Straight Life - Art Pepper [32]
I was doing well. People were getting to know me in the music business. I was starting to get a little following. And I was in love-after seventeen years of loneliness. I knew it couldn't last. Then, one day in the latter part of 1943, after six months of marriage, I got my greetings from Uncle Sam.
4
The Army
1944-1946
THAT WAR was a real war. Every day the papers had casualty lists showing thousands of Americans killed. You'd go to movies and see newsreels of bodies. I was praying for some miracle. I was just one little person. Maybe they'd make a mistake and overlook me. And then I got the greetings.
I wish I could describe the feeling. It was as if I'd been given six months of happiness and now I was going to be killed. I did everything in my power to get out of it. I wanted to fail the physical so I kept taking the strips and bennies and drinking. I'd get in the shower on a cold night, put my clothes on, and, still soaking wet, walk around the block barefoot so I'd catch TB or something. I stopped eating. I stayed up for days at a time. I ran into a chiropractor. He checked my heart. I had a slight murmur, and he said I didn't have anything to worry about. He wrote a long letter to the draft board to take with me when I went to my physical. I didn't know that the word of a chiropractor is valueless, so I paid him and continued my escapades, and when I went to my physical I was so weak I could hardly get to the place. I went through the first part; they tell you to touch your toes fifteen or twenty times and they listen to your heart. I touched my toes once and was going down the second time and blacked out and nearly fell over. My heart was pounding, and I thought I had it made, but it didn't work out that way.
I was inducted into Fort MacArthur on February 11, 1944. My dad drove me down, and I went in. I was a loner. Even playing with the bands, I was a loner. The only times I could act out or talk were when I was drunk. Sober I was completely cut off. Now I was in the army. I had trouble going to the bathroom; I couldn't urinate in front of people. I couldn't do the other thing.
I stayed at Fort MacArthur having physical examinations and being miserable, and then they sent me to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. You took seventeen weeks' basic training to prepare you for overseas. We did everything imaginable at Fort Sill. We marched. We drilled. We scrubbed. It was a field artillery base so we fired all kinds of weapons. Whit, one of my stepfathers, had taught me how to shoot a .22, and I was an excellent shot. I got an expert's medal. After that we threw hand grenades, and then we went through obstacle courses, climbing ropes, and infiltration courses with barbed wire around them. You crawl up onto the course from a trench and you have to stay flat on the ground because .50-caliber machine guns are being fired over your head, four feet in the air. If you raised up, you'd get killed. They had holes with land mines, and the land mines would explode, so you'd feel as if you were in battle. Since we were in Oklahoma there were water moccasins and copperhead snakes. They used to crawl down on the course, and a couple of people were killed while I was there because they ran into a snake, flipped out, stood up, and got shot. You go through it twice in the daytime and once at night, and at night every fourth or fifth bullet in the machine gun clip is a tracer, which means it lights up. You could see these flashing bullets going over your head.
The only other person that wasn't from the south in my platoon