then took the offensive, his troops pouring into occupied Albania in full pursuit of the demoralized Italians. Reinforcements of men and materiel poured in from Italy, of course, but even with these, the best that Italian General Visconti-Prasca could do was to hold a little over half of Albania, the rest being occupied by the Greeks. It is most probable that that unhappy man thought quite often of the hoary folk proverb involving the best treatment of sleeping dogs.

Completely lacking any air force, the Greeks had been aided in this regard by elements of the British forces engaged against the Italians in North Africa. Had the British not constructed airbases and supply points on the Greek mainland and on Crete, chances are good that Mussolini’s Teutonic allies would have allowed Visconti-Prasca and his stymied, stalemated army to twist slowly in the wind of the Albanian mountains until hell froze over solidly. But the German high command, just then preparing to invade their sometime ally, Russia, and not at all savoring the thought of Greek-based British planes menacing a flank of their Russia-bound army, elected to drag the well-singed Italian chestnuts from out of the Greek fire.

When once the Nazi propagandists had thoroughly cowed the leaders of Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, forced them in their terror to sign degrading treaties and sent in German troops to occupy and prepare for an invasion of Greece, Britain sent General Henry Wilson with upward of sixty thousand British troops from North Africa (where they, too, had recently inflicted a humiliating defeat on Italian arms in the deserts).

But Wilson’s sixty thousand and the remainder of Papagos’ hundred and fifty thousand proved just no match for the Waffen-SS, Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe units thrown against them in their hastily erected position. The German invasion had commenced on April 6, and by April 29 the shattered remnants of the Greek army had surrendered and the only British still remaining in Greece were either captives or corpses.

The conquest of Crete took only about ten days and was a purely Luftwaffe victory, even the ground troops being of the Luftwaffe Fallschirmjager or airborne troops. The lightning-fast victories of German arms made it abundantly clear to a closely watching world that only large, strong, well-trained and, above all else, well-supplied and well-armed forces could represent any sort of a match for the triumphant forces now scouring Europe and the Balkans with fire and steel.

The United States of America was not as yet formally a warring nation, but only fools could doubt that she soon must be such. This became more than abundantly clear when the U.S. Navy destroyer Kearny, while helping to protect a Canadian merchant convoy in the waters off Iceland, was torpedoed by a German U-boat on October 17, 1941. A brand-spanking-new vessel replete with all modern appurtenances, DD Kearny survived the torpedoing and limped back to port safely. But not so with the elderly four-stacker DD Reuben James, two weeks later. The James was torpedoed without warning, the deadly “fish” struck her main magazine and the explosion ripped her completely in two. The bow section sank immediately and the stern section stayed afloat only long enough to explode into millions of pieces; all of the ship’s officers went down with her, and a bare forty-five of her men were saved.

“If you don’t want to go to war,” First Sergeant Jethro Stiles remarked to Milo, “then isn’t it a bit silly to allow your warships to escort the merchant shipping of a combatant? Roosevelt—or someone very close to him, at least—wants us in the war against Germany and Italy, you can bet your GI shoes on that, my friend. Of course, it may well be economics, pure and simple. Arming for a war and then fighting it is a surefire way of pulling a country out ,of a depression. He’s tried damned near everything else, the crippled old socialist bastard, so maybe he figures this war business to be his last card. I tell you, Milo, the people of this country are going to live to heartily regret allowing that man and his near-Bolshevik cronies to play their socialistic New Deal games on the citizens and institutions and economy of this country. And now he and they are going about making damned certain that, like Wilson, they drag us into another war in which we have no real business.”

Stiles sighed deeply, then shrugged. “Naturally, I could well be wrong on the whys. Roosevelt and his Red-loving friends may just be all a-boil to help Mother Russia, but that’s as poor a reason to send Americans to be killed and butchered as any of the others. Josef Stalin is as much a murderous animal as is Adolf Hitler, if not more so; power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and Stalin has been in power for longer than Hitler, so we can be certain that he has become far and away more barbaric. And if proof of that last were needed, consider his recent purge of his own army’s officer corps.

