CHAPTER THREE THE 761ST
CHAPTER
THREE
Lee untied the piece of cloth from around his hand to see how his wound was healing. Not bad. If he was lucky, he wouldn’t have much of a scar. He scoffed. Army-luck was like a speck of good fortune in a sea of bad breaks.
The cut on his hand hadn’t come from fighting or training but from a razor blade that an officer dropped into his cleaning bucket when he was on mopping duty.
It sliced the length of his palm as he wrung out the mop, and three of those white devils looked on and roared with laughter.
A big joke. The medic told him he was lucky it had missed any major tendons. Army-luck.
The casual cruelties made his homesickness worse. He missed all of it: playing the clubs with Jasper, catching fast balls behind home plate, hanging out with the guys, Uncle Drew’s lectures. And Cora. His longing for her curled through him like smoke, burning red-hot to his core.
She hadn’t forgiven him. He’d written and written to her all that year, trying to explain why he’d enlisted, to stand up, to prove himself, to fight for what was right.
He couldn’t bring himself to tell his whole truth.
That each time she recoiled from telling people about them being together was a stab in his heart, and under the tree in the park that last night, seeing her tense when he mentioned their future together had decided it for him.
He knew he was asking too much of her to be with him as he was, with her mother, her aunt and all the church gossips convinced he had no business with a woman like Cora.
He couldn’t expect her to choose him over everybody else, but if he came home a hero, with a medal on his chest, they’d have to respect him, even if they didn’t like him, and they’d accept her choice.
It was the only chance he could see they had.
Maybe Cora sensed he wasn’t telling her everything in his letters, or maybe she wanted to punish him for leaving her. Whatever the reason, she hadn’t written back once in more than a year. In the barracks, the guys joked that he’d made her up, and some days it felt like he had.
He’d been army-lucky a few months back, getting transferred out of the service corps and into a new Negro tank battalion down in Camp Claiborne, Louisiana.
The War Department had been pressured into giving Negro troops a shot at real fighting.
Unfortunately, southern bigots ran the camp, and their training tended to cross the line from rigorous to sadistic.
They enjoyed meting out excessive punishments for the most minor infractions, so a badly made bed could earn you two hundred push-ups, and a poorly polished boot might mean a thirty-mile run in the Louisiana heat.
Dirty boots were a particular problem, since they spent their days slogging through mud.
Camp Claiborne sat on a swamp, so Lee became an expert in the entire palette of wet-earth possibilities, from the solid, baked-by-the-sun mud that left behind perfect footprints when he walked, to the dark, almost black sludge that was as thick as oatmeal and sucked at his boots, to the sloshy soup that was barely more than dirty water.
He marched through it, crawled through it and drove tanks through it.
After more than a year of skirmishes and exercises in the mud, there was still no talk of deploying, and morale for the 761st sank lower than low.
And since you couldn’t advance a career commanding soldiers who’d never fight, no officer wanted the 761st assignment, until Lieutenant Colonel Paul Bates rotated into Camp Claiborne.
The first thing he did that told them he was different was to take living quarters near the men, despite their post being beside the sewage treatment plant and always smelling like a latrine.
He went on marches and runs with them, listened to them, got to know them, and he wouldn’t let anybody mistreat them.
No more razor blades in buckets or outlandish punishments for minor infractions.
Under Bates, they trained and learned, and they became excellent tankers, so when the battalion got word to transfer down to Fort Hood, Texas, where they’d run pre-deployment maneuvers, Lee assumed it meant they’d soon deploy.
Once they got there, he was gutted to find out they’d be running the pre-deployment maneuvers for other battalions who’d ship out while they stayed behind.
There was nothing Lieutenant Colonel Bates could do about it, although he tried.
One man couldn’t change the army, but at least they knew he’d go to bat for the men in his battalion.
Lee learned that beyond a shadow of a doubt after the bust-up with his tank commander, Second Lieutenant Jackie Robinson.
He’d heard Bates shouting down the phone to someone, fuming mad, when he went to see him.
