I Heard You Paint Houses Page 5

  The logging company hired us both. They put Yank in the kitchen helping the cook. On account of my size they put me on a two-man saw. I was too young to fell the big trees, but I sawed the branches off the trees and turned them into logs once they were on the ground. Then bulldozers would push the logs into the river and they’d float downstream to a point where trucks would load them. Sawing those trees all day was hard work. I was only about 6'1" then and weighed about 175 pounds, and after nine months of that work there wasn’t an ounce of fat on me.

  We slept in little shacks they had set up with potbellied wood-burning stoves and we ate—you guessed it—stew and more stew. After a day of sawing logs by hand you never tasted food so good.

  We saved what little money we made because there was no place to spend it. Neither Yank nor I played cards with the men or they’d have cleaned us out.

  They had a wild form of rugby they played on Sundays. I played a lot of that. I never did catch on to the rules, if there were any. It was just a lot of knocking each other down.

  It seemed like every night that it didn’t snow we had boxing matches in a roped-off section that was like a ring. They didn’t have any gloves up there, and so the fighters would wrap their fists in bandages. Everybody wanted to see the big kid fight the men who were in their late twenties and thirties, so by popular demand I participated a lot in those matches. It reminded me of my father pairing me up with older boys to win beer bets. Including my own father, it seemed like I was always matched against people older than me. Only these loggers could hit even harder than my father. I lost many a fight, but I could always hit, too, and I learned an awful lot of tricks.

  I think you’re born with the ability to hit. Rocky Marciano didn’t start boxing until after the war when he was already twenty-six, but he was a natural hitter. You need leverage, but a lot of your power comes from your forearm down into your wrist. There’s a snap to your punch that comes from your wrist to your fist, and that’s what knocks the other guy out. You can actually hear that snap; it sounds like a pistol shot when it’s working to perfection. Joe Louis had that famous six-inch punch. He’d knock a guy out with a punch that only traveled six inches. His power came from the snap. It’s like snapping a towel at somebody’s butt. There’s no power in your arms.

  Then if you learn a trick or two besides, you’re set for life. They say Jack Dempsey learned all the tricks of fighting as a thirteen-year-old working in the mining camps of Colorado. I can believe that about Dempsey after my nine months in the deep woods of Maine.

  We hitchhiked back to Philly that next summer, and all of a sudden we found we had a new interest besides boxing—chasing girls. I worked two or three jobs, whenever I could find work, until I got an apprenticeship at the Pearlstein Glass Company at Fifth and Lombard. It was a commercial area then just off South Street; now it’s where the young kids go to shop. I was studying to be a glazier. I learned how to set windows in all the big buildings in town. Sometimes I worked in the shop grinding bevels on the glass. I learned a lot, and it was nowhere near as hard work as logging. At the end of a workday I still had plenty of energy left to compete against Yank for the neighborhood girls.

  My secret weapon against Yank was my dancing. Most big men are clumsy and heavy-footed, but not me. I had a good sense of rhythm and I could move every part of my body. I had very fast hands, too, and good coordination. Swing music was sweeping the country and social dancing was all the rage. I went dancing six nights a week (never on a Sunday) to a different hall every night. That’s how you learned the dances. You learned by going dancing. They all had certain steps, unlike today where you just make it up as you go along. After the war, one of the jobs I had was a ballroom dance instructor.

  In 1939, when I was nineteen, my dance partner, Roseanne De Angelis, and I took second place in the fox-trot competition against 5,000 other couples in Madison Square Garden in the Harvest Moon Ball dance contest. Roseanne was some graceful dancer. I met her up at the Garden before the contest when her partner got hurt on the dance floor during practice. My partner got tired and worn out, so Roseanne and I teamed up. The Harvest Moon was the biggest event in dancing in the whole country. It was sponsored every year by the New York Daily News. Many years later I taught my daughters how to dance, every kind of dance, even the tango and the rumba.

  I made good money at Pearlstein’s, almost $45 a week. That was more than my father made at the Blessed Virgin Mary. Out of that money I paid room and board at home so we didn’t have to keep moving. My sister, Peggy, was still in school and worked after school at the A&P as a stocker. My brother, Tom, was out of the house. He had dropped out of school and joined the CCC, a youth conservation corps that Roosevelt had set up to provide jobs for the youth on account of the Depression. The young men would go to camps set up in rural areas around the country, and they’d work on conservation projects.

  Most of the money I had leftover from paying my parents out of my Pearlstein’s pay was spent in the dance halls. There wasn’t a lot left over to spend on dates with the girls, but Yank and I found ways to have fun without money. One afternoon I took a pretty young Irish girl with freckles buck-bathing in the creek off Darby Road, where Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital is now. The creek was about a hundred yards from the road. Yank snuck up on us and swiped our clothes. Then he stood up at the top of the hill near the road and yelled down for the girl I was with to come out of the water, get dressed, and go with him or he’d leave with her clothes, too. So she came out and went off with him and he gave a kid a quarter to hold onto my clothes until Yank and the girl got out of sight and then drop them back down by the creek and run like hell.