“If this is Roosevelt’s reason for plunging our nation into another European war, it is akin to making alliance with a bear to fight a pack of wolves; even if we win, what is there to stop the bear from attacking and eating us? Maybe that’s just what Roosevelt and his crew want to happen.

“Maybe it’s what is ordained, too. Russell and Wells and not a few others seem to be of the opinion that socialism is the wave of the world’s future. Sometimes I get the sinking feeling that we—the world’s republics and monarchies—are at the best only fighting a grim, foredoomed, rearguard action against that which is to be.”

Abruptly, he switched back to his everyday, workaday voice and manner. “Oh, shit, Milo, if I keep on in this fucking vein, I’ll be singing ‘Einsamer Sonntag’ and opening a few of the larger, more important of my own veins.”

“‘Lonely Sunday’?” queried Milo. “I don’t think I’ve heard of that song, Jethro.”

“It’s called ‘Gloomy Sunday’ in this country and other English-speaking countries. It was written some years ago by a Hungarian, I believe, and has become infamous because so very many people, worldwide, suicided while listening to it. Also, it is said, every artiste who recorded it has come to a bad end.

“Which, my friend, is precisely the end you and I are going to come to if we don’t get cracking and have this report ready for our little captain to turn in to Colonel Oglethorpe on Monday.”

One weekend in late 1941, one class having just finished and another not due until the middle of the coming week, Stiles and Milo had left the skeleton-manned company in the hands of a weekend charge of quarters and taken a few days of accrued leave together at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Free-spending Jethro had easily snagged a brace of attractive and complaisant “ladies” to share the beachside cottage he had earlier rented. When he and Milo were not fishing in the icy surf or enjoying their catch along with a plentitude of other foods and alcohol, they enjoyed the attentions of their bed warmers.

On the Sunday afternoon, Milo and the two women sat close to the driftwood fire blazing on the hearth while Jethro basted for the last time a bluefish stuffed with herbs, spices, breadcrumbs, onions and finely chopped shellfish. The aroma of the baking^fish, of the horse potatoes baking with it and of the other savories simmering in the battered saucepans atop the gas burners filled the small parlor with mouthwatering cheer every bit as much as did the opened magnum of champagne and the two unopened still-chilling ones nestled in a washtub full of cracked ice.

Pleasantly tiddly, Milo had but just arisen from his place to fetch a fresh magnum when he heard rapid footsteps ascending the shaky stairs, then an even more rapid pounding on the front door. He opened it to admit their landlord, Huell Midgett, a long-retired Coast Guard chief of about sixty years.

Politely ignoring the two female “guests,” the old petty officer took a few breaths so deep as to set his beerbelly and multiple chins ajiggle, then said, “Boys, ain’t none of my own bizness, of course, but you two is both of you Army off sers. Ain’t you?”

Jethro looked up from the fish and smiled. “Close enough, Chief Midgett, close enough. We’re noncoms, but first-three-graders. Why?”

Midgett shook his head dubiously. “Funny, I ain’t been wrong often, and I coulda swore you were both off sers. But anyway, y’all better git on iny telephone to your base, and real quick, too. ‘Cause this mornin’ the fuckin’ Japs has bombed Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands. The fuckers caught the whole damn Pacific Fleet bottled up in Pearl Harbor, it sounds like on my shortwave radio. Feller I was talkin’ to said all they could see from his place was black, oily smoke and fire way up inta the sky, them and the fuckin’ Jap planes, was all.

“He said he was yet to see airy a one of our planes, so the Nip fuckers must’ve bombed the aerodromes afore any of ours could git up to fight the slant-eyed bastids. Afore he signed off, he allowed as how he ‘spected to see Japs on the fuckin’ beaches afore night. Don’t thishere shit beat all, boys?”

