The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [11]
With the infusion of troops, Captain Simon Warmenhoven, formerly the senior resident in Surgery at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and now one of the doctors in the 126th Infantry Regiment’s medical detachment, stayed busy. Warmenhoven was no stranger to hard work. Growing up, he had put in long hours on his father’s farm. On summer breaks during college he ran a four-horse grain binder and traveled all over cutting wheat for local farmers. His younger brother Cornelius, who helped him by drumming up business, remembers how Simon would make it back to the house well after dark and practically fall asleep at the supper table. Once he got back to college, he shoveled coal into campus furnaces for spending money.
The new soldiers needed physicals and vaccinations. After days of marching they needed help tending to sore feet. Perhaps what they required most was sound medical advice about the dangers of cavorting with the kind of women who made their living at Ma Belle’s. Doc Warmenhoven could only do so much, though. These were young men in the prime of their lives, and he was not given to preaching. Regardless of his warnings, the soldiers sowed their wild oats on Friday and Saturday nights and then, as the saying went, attended church on Sundays “to pray for crop failure.”
Warmenhoven, who in his early thirties was practically as old as some of the soldiers’ fathers, stayed behind in camp writing letters to his wife Henrietta, whom he called Mandy (she called him Sam). Warmenhoven was a devoted husband and father, and the son of staunchly religious parents. When his parents emigrated to the United States from the Netherlands in 1921 (Simon was eleven years old), they chose the community of Sunnyside, Washington. Sunnyside was founded in 1898 as a Christian cooperative colony by members of the German Baptist Progressive Brethren, who selected the beautiful Yakima Valley as the site for their experiment in Christian living. In every land deed it sold, Sunnyside included a morality code: no drinking, dancing, gambling, or horseracing. By the time Warmenhoven was of high school age, his parents sent him off to Hull Academy, a Christian school in Hull, Iowa, where he boarded with the minister’s family. Later, with a student loan from the Christian Reformed Church, he attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was preparing to enter the seminary, fulfilling his parents’ dream, when he signed up for dance lessons, and realized that thanks to the church’s austere code of conduct, he had been missing out on one of life’s great joys. He switched his major to biology, got a Bachelor of Science degree, and later attended medical school at Marquette, a Jesuit university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
On Sunday, March 9, 1941, while most of the men were dragging themselves back to camp after boozy weekend jaunts to Alexandria or Natchez or New Orleans, Warmenhoven was listening to the Blue Danube Waltz on the radio and penning a letter to Mandy. Mandy was pregnant with their second child, and as he wrote, Warmenhoven was trying out names. How he hoped to be home for the birth.
Livingston was a melting pot of men from all over the Midwest. They came from small towns and farms and industrial cities, from immigrant families, separated by only a generation from Poland, Germany, Holland, Italy, Ireland. At first, the guardsmen and the draftees regarded each other skeptically. The draftees, according to the guardsmen, were not real soldiers. The draftees, on the other hand, considered themselves intellectually superior to the guardsmen. Most of the draftees had graduated from high school; some had even been to