Citizen Soldiers

Jerks

Most GIs did their job, fought well, managed to stay out of serious trouble, and were generally regarded as "good guys." The ones who slipped and became jerks for a night, or a day, or a week, could usually blame it on wine, which was present in almost every cellar in France and Belgium (in sharp contrast to the Pacific Theater, where the men drank homemade stuff, always vile, but with a punch). Paul Fussell, in "Wartime", catches the situation exactly in his chapter title "Drinking Far Too Much, Copulating Too Little."

When it came to drinking, the men of ETO were just boys. Growing up in the Depression, their experience with alcohol was pretty much limited to a few beers on graduation night, and a lot of beer on Saturday nights in training camp in Georgia or wherever, and in English pubs. This in no way prepared them for the challenge France had to offer.

On December 15 Dutch Schultz, 82nd Airborne, stationed in an old French army barracks, got a pass to Reims, champagne capital of the world. There he ran into three high school buddies from another outfit. The corks popped. "This was my first experience with champagne," Schultz recalled. "I started drinking it like soda pop." He can't recall anything that happened in Reims after the drinking started, but he does remember what happened when he got back to barracks.

"I headed for my bed which was an upper bunk on the second floor of my building. When I got to my bed, I found someone sleeping in it."

Dutch shook the man awake. "What the hell are you doing in my bed?" he roared.

The soldier roared back: "It's my bed, what the hell do you think you are doing? Get the hell out of here!"

They started throwing punches. The lights went on. Every man in the room wanted to kill Schultz. To his consternation, he discovered he was not only at the wrong bed, but also the wrong room, the wrong barracks, the wrong battalion. "I made a hasty retreat."

"Jerk!" the men called out as he fled, using a variety of obscene adjectives to express their feelings.

Copyright © 1997 by Ambrose-Tubbs, Inc. Converted for the Web with the permission of Simon & Schuster.