The chaos to which Milo and Jethro returned was indescribable. At the hour of the Japanese sneak attack on the Hawaiian Islands, over half of the noncommissioned cadre and some two-thirds of the officer complement of the training division had been off post to lesser or greater distances. Although their post was thousands of miles from the Pacific Coast, although the only local Jap of whom anyone knew was the post commander’s gardener, an unknowing witness to the pandemonium would never have guessed the truth.

During the two days it took Milo and Jethro to get back, the gates were become mazes of entrenchments, sandbagged strongpoints, machine-gun nests manned by edgy, sleepless, confused men with itchy trigger fingers. Sentries walked the perimeters, while details laid out barbed-wire entanglements just beyond those perimeters, unreeled and laid commo wire for field telephones, dug and roofed over revetments or excavated tank traps and laid land mines. Three-quarter-ton and the new quarter-ton scout cars mounting machine guns on pedestals moved here and there along the perimeters slowly, men with binoculars scanning both ground and skies lest they too be surprised by the treacherous yellow enemies.

Fortunately for all concerned, Milo still was wearing his identity plates strung around his neck under his mufti, but Jethro was not, and not until a Military Police staff sergeant who knew them both of old was summoned would the grim-faced, tommy gun-armed guards allow them to drive onto the base.

In B Company’s orderly room, the CQ, a buck sergeant named Schrader, all but wept openly at sight of the two of them. When he had rendered his report to Stiles, Milo demanded, “Where’s your runner, Emil?”

“Some captain from up division come and took him and damn near ever other swingin’ dick in the whole fuckin’ area, Sarnt Moray. Said he needed bodies for to man the p’rimeter. That was Sunday afternoon, late, and ain’t none of them fuckers come back, neither, not even to eat or sleep or shower or change clothes or nuthin’. I done been here since then all by my lonesome, checkin’ fellers in and watchin’ them all get dragged off for details and all, and I guess I’d’ve plumb starved to death if old Sarnt Trent hadn’ sent me chow and all over here whenever he thought to.”

“Okay, Emil, you did well, all things considered, you did very well,” stated Jethro, clapping a hand on the haggard man’s shoulder and smiling. “Now you shag ass back to your quarters and shower and get yourself some sack time, at least twenty-four hours of it, before you report back here to me. Now, go!”

When once the exhausted man with his dark-ringed, bloodshot eyes and his three days’ growth of beard had staggered out in the direction of his barrack, the two noncoms began to go through the stack of messages.

“The captain called in Sunday, about the same time we did,” Jethro announced. “He should have been back from New Orleans by now, shouldn’t he?”

“Maybe not.” Milo shook his head. “Not if he was driving over the same kinds of roads we were, and his old Ford isn’t a match for your car, either, Jethro. He might well have had a breakdown,in some backwater without a telephone or a wire.”

At that moment, the telephone jangled. Both grabbed for the receiver, but Stiles reached it first. “B Company, Sergeant Stiles speaking, sir.” Then he smiled faintly and visibly relaxed.

“Hello, James … ahh, Captain Lewis, sir. What’s our status? Odd that you should ask me that, sir. Sergeant Moray and I have just driven in from South Carolina to find that someone from up at division has taken it upon himself to strip this company of every man with the exception of cooks, first-three-graders and the company CQ. As of this moment, there are no officers, two master sergeants, one tech sergeant, one buck sergeant and three cooks in all of B Company.”

He fell silent for only a moment, then exclaimed, “Whaat? My God, James, you can’t be serious. That bad, is it? All right, all right, you can borrow Milo, but only if you help me get back some of my other men from whoever has them just now. War or no war, the last I heard there were inductees due in here on Wednesday, Thursday, latest, and my cadre are needed here, in the company area, one hell of a lot more than squatting in a trench somewhere out on the post perimeter. Besides, does any officer or man really think the Japanese are going to assault us here within the next day or so? Doesn’t it stand to reason they’ll hit California or Washington State first? And the last time I consulted a map, James, California was over two thousand miles from here.”

