Shrapnel
A previously unpublished wartime memoir from the acclaimed author of Birdy and A Midnight Clear.One of the most acclaimed American writers of his generation, and author of classic novels such as Birdy, A Midnight Clear and Dad, William Wharton was a very private man. Writing under a pseudonym, he rarely gave interviews, so fans and critics could only guess how much of his work was autobiographical and how much was fiction.Now, for the first time, we are able to read the author’s own account of his experiences during the Second World War, events that went on to influence some of his greatest novels.These are the tales that Wharton never wanted to tell his children. It is an unforgettable true story from one of America’s greatest writers.
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William Wharton
Shrapnel
Contents
Title Page
Prologue
1. Basic Training
Birnbaum
Williams
Corbeil
Logan
2. Fort Jackson, South Carolina
Sergeant Hunt
Water
3. Shipping Out
Doctor Smet
Need a Body Cry
D-3
4. Invasion
Sergeant Billy Dan Gray
Hide and Seek
The Galoshes Caper
Mike Hennessy
Capture
Franklin
Sergeant Ethridge
Crossfire
Court Martial
Champagne Party
5. Men at War
Russian Roulette
Rape Rap
Rolin Clairmont
A Flight of Fancy
Downhill Slide
The Great Jewel Robbery
6. Aftermath
Celebration
Flame Throwers
Massacre
7. Homecoming
Fort Dix, New Jersey
Glossary
Other Books by William Wharton
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
When we had little children, four of them, they always wanted me to tell them stories and I enjoyed the telling, but there were certain tales I never told. I’d developed the storytelling habit as a young boy, less than ten, making up scary stories for my younger sister.
Most of the tales I told to our children were about a fox named Franky Furbo. I told these stories from 1956, when our oldest daughter was four, until 1978 when our youngest was twelve. Mostly I told ‘get up’ stories in the morning while they were fresh and so was I, not bedtime stories.
We were lucky because, through most of my adult life, I did not leave home to work a job, and often, our children did not go to school. In a certain way, these stories were part of their schooling. Franky Furbo, among others, was a good teacher.
But sometimes our children wanted stories not about Franky Furbo but about other things, such as my childhood experiences, or fairy tales which ended with ‘and they lived happily ever after’. Our oldest daughter called these Ever After stories. Or occasionally, they wanted what they called ‘war stories’, tales about what happened to me during the course of World War II.
I generally didn’t want to tell those tales and tried to divert them, but children can be awfully persistent, so when I did tell tales about the war, they would be relatively amusing incidents, different ways of foraging for food, or evading various regulations, unimportant events of that nature.
In my book Birdy, in the penultimate chapter, I develop an important war experience, one of the types of tales I didn’t tell our children. The entire book A Midnight Clear revolves around another tale. I wrote A Midnight Clear because I thought we were about to re-establish the draft of young men, to send them off to kill or to be killed. I felt an obligation to tell something about war as I knew it, in all its absurdity.
One evening in New York I had dinner with Kurt Vonnegut. He asked me, ‘How was your war?’ I flippantly responded by recounting the number of court martials in which I’d been involved. It was not a good answer. War for me, though brief, had been a soul-shaking trauma. I was scared, miserable, and I lost confidence in human beings, especially myself. It was a very unhappy experience.
It was not a pleasant experience writing this book either. When dug up, the buried guilts of youth smell of dirty rags and old blood. There are many things that happened to me, and because of me, of which I am not proud, events impossible to defend now; callousness, cowardice, cupidity, deception. I did not tell these stories to my children. My ego wasn’t strong enough to handle it then, perhaps it isn’t even now, when I’m over seventy years old. We shall see.
I did write out many of these unacceptable experiences just after I came home when the war was over. I was fifty per cent disabled, and a newly enrolled student at UCLA. I cried too easily, made few friends, and couldn’t sleep. I’d stay up nights when I couldn’t sleep, trying to write the events, my feelings, my sense of loss, ineptitude. I had changed from an engineering major to an art major. I took a job as night watchman in a small notions store. I wanted to be a painter, but in the back of that store where I was night watchman, I was learning to be a writer and didn’t know it. Each dawn I’d read over what I’d written, tear it into pieces, and flush it.
There is written into Birdy one of the first really negative experiences I had in the military. It involved shovelling coal outside Harrisburg on a cold December morning. I hit a man with a shovel and was threatened with a summary court martial. Actually it was so summary, my only punishment was that I was confined to quarters until they shipped me out for infantry basic at Fort Benning, Georgia. It was the first in a series of my personal reactions to the constrictions and expectations of the military.
The conditioning of soldiers, so they will respond to command without question, was an abomination to me. Also, the rigid hierarchy on vested authority was an insult to my personal sense of identity, of value. I fought the military mentality with my meagre resources but to no avail. In the end they prevailed. They taught me to kill. They trained me to abandon my natural desire to live, survive, and to risk my life for reasons I often did not understand and sometimes did not accept.
