April 12th

Overcast and 5c. I turned the two gas fireplaces off last night, so that makes it officially spring in this house!
After tomorrow what I put on here will be somewhat limited for the next week as we are going to Salmon Arm.
The leaves are really popping now and the spring flowers are enjoying the cool weather.

Here is next part of "A Soldier's Story".

And by the way most everything you read on here are extracts from books I've written, they can be found at this web bookstore:  http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=984681

2

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wo days later I boarded an army bus that had started at Klamath Falls and was working its way south to San Francisco. When I got on there were half a dozen other recruits on board. By the time we got to ‘Frisco the bus was full and we were being followed by a second bus also full.  That evening we were all loaded on a couple of train day coaches and pulled out about midnight. Two days later we were off loaded in Columbus Georgia, then transported by truck to Fort Benning.

  It must have been close to midnight when we arrived and were escorted to some barracks. At five the next morning we were rousted out of bed, herded to a large shower room, after a luke warm shower and dressed only in our underwear, we were herded again to a large hall where one by one in alphabetical order were issued khaki underwear shirts, pants, socks and boots. We were directed to strip down and dress in the army issue. There were about sixty of us but three barbers were able to shear all our heads down to the scalp in under an hour. Once again in sheep like manner we were lead and pushed to a mess hall and were given forty five minutes to  load tin plates, eat, attend to calls of nature and then be at the parade square a few yards from the mess hall.

  This was the first day of what was known as Hell Week.

  In the first couple days I regretted my decision to join up almost more than anything that happened for the rest of my life. But I was lucky, I guess. Because of my size I had always tried harder than most others, my months of damn tough working in the logging camp had left me harder and tougher than most of the other guys.  Through my teens I had never avoided fights and had learned that if you’re a small guy yuh gotta fight dirty or you’ll always be on the receiving end. So the muscle wrenching, body tearing things we were put through while not a breeze, weren’t really that bad.  The screaming and yelling by those big ugly drill sergeants didn’t seem to phase on me like it did on some of the others and when some of the other recruits looked for someone to take their frustrations and anger out on and they thought I would be an easy mark, I took them out quickly – first using my own past experiences , then combining my primitive abilities with the stuff we were being exposed to.

  Up to this point in my life I had never worried to much about personal appearances, I had got by when I was a kid ‘cause I was cute and later I didn’t give a damn. But the day our drill clothes were supplemented by a real uniform and we were given our first three hour break off base, something kinda got to me. I remember pulling on that uniform and checking myself out in a mirror. By God I looked pretty good! I looked older than I remembered, I looked bigger, and I wasn’t cute anymore. I – well I just looked pretty good and I liked it.

  They had some point system to check on how good we were doing and we had to get sixty points on each thing before you could move on, I usually came in anywhere between sixty-five and eighty so that part was a bit of a breeze. We were there for just a shade under four months, well not all of us, some were gone in a few days, some made it to about the middle of the second month; after that I don’t remember anyone checking out.

  After basic we got split up a bit, I was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma with about ten others and were mixed in with other guys who had come from other basic locations, we now went into what years later they called the White Phase. Still lots of parade square stuff, but now real combat training began; rifles, bayonets, hand to hand, grenades, camouflage, working next to big guns and a hell of a lot of how to stay alive when somebody’s shooting at you. I got my first promotion – Lance Corporal and got the first taste of being responsible for somebody besides myself.

  After a couple of months of this we were sent out on bivouacs where we learned to work at night, practice infiltration and try and out smart drill sergeants and second lieutenants.

  We weren’t at war at that time so sometimes things got a little complacent, by this time we got at least a couple of weekends off every month and took turns hitting town and raising a bit of hell. I was now a full corporal and felt pretty full of myself.

  There was this one Drill Sergeant who was a real asshole, he didn’t go after me personally but he really liked giving a couple of guys in my platoon a hard time, some how I always felt it was me he was actually going after, it was his style.