He paused once more, and Milo could hear Captain James Lewis’ familiar voice, though not his words. Then Stiles spoke again. “Yes, I understand, James. Milo will be over as soon as he can get into uniform and drive there. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

In the existing paucity of officers, Captain James Lewis ranked high enough to need very little bluster to free the impressed cadremen of his and Milo’s training battalion from the guard and labor details scattered here and there about the periphery of the post. And those men —tired, hungry, sleepless, filthy and shivering with cold —were every one more than happy to clamber aboard the trucks and be borne back to hot meals, showers, clean clothes and their bunks.

By the time Milo had offloaded his company’s men before the mess hall and dispatched the trucks back to the motor pool, then reported back to the orderly room, Captain Muse and two of the other officers were back and affairs were gradually returning to as close to the old peacetime state of normalcy as any of them would again see.

With the dastardly attack on Pearl Harbor and the other military facilities on Oahu, the former flood of trainees became a virtual tsunami, as patriotism, rage and the declaration of war coincided to swell the ranks with not only the hapless draftees, but enlistees by the scores of thousands, the very cream of the citizenry answering the call to the colors of their now-beset land.

Given better pickings from which to choose, the training units began to flesh out, to replace stopgap personnel with really effective cadremen and, consequently, to turn out a far better grade of graduate from the basic training courses. But the great and too-rapid growth also necessitated the quick establishment of more training camps and units. James Lewis was advanced to major and sent to take command of a training battalion somewhere in a new camp in Pennsylvania. Captain Muse was given similar treatment, and all of the other company officers were promoted and shipped out. For all of his refusals, Jethro Stiles soon found himself commanding B Company with the silver bars of a first lieutenant on his shoulders. Milo moved up to first sergeant, with Emil Schrader, now a tech sergeant, as his field first.

Schrader hailed from Kansas and was a son of immigrants from Brandenburg. Though American-born and -bred, he spoke better and more grammatical German than English. Milo often chatted with him in that tongue … and that was where the trouble started.

Jethro entered Milo’s office and carefully closed and latched the door one morning. “Milo,” he began in a low, guarded tone, almost a whisper, “something damned strange is going on concerning you. Have you made any application for OCS or for a transfer out of the unit without telling me about it?”

“Of course not, Jethro,” was Milo’s prompt reply. “Why?”

Lieutenant Stiles shook his head slowly. “Why? I don’t know why, anything, Milo. But I just received an order to hold you ready here to be picked up and transported to an interview with an officer that I happen to know is connected with division CID … probably G-2, too, if not Army Counterintelligence. I can’t imagine why a man like that would want to interview a noncom of a training company. Can you?”

Milo disliked Major Jay Jarvis from first laying eyes upon him. The man was short, skinny and pasty-white, save for his petulant, liver-colored lips, a multitude of facial pimples and muddy-brown eyes. He was of early middle years, balding and had chewed his nails to the quick, and his class-A uniform hung on his bony figure like a sack. His hands never stayed still for an instant, always playing with one of the profusion of stiletto-sharp pencils, a cold pipe which had strewn ashes from end to end of the GI desk, a stack of manuals and pamphlets, a higher stack of assorted papers and personnel files, the knot of his tie or the soggy handkerchief with which he dabbed at a dripping beak of a nose.

When Milo had been coldly ushered into the office by the armed second lieutenant and buck sergeant who had escorted him here from B Company, the door had been closed—and locked—behind him, leaving him to salute and report to this strange officer.

The major looked up at him, but would not look him in the eyes. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” he demanded in an atrocious accent.

“]a, Herr Major. Ich spreche Deutsch,” he replied aloud, adding, to himself, “And one hell of a lot better than you do, you sourpussed bastard.”

