Some Faces in the Crowd (31 page)

For the next half-hour we sweated through the alien intricacies of close-order drill, and under Luther’s expert command we were surprised to find ourselves, grown men and relatively sophisticated, taking absurd delight in keeping in step with one another or carrying out a flanking motion. The tediousness of it for me, I know, was dissipated by the fascination of being in on Luther’s metamorphosis.

Then Major Duggan appeared. Luther brought us to attention, saluted smartly, said, in his new sergeant’s voice, “The platoon is ready for inspection, sir,” returned Duggan’s salute with a snap, and fell into step behind him as Duggan started the rounds of his first inspection.

They were both playing it for deadly earnest, with Duggan stopping to inspect this man’s tie, another man’s shoes, while Luther, always a pace behind and in perfect step, produced from somewhere (there was no bulge in his uniform to indicate it) a little black notebook in which he scribbled obediently the Major’s comments.

Then Luther gave us “at ease,” and Duggan gave us his inaugural address. It was the kind of fight talk a commanding officer probably gives his men on the eve of battle, or rather, the kind he would give if he had the talent and imagination of Joshua Duggan. “Tonight,” he said, “we hold our first inspection in an empty theatre in the heart of New York City. But who knows in what theatre of war our final inspection will be held? Who can tell what ordeals we will be compelled to undergo in the fulfillment of our duties, and who can tell which ones of us will be called upon to make the final sacrifice before the last ‘fall out’ is given?”

I looked at Lou, and Lou winked at Tom, and almost every one of us, I think, fought back the impulse to break up, but when I looked at Luther, standing there with his braid and his medals, unbelievably transformed into a figure of importance, the whole show seemed to be like nothing more than a marvelously acted and costumed charade.

One week after the do-or-die inaugural, we embarked for the Munitions Building, where, except for the protocol kept alive by Duggan and Luther, we all found ourselves with our bottoms planted in swivel chairs, doing pretty much the same kind of work we previously had been doing in striped ties and tweeds. It was our job to work up propaganda schemes to undermine the Japanese will to fight. Since it was the kind of brainwork only slightly removed from our civilian activities, all of us soon found ourselves relapsing into the relaxed postures and attitudes of pre-military creation. To Luther, whose heart was set on maintaining smart military discipline, these aberrations from standard operating procedure were a source of constant shock and frustration. And Duggan, of course, took everything with solemnity.

The feeling between the two camps, Duggan and Luther against the rest of us, was more or less an armed truce most of the time, with Luther the butt of most of our comedy and Duggan coming in for our more profound observations. Only once in a great while did it flare into the open. One Saturday morning, for instance, Luther gave the order to fall in for inspection. Jack, who always had a tendency to be nervous when he worked, was trying to finish a script that was supposed to have a noon deadline. “For God’s sake, I’m trying to knock out a script. Do we have to play soldier all the time?”

Luther just looked at him unbelievingly, with deep hurt in his eyes.

At this moment Duggan, who had happened to overhear this mutiny, strode up. “Sergeant,” he said, “put this officer on report for disciplinary action.”

Jack got by with nothing more than what Duggan called “an official reprimand,” which was little more than an opportunity for Duggan to play a scene from his favorite drama—himself. An hour later I’m sure both Duggan and Jack had forgotten all about it, but Luther was still brooding about it. When work was over for the day—retreat, Luther called it—he caught up with Jack in the hallway. “I’m sure sorry, sir, if I got you in the doghouse with the old man,” Luther said. “I was just trying to do my duty, sir. I’m sure glad the old man let you off with a reprimand. That won’t show on your service record, sir.”

But despite these differences of orientation between Luther and the rest of us, this must have been the happiest period of his life. Whenever he was in the presence of Duggan I’m sure he had the feeling that he was living life deeply, significantly, and efficiently. I’m sure he had not the slightest idea what we were supposed to be doing, but, trusting Duggan with blind devotion, he was ready to follow him around the globe and serve him around the clock. He called for Duggan at his hotel in the mornings. He took him home in the evenings. He took his uniforms to be cleaned. He saddle-soaped his boots. He made and served coffee for him every afternoon. There seemed to be no errand too menial for Luther to perform gladly, as long as it was “for the old man.” And not only perform them, but lend to them a sense of eminence, a sense of importance. Going out to the snack bar to get cigarettes for Duggan seemed to become in his mind, and perhaps in Duggan’s, too, a courageous penetration into enemy territory.