One Saturday, a bunch of us were in one of our watering holes when he came in. I was talking to the old Master Sergeant who had sort of helped me along out in the field. The Drill Sarge shouldered me and spilt my drink, I just gave him a look then turned my back on him. He made a couple of remarks about pretty boy smart ass kids and as I turned back the old Master Sarge touched my sleeve, shook his head slightly and whispered, “Not here, not now.”

  About an hour later the drill Sarge, Bates was his name, started giving one of my guys a real hard time, he shoved him a couple times and when there was no response, threw a beer on the guy’s uniform. I’d had enough and stepped up to Bates and said, “I’m going outside you useless piece of shit, I won’t have my stripes on. You want it? Then come and get it.” I turned and walked out to the parking lot.

  He did follow me out and when he saw me waiting he stripped down to his pants as I had. Nothing more was said between us. He was almost a foot taller than me and was probably eighty pounds or more heavier. I guess he didn’t figure I would go on the attack so I kinda got him by surprise when I jumped and skidded between his legs and caught him with a back kick to the balls. It all would have ended in a few more moments as he went straight to his knees and I wasn’t letting up but the bar tender had called for the MP’s and one of the roving units was just a couple of blocks away.

  I ended up losing one of my stripes and Bates was knocked back to private. The Colonel told us it was lucky we were out of uniform or it would have been worse, then he docked us each a months pay for being out of uniform.

  I got shifted to different army bases three – no, four times over the next couple of years, got my second stripe back in no time then made it to Sergeant.

  Back in those days we usually got a few days off at Christmas, probably ‘cause the  brass wanted a holiday, we got rail passes so each year I went home to Eureka. Gotta admit it was kind of fun as now Ma was real proud not to mention Pa. Ernie had got married, Violet and John and young John had gone to Canada and Erma was off learning to be  a nurse or something but me and Ernie got real close again; it was like we had come closer in age. The poor bugger though had got hit by a tree when he was logging and it had shattered his one arm and it just hung there like a piece of meat. He told me once that it wasn’t what happened to his arm that bothered him so much, it was that he had planned to join up too and the accident ended that.

  As everyone in the world knows December 7, 1941 came along and my army life took a real turn in the road. Refresher courses, new equipment, fewer free weekends were the order of the day and all furloughs were cancelled. I was shipped out with about twenty others to some old town in the Nevada desert for some specialized stuff

  I was a platoon Sergeant by now and knew by scuttlebutt from a couple of the officers that going into action wasn’t far off.

3

 

I

n June of 1942 some of were granted short furloughs with the idea we would all head home. Instead a buddy and I hitchhiked our way to Reno and went on a drunk. I woke up the morning of June 19^th to find out I had been a married man for about twelve hours.

Two days later I was back on base then a day after that we were loaded onto trucks and headed for San Diego.

  By the time August came we had made landings on several small islands, but no major skirmishes. Oh yeah while I think of it, I did meet God one day, except his name was General MacArthur, he smoked a pipe. I was hunkered down on the edge of a beach and he just walked up and put his hand on my shoulder, he patted me then said, “Keep up the good work son.” Then he just walked off again.

  Eventually I went to New Guinea, that’s when I found out what it was like to have a bunch of bastards tryin’ to kill me. However my luck held out, I got wounded, lost a finger and part of another but it didn’t affect my trigger finger none. I was sent home to get it all mended and when they gave me my Purple Heart they also gave me and my unit a Unit Citation, a couple of weeks later they followed it up with a Personal Citation.

  As soon as I was all healed I was shipped out again and ended up at Guadal Canal. Most of the work had been done there, but there was still things to cleanup and I got to be a real ‘clean-up guy’. I took some shrapnel just before Christmas that year and was sent home again. I wasn’t in the hospital too long and got to spend Christmas day till New Years with my parents and Nina my wife. Then I got sent to get some rehabilitation work on my one leg. Nina visited me a couple times but she wasn’t too happy, she said once when we were havin’ a bit of a row that it was too bad I only got wounded, she would have at least got a pension if I’d just been killed.  She finally pulled up stakes and took off with some guy. Ernie and my Pa helped me get a divorce, the army helped a bit as I guess I wasn’t the first one to get married to what the they called a ‘marriage of opportunity’. I was glad to get shed of her although I’ll tell you she was a real looker!

