Soldier*
(*Rifleman by Training, Clerk-Typist by Accident. In North Africa, Italy, and Austria)
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Yeah, some welcome. It started raining a few hours after we got off those trucks and it didn’t really stop for weeks. At least that’s the way it seemed. It rained and it rained and it rained. The place? The 8th Replacement Depot, U.S. Army. The address? APO 398. Near Canastel, Algeria. Give or take a few puddles. The purpose? Staging area for casuals. Which means? Waiting room for replacements. What are replacements? The guys who go to combat outfits to replace casualties. What are casualties? The guys who get shot. Wounded. Killed. Oh. Well, I’d asked for it, so now I had it. I was one breath away from combat and beginning to wonder if this had been such a hot idea after all. Maybe I should have settled for OCS when they’d offered it to me after basic training. Still, I hadn’t wanted to be an officer then and I still didn’t want to be one. But I didn’t want to get killed, either. On the other hand, who said I’m going to get killed? Stuff like that just happened to other guys. I wanted to help win the war and now I was going to get a chance to do it. If I just watched my step... So I worried a little and fretted a little and even swore a little; your vocabulary picks up some interesting coloration in the army. Especially when you get overseas, you’re marooned in an ocean of mud, and it’s still raining. But eventually you settle down and go about your business. Most of which is waiting for something to happen, a little of which is training to make sure you’ll be ready when it does happen, and all of which is pretty boring. So we sat and waited. Me and all the other guys in the 8th Repple Depple, as we began calling it. Just sitting and waiting for our number to be called. All six or seven thousand of us. Sitting and waiting and wishing we weren’t hearing quite so much about casualties and air raids and patrols getting ambushed and things like that. Sitting and waiting. The most frustrating thing about a replacement depot is that the whole thing is just a big canvas hotel. A thousand and so tents, each of them holding five or six guys, and practically all of the guys in constant motion. Except you. They were shipping in or shipping out at all hours of the day and night. Coming and going. Hello and goodbye. You never knew who your roommates were going to be from one hour to the next. One of them might change, two of them might change, all of them might change. Coming and going. Hello and goodbye. The whole thing was a walking traffic jam. A big funnel collecting guys from all directions and squirting them where they were needed. Two to this outfit, twelve to that outfit, a hundred and fifty to another outfit. New meat for the meat grinder. New heads for the headhunters. New bulls-eyes for the targets.
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About the Book
Over 11,200,000 men and women served in the United States Army during World War II. An estimated 5,200,000 of those men and women were in actual combat of one form or another. And over 880,000 of them became casualties. The other 6,000,000 or so were in the same Army. At the same time. In the same war. Like those in combat we lost girls, lost friends, and lost 3 or 4 years of our life. We trained just as hard. Got just as homesick. Worried and ached and grumbled just as much. We were radar operators and cryptography specialists and MP's. Medics and buglers and mechanics. Truck drivers and cooks and clerks and everything else. But there was one big difference: we were the lucky ones. The ones that didn’t get shot at. It was still the same war, but the shooting was aimed at somebody else. Yes, we were the lucky ones. And a lot of us still feel guilty about it.
About the Author
He was nineteen. Raised in Wisconsin and fresh out of high school when the Army came calling. Eager to go and gung-ho to get the bad guys, especially after rigorous infantry and combat engineer training. So the army promptly shipped him overseas. And handed him a typewriter. That wasn't exactly what he had in mind, but it didn't do any good to argue. So Wallace J. (Wally) Gordon hitched up his socks and typed his way through North Africa, Italy and Austria. Then, after forty more years of typing ads and commercials for clients ranging from Coca-Cola to the local bank and supermarket, he decided to write a book about it all. Enjoy...