In spite of all kidding, the interruptions, and the occasional irritation, I found myself missing Luther when he flew out with Duggan for the New Britain invasion. He had been grim and warrior-like about the adventure. Duggan, of course, had taken leave of us like a man who was going to parachute alone into Tokyo itself. But Lou was offering two-to-one the pair never would get beyond Honolulu, and getting no takers.

When word came that they actually had shoved off for New Britain, though, I think we all felt a little lumpy. We told one another that Duggan, for all the comedy, was a pre-Pearl Harbor volunteer when most men his age were sitting back and letting their kids run the show. And at the thought of anything happening to Luther, everyone got a little moist.

But a few weeks later, the New Britain fighting still in the headlines, they were back. Duggan, now a lieutenant colonel, was wearing a new Purple Heart and the Legion of Merit and had a tremendous tale to tell. They had gone in with the first wave, it seemed (though it was never really explained what they were doing there), and Duggan had been hit in the knee with shrapnel and would have bled to death if Sergeant Bissell hadn’t carried him back to an emergency aid station. The story and Duggan’s wound grew with each telling, although for a man who had been at death’s door such a short time before, he looked remarkably fit. I tried to get Luther alone and pin him down, but either he had received a thorough briefing from Duggan or he had heard the old man tell the story so often he had come to believe it. “Believe me, you would have been proud of the old man,” he told me. “I must have carried him almost a mile to the beach, and not a peep out of him.”

“Luther, are you sure this whole thing didn’t take place in a bar in Honolulu?” Tom wanted to know. “Maybe it was the Royal Hawaiian you carried him to.”

Luther just waited with his pained face until the laughter died down. “Gentlemen,” he said, “before this thing is over, I hope you’ll all get a chance to go up front with the old man.”

During their fourteen-day leave, Duggan took Luther to 21, a place he had always wanted to go, and introduced him to Jack and Mac, to Quent Reynolds, to John O’Hara, to
everybody
as “the man who saved my life.”

Lennie Lyons devoted a paragraph to Luther, and Adela Rogers St. John gushed over two columns on the inseparable bond between these two Broadway heroes.

Eventually the excitement wore off and we all plugged away again, with all the jokes about the chair-borne soldiers and wearing the red-and-black ribbon for action with a typewriter. Once in a while, of course, work halted for military ceremonies, like the Saturday morning Duggan presented Luther with his second bronze star. For this event Luther’s wife came all the way from Brooklyn. She was a sweet-faced, homey-looking woman who never should have tried to get dressed up. For the occasion she was wearing an orchid corsage Duggan had sent her. The three of them smiled for the news photographers. I still have a picture of it clipped from the
Daily News,
with Duggan upstaging Luther a little as he pins the medal on him, while Mrs. Bissell looks on proudly.

Then all of a sudden our entire outfit, penned up so long that the real war seemed as if it were being fought on another planet, got the word that we were moving out to the Pacific. Duggan, on his last trip out, had made a number with MacArthur (that’s how these things were done, I came to find), and as a result we were all going to work the Philippines invasion, beaming radio messages to Filipino resistance groups.

The week before we shoved off, a strange thing happened. Mrs. Bissell came in and asked to see Duggan alone. She was in there a long time, maybe twenty minutes, and when she came out she walked right on through without even stopping to nod at those of us she had met. I happened to follow her into Duggan’s office, for a regular conference. He held forth for four or five minutes, as he often did, about the importance of the work we were doing, and then, with an expression of martyrdom, he said, “You know, sometimes I’m disappointed in human nature. So few people ever measure up to their responsibilities. Take Mrs. Bissell, for instance. She just asked me not to take Luther back overseas, because, she says, he isn’t what he used to be.”

“So what did you say, Colonel?” I said.

“What could I say?” Duggan wanted to know. “Why, it would break Luther’s heart to be left behind. I just wouldn’t tell an old campaigner like Luther that he was going to have to miss out on the Philippines show.”

Just to keep the records straight I grabbed a cup of coffee with Luther at the snack bar one morning and put the question to him about our expedition.

