The Hunting Trip (4 page)

“The flag is up!”

Whereupon a red flag in the target area would be hauled to the top of a flagpole.

“The flag is waving!”

Whereupon another flag, this one checkered, would be waved in the target pit, and the bull's-eye targets would be raised.

“The flag is down! Commence firing!”

Whereupon the checkered flag would drop out of sight and the shooters were free to fire.

This required that the cadre-man hand his shooter the one cartridge he was trusted to have, and for the shooter to then insert the cartridge into the chamber of his Garand, and then to close the action of the Garand, which would make the Garand ready to fire once the safety on the front of the trigger guard was pushed out of the way.

The trick here was to get one's thumb out of the way after depressing the magazine guide in the open action of the Garand before the bolt slammed closed.

PVT WILLIAMS P had no problem with this, but eleven of the twenty shooters on the line already had what was known as “M-1 Thumb,” a physical injury, the symptoms of which were a black (or missing) thumbnail, and smashed tissue in the thumbnail area.

After the cartridge was chambered, the shooter was to disengage the safety by pushing it forward in the trigger guard. Then he was to align his sights on the bull's-eye, take a deep breath, exhale half, check his sight alignment, and then slowly, gently squeeze the trigger until the weapon fired. He then, after inspecting the now-open chamber of his rifle to make sure it was indeed open, would lay his weapon down and wait for further instructions.

When the sixty seconds allotted for the firing of the trainees' first
shots had expired, the range officer would announce, repeating the command twice, to make sure everyone heard him: “The flag is down! Cease firing!”

Whereupon the red flag would come down from its pole, and the targets disappear downward into the berm, where they would be marked.

If the bullet had struck any part of the target at all, including the frame, a “peg” would be inserted in the bullet hole. This was a ten-inch black dot exactly the size of the bull's-eye in the center of the target. When the target was raised, the shooter could see where his bullet had hit.

In case the target pullers could find no bullet hole anywhere, they would raise and wave a red flag, called “Maggie's Drawers,” to tell the shooter he had completely missed the target.

When the range officer completed the series of commands ending with “Commence firing,” the cadre-man next to PVT WILLIAMS P handed him the cartridge he was to fire with a little paternal, or perhaps brotherly, advice: “
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head, if you
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up your
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thumb loading this, I will kick your
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from here to
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Trenton.”

Sergeant Andrew Jackson McCullhay feared that “M-1 Thumb” would keep PVT WILLIAMS P from being able to manipulate M-1 parts with the extraordinary facility that was making him so much money.

PVT WILLIAMS P loaded his rifle without harm to his thumb, lined up the sights, and squeezed the trigger. The recoil, while not pleasant, was not nearly as bone-shattering as Sergeant McCullhay had led him to believe it would be. He checked to see that the action was indeed open, and then laid the rifle down.

The sixty-second firing period expired.

The range officer proclaimed the flag to be down, and ordered “Cease firing!”

The targets dropped down behind the berm.

One by one, they rose again.

The first several to rise had pegs on them, which showed where the bullet had stuck. Some were actually within a foot or so of the bull's-eye, but most were scattered all over the target. Two marksmen had shot the frame.

PVT WILLIAMS P's target rose, but he could see no peg on it, and he braced for the shaming Maggie's Drawers, which would soon flutter to announce his lousy marksmanship to the world.

No Maggie's Drawers fluttered before his target, although they proclaimed the shame of seven other marksmen.

“What the
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?”Sergeant McCullhay asked rhetorically, and then raised his voice. “Tell the
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in the pit to mark
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Number Seven.”

A minute or so later, the range officer appeared at Firing Point Number Seven.

“The pit reports Number Seven is in the X Ring,” he reported. “Obviously a fluke. Have your shooter fire again.”

This time PVT WILLIAMS P had the entire flag-is-up-and-down procedure all to himself. He was given a cartridge, loaded it without damage to his thumb, lined up the sights, et cetera, et cetera, and in military parlance, “squeezed off another round.”

