“As was anticipated,” wrote Mark Clark about it, “heavy resistance was encountered in the Thirty-sixth Division’s crossing of the Rapido River.”
“The frontal attack across the Rapido River,” wrote the German commander in Italy, Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, “should never have been made.”
General Fred Walker, division commander, wrote in his diary, “The great losses of fine young men during the attempt to cross the Rapido to no purpose and in violation of good infantry tactics are…chargeable to the stupidity of the higher command.”
What higher command? Which? Walker blamed Clark. Clark blamed General Harold Rupert Leofric George Alexander, the MTO commander. Alexander attributed the idea of an Italian campaign, an attack against “the soft underbelly of Europe,” to Winston Churchill who, in connivance with his crony Roosevelt, was able to test his pet theory, as he had done at Gallipoli in April 1915, by means of the lives of others. Churchill never visited the Italian battlefront. Not once. He never visited any battlefront. Neither did FDR. Neither did Stalin. Neither did Hitler.
After his rescue of Captain Sprankle, Will was offered a battlefield commission as second lieutenant—there was always a need for fresh platoon leaders. Company C had already lost three of them, together with most of three platoons, under mysterious circumstances: folks they’d never met personally or even seen or even heard of kept shooting at them. Will declined the honor of a commission, preferring to remain a squad leader. His reasoning was as follows: There’s only about eight, nine men in a squad; I could keep my eye on that many. But there’s forty in a platoon; I was afraid I’d lose some.
He came home in October 1945 still a buck sergeant. Three stripes on each arm. No rockers. No little brass bars. Only a buck. He was proud of that too.
VI
“What you Lightcaps so proud of all the time? You ain’t rich. You ain’t famous. You ain’t important. You ain’t even good-lookin’. What you got to be proud about anyhow?” That was old Raymond Houser (Ernie’s uncle) talking.
Well—that’s true. That’s the simple truth, Raymond. The only thing the Lightcaps had to be proud about is that they were—and still are—and always will be!—Lightcaps. That’s all we got.
7
On to Gallup
In the morning. Thank God for morning, an end to endless night. The dog and I walk for a while toward an opaline sky, the topaz sunrise. I splash my head in the cold water of an algae-coated stock tank, return to camp and make breakfast—water and Hi-Pro for Sollie, cold cheese burrito and another can of Coors for me. How could I have failed to pick up some Mexican beer, real beer, back in Tucson? At least three things the Mexicans are good at: murals, manslaughter and beer. Which is more than you can say for most of the nations of the Peace Corps world.
Onward again, northeast, Merle Haggard unreeling in my cassette player as he sings a Hank Williams number: “I don’t worry ’cause it makes no difference now.” How true, how true—give me another ten days, Merle, or maybe six weeks, and I’ll sing along with you, old buddy. After Merle, with Tom T. Hall on deck, how about some classical chicken fat, some high-class schmaltz? Why not Mozart and his Sinfonia Concertante smiling through the tears, happy ending guaranteed? No matter how deep the sorrow in the middle, Mozart always gives us a sprightly, gay and sparkling finish. If art can’t make you feel better—after first making you feel worse—what good is it?
The pink outliers of the Painted Desert rise across my northern horizon. Suddenly we’re in sight of Sanders and former Highway 66, Main Street of America—Get your kicks on Route 66—now U.S. Superstate Interstate 40. This is Indian Country, the Navajo Nation, Home of Diné—the people. The term implies not arrogance but only the native simplicity of original and aboriginal tribes anywhere. All who aren’t Greeks are barbarians.
