Arnie’s War

The first thing Arnie did was to take out a pad of graph paper, apologize for reading to me from notes, and explain that he was doing so because he wanted to be sure to remember everything he’d planned to say. He even recited his apology from notes, saying he was aware we’d hardly seen each other since our high school graduation, and how he hoped I wouldn’t be offended by the impersonality of what he was going to propose, but that inviting me to join up with him for the buddy program—if you and a friend enlisted together, the army guaranteed you’d go through basic training together—was the most important decision he’d ever made.

I was entitled to know why he’d chosen me, he said, and the reason went back to what happened when a group of Italian kids from Boys High School had surrounded him on the way home from a football game. The game was on Saturday afternoon at Boys High Field, and he was walking along Maple Street, right past the house Walter O’Malley lived in—O’Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was a man we’d come to hate a dozen years later for moving the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles—when the Italian kids did the same thing the Irish kids in our neighborhood did back then, which was to ask if they could “borrow” some money. If you said you didn’t have any, they’d say, “Then all we find on you, we keep, right?” and if you didn’t pay up, they’d call you a liar, tell you you were a “dirty Jew” or a “kike,” rough you up, and take what money you had.

I was on the other side of the street, and I crossed over fast and poked my finger in the chest of one of the Italian kids, told him and his friends to get lost. One of them recognized me—I’d had a good game, rushing for nearly a hundred yards, and knocking the shit out of some of the Boys High players on defense—and I asked which of them was ready to take on someone his own size. They started backing off, but not before I grabbed the biggest guy and said that if he didn’t want his brains splattered all over the street, apologies were in order.

I didn’t remember saying “apologies were in order,” but Arnie insisted those were my words, and he said that inviting me to be his army buddy was a way of paying me back because he intended to watch my back the way I’d watched his, and after he explained how the buddy system worked—the army had instituted the system right after Pearl Harbor—I told him I was as ready as the next guy to roll up my sleeves and do my part for Uncle Sam.

Arnie was a skinny five feet, five inches tall, and I was six two and one-ninety, and when we went down to the draft board on Whitehall Street, they began calling us Mutt and Jeff like the guys in the comic strip, and Arnie loved it. At Erasmus, he’d been the kind of guy who walked around with a slide rule glued to his hip, and was not only a genius at math and science—captain of the school’s math and chess teams—but he was also a maniac about baseball statistics, so that if guys were having an argument about who hit how many home runs, and in what year, Arnie was the guy you went to for settling the argument.

To say he was a lousy athlete would be putting it mildly. It never mattered with me and my friends, though, because of what he did when we started our baseball team. There were no high school freshman teams in those days—and this was before Little League existed—and what Arnie did was to come to one of our practices at the Parade Grounds, tell us he wasn’t there to try out for the team, but to apply for a position as our General Manager. He came to us that day the same way he came to me about the buddy plan, with notes he read from about how to raise money for equipment and team jackets, lists of teams we could play against, and information about how to get permits for playing fields and how to hire umpires. He’d made copies for us on a Rexograph machine of what he called his prospectus—two pages, in purple lettering, stapled together—said he hoped we’d give the prospectus our serious consideration, and called our attention to the list of team names he’d drawn up, and said the one he recommended was “The Zodiacs” because he thought it would be the perfect name for a star-studded team like ours. Mike Friedman, our captain, told Arnie to wait by the backstop while we considered his offer, and a few minutes later we told Arnie we’d elected him General Manager of The Zodiacs, after which we each gave him a “tough noogie” to seal the deal, grinding our knuckles into his shoulders, right side and left.

Arnie was true to his word. He got an uncle of his who ran a cafeteria on Kings Highway to have the cafeteria sponsor us, and the uncle put us in touch with a friend who managed a Davega sporting goods store that gave us good discounts. Arnie also had raffle books printed up, and he got local places to donate prizes—toasters, radios, alarm clocks, movie passes, and coupons for meals at restaurants. He organized a meeting at his apartment where he gave us pointers on how to sell the raffles by starting with your parents and your aunts and uncles, so that when you went around to what he called second-tier prospects, especially people who owned local businesses, you could tell them who’d already bought tickets, give them a printed invitation for the drawing at the Parade Grounds, and—the big selling point for store owners—tell them that Jimmy Murphy of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle had promised to cover the event, and ask if they wanted to be the only ones left out.