“You speak it well, too,” said the officer grudgingly. “As well as a native, I’d say. Moray, you’re being considered for a commission, but we need to know more about you, more than this”—he flicked a personnel file with the nailless fingers of one soft hand—“so-called 201 file of yours gives us. Where did you learn your German, Moray?”

Milo sighed silently. Here it starts again after all this time. “Sir, I don’t know how or when or where I learned any of the languages I speak. I have been an amnesiac since the mid-thirties. My very earliest memory is of waking up in a hospital in Chicago, having been found clubbed down and robbed in an alley.”

The major smiled coldly, showing uneven, scummy teeth. “Sergeant, am I really expected to believe that hooey? Please credit the Army of the United States of America with some small degree of intelligence. No, I am not one of your Sturmbannfuhrers, Moray, or whatever your real name is, but I can sniff out a phony just as quickly as they can, mister! Can you offer me a single, solitary shred of proof that you are who and what you say you are? You’d better be able to, mister, because since we arrested Sergeant Emil Schrader, you’re—”

“For the love of God, major, why did you- arrest Emil?” Milo interrupted, and military protocol be damned.

Anger smoldered briefly in the officer’s lackluster eyes and his mouth started to snap a reprimand at Milo’s interruption. But then the anger died away without a wisp of smoke and he shrugged and replied, “Because he’s a Nazi spy, Moray, that’s why, as if you didn’t know it all along. You’ve been heard time and again conferring with him in German. Those who heard you didn’t understand what you two were saying, but they did recognize the langauge when they heard it, you see.

“You and Schrader identified the men we planted in B Company immediately, didn’t you? I know that’s why you began talking in code, right? Still in German, but in code.”

“Major Jarvis,” said Milo, “I find it difficult to credit any of this. You think, truly, that Schrader and I are Nazi spies? That you might entertain some questions about my background is perhaps understandable, all things considered. But Emil Schrader’s background is completely documented from year one. He was born in Kansas; his family still lives and farms there. His parents came from Germany sometime back before the Great War, but all of their children are Americans, born.”

Jarvis nodded. “And Emil Schrader, his parents and all of his brothers and sisters saw fit to become members of the German-American Bund, as coy a nest of traitors and spies as this country ever has produced. His father, Franz Schrader, is high on the Kansas councils of these homegrown Nazi-lovers.”

In grim tones, Milo stated, “So you think that simply because Emil and his family joined and participated in an ethnic group, did so long before any American considered the Germans to be our enemies, he is a spy. Major, don’t you think that if the Nazis really wanted to use that poor dimwitted boy for a spy they’d at least put him someplace of more importance to the nation and the war effort than in a noncom slot in a basic training company? If you types are going after everyone who has some German in this division, you’re going to have your hands full and you’ll need to enlarge the post stockade to lock them all up.

“In addition to German and English, major, I speak Russian. Does that make me a Bolshevik? I speak Italian. Does that make me a Fascist? I speak Spanish. Does that make me a Falangist?”

Jarvis began to squirm in his chair. “Okay, Moray, okay. If you are what you say you are, I … we … are going to need some proof, some hard facts in corroboration.” He stood up. “You sit down at this desk and write me out a complete history of your life … well, of as much of it as you can remember. I want names, titles, dates, places, everything, Take all the time you need; you’re relieved of all your other duties until this is done with, understand? But tell it all, Moray. If we catch you in a lie, that’s it—you’ll go to jail with Schrader. Better get to it, sergeant.”

During the nearly forty days it took the authorities to run down and check out the persons whose names he had given in his handwritten account, Milo was allowed to carry on his work in B Company almost as normal. He was, of course, restricted in his movements; his pass had been lifted and he could not leave the post for any reason. Moreover, he was dead certain that he was under constant surveillance and that his quarters were being searched about once each week.

