This Is the Army

SEE HERE, PRIVATE HARGROVE--Marion Hargrove--Half ($2).

This is World War II's best book to date about U.S. Army life. It is a realistic, informative, good-natured sketch of what life in camp is really like, written with a certain cub-like charm. It approaches Army life with just the right touch of hard-boiled banter to take the sting out of it. If a book can build morale, this should.

From the start, Private Hargrove (a former reporter on the Charlotte News) was something of a dud when it came to neatness, drill, getting up on time. He spent most of his early days on K.P. and ether punitive details.

Every soldier has to go through an interminable regimen of Army inoculations. A medical attendant punctures the recruit's arm with "a hypodermic needle that looks like an air pump for Zeppelins. . . . You walk away, saying, 'Well, that wasn't too bad.' Then, suddenly, you fall to the floor in a dead faint. When you wake up, you look at your arm and discover the bicep [sic] you never suspected was there."

But it isn't all K.P. and medication. There is also griping--an extremely important morale builder, says Private Hargrove. Typical soldier's gripe: "Our battery has the worst food in the Army. We've got the worst sergeant in the battery. No kidding, though, our platoon makes all the others look crummy." Private Bushemi, photographer, hazes a mess sergeant: "You know the one thing that's missing from this meal--the one thing that would make it perfect?" "Ice cream?" asks the sergeant. "Chloroform," says Bushemi.

From the prize of all griping letters (written by some anonymous camp genius), which Private Hargrove carried around with him as a literary masterpiece: "At the infirmary, patients are divided into two classes: 1) those who have athlete's foot and 2) those who have colds. Anyone who claims he has neither a cold nor athlete's foot is sent to the guardhouse for impersonating an officer. I am very popular at the infirmary. I told them I have both a cold and athlete's foot. What I really have is gastric ulcers, but I know when to keep my mouth shut."

It didn't take long for Private Hargrove to get the feel of the Army. (By the time his book was published, he was a corporal.) It was a matter, simply, of getting used to an environment which is novel and robustly companionable, despite its hard work and its basic seriousness. Says Private Hargrove: "I seem to be adopting the philosophy of the old soldier: 'If it's going to happen, it's going to happen, so why worry about it?' If I sleep until too late to stand reveille, I know that the first sergeant is going to put me on K.P. Sunday. The Sunday K.P. is an unpleasant thought--for next Sunday. But why worry about it?"

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