  I’m sure I played a trick back on him; I just don’t remember exactly which trick it was. Did I spread the rumor that a pregnant girl he didn’t even know was his responsibility? Probably. Did I give him a hot foot? No doubt. But that’s about all we did. Played jokes. Walked around and messed around. We were no longer boxers and fighters and road warriors; we were lovers and dancers. I had been to the Little Egypt University and the Neptune of the Nile Graduate School, and it was my duty to the young maidens of the City of Brotherly Love not to let all that good education go to waste.

  I had the ideal carefree young man’s life—the Life of Riley—popular with the girls, good pals, no responsibilities; a life where your only real job is to build memories for the rest of your days. Except I couldn’t stay put. I was impatient. I had to move on. Pretty rapidly I found myself halfway around the world. But by then I no longer could have the luxury to be impatient. I had to do things the Army’s way: hurry up and wait.”

  chapter five

  411 Days

  “I first heard the song “Tuxedo Junction” in 1941. I was an MP in Colorado, pulling guard duty at Lowry Field for the Army Air Corps. Most people think it was Glenn Miller who first made that song famous, but it was a black bandleader named Erskine Hawkins. He wrote the song and had the first hit with it. That song stayed with me like a theme song through the whole war. After the war I had my first date with Mary, my future wife, to see Erskine Hawkins at the old Earl Theater in Philly.

  One cold night in December 1941 I won a dance contest jitterbugging to “Tuxedo Junction” at the Denver Dance Hall. The next thing I knew I was on a troop train at four in the morning heading for the West Coast to defend California. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I just turned twenty-one and I was 6'2". Four years later when the war ended I got my discharge one day before I turned twenty-five; I was 6' 4". I had grown two inches. People forget how young we were. Some of us were not full-grown yet.

  I spent the war as a rifleman in Europe in the Thunderbird Division—the 45th Infantry Division. They say the average number of days of actual combat for a veteran is around eighty. By the time the war was over the Army told me I had 411 combat days, which entitled me to $20 extra pay a month. I was one of the lucky ones. The real heroes, some of them with only one combat day, are still over there. As big a target as I
was and as many fire fights as I was in, I never got hit by a German bullet or shrapnel. I said a lot of foxhole prayers, especially pinned down in a dugout in Anzio. And whatever anybody wants to say about my childhood, one thing my childhood did teach me was how to take care of myself, how to survive.”

  Eliciting information from Frank Sheeran about his combat experiences was the most difficult part of the interview process. It was two years before he could accept the fact that his combat experience was even worth discussing. And then it became painstaking and stressful for both a respectful questioner and his reluctant subject, with many stops and starts.

  To help me understand his combat days, Sheeran tracked down the 45th Infantry Division’s hardbound, 202-page official Combat Report, issued within months of World War II’s end. The more I learned from both this report and Frank himself, the clearer it seemed to me that it was during his prolonged and unremitting combat duty that Frank Sheeran learned to kill in cold blood.

  The Combat Report states: “The 45th paid heavily for maintaining our American heritage: 21,899 battle casualties.” Considering that a fully staffed division has 15,000 members, Sheeran saw replacements march in and be carried out on a daily basis. The report asserts a record of “511 days of combat” for the division itself; that is, 511 days of shooting and being shot at on the front lines. The Thunderbird Division fought valiantly from the very first day of the war in Europe to the very last.

  With time out for rest and rehabilitation along the way, Private Frank Sheeran, with 411 combat days, experienced more than 80 percent of the division’s total “days of combat.” Sheeran was conditioned for the rest of his life by the experience of killing and maiming day after day, and wondering when he would be next. Not all people are affected the same way by the same events. We are each our own fingerprints and the sum of our own life’s experiences. Other combat veterans I have interviewed drop their jaws and gasp at the thought of 411 days of combat.

  ““I ought to kick your ass,” Charlie “Diggsy” Meiers said. I was two years older than Diggsy and a foot taller. We had been pals since grade school.

  “What did I do wrong? What do you want to kick my ass for, Digs?” I asked and smiled down at him.

  “You had a noncombat gravy job in the MPs. You could have sat out the whole friggin’ war in the States. You must be crazy transferring over here. I always knew you had a screw loose, but this takes the cake. You think we’re having fun over here?”

  “I wanted to see some action,” I said, already feeling like a jackass.

  “Well, you’ll see it.”

  A blast like thunder and a loud, whistling buzz shot across the sky. “What’s that?”

  “That’s your action.” He handed me a shovel and said, “Here.”

  “What the hell is this for?” I asked.

  “Your foxhole. Start digging. Welcome to Sicily.”

  After I got done digging, Charlie explained to me that an exploding shell is going to spread its shrapnel on an angle upward. You get down and stay down and let it sail over you. Otherwise it cuts you in half right across your chest. When we were kids I looked out for Diggsy, but now it was going to be the other way around.

  How did I end up with a shovel in my hand in Sicily in 1943?

  In August 1941 I had enlisted in the army. The rest of the world was already in the war, but we were neutral and weren’t in it yet.

  Biloxi, Mississippi, was where I did my basic training. One day a Southern sergeant addressed the recruits and said he could lick any one of us and if anybody thought otherwise they should step forward now. I took a giant step forward, and he had me digging latrines for five days. It was just a trick to get us to respect his rank and rank in general. They were getting us ready for a war.

