The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (10 page)

One down and one to go. Now we would find the air base. Then, my past safely reclaimed, we would become tourists again and move on to Lecce and the baroque churches.

I’d already seen Vincenzo Lattaruolo in the streets of Cerignola the day before. It was a hard face to miss, homely, rough, humane. With his big broken nose and his coarse features, he would be a natural as a character in films. We needed a driver to help us find the airfield, and he offered his services.

When he had been a young boy, maybe ten or eleven, Vincenzo had worked at one of the American air bases. I asked about Pete, also a native of Cerignola, who had worked at ours. Vincenzo said Pete had gone north to Milan to work in the factories. Vincenzo picked up a friend who turned out to be the driver and we went out to find the site of the 825th Squadron, 484th Bomb Group.

It wasn’t easy. For two days we ran about the grain-covered countryside and we found the site of many squadrons, but not the 825th. It didn’t help when I mentioned it had been located the same place as the group headquarters, and by the third day I was getting discouraged. There had been many squadrons in that region called Tretitoli. Then I remembered the three whores in the pumphouse.

Three whores had set up shop in a pumphouse about a quarter of a mile from the squadron and had operated there for weeks. When the command discovered them, clued by the sudden breakout of VD in the men, it took photos before throwing them out, and pasted the pictures on placards which were posted on the squadron bulletin board. The caption read “The Pumphouse Trio” in big printed letters. Then under the photo of the three wretched-looking creatures, a sarcastic diatribe congratulated the American G.I. on his taste in women. The poor prostitutes looked so scroungy I imagined one might contact VD just looking at the photo.

Italians seem to remember subjects of gossip no matter how old, and Vincenzo picked up as I told him and the driver about the whores. The word for pumphouse was beyond me, but
torre d’acqua
was good enough.

Soon we were approaching the site. The farm buildings we had used for group headquarters and the squadron mess hall were still intact. My wife knew we had found it, and she murmured, “Oh, dear” and started to cry softly. I never understood how she knew. I’d never described it to her nor had I given any sign of recognition.

There they were. The squadron mess hall on the corner. The courtyard that had been our outdoor theater where Joe Louis, the only celebrity to visit, us, walked through the crowd of G.I.s who were yelling, “Hey, Joe. Want to fight?” and stood on the stage, his huge hands reaching nearly to his knees because his powerful shoulders were so slanted. The group intelligence building. The group commander’s upstairs quarters, and below it the briefing room where we would sit very early in the morning and stare at the red ribbon on the map leading to the target. Silence when the ribbon led to Vienna and back (would we get back?), or to Munich, or Linz. Joking if it was a “milk run.” More often than not we heard our fearful silence as we stared at the map and listened to the briefing.

The other buildings were gone, the squadron headquarters, the squadron intelligence building, the sheet-metal quon-set hut movie house and theater. Remember the marvelous Italian magician? The Italian jazz band that played famous American numbers and had the solos memorized note for note? Even the drum solo was Krupa, no variation from the original. The movie
Bombardier
, when Pat O’Brien said, “General, you’ll see the day when the pilot is only a taxi driver paid to carry the bombardier over the target,” and the riot that threatened to start when the pilots in the audience, who worked themselves to exhaustion flying formation for eight and nine hours each mission, began to scream while the bombardiers cheered? What was the name of that even worse movie where Noah Beery, Jr., home with wounds and recuperating on the sands of Santa Monica with Martha O’Driscoll, said with solemnity and resolve, “I can’t wait to get another crack at them,” and we yelled “Shit,” and “Fuck you,” and “Oh, my naked ass”? And wasn’t that a good build? Martha O’Driscoll’s? We whistled and stomped when she came on the screen in her bathing suit.

Beautiful fields of grain now and recently constructed farmhouses nearby, a part of the
Mezzogiorno
program. I showed my wife where our tent had been, and I remembered a subnormal farm boy who brought eggs to sell. We teased him a lot. One of us would say, “New York.” And he would say, “New York fineesh.” He thought major American cities had been leveled by bombing, and we found his ignorance funny.