This time the pit again reported “In the X Ring.”

PVT WILLIAMS P had no idea what the X Ring was, but he was shortly to learn that it was sort of a bull's-eye within the bull's-eye, a three-inch circle in the center of the ten-inch bull's-eye.

“I'll be a
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,” Sergeant McCullhay exclaimed.

“Very possibly, Sergeant,” the range officer said. “But let us not jump to a hasty conclusion. One in the X Ring may be a fluke. Two
in the X Ring may indeed be an extraordinary coincidence. But we should investigate further. Give your shooter another round, Sergeant. No! Give him a clip.”

“Yes, sir,” Sergeant McCullhay said, and handed PVT WILLIAMS P a metal clip holding eight cartridges.

PVT WILLIAMS P loaded the clip into his Garand and squeezed off eight rounds.

“I don't
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believe this,” the range officer said, when the pit crew had marked PVT WILLIAMS P's target and reported what they had found. “Bring the target to the line.”

The target was removed from the frame and brought to the line. It showed beyond any question that PVT WILLIAMS P had fired a total of ten shots. All of them had gone into the bull's-eye. Six of them had gone into the X Ring.

“Son,” the range officer said, “I predict a brilliant career for you as an Army Marksman.”

[ SIX ]

1000 Scharwath Road

South Orange, New Jersey

Friday, December 13, 1946

D
uring the sixth week of his Basic Training, Phil turned, depending on which birth certificate one looked at, either eighteen or seventeen.

And eight weeks and five days after getting the boot from St. Malachi's School, Phil finally made it home to South Orange.

On his sleeves were the single stripes of a private first class, to which rank he had been advanced the previous day after being adjudged the “Distinguished Graduate” of his Basic Training Company.

And on his chest was a silver medal, looking not unlike the Iron Cross of Germany. It was the Expert Marksman Badge. Hanging from it were three small pendants, one reading Rifle, a second Sub-Machine Gun, and the third Pistol.

He saw his mother on that Saturday. On Sunday, he went to New York to see his father. His father took him to lunch at his favorite watering hole, which was on West Fifty-second Street not far from Radio City Music Hall.

Jack, one of the two proprietors of the establishment, on seeing the marksmanship medals on Phil's chest, said, “I wish you'd seen me before you enlisted, Phil. I'd have steered you to the Corps. They really appreciate good shots.”

It was well-known that the proprietors of what the cognoscenti called “Jack and Charley's” bar had served in the Marine Corps and had never quite gotten over it.

Phil didn't argue with Mr. Jack, as he had been taught to call him, but he thought he was better off where he was. From what he'd heard of Marine Corps recruit training, he didn't want anything to do with it.

After lunch, he went to Pennsylvania Station and took the train to Trenton, where he caught the bus to Fort Dix.

—

The next Monday morning,
Phil learned that rather than being shipped off to a remote corner of the world to fill an empty slot in the manning tables of an infantry regiment, he would be retained at Fort Dix as cadre.

He was just the man, Training Division officers decided, to teach
the dis- and re-assembly of the U.S. Rifle, Cal. 30, M-1 Garand, to the stream of recruits that flowed incessantly through the battalions and regiments of the division.

This training was conducted in three two-hour periods over as many days. On Monday mornings, Phil would go to the Basic Training Company where this training was scheduled, do his two-hour bit, and then have the rest of the day off. He would do this for the next two days, and then have the rest of the week off.

During the week, Phil spent most of his off-duty time on the KD ranges. It was like Coney Island for free. He didn't get to win any stuffed animals, of course, but on the other hand the Garand was a much nicer weapon than the Winchester pump-guns firing .22 shorts at Coney Island, and instead of five shots for a dollar, he had all the ammunition he wanted at no charge at all.

His weekends were free. He spent most of them in Manhattan, in a relentless but ultimately failing attempt to get a tall, thin, blond seventeen-year-old named Alexandra Black, who lived in the apartment directly above his father's, to part with her pearl of great price.