He hovered in the doorway, not sure if he should approach, but when the lieutenant colonel looked up and saw him there, he covered the receiver and said to Lee, ‘Get Jones and bring his wife.’
Lee saluted and hurried off to find Lieutenant Jones. He had no idea what he was going to do about the man’s wife, but he figured that would be Jones’s problem. It turned out his wife was visiting so he could bring both of them, as ordered.
Bates was off the phone, pacing, when they came in. ‘Some MPs arrested Second Lieutenant Robinson,’ he said.
Lee looked up, shocked. Jackie Robinson was a smart, likeable guy with self-discipline coming out of his ears. Not the kind to get himself arrested.
‘What for, sir?’ he asked, but Jones and his wife exchanged a look, like they already knew.
‘Mrs Jones, I need you to tell me exactly what happened on that bus.’ He turned to Lee and ordered, ‘Take notes, Corporal Peters.’
Lee grabbed a notebook and settled himself into a chair in the corner.
‘Well,’ Mrs Jones said, ‘I got on the shuttle bus on my way to the base and sat four seats from the back, which I’ve always considered the rear of the bus.
My husband,’ she glanced at Lieutenant Jones, ‘had introduced me to Second Lieutenant Robinson before, so we recognized each other when he got on and he came and sat next to me. We got to talking and everything was fine, but then the bus driver looked back and saw us sitting together and told Jackie, Second Lieutenant Robinson, to move back.’
‘He thought she was white,’ her husband cut in. ‘It happens to us all the time. Nearly got arrested trying to check into a hotel one time.’ He reached over and took her hand, and she leaned into him a little. ‘Being out together in public can be tricky.’
‘So what happened with Robinson?’ Bates pressed.
‘He refused to move. Told the driver to go on and drive the bus. So the man stopped the bus and came back, telling him again to move, but Jackie still wouldn’t do it. He just said, “I’m not moving,” with that bus driver glaring down at him.’
Lee’s pen flew over the notepad taking it all down, but his stomach bunched tighter with each word. Colored soldiers who got involved in disputes turned up dead all the time, and his tank commander was shaking a rattlesnake.
‘When we got to the next stop, the driver jumped out and got the military police on him. They got him off the bus and we drove on. That’s all I know.’
‘They can’t make that stick,’ Lieutenant Jones said. ‘She’s colored, he’s colored, and they were sitting in the back, more or less. It’s the driver who was out of line. They can’t charge him.’
‘Oh, they’ve charged him all right. Behavior unbecoming an officer, plus failure to comply with a direct order and disrespect to a commanding officer, which both have something to do with what he said when they took him off the bus.’
Lee was furious on Jackie Robinson’s behalf, but so was Lieutenant Colonel Bates.
The upshot of that bus ride was that the army wanted to court-martial Robinson and they wanted Bates to sign off on it, but he wouldn’t do it.
They pressured and prodded, but he flat-out refused, so in the end they transferred Robinson out of the 761st into another battalion and let the other CO sign the court-martial papers.
As angry as everybody was about the whole thing, the men were in awe that Bates had their backs even if he had to stand against the army to do it.
Before Bates, Lee would have said he knew all about white men – pale devils with no regard for anyone but themselves.
Selfish, cruel and entitled. Bates made him re-examine what he thought he knew.
That’s why when word went around a year later that Bates had been offered a promotion, the men’s morale nosedived and Lee had visions of going back to the days of razor blades in buckets.
After about a week of talk, Lieutenant Colonel Bates called the men together and told them the rumors were true. Lee could feel the weight of every man’s spirit sinking.
‘I’ve written to army command,’ he announced, ‘and I’ve told them I’ve decided to refuse the promotion.’
The crackling silence was like static electricity in the air. Lee would have bet money he was hearing things, except for the shift in the mood and the faces brightening up all around him.
‘I’ve told them I choose, instead, to stay with my men.’
The cheer that rose lacked discipline or protocol, but it thundered and roiled with heart and soul.