“Well, I don’t know,” Luther said, and I thought there was more weariness in his voice than usual. “I seen a lot of places and a lot of fighting in my time. And I already been to the Pacific. Them islands is all the same. But if the old man thinks he needs me …”

The old man needs you to make his coffee, snap to attention, and hang up his breeches, I thought to myself.

But no matter how anxious or reluctant Luther was to return to the wars, he played his part to the hilt all the way over. On the C-54 going to Honolulu, when Tom, who had had a hard night in San Francisco, dropped into the first of two reclining seats (it was a bucket job), Luther spoke right up. “The Colonel isn’t aboard yet, Captain,” he reminded Tom. “Don’t you think you’d better wait and see where the old man wants to ride?”

And when we landed at Hickam, Luther wanted to line us up and call the roll, even though there weren’t a dozen of us. But after bouncing around on those buckets for twenty-four hours, we were in no mood for military sport, not even to indulge Sergeant Bissell.

But it was when we shoved off from the staging area with regular components of the 6th Army that Duggan and Luther really began to express themselves. Any way you looked at it we were a freak outfit, not slated to hit the beach until after it had been secured; and in cases like that, when you’re among fighting men tuning up for an invasion, discretion is not only the better but the only part of valor. But the way Duggan and Luther behaved, and no doubt felt, the Colonel (he had made his full colonelcy) and the Sergeant were MacArthur and his chief of staff about to throw their army into the jaws of death. At Luther’s suggestion, several inspections were held on the afterdeck, with thousands of jeering GI’s on hand to watch the comic opera. Every time we passed Duggan on deck we were supposed to salute, although even combat officers were dispensing with the formality except upon first greeting in the morning. But the pay-off came when Duggan called us together for instruction from Luther on hand-to-hand combat.

“These Japs are tricky,” Duggan said, standing on a hatch with the sun highlighting his strong face like a baby spot. “Even if we’re back in Headquarters territory, you can never tell when the Nips will make a surprise night raid. I want every one of my men to know how to defend himself if necessary. I don’t want to have to live with myself after this show is over if I have to think I lost a man through carelessness. So every afternoon until we land I’ve asked Sergeant Bissell to give you an hour of routine judo.”

“Can you show us how to wrest a typewriter from a Jap in hand-to-hand psychological warfare?” Jack called.

Everybody laughed except Duggan and Luther. “You can save the comedy for when you go back to Lindy’s,” Duggan said. “Whether you realize it or not, gentlemen, this is a matter of life and death.”

Everybody passed whispered jokes around to everybody else. It was like hearing Duggan in one of his plays telling another character that some hoked-up situation was life or death. He made it sound convincing because he read his lines so well. But actually you knew that this was just a theatre and that the character, if he did, subsequently, fall lifeless across the apron, would rise again the moment the curtain was down.

We got to Leyte with very little trouble. The Kamikazes gave some of the ships around us a shaking up, but the landing turned out to be easier than anybody expected. The first five waves went in with practically no opposition. Our outfit went in with the sixth, all except Duggan and Luther, who were waiting to go in with MacArthur and Osmena.

Even though resistance was light, there was plenty of confusion on the beach as the various HQ’s tried to set themselves up. We had a portable radio transmitter and started beaming our stuff as soon as we got ashore. Duggan and Luther showed up a couple of hours later. I didn’t have time to ask whether Luther had saved his life yet or not. Duggan and Luther inspected our position, and then a terrible thing was discovered. Luther had forgotten the coffee, the “joe,” as he and Duggan called it. Luther was ordered back to the Quartermaster tent to get some more. It was growing dark by that time. There wasn’t too much happening on the beach. It looked more like the aftermath of a Rose Bowl game than a battle, with jeeps, trucks, half-tracks, tanks, everything the army had that moved pouring out of LST’s and getting snarled in traffic jams as the beachmasters muffed their signals in the dark. Out at sea a terrific naval battle seemed to be going on, but the only casualties I saw on the beach were from occasional snipers in the palm trees. There was one sniper who winged a couple near our transmitter before somebody picked him off. He fell practically at Duggan’s feet, a little man with a face we would have called cute if he had been a houseboy.