Not having been told not to do so, he had early on discussed the entire matter with Jethro, whose immediate reply had been, “Bullshit, Milo. You’re no spy and neither is Schrader, for that matter. I’ll see what I can do, and I’ll get in touch with James, too. But you play along with the silly bastards, at this point. It would seem that the lunatics have taken over the asylum.”

So Milo just sweated it out, doing his hard job as well as he could, breaking in a replacement field first and waiting for the other shoe to fall. He was in the field when the same armed duo sought him out, relieved him of his empty pistol and nudged him into their three-quarter-ton command car, then drove back to the division headquarters.

The file before Major Jarvis still was marked “Moray, Milo (n.m.i.),” but it was now much fatter and there were two other fat files of differing colors under it. When Milo had gone through the formalities, there was dead silence save for the tapping of a pencil point on the major’s still-scummy teeth.

At length, the officer spoke. “Moray, I could almost believe that I was right about you to begin with, but if I believed that, I’d have to also believe that some damned big people are also involved with you, both niilitary and civilian. So all I can say now is that, mister, you have some friends in some damned important jobs and places —two military medical officers, one of them a Navy captain, and a very well-connected JAG officer, to name but three of a lengthy list.

“Your story you wrote down for us checks out, all of it. But, Jesus God, mister, with the linguistic abilities you have, why in hell have you wasted so much time as a damned infantry sergeant? Christ Almighty, man, that’s the hardest, most thankless drudgery in the Army, what you’re doing. And we, my service, is desperate for people like you, and our need gets greater every day, too. I think I’m safe in promising you that if you make application for transfer to the Counterintelligence Corps, you’ll be a commissioned officer inside a month and you’ll probably outrank me before a year is up.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Milo. “But I’m happy where I am. I have no desire to be an officer. I’m needed in B Company, and my friends, my buddies are all there.”

“Not good enough, mister, not good enough at all,” snapped Jarvis. “Fuck what you want, mister, this is war! Go on back to your company, your friends, your buddies … for now. But I’m going to have orders cut transferring you and your abilities to where they’ll do the. most good for Uncle Sam and the U.S. Army.

“That’s it, Moray. Dismiss. Lieutenant Carter will give you back your sidearm as you leave and Sergeant Lawford will see you’re driven back to wherever you were when they found you.”

Milo’s hand was on the knob when Jarvis spoke once more. “You’re no longer restricted, of course, Moray, and you’ll notice a few faces missing from B Company in the next few days, too. I can no longer justify keeping them and you in place. But I still don’t trust you, mister. I think, I feel that there’s one hell of a lot more to you than meets the eye. My intuition tells me that there’s something damned odd about you, and my intuition is never wrong, so I mean to take you and just what you are or are not on as a sort of personal crusade … when this war doesn’t interfere, that is.

“Yes, you have scads of highly placed friends and supporters, but then so too do I, mister, and you’d better believe it, too. No matter how high you rise in rank, I’m going to keep digging at this secret of yours until I finally expose it and you.

“No, don’t turn that knob, not yet, Moray. This … this thing that I sense about you is … well, if certain persons heard all of what I feel about you, they’d most likely see me tucked away in some back ward at Walter Reed in a straitjacket for the duration of the war.

“Moray, I feel about you the same as I would feel … well, almost the same as I would feel around some highly intelligent animal. It’s as if you’re not really a human being, just a … something masquerading as one of us. Had I the authority, I’d have you run through the most complete physical examination of which the post medical facility is capable, have them do or at least try to do everything until I was proved right about you. What do you think of that, mister?”

Milo just shook his head. “I think you’ve got what a very brilliant friend of mine, a man who had studied under Dr. Sigmund Freud, used to call a fixation … I think that that was the proper term. Yes, Major Jarvis, you probably would benefit from the attentions of a good psychiatrist and a well-equipped, modern psychiatric facility, for you are clearly disturbed. You are bound to be suffering delusions if you think I’m not human. What the hell else could I be, major? One of H. G. Wells’ damned Martians, maybe?”