Maybe because the day was bright, the grain a warm green in the wind, and the ground hard, I remembered Captain Simmons, the squadron supply officer who didn’t provide us with enough blankets, and the cold, wet winter of 1944–45 when we shuddered at night trying to escape into sleep from the cold. I wrote Grandmother and asked for a sleeping bag and she sent one. In 1964 I still had it, somewhere among our belongings back home. Simmons didn’t seem to do much but make excuses and bullshit a lot and hate Italians.

A young G.I., maybe nineteen (I was twenty) knocked up a farm girl who lived near the base. Her father demanded the boy marry her and the boy wanted to. But Simmons intervened. “I’m not going to stand by and see that nice kid throw his life away on a goddamn eye-tie.” Simmons and some others had gone to the farm to “reason” with the father. I don’t know how they communicated with no common language, but Simmons bragged about knocking “the old bastard” around when he insisted on the wedding. “All that son-of-a-bitch wants is to marry his daughter off to an American so they can get in on some of our money,” Simmons explained with no self-doubt. A long time later, I knew enough about the southern Italian peasant and the power of religion in that life to realize what a sad business it had been. On bad days, Italians were our enemies.

And it was here where the grain now grew that Squadron Commander Joel O. Moe of North Dakota knocked on each tent door one afternoon and drunkenly announced that he would demonstrate the correct way to slide into third base. No grain then. Only unrelieved mud. And in his fresh uniform, while we stood in front of our tents, Major Joel O. Moe came running down the sloppy road between the two tent rows and hit the mud in what must remain baseball’s longest and filthiest slide and we applauded and called him safe.

The mess hall was now a school operated by two nuns who had been little girls in Cerignola during the war. Had they begged me once for candy and cigarettes? They gave us
strega
and cookies and we spent a warm hour there. Later I would try to do the experience justice.

Not good enough. I should have given it more time. The last six lines in the third stanza refer to a recurring nightmare I suffered the last weeks before we left for home. That face spun in at Odertol was a young man named Sofio from Chicago, a bombardier, eager to be friends. His pilot’s name was Martin, and the crew seemed doomed from the first. They crashed once on takeoff and survived. Another time, separated from the formation in a plane crippled by flak damage, they were hopped by three ME-109 fighters and would not have lived had not four P-51 fighters from the only Negro fighter squadron in the theater of operations shown up to rescue them. Only two of the American planes bothered to attack the Germans. The other two hung back in reserve above a cloud. The blacks were hot pilots, and two were enough to route the Messerschmidts. We watched it from the formation.

Because I was a warm, friendly man (still am, I guess), I was sometimes mistaken for a homosexual. Sofio was warm and friendly, too, and years later when I remembered this, I caught myself wondering if he had been homosexual. I was too sexually naïve to consider those matters when I was twenty. Whatever his sexual leanings, he was a likable young man. He died at Odertol near the Polish border, nailed by centrifugal force to the interior of a B-24 that would never pull out of the tight spin down five miles of sky. I remember the Messerschmidts shooting into the bomber even after it was hopelessly locked in the spin. I remember my terror that day, the unbelievable number of German fighters that struck during the eight minutes we were left unprotected by our own fighters on the bomb run because those who took us up there for the long haul had to turn back to avoid running short of fuel, and my certainty we would be killed. We had crashed only a week before—miraculously the full load of gas and bombs hadn’t ignited. That was our first mission following the crash and it was hardly one to rebuild our confidence. I was so frightened that day that the sight of Martin and crew spinning into oblivion remained immediate and vivid long after the fear was in the past. It is still vivid. Sofio. Why did I think of him that day in 1963 in Tretitoli? I didn’t know him well. Maybe because in a world of men he remained, like me, a boy, and I sensed that. Like me, he had not developed the cold exterior expected of men in those times.