We went door to door, wound up with a pretty good haul, and voted to spend most of the money on equipment—bats, balls, catcher’s equipment, bases you could anchor down—and fancy baseball hats, black with a gold “Z” in front. For our uniforms we wore yellow t-shirts and black pants, and put the rest of the raffle money into jackets that felt like silk and had “The Zodiacs” on the back in gold script, and our first names stitched in on the front.

At the big drawing we held before our first game, against a team from the Midwood section called “The Flashes,” about eighty or ninety people showed up, including Jimmy Murphy. Arnie arrived with an old windup Victrola, and after the drawing, and before the umpire yelled “Play ball,” he inserted a handle into the front of the Victrola, cranked it up, put on a record, and while we stood at attention, the Victrola blasted out “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Which—the music—brings me to what Arnie was most famous for in our neighborhood, which was for playing the violin. Starting when he was in second or third grade, he’d stand in front of our school at assemblies, and with Mrs. Kirshenbaum—a sixth-grade teacher with huge boobs that drooped down almost to her waist—pounding away on the piano, Arnie would play pieces like “Love’s Old Sweet Song” and “Danny Boy”—“Ave Maria” at Christmas—but also, without Mrs. Kirshenbaum, classical pieces by composers like Beethoven and Mozart. In our freshman year at Erasmus, he made the All-City High School Orchestra, and a few times, for their annual concerts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, he had solos.

My parents took me to one of the All-City concerts, and at school the next day when I told him my father said he was going to be the next Jascha Heifetz, he said two things that stayed with me. First, that it wasn’t a big deal because he just happened to be born with a talent for music the way guys like me were born with a talent for playing ball, and that his talent for music probably had to do with the same thing in his brain that made him good at math and chess. The second thing, which he figured was like me always pushing myself to be a better ballplayer, was that he’d had to practice his ass off to be able to play the way he did. Ever since he was a kid, he’d put in at least four hours a day, and that whenever he’d slack off and skip a day, or go down to two or three hours a day, it showed, and it let other talented kids get ahead of him.

By the time Arnie and I were on a train heading west for Fort Knox, in Kentucky, and especially after we arrived, worrying about Arnie had become a full-time job because Arnie was like Lou Costello in Buck Privates—a total screwup who couldn’t do anything right, and couldn’t even figure out which foot to put first during marching drills. Having a high IQ and playing the violin—which he wasn’t allowed to bring with him—were no help in basic training where no matter how nasty your sergeant was, the only thing you were allowed to say back was “Yes, sergeant,” or “No, sergeant,” and the main thing they hammered at you was to do-as-you’re-told-what-you’re-told-when-you’re-told and never ever to ask why. But that was exactly what Arnie did our first week there, which resulted in his getting his ass handed to him in front of the whole company, after which he had to lug a huge backpack around the parade ground all day for the better part of two days.

At the same time, though, his having taken care of his violin like it was his baby probably helped in the way he took care of his M1 rifle—what we called our black licking stick—since nobody, including some of the drill instructors, was better than Arnie at taking it apart and putting it back together. The M1 they’d given us was an experimental model that had less power than the old version but was lighter and more suitable for combat, and they were testing it at a few bases around the country before they made a final decision for its use overseas. When guys in our company were having problems with it, they’d go to Arnie the way we’d gone to him to check out baseball stats. And when the assistant commanding officer came by one day, he asked Arnie’s advice on the trigger mechanism, which could jam sometimes, and praised Arnie for what he called his “admirable digital dexterity.”