  I got a little more convalescent leave, got awarded my second Purple Heart along with a bronze star and a silver one. I wanted to go back out but orders came for me to head to a special training facility that had been set up in Oregon. I remember thinkin’ ‘Jesus how much more training do they think I need?’ Well as it turned out I wasn’t bein’ trained I was going to be one of the trainers and that led me to getting to be a Master Sergeant.

  I don’t know how many guys I stuffed through that ‘special training’ but I knew after what I had gone through and was lucky enough to come through they needed something extra and the officers that had been selected for the camp knew it too.

  We weren’t easy on those boys but everything we did was for their own good, I did have one guy take a shot at me one day, he missed and not by much. After I got through tuning him up he was court martialled and sent off to one of our prisons, I forget which.

  Sometimes I would wonder if we were too hard, if we pushed them too far, then one day I was ordered to report to the base commander, a Colonel.  “Christ’, I thought, ‘now what have I done?’

  After I saluted he told me to stand at ease, then he actually went and poured a couple of shots of booze and handed me one. “Well Master Sergeant, I got a letter here I want to read to you.” He then proceeded to read from a page that was laying on his desk.  “Letter of Dispatch, Attention of Base Commander Colonel Hargreaves.” I don’t remember what it all said and although there was a copy of it for me I lost it a long time ago. But it said something about the quality of the troops being combat prepared as a result of the training they had received at our camp.  It thanked the Colonel for identifying which training sergeant stood out above the others and then ‘requested’ that “my personal thanks and congratulations be extended to Master Sergeant Roy S. Harvey”. Would you believe it, the thing was signed by General Douglas MacArthur! Christ, God had patted me once again.

  Well the Colonel shook my hand, told me to drink up, poured us each a second and sent me on my way.

  I put in about a year at that camp and I was getting damn tired of it all. Me an’ the other training sergeants would usually hit the booze pretty hard every chance we got, for a little while it usually let us forget about things and sometimes gave us the energy to go chase a skirt or two.

  Then one day I got this idea that maybe I should be back out again where the fighting was goin’ on, how was I to know if everything I knew was still the right stuff. I had a Captain that was a pretty good guy, he had seen quite a bit of the real stuff as a Lieutenant and would know what I was talkin’ about. So one day out on bivouac I asked him if he would vouch for me if I asked for active duty. He made me explain why I wanted to do that and it wasn’t long before he was nodding and soundin’ kind of interested. Finally he said, “Okay Sarge, I’ll help you with the paper work and I’ll support your request.”

  No word came through for a couple of weeks, then one day when we just got back from some field hand to hand stuff, I was called again to the Colonel’s office. No shot of booze this time, he just said, “Your request for active duty is approved Master Sergeant, be ready to go within the hour. Dismissed.”

  An hour later I was headin’ out with one other, The Captain, came up just before we left and shook hands with both of us, “Good luck men, I hope when I get back out there we’ll be in the same unit.”

  Five days later I was jumping out of a Dakota onto a sand runway just off the coast of New Guinea. Over the next few months I was at Nassau, Arwe and Cape Gloucester; in July of ’44 we hit the beaches at Guam and then on to Angaur. I tell ya, there were many times I wished I was back in that Oregon desert.

  Finally I got rotated back stateside, had just about a month’s furlough then spent a few months with a recruiting officer. I was not much good at that;  I think he asked for me to be transferred out.

  I was sent up to Fort Pendelton to help with basic training but I didn’t get much out of that. I was having a hard time, what I had been trained for was to be a fighting soldier; I was no mechanic, was a lousy driver and  wasn’t smart enough to work in officer country.

  I started drinking too much, got into fights, lost my Master stripes, once was even demoted back to Corporal for a month.