  After basic training, the army took one look at me and sized me up as a perfect specimen for the military police. They didn’t ask you what you thought of your new assignment, and before the war started there was no way out of the MPs.

  But after Pearl Harbor, with a war going on, they let you transfer out of the military police if you were willing to go into combat. I liked the idea of dropping out of the sky and into combat, and I signed right up for the Army Airborne and transferred to Fort Benning, Georgia, for paratroop training. I was in real good shape, so the rigid training of a paratrooper came easy for me. I liked the whole idea of finally seeing some action. When your parachute landed, you’d be on your own a lot, kind of self-reliant. I thought I was something special until I jumped from a tower during training and dislocated my right shoulder. I had landed wrong, and they gave you only one mistake. They cut me from the team. I was now going to go into the infantry as a combat foot soldier.

  Meanwhile, no amount of authority or military discipline could stop me from getting into my little scrapes. I was in one scrape after another in my army career. I went into the army as a private, and I came out four years and two months later as a private. They gave me combat promotions from time to time, but then I’d have my fun and get busted back down. All in all I had fifty days lost under AWOL—absent without official leave—mostly spent drinking red wine and chasing Italian, French, and German women. However, I was never AWOL when my outfit was going back to the front lines. If you were AWOL when your company was going back into combat you might as well keep going because your own officers would blow you away, and they didn’t even have to say it was the Germans. That’s desertion in the face of the enemy.

  While I was waiting to be shipped overseas they had me at Camp Patrick Henry in Virginia, and I gave some lip back to one of those Southern sergeants, so they put me on KP (kitchen patrol) peeling potatoes. First chance I got I bought some laxative at the PX and put it in the giant coffee urn. Everybody wound up with bad diarrhea, including the officers. Unfortunately, I was the only one who didn’t report in sick at the infirmary. They had that caper solved before they put in a requisition for extra toilet paper. Can you guess which brilliant criminal ended up on his knees scrubbing bathroom floors?

  I set sail on July 14, 1943, for Casablanca in North Africa, assigned to the 45th Infantry Division as an infantry rifleman. While you couldn’t choose your division, you could choose a particular company in the division if they had an opening. A company is about 120 men. Our church in Philly put out a newsletter keeping tabs on where all the neighborhood boys were stationed, so I knew Diggsy was with the Thunderbird. I asked to be in his company and got it. That didn’t mean I’d end up in his platoon of about thirty-two men or end up in his eight-man squad in his platoon, but I did, and we stayed together in the same squad.”

  In the fall of 1942, while they were still being trained for combat in the States and had yet to go overseas, General George S. Patton addressed Diggsy and the men of the 45th from the stage of a theater in Fort Devens, Massachusetts. General Patton told the impressionable boys of the 45th—boys away from home for the first time, about to be sent overseas to fight and die—that he had a special role in the war for their division.

  As reported by Colonel George E. Martin, chief of staff to the commanding officer of the 45th Infantry Division:

  [General Patton] had much to say, all interlarded with shockingly coarse and profane language…. He was telling of occurrences when British infantry moving forward to attack would bypass enemy pockets, only to find themselves engaged by this enemy to the rear. Then when the British turned to mop-up, the German soldiers would fling down their weapons and raise their hands in surrender. If this should happen to us, said General Patton, we should not accept their surrender; instead we should kill every last one of the bastardly S.O.B.s.

  We were then told that our Division probably would see more combat than any other American division, and he wanted us to be known to the Germans as the “Killer Division.”

  In a follow-up speech on June 27 in Algiers, North Africa, as reported by an officer of the division who was present, Patton told the men of his “Killer Division”:

  …to kill and to continu
e to kill and that the more we killed the less we’d have to kill later and the better off the Division would be in the long run…. He did say that the more prisoners we took the more men we would have to feed and not to fool around with prisoners. He said that there was only one good German and that was a dead one.

  Another officer listening to the speech reported Patton’s position on the killing of civilians: “He said something about if the people living in the cities persisted in staying in the vicinity of the battle and were enemy, we were to ruthlessly kill them and get them out of the way.”

  “After I got my foxhole dug, Diggsy told me there were two big scandals going on. Everybody hated snipers. Both sides hated snipers, and if you captured one it was okay to kill him on the spot. They had some sniping going on outside Biscari airfield and a bunch of Americans had been hit. When about forty Italians soldiers surrendered, they couldn’t tell which ones had done the sniping so they lined them all up and shot them. Then a sergeant took about thirty prisoners back behind the line. When they got some distance he grabbed a machine gun and let them have it. That got my attention like the whistling shell that had sailed over us. It made you think twice about surrendering yourself if it ever came to that.”

  In his last speech to the 45th Infantry Division in August 1943, following their combat success in Sicily, at an outdoor address, Patton told the men and officers of the 45th: “Your division is one of the best if not the best division in the history of American arms.” By his praise Patton was reinforcing his faith in his “Killer Division.” They were doing things the way he wanted their division to do things and the way he had instructed them to do things in prior speeches.