When it came to bayonet training, slap boxing, hand-to-hand combat, and infiltration, though—all the one-on-one stuff—and especially when we practiced how to strangle an enemy or break his neck by grabbing him by the chin, your knee in the small of his back, then jerking his head back hard and fast—Arnie was hopeless. But what scared him most of all was what they told us about on our first day—and again on Patch Day, when the crack sharpshooters got our company’s insignia to wear—which was what you had to go through before you got your orders: an advanced infiltration drill where you crawled across ground in full gear—and the ground at Knox was made of superhard clay—under barbed wire, with real bullets, not dum-dums, firing over your head.

The other thing that happened during our first week at Knox was that they called me out of lineup after inspection on our third morning because the base had a football team that played against teams from other bases, and the coach found out I’d made second team All-City in New York. So I had to leave Arnie on his own half the day while I got to do the original two-a-days—basic training in the mornings, football practice in the afternoons. The guys on the squad, forty-four players deep, were mostly huge guys from coal-mining towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania, along with several guys who’d played college ball, and a few who’d made it to the pros, which wasn’t as big a deal back then as it would be later on. Once the war was going in earnest, though, the army cut out football programs at most bases, and only kept them going at big permanent bases like ours where they believed the rivalries between bases improved morale.

They may have been right. All I know is I worked my butt off to earn the respect of guys I knew would do anything for me the way I’d do anything for them—where we learned to carry out our assignments to the letter because then and later on, when it could mean the difference between life and death, working together was what made us that beautiful beast we called a team. And after we won a few games—against Fort Campbell, Fort Riley, and Jefferson Barracks—our coach, Lieutenant Colonel Joe Monahan, would take us out on the town to celebrate, and we’d get so shit-faced we had to be hauled back to the base in trucks, piled on one another like old punching bags.

At practice the day after one of our nights out, Coach Monahan took me aside and said he’d been wondering why a guy like me was friends with a guy like Arnie. Was it because Jewboys like us always stuck together, he wondered, and I answered by telling him that it was because of Arnie that I was there—that Arnie had gotten me to sign up with him on the buddy plan, and that he’d been a star at Erasmus, not in sports, but in music and science, and about how great he was on the violin. Coach asked me to tell him exactly how great, and when I said he was as good as there was, that made the coach a happy man. The reason why, he explained, was that the chief honcho at our base, Major General Rogers P. Gordon, was a classical music nut whose favorite instrument was the violin, and that Gordon believed that the best violinists were always Jews. So Coach arranged for getting a violin for Arnie, and for giving him special leave from drills along with a soundproof room to practice in, and as soon as Arnie said he was ready, Coach arranged for a meeting with General Gordon.

General Gordon’s home was like one of those Southern mansions you see in movies, except smaller. After his wife, who wore a long purple gown full of ruffles, served tea and cookies, the general invited Arnie to play a few scales. Arnie did the scales like a whiz. Then the general asked Arnie if he could play “Flight of the Bumblebee,” and mentioned that the world record for the fastest it had ever been played was one minute and four seconds. Did Arnie think he could come close to that?

Arnie tucked the violin under his chin. General Gordon took out a stopwatch, clicked a button, and Arnie took off, and when he finished with a flourish, his bow lashing the air like a whip, the general looked at Arnie, and set the stopwatch down. “One minute and two seconds!” he exclaimed. “Well, I’ll be! One minute and two seconds, which would be a new world record had we been prepared to officially record your achievement.”

The general said he’d be making arrangements so that the extraordinary gifts of such a talented young soldier could be put to proper use, after which, looking at me, he made a speech about the way our fine football team helped build up the spirit of the men under his command, and how it was this spirit—this wonderful American never-say-die spirit—that was going to win the war for us. He’d put himself to school about the preparation of soldiers around the globe, he said, and had concluded that the difference between our soldiers and everyone else was that American boys were the finest competitors in the world. Our will to win, along with our melting-pot identity—Christians and Jews, Irishmen and Italians, Poles and Slovaks and others all fighting side by side—were our great natural resources. In addition to which, we had what the fighting men of our enemies, young men against whom he bore no personal grudge, did not have: the ability to improvise.

