The Good War by Studs Terkel

Author:Studs Terkel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 2011-09-08T10:00:00+00:00

BOOK THREE

SUDDEN MONEY

RAY WAX

He is a stockbroker, living in a middle-class suburb just outside New York City. It is a recent endeavor. Previously he had been a builder and a real estate broker. In his younger days, he hawked long-stemmed roses at subway stations.

His words pour out torrentially. He is restless; a fever possesses him, though in these later years it is lowering. A touch of resignation is setting in.

I’m lucky to be alive. Though I thought that war was important, I really didn’t want to go. I was drafted in 1940 and looked upon the regular army as Cossacks. It was made up of people many of whom joined to avoid a small conviction. The judge would say, Do you want six months or a tour of the army?

I was on the beach at Santa Monica when someone said Pearl Harbor had been attacked. We all got up in our swimming trunks and headed back to camp. A day or two later, they shipped us all out to protect the coast. What we really did was terrorize the Japanese up around San Francisco.

America became paranoid after Pearl Harbor and decided that the Japanese were gonna attack the West Coast. We put a curfew on the Japanese villages that ran above and below San Francisco. I remember two bandoleers around me with a hundred rounds of ammunition and an M-1 rifle, riding in the back of a truck making Japanese farmers observe a six o’clock curfew. So help me God, we were told to shoot anything that moved.

If there’s anything more goddamn bloody boring than the infantry, I don’t know what it is. How many times can you break down a machine gun and reassemble it? I fought continually to get out of it. One of the main things lacking in the whole goddamn army was any kind of recreation. I had a chance to go out and do a show for the guys. My captain said, ���If you go on that show, I’ll never get off your ass. Goddamn it, you’re in the infantry.” When that thing broke up and I got back, the son of a bitch had me cleaning aluminum stoves for six weeks, every day. I found out later, in regulations, no man can do KP more than once every thirty days. It didn’t make any difference in the regular army.

I was in the first group they used to call your thirteen-week wonders. I was training to be an anti-aircraft officer. I bullshitted ’em that I knew mathematics. I was goin’ up against these college kids. That’s how I got in OCS.

All the officers alongside me thought we had it made. We could stretch out the rest of the war training troops in the South. I decided I wanted to do something about the war. I was still trying to read things that interest me. I read a guy who was amazingly accurate: he said the Russians would stop the Nazis at Stalingrad. I used to lecture that in front of my troops.

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