IV

Off to Fort Thomas where my rating on the AGCT test allowed me to choose the Army Air Force. Shipped out to San Antonio, baked in the Texas sun for six months, staged at Fort Dix, and I was off for the invasion of North Africa via New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Cape Town. My ninety-nine percent Texas-born outfit, the 8th Air Depot Group, loaded onto barges on the Jersey shore at night and headed for the SS Aquitania somewhere beyond. As we pushed off, the men began to sing a bawdy song, a not uncommon practice. Running without lights we entered New York harbor. The towers of Manhattan were lost in mist. Suddenly the mist parted and there bathed in moonlight stood the Statue of Liberty, the base hidden, floating in air as it were. The singing stopped and only the breathing of hundreds of men and the slapping of waves against the hull could be heard. It was a solemn moment. With hand in air Miss Liberty seemed to be waving farewell. For some it was the last view of America forever. The singing began again, and the song was "Shall We Gather at the River."

There were some ten thousand of us on the Aquitania which had served in World War I at Gallipoli and had been slated to be broken up when war erupted. Before us a journey of twenty-six days to Cape Town on the first leg of the trip. We poked along, changing directions every six minutes to thwart submarines, putting into Rio for a week, going in circles for days as we neared Cape Town until destroyers were sent to lead us in. The harbormaster at Cape Town turned out to be a German spy which accounted for the sinkings of numerous merchant vessels in the area. What a prize we would have made, ten thousand putrid men who hadn't bathed for nearly a month, some never removing their shoes. Good for an iron cross.

We transhipped to the Antenor after a spell at Palls Moor, joined a fleet of ships north, and made a landing at Freetown, Sierra Leone. Every soldier aboard will remember the hour we awaited the signal to board the landing craft, each of us a walking arsenal. The order rang out, "Let's go men!" We were excited but I think not afraid. We went. We hit the beach and nobody was there. We'd half-expected the Vichy French. We had no inkling of the vast movement of men investing the horn of Africa that day. I subsequently learned we liberated Graham Greene the novelist serving with British intelligence and in hiding in Freetown.

My outfit settled down at Accra, Gold Coast Colony (now Ghana), our base for the more than two years overseas. I traveled to Egypt, Palestine (Israel), and to Eritrea where I picked up a dysentery I was long in overcoming. Survived a crash landing in the Anglo-Egyptian Sedan. Endured two cases of blackwater fever, an often fatal form of malaria. In the Ashanti kingdom I enlarged a collection of pre-Columbian counter-gold-weights made of hand-smelted ore and shaped by the "lost wax' method.

It is said that every soldier is glad to come home but he comes home angry. I came back disoriented. For months I sat in the door of my log house and could not arouse interest in things I had done before. Gradually I adjusted and again joined the staff of the Hindman Settlement School, with a modest salary. Next I taught ten years at a state university, resigned and returned to Wolfpen Creek. Since 1970 I've spent fourteen winters in part in Central America pursuing an interest in Mayan civilization, and five trips to Europe to visit World War I battlefields, Passchendaele to Verdun. I have an irremovable reputation of being a hermit.

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