At this point, he asked Arnie to select a solo of his choice, and Arnie played a wicked bunch of notes the general identified as being a cadenza from a Paganini sonata, and he talked about how what he called the “ingeniously original variations” Arnie came up with proved his point, after which he told Coach Monahan we would be hearing from him, and we were dismissed.

I loved seeing how happy Arnie was once the news got around, and to see how different the guys in our company treated him. But before that, as we parted ways with Coach Monahan, who called us his very own Gold Dust Twins, the way the great young players on the Dodgers then, Pete Reiser and Pee Wee Reese, were called, Arnie started giggling, and as soon as we were alone, just the two of us, and I repeated what Coach said about how incredible it was that Arnie had broken the world record on the “Bumblebee” piece, Arnie cracked up and told me how he did it—how with so many notes flying around at a speed most people couldn’t follow unless they’d played the piece themselves, it was pretty easy to break the world record. All you had to do, he said, was to remember to leave out five or six measures.

We were both on easy street for a while, me with football and Arnie playing for what General Gordon called at-home salons he gave for officers, their families, and visiting big shots. The general found a pianist to accompany Arnie, and he took pride in having Arnie play pieces not only by great European composers—leaving out the Krauts, of course—but by American composers I’d never heard of. And in order for everyone on the base to experience the same pleasure he did, he had a platform set up on the football field, with Arnie on the platform by himself but accompanied by music from invisible orchestras, the music coming from records that blasted out through a huge PA system.

Before Arnie played, the general would take the stage and talk about how important it was for our fighting force to be healthy in mind and body for the trials that lay ahead of us. In his own life, he gave credit to music for having inspired him to feel and see things beyond the passing moment, and for having strengthened his heart and soul—cornball stuff like that—but you know what? Given what we were up against—they showed us movies about the vile, lowdown things our enemies were doing—and with Arnie’s sweet music floating above us in the cool night air, the general’s words got to us, and made us prouder than ever of our country, and inspired a fierce hunger in us to finish up basic training so we could get to work doing our real job.

But here’s the weird thing that happened. Starting from the first time we were invited into the general’s home, whenever Arnie stopped playing, the music kept going. It was like someone had planted a radio in my brain that could turn itself on and off whenever it wanted—when I was in bed, or in the mess hall, or on the football field, or even when I was taking a crap. And after that—the really crazy thing—these voices started coming at me too.

They began by talking to me in the middle of a concert so that I’d turn around to see if a soldier behind me was saying something, and on the football field it would be as if one of the players, or a coach, was trying to get my attention. The voices were garbled at first so that I couldn’t make out exact words, and there was nothing scary about that because it was like an extension of what had always been there—sounds I’d been hearing ever since I was a kid—as if there was a river nearby, the water rushing along and getting louder when it went over a waterfall. What was new, though, was that the rushing sounds had words inside them now, and I began worrying that the words might contain secret messages and that if I didn’t figure out what the messages were—and who was sending them!—I could be in deep shit, and that the whole fucking United States Army might be in deep shit with me.

But I didn’t say anything—not to Arnie, or Coach Monahan, or to anyone at the infirmary—because I didn’t want to give them a reason to ship me somewhere for “observation” and screw up my chances for going overseas. The words never stopped coming, though—not through the rest of basic training, or when they sent me to artillery school at Fort Wood, or when I was overseas, and not even when the war was over and what happened to Arnie was yesterday’s news and the new news was me also seeing things that weren’t there, and being ferried in and out of hospitals where they asked me about my toilet training, and my mommy and daddy, and how it felt to watch my buddies bleed to death in front of me.

The voices calmed down when we started preparing for our final infiltration drill, but the minute they posted the schedule—and while the guys in our barracks were whooping it up since this meant that basic training would be over soon, and maybe you’d get leave to go home for a day or two—Arnie started having shit fits. He went to the chaplain and talked to him about how more than being afraid to die, he was afraid he’d have to kill young men he didn’t know, and was there some other category—a non–combatant category—he could apply for.