Turning eastward on the four-lane superhighway, I run a forty-mile gauntlet of red-and-yellow billboards, a near-continuous wall of urgent exhortation from the village of Sanders to the small city of Gallup, New Mexico:
SALE! INDIAN JEWELRY ONE MILE AHEAD! LARGEST COLLECTION IN ARIZONA SNACK BAR ORTEGA’S INDIAN CENTER STOP RELAX SHOP ICE CREAM SHOP ORTEGA’S INDIAN RUINS FINE JEWELRY WHOLESALE RETAIL SNACK BAR MALTS SHAKES BURGERS RUGS BEADED BELTS MOCCASINS TOMAHAWKS BOWS & ARROWS POTTERY KACHINA DOLLS NAVAJO RUGS 33½% OFF! SAND PAINTINGS 40% OFF! INDIAN CENTER 50% OFF! NECKLACES TURN HERE EASY OFF EASY ON NEXT EXIT THIS EXIT LAST EXIT (TURN AROUND!) INDIAN SOUVENIRS 55% OFF! EXXON INDIAN CITY NEXT EXIT GULF TEXACO SHELL MOBIL NAVAJO ASSEMBLY YOUTH CHURCH WELCOME TO NEW MEXICO LAND OF ENCHANTMENT (GATEWAY TO TEXAS) FORT COURAGE BREAKFAST 99¢ COFFEE & GIFT SHOP CHEE’S INDIAN STORE (one-room tar-paper huts among the billboards, swarms of children, rack-ribbed unbranded unclaimed horses browsing on the roadside weeds, herds of sheep grazing on dust and stubble, the Rio Puerco carrying its radioactive waters down an ever-deepening channel of erosion and pollution, frame & stucco shacks, abandoned hogans of log and mud, more horses, more kids, more strings of bright laundry fluttering on clothesline, horse-trampled cornfields, dusty pastures of cropped alfalfa, acres of tumbleweed and sagebrush, dead junipers hacked down to stumps, living junipers mutilated with ax and hatchet, firewood getting scarce in this region, solitary men shuffling along the highway toward Gallup, nothing else to do, stuccoed hogans with green shingle roofs, shingles held down against wind by worn-out auto tires, plywood wigwams, cement tepees, a flock of sheep escorted by a single child in a field that glitters with metal and broken glass, the bright desert sun shining down meanwhile with unlimited and impartial benevolence upon the dust, the animal dung, the human excrement, the acres of cardboard, wrapping paper, bottles, tin cans, junked cars, burned mattresses, smashed bottles, broken chairs, the sleeping drunks, the short heavy wide-hipped women (most of them pregnant) hunting for something—a child?—in a sagebrush flat, and children, more children, children everywhere….
Feeling oddly tired for so early in the day, I stop at a gas station to fill my twenty-two-gallon tank with regular. Check the oil: quart and a half low; I add a quart from the supply of Yellow Front oil burner’s special I carry in the back. Check the radiator: low again; really should repair that leak. I fill the radiator and head for the men’s room to tap a kidney. Reading as always the writing on the wall, vox populi clamantis in deserto:
Q: What’s the difference between the Navajo Nation and a bowl of yoghurt?
A: Yoghurt is a living culture.
HONKIES EAT SHIT
Q: Why dont the Navajo Nation declare war on the US Govt?
A: Because theyre afraid the US Govt would cut off their welfare checks.
HONKIES EAT SHIT OUT OF PLASTIC HATS
I find something heartwarming in this frank, informal, businesslike exchange of views between the races. But am glad to move on to the seclusion of Don Williams’s gun shop, book shop and general trading post—where I have business—well off the main line of Gallup’s cultural life. Stopping at a liquor store en route, for my friend Don likes his beer. He’s that type. And I ain’t flat broke yet.
Two Navajo gentlemen approach me as I leave the store. They are barely able to stand. Give us some money, man. I give them each a dollar bill. (Spend it wisely, fellows.) Leaning on each other, they shamble inside the store, vague eyes seeking the sweet-wine shelves for something cheap, fortified, time-tested. Thunderbird wine, for example. Or Twister. Or Easy Days and Mellow Nights. A sound choice from the standpoint of strict cost/benefit analysis.
Don looks up from his workbench—loading rifle shells—as I enter, raises his glasses, smiles and gets to his feet. “Is that you, Henry?” The light is behind me.
“It’s me,” says I, “in the flesh.”
He comes toward me, takes my hand. “You call that flesh?” He looks me over. “Old Henry, you’re thin as a bean pole. You lost some weight. What’s happened to you?”
“Nothing much. Routine troubles.” I offer him the sixpack of Dos Equis.
Don looks sad and rubs his
sagging paunch. “I have my troubles too, Henry.”
“What’re yours?”
“What’s yours?”
