Army Days

The first thing the army taught Barney, he writes, is that he had no idea who the average American male actually was. He had assumed his friends — solid high-school and college men — were somewhere in the middle. Basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, nicknamed by the men themselves Fort Lost in the Woods of Misery, disabused him. A nineteen-year-old from Detroit asked Barney to read his eight-year-old sister's letter aloud because the man could not read it himself. It was the middle of winter. The sergeant woke them at 4 a.m. and, to make a point, had an underling kick the door off its hinges. They slept the rest of basic training in zero-degree weather with no door.

A private at the enlistment office — whom Barney says he would give a hundred thousand dollars to find today — had noticed Barney's two years of mandatory ROTC at Mizzou and told him he could bring a letter from the ROTC officer and enter as a PFC with one stripe. That single stripe was the difference between kitchen patrol and charge of quarters, between twelve hours of greasy dishes and waking the men up.

A Bullet Through the Helmet

During a shooting exercise, ten recruits with M-1 rifles — difficult weapons that jammed perhaps one time in ten — lined up to fire. Behind them stood ten “smarter” recruits, Barney among them, whose job was to hold the shooters' ammunition belts and keep them from rotating if their rifles jammed. The man next to Barney stopped and his weapon discharged sideways. The round took Barney's helmet off. It felt, he says, like someone had hit me in the head with a sledgehammer. The lieutenant asked if he was all right. Barney saw the shrapnel. It was only then that he realized he had been shot at.

Willing Himself to France

Most of his basic-training class shipped out to Korea. Barney's college roommate went to Germany. Barney willed himself to France — not because anyone sent him there, but because he had read Marcel Proust's Swann's Way in college and fallen in love with a country he had never seen. On the troop ship from New York, a “deluxe cabin” for 280, he was assigned the bottom bunk of six. All five men above him were seasick. He went on deck and watched the Atlantic roll past. Two young soldiers from Arkansas stood at the rail complaining that they'd be in Europe a year and a half. A gull, on cue, pooped on their heads. That's the difference between a good attitude and a bad attitude, he writes.

The Ammo Depot and the Unholy Three

Barney's colonel, collecting the highest-IQ men on the post for prestige, made him forms-and-reports control officer for the largest ammunition depot in Europe. Three French women worked under him. He had enough work for one of them. He divided the job in thirds. They kept only a few perfect files in the cabinet; the rest were stuffed with waste paper. Inspections rated the unit highest on the post.

Because Barney had extra time, officers asked him to run all three NCO clubs for extra-duty pay. This made him the highest-paid corporal on the base. His two closest friends, “the Unholy Three” — Catholic Dan Devine running the officers' club, Jewish Wally Sugar running the EM club, and Barney running the NCO clubs — split the base's social life between them. Barney's main bartender was the sergeant major of the company who controlled all the passes. The deal was never discussed. Barney signed his paychecks; he signed Barney's passes. When no one else on base had a weekend pass, Barney had one. Every weekend, the pass took him to Paris.

When Barney discovered the sergeants before him had been running a black-market francs scheme — writing dollar checks, flying the money to Luxembourg, exchanging at 440 francs to the dollar instead of the official 350, and pocketing the difference — he shut it down on his first transaction. The sergeants, who called him “Sir” even though he was only a corporal, were aghast. That's not the way we usually do it, they said. That's the way we're doing it now, he answered.