The chaplain, a young Catholic priest, said he didn’t know enough about the Jewish religion to help Arnie apply for non-combatant status, but even if he did, it was probably too late, since Arnie had never made this an issue before. And he also asked him the kinds of questions a board would ask him, like: if somebody was about to kill your mother and you had a gun, would you let the man kill your mother or would you kill him. Arnie said that if the priest knew his mother he’d know this wasn’t a fair question, but told me the priest didn’t get the joke, though he did say that to other hypothetical situations the priest raised—if one of his buddies was about to be killed by a Jap or a German and he had a gun, would he kill the Jap or German—Arnie couldn’t lie, and said that of course he’d shoot the Jap or German, that he’d do anything to save the lives of one of his buddies. Arnie was also worried that General Rogers or Coach Monahan was going to figure out that he had cheated when he’d played “Flight of the Bumblebee,” and that they’d say that cheating the way he had was typical of what a Jew would do. And even if he could somehow get through the infiltration drill, he was scared they’d make sure he was put in some suicide battalion in Germany so that as soon as the Krauts captured him, undressed him, and discovered he was a Jew, they’d torture him and throw him in an oven the way, according to rumors, they were doing to Jews all over Europe.

Mostly, though, he kept saying he was scared he’d never make it through the infiltration drill because even if he crawled on his belly somebody was bound to discover he’d gone to the chaplain, and find out what a coward he really was, and would not aim above his head. I kept telling him that we were all nervous and lots of us were scared, but that I’d be right next to him, and that all he had to remember was to keep crawling, and to do it the way they taught us—not on your knees, but pushing off by using your legs and your elbows as much as you could, and if he panicked and started to stand up, I’d be there to shove him right back down.

But when we lined up at the starting line—it was a drizzly day and that was good because the ground would be softer and we could dig in more easily—he was trembling and shaking so much that I had to half lay on top of him so the sergeant wouldn’t call him out, since if that happened, they’d make me keep going alone, and that would leave him with nobody to protect him. They gave us all the usual warnings about keeping our heads down, and never reaching up, and how the first line of troops would cut through low-hanging wire, and a reminder that this one was for all the marbles—that real bullets would be firing over our heads, and that he didn’t mean to scare us with old wives’ tales, but through the years there had been a some widows and grieving mothers created because a soldier forgot, or panicked, or stood up too soon. We were at war, and this was for our own good so we’d be ready for anything and everything. Did we get it? Did we get it? We all screamed that We got it! We got it! We got it! and then the sarge blew a whistle, and the machine guns started their rat-a-tat-tat-tat.

Before he’d crawled five feet, Arnie was blubbering away, and screaming I’m gonna die! I’m gonna die!, and guys were moving past us, and what I realized was that Arnie was so completely scared that he was getting ready to stand up and take bullets in his back just to put a stop to the fear that was pounding away inside him. So with my free hand I grabbed him by the straps on his backpack—I was cradling my M1 with my other hand, the way you were supposed to when you infiltrated—and started pulling him along. He tried to stand and I almost clubbed him over the head with the butt of my rifle, and that was when he did it—didn’t stand or scream but just sagged down into the mud, and before I could stop him—when he sagged down, I’d relaxed more than I should have—he reached up with his bare hands and grabbed onto the barbed wire, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pry his hands loose. And when I finally did, he just turned over onto his back like he was dead, blood pouring out of his hands, his fingers torn up like chunks of raw steak, and guys around us yelling Medic! Medic!

They came and dragged him out, and by the time I got back to the barracks, his bed had been stripped, and his footlocker emptied out. I went down to the infirmary, but they told me his hands had been cut up so bad they had to send him off-base to a hospital in Louisville. Later on, when I was living back home, and during a time when they weren’t shuttling me in and out of hospitals, I stopped by his parents’ apartment a few times, but they only opened the door a crack, keeping the chain in place, and said the same thing each time: that they appreciated my concern, but that Arnie wasn’t available. So time went by the way it does, and thinking back makes me realize how, war or no war, Arnie was probably always doomed the way lots of us were back then.