Fetterman
QUIET WEEKEND in the old Second World War barracks that houses the headquarters platoon of Fort Lewis Training Center. I sit alone on my bunk writing, and look up and down the twin rows of double bunks and lockers, each representing a man and his individual dreams.
For some reason I think of Fetterman the Unclean. Fetterman was not his name but it will do. In Fontainebleau, our headquarters platoon at Caserne Larisboisiere considered him a half-moron. What do you call a Fetterman with an IQ of 100? His entire family going back to his grandparents. A tired old joke originally directed at Mexicans, resurrected for Fetterman.
Fetterman the Unclean was a clerk, scrawny and ugly, who seldom bathed, hence his nickname. His face was constantly red in some kind of unseemly rash, and constantly infested with erupting pimples that a little judicious soap and water might have cleansed. Every time he shaved, that awful redness was severely inflamed and being a soldier he had to shave his sparse whiskers daily. His beaked nose shone like Rudolph’s, right along with his burning cheeks. His entire reading consisted of those women’s magazines like True Confessions, which he absorbed with rapt attention. Where he found them on an Army post we had no idea.
Fetterman spent his money like water at the Enlisted Men’s Club on two-bit female singers who came through in a steady rotation, and never got a tumble. But they always seemed content to permit him to buy all their drinks until he ran out of cash and they dumped him, which made him a source of contempt to other GIs.
When I worked late in headquarters on the garrison newspaper, writing stories or developing film, he was almost always duty driver for the duty officer. I remember him sitting in the disheveled duty driver’s bunk in the next office, watching me work without comment. They always had to air the room out next morning. He bought the duty-driver assignment from others who hated it because he always needed money.
He seemed to ache to be a big-shot, and was routinely harassed by just about everybody. He was always catching hell — and a lot of times he deserved it for bone-headed things he did. When DeGaulle ordered NATO out of France and the evacuation began, a loudmouth from Texas tore up Fetterman’s orders for rotation home and threw them away when he left them on his bunk to go to the latrine. The others told him he wouldn’t be able to leave France now. It sent Fetterman into wholesale panic. It must have taken all the courage he possessed to go back to Processing and ask for a duplicate set.
Looking at rows of lockers now at Fort Lewis, one for uniforms and one for civilian clothes for each soldier, I remember the single lockers in France and how dismally empty Fetterman’s was when he opened it to pack. Besides his uniforms there were two or three civilian shirts and pairs of pants, all exuding the musty odor of unwashed Fetterman into the squad bay. After he packed his duffel bag, everything besides his Army issue fitted a small AWOL bag including a couple of confession magazines.
I got my own orders shipping me across the world to Fort Lewis, with a week’s annual leave in Paris before my flight. Fetterman dropped entirely out of my awareness. Somehow he must have wound up on the same chartered 707 as me, but every seat was filled with returning soldiers and dependents and I never saw him. I still wonder why the frantic swirl of arriving plane loads of troops at McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey, washed me into a quiet backwater of activity for a strange moment — and showed me Fetterman one last time.
He was standing in the embrace of his mother and girlfriend, his mottled face so happy he did not even look like ugly Fetterman the laughing stock. His girlfriend was damn cute. She gazed up at him the way men dream of women looking at them. His short, small-framed father, whose stooped posture somehow signaled perpetual underdog, stood by with pride suffusing his features.
When Fetterman spoke to them, his voice was choked with emotion:
“Let’s get the hell out of here. Let’s go home.”
His father led, carrying the duffel and AWOL bag. Fetterman disappeared into the thronging uniforms with his arms around his mom and his girlfriend. Now, sitting here on a quiet Army afternoon with the empty bunks and closed lockers, each representing a man who is number one in the story of his own life, Fetterman’s triumphant homecoming is what I remember.