“Domestic. What’s yours?” Should I share my little secret with Don? No, not today. Maybe someday, when I get back this way. If I ever get back this way. I open two bottles of the Mexican beer.
Don locks the front door of his store and turns to me. Big and burly, gray-bearded but ten years younger than I, he looks genuinely aggrieved. “Henry,” he says, “what’s the most horrible thing that could happen to a man?”
“I don’t know. A night in bed with Margaret Thatcher?”
“Come on, I’m serious.”
A customer taps gently on the window of the door. Without looking around, Don reverses the sign that hangs inside the glass. Now it reads OPEN on the inside, CLOSED COME AGAIN on the outside. The stranger goes away.
I keep guessing. “Germaine Greer? Fritz Mondale? Henry Kissinger?”
“No, really.”
“Well what? Tell me.”
“My doctor tells me I can’t drink anymore.”
“Find a better doctor.”
“He says I’ve got something he calls an irritable colon, for godsake. No more beer, no animal fats, no fry bread, tacos, salsa, and especially no more booze.” I start to withdraw the bottle I’ve been holding toward him; he removes it from my hand. “One beer can’t hurt me.”
His problem puts mine in clearer perspective. I’m sorry I mentioned it. But after a while he fishes part of my story out of me. “There’s only one cure, Henry. Get yourself another woman.” I know that, I tell him, but my heart’s not in it now; I’m going home instead. “Home?” he says, “where’s that? You’re home already, the West is your home, people like you can’t even get across the Mississippi River without a passport.” I tell him my heart longs for the Smoky Mountains of Appalachia, the green spring woods of home. “What bullshit. You can’t go back there, Henry.” I tell him I want to see my brother again, my old gray-haired mother, Paul’s grave, the old man’s grave, the grave of Cornflower. “But you are coming back?” Maybe, probably, who knows.
Giving up on the question for the time being, Don shows me recent additions to his stock. He’s acquired new rugs, more books, new firearms, including a couple of muzzle-loaders. Against the wall stand racks of rifles and shotguns, a cabinet full of handguns, piles of Navajo rugs, buffalo robes, sheepskins. Kachina dolls fill several shelves. But his main stock is books, especially the rare and out-of-print in the field of Western Americana. There are no billboards showing the way to Don Williams’s trading post and every time I stop here his inventory seems larger; it would appear that he buys more than he sells. How does he make a living? He smiles. “I’m a dealer; I wheel, I deal.”
“How do you define a rare book, Don?”
“A good book is a rare book. But not all rare books are good books. Have something to trade? Something to show me?”
“I’ve got an old carbine that might interest you. A .25-.35.”
“We’ll have a look at it.” But he’s in no hurry. “Let’s eat first.” We go up the inside stairs and into the apartment above the store. His wife, Jenny, is in the kitchen mixing pancake batter. Juniper burns in the cookstove. April can be winter in Gallup, N.M., here at sixty-five hundred feet above sea level; the kitchen stove helps keep the apartment warm.
Jenny seems glad to see me. She puts down her mixing bowl and gives me a strong embrace. She’s a good tough sweet well-rounded woman and it’s disturbing to feel her in my arms. Half Anglo, half Navajo, she has the round Mongolian face, high cheekbones and long rich mahogany-colored hair of an Indian woman, the light eyes and slender figure of a European. She’s a beauty. The face and eyes remind me of Grandmother Lightcap.
Jenny has never borne a child but there’s a four-year-old Indian girl toddling about in the kitchen. The child is too small for her age, poorly coordinated, wearing a black patch taped over one eye. She grabs the calf of my leg as I sit down and rides back and forth on my foot. Another case of fetal alcoholism. The poor kid was a drunk before she was born, an alcoholic fetus taking its nourishment from a placenta marinated in booze. A common story on the reservation.
Don and Jenny had found the baby, only a few hours old, wrapped in a newspaper and deposited in their alleyway garbage can. No one would ever know, most likely, who the mother was. But nevertheless they still dread the possibility, slight but real, that the mother might be alive, may remember the location of that garbage can, may come back someday demanding the return of her baby. There is no love so fierce as mother love. Also, in the state of New Mexico, a child is worth eighty-five dollars a month in AFDC—welfare payments—until the age of eighteen.
