Second Glance
A life turned on a dime
SOMETHING ABOUT A SOLDIER
By Charles Willeford
255 pp. Random House, 1986 (Out of print)*
Reviewed by Carter Jefferson
This is a book about the U.S. Army in the late 1930s. About an enlisted man’s life in the Air Corps in the Philippines, and in the cavalry in California. And yet . . . it’s really about a period in American history most people have heard of but know nearly nothing about.
A few novels show us something about that era: The Joads trek across the Dust Bowl in hopes of finding a new life in California; Studs Lonigan tries to climb out of the slums of Chicago. But memoirs like Willeford’s are scarce, and a memoir can have an impact unlike that of a novel.
Willeford joined the Army in 1935 so his grandmother could eat—it’s that simple. His parents died young; his grandmother took him in, but soon lost her job selling millinery in the French Room at the May Company in Los Angeles. His uncle was able to give her a small allowance, but, says Willeford, “I could no longer ask her for a dime, or even five cents to ride the streetcar downtown.”
At sixteen, he finished his sophomore year in high school. He dreamed of being a poet, but school was a luxury he couldn’t afford. That summer he tried to find a job—any job. Selling newspapers on the street paid too little. He could find a few dimes under the stadium seats at the Coliseum in the winter, but in summer there were no games, so that, too, dried up. A friend told him he could join the National Guard, go to a two-week camp, and earn $14. He lied about his age, and his Army career began.
The camp, with its “little war games,” turned out to be fun, though even there signs of the dismal economy showed up: the captain of Willeford’s company, who had a B.A. in English, pumped gas at a Standard station; many of the band members played in the L.A. Symphony, but needed the extra dollar they could earn by attending weekly Guard meetings. Some of the troops had been in the regular Army—they persuaded Willeford it was a good bet.
Before he joined the regulars he made one last attempt to stay in civilian life. Wearing the only presentable clothes he had, “a good white oxford-cloth shirt and a tie” his uncle had given him, he asked for a job at every business along thirty blocks of Main street in L.A. Nobody could afford an office boy, but at his last stop a secretary gave him a hard-boiled egg she said she didn’t need for her lunch. He “borrowed some salt” from a cafe, ate the egg, and gave up his hunt.
The infantry didn’t need him. A recruiter told him they took only “previous service” enlistees to fill their two slots per month. After all, the entire Army consisted of only 45,000 men—even Portugal had a bigger force. The Air Corps found him a place, but he never flew in an airplane. After “a dull year” driving a truck at March Field, he enlisted for a two-year stint in the Philippines.
Filipino laborers did the scut work there. Willeford drove a fire truck. He had virtually no money to spend. The $21 a month privates earned was not much, even then. Still, there was just enough to buy him a whore and some whiskey on every payday, for whores in the Philippines cost half as much as those in the States. (Whores were cheap everywhere—starving women couldn’t join the Army then.) Cigarettes cost less, too; he could smoke tailor-mades instead of rolling his own. His engrossing stories of an 18-year-old’s Air Corps life, in and out of trouble, are comical and sad at the same time. He never felt like a soldier, he says.
He had time to finish three or four books a week from the Fort Stottenberg library, and kept up with current events by reading the magazines in his barracks day room. One day he picked up a copy of Scribner's and read a short story by Thomas Wolfe: “It wasn’t a regular story, it was an excerpt from a new novel he was writing. Again and again, throughout the story, he repeated, ‘Ah, April, sweet April,’ but nothing much happened.” Even poets like a little action now and then.
That he finally got when he returned to California. At last he became a real soldier—a cavalryman. He learned all about horses, and his readers do, too. Tribulations continued to abound, as they had earlier, and money was scarce as ever. He avoided the corporal who pimped for his wife, and admired the sergeant who demanded that he dress and act like a soldier. At the end, as a blacksmith, he wangled a promotion and a pay raise. He could start enclosing a five-dollar bill every month in the letters he wrote to his grandmother.
“It just went to prove that all a man had to do in the Army was to live right, work hard, and all the good things would eventually come his way. It had certainly worked out that way for me.”
The story ends in 1939, and I yearned to follow him through the rest of his life. A tank commander during WWII, he won decorations for bravery and a Purple Heart for his wounds. Back home a few years later, he retired from the Army. Never a poet, he wrote several mysteries in which he used his comic talent so well he made the best-seller list, and one hopes he lived happily ever after.
What makes this book more than just a lot of good stories is Willeford’s portrayal of the world he lived in. Money meant status then, as it does now, but few of the people reading this review will ever have their lives almost completely determined by the need to send their grandmothers a few dollars to fend off disaster. Whenever I hear that near-starvation has pushed someone into making a desperate choice, I think of Willeford. Somehow I don’t think most people could handle abject poverty with quite the humor and appreciation that he did.
*Note: This book is available as part of a paperback collection: The Collected Memoirs of Charles Willeford: I Was Looking for a Street/Something About a Soldier. Disc-Us Books, $24.95. Cheap used copies also are available, but the Boston Public Library doesn’t have it.
Carter Jefferson is editor of The Internet Review of Books.