Close, but no brass ring, so to speak, which caused Phil to suspect that he and Alexandra were the only seventeen-year-old virgins in the world.

—

On the Thursday
of his fifth week as the dis- and re-assembly cadre instructor, one of the officers, Captain Barson Michaels, head of the Fort Dix Skeet and Trap Shooting Club, needed someone to operate for him the “trap” at the Post skeet range while he practiced, and his eye fell upon PFC Williams.

The “trap,” Phil learned, was an electromechanical device that, when triggered, would throw a frangible clay disc into the air at
great speed. Captain Michaels showed Phil how to load stacks of the discs, which were called “birds,” into the trap, and handed him the trigger.

“When I call ‘pull,' Hotshot,” Captain Michaels ordered, “you push the button, which is the trigger, whereupon the trap will fire, the bird will fly, and I will shoot at it. Got it?”

“Yes, sir, Captain Michaels, sir.”

Perhaps forty-five minutes later, during which time PFC Williams had flawlessly carried out his orders, and most of the carton of birds had flown, Captain Michaels, perhaps because he had heard a probably
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story that the kid was some sort of Annie
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Oakley in pants with an M-1, decided he could afford to be a nice guy.

“You ever fire a shotgun, PFC Hotshot?”

“No, sir.”

“Let me show you how it's done, and then you can have a try at it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Captain Michaels then handed Phil a shotgun. It was the first shotgun he had ever had in his hands. He later learned that it was a Remington Model 11, but at the time all he knew about it was that it was a semiautomatic weapon into which one fed—through the side, not the top—shotgun shells.

He was given a sixty-second course in its operation—
Drop the shell in, push that little button, and you're ready to go
.

Captain Michaels put Phil in position.

“Anytime you're ready, son.”

Phil called “pull.”

Captain Michaels pushed the trap's trigger. The bird flew. Phil fired. The unscathed bird kept flying.

Captain Michaels then imparted to PFC Williams the First and
Great Commandment of Skeet and Trap Shooting, to wit:
Shoot where it's going to be, Hotshot, not where it's at
.

“Yes, sir.”

The second bird at which Phil fired disappeared in a cloud of dust.

And the third and the fifth—not the fourth—and the sixth, and the seventh,
und so weiter
, until the twenty-second, which he also missed, and then the twenty-third, -fourth, and -fifth, which were also reduced to puffs of dust.

“You sure you never did this before, Hotshot?”

“No, sir. I mean, yes, sir, I'm sure I never did this before.”

“I'll be a
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,” Captain Michaels said, his mind full of images of the greenbacks he was going to take from his pals at the next skeet shoot after betting this innocent young enlisted man could beat them.

“Get another box of shells, my boy, and we'll have another go at it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Phil went “straight”—that is, broke all of the twenty-five birds—in his second “round” of twenty-five birds.

—

Phil repeated the feat
the next Saturday morning—in fact went fifty-two straight—at the weekly competition of the Fort Dix Skeet and Trap Shooting Club, following which Captain Michaels handed him two twenty-dollar bills with the explanation he'd made a small bet for him. As PFC Williams was being paid fifty-eight dollars a month at the time, this was a small fortune.

Phil blew just about all the forty bucks that same night on Alexandra Black in Manhattan. But to no avail. Worse, that night as she gave him a friendly kiss on the cheek good night, Alexandra told him that she had met a very nice boy from Yale and didn't think she and Phil should see each other anymore.

—

Even worse,
the next Monday morning, Phil was summoned by his first sergeant.

“How come you know General Schwarzkopf, PFC
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head?”

General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Sr., who invented the New Jersey State Police and later returned to the Army for service in World War II, was a pinochle-playing crony of Phil's grandfather, the corporate counsel for the Public Service Company of New Jersey. The other General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, his son, the one who would win the first Desert War, was at about this time a second lieutenant.