Jenny and Don had named her Celestina: gift from the sky.
Don makes coffee, Jenny stacks blueberry pancakes on a platter on the hot stove. We eat the pancakes and drink too much strong coffee and talk once again, one more time, about the American Indians and their never-ending problems. You think you’ve got troubles, consider the Navajo. Don and Jenny know the tribe well; they’d taught school for a combined total of twenty-two years in the heart of the Navajo reservation at Shonto, Chinle and Window Rock. Now they live in Gallup, drunk-tank capital of the American Southwest, chiefly in order to remain near their favorite people.
“Indians,” says Don, passing me a cigar and unwrapping one for himself, “los indios, as Columbus named them, old Cristóbal Colón himself. You know why?”
Sure, he thought he was in the East Indies. Fourteen ninety-two, the ocean blue, and all that.
“Not so. Columbus knew he was nowhere near India. He knew what East Indians, Oriental Indians, looked like. Colón knew he’d found a new people, a new world. He was so charmed by the natives he found in the Caribbean—a people so sweet, generous, happy, so blessed, he thought, that he called them los gentes in Dios—the people in God.”
We light our cigars, blow the smoke above Jenny’s head. The child still rides my leg, clinging like a limpet, giggling.
“Los gentes in Dios,” Don repeats. “And that’s what Columbus wrote in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella. In the next paragraph he offered to bring their majesties a shipload of ‘inDios’ as servants and playthings. ‘They have few and simple weapons,’ he wrote, ‘and conduct warfare only as a game.’ With a handful of men, he said, meaning Spaniards not inDios, he could easily enslave the whole population of the Caribbean and put them to useful work, like mining gold and silver.”
Jenny says, “I always wondered if that name Colón doesn’t have a close connection to asshole.”
I mention the favelas that I’ve seen along the highway; the garbage dumps and shantytowns seem twice as large as only a few years before.
“You want to know what the Indians’ problem is?” says Don. “The Indians’ problem is so basic and simple that nobody will mention it. It’s an unmentionable. Taboo. When Kit Carson rounded up the Navajos in 1864 he counted 11,000 of them. In 1868 the Navajos got their territory back, a reservation of sixteen million acres, most of it good range for deer, antelope, sheep, cattle. There was timber in the mountains and a permanent stream in every canyon, everything they needed for a good life in the traditional way. But in the census of 1890 the tribe had grown to 15,000. In 1920 there were 20,000. In 1940, 40,000; in 1960, 80,000; now there’s 160,000. At least. See the pattern? The population doubles every twenty years. By the year 2000 we’ll have 320,000 of them trapped on a piece of land that could once have supported about 10,000 in health and dignity. Look at them now. Look at the land now: a dust bowl.”
“You think that explains a highway slum?”
“That’s no mere slum, that’s the Third World.” Having drunk all the coffee, Don opens our last two bottles of Dos Equis. His fingers tremble. Too much coffee? No, the truth is that Don still loves the Navajo, that’s his trouble. “We’ve got our own banana republic out there. We control the police, we supply the funds and equipment, the energy corporations ext
ract the oil and coal and uranium, the tribal bosses get paid off, the rest of the people get babies, the monthly welfare check, the food stamps, the Head Start program. A lot of nothing.”
“Maybe the young bloods are right,” I say. “Maybe revolution is the answer.”
“That’s your solution for everything.”
“Revolution makes the world go round. As Abe Lincoln said, ‘There never was a good war or a bad revolution.’”
“He never said that.”
“Revolution plus birth control. Bayonets and bazookas for every working mother, condoms for the boys.”
“You had a good time in the Army, didn’t you, Lightcap?”
“I liked it. But I didn’t reenlist. And I don’t keep two hundred guns in my house like some folks I know.”
“Is it still your house?”
Pause. Now that’s a good question. Don’t really care to be reminded that I’ve lost my home, my wife and my job in the last forty-eight hours. It’s my turn to stare out the window. I drink my beer in silence. I talk too much.
“Sorry,” Don says gently. Another pause. “Let’s go have a look at that piece of yours.”