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Joe B. Davis
Using my mess kit fork, I fished one of the artichokes out of the boiling water in the #10
can. "Won't you try one?" I asked. "I think you'd like it."
My jeep driver, T/5
Joe B. Davis, recoiled as if I had offered him the business end of a
rattlesnake. "No, sir." A pause. "Thanks anyway." It was clear that in his West Texas home
artichokes were not a staple of diet like fried okra or black-eyed peas, and he was not about to
experiment on some strange weed that a foolhardy captain had picked in a deserted garden in
Normandy. He had humored me enough by cooking the things.
Joe B. Davis was a small, wiry man with a weather beaten Texas face that might have
belonged to a man of twenty or forty-five. I expect he was in his upper twenties. He didn't talk
much.
He was the last of a series of drivers I had experienced, and I got him when we were on
desert maneuvers in California. He was a substitute for my regular driver, who was on sick call
for the day. Joe B. Davis drove me for about a mile along a trace of trail that wound between
creosote bushes, when I mentioned mildly that I thought we were going a little too fast for the
conditions underfoot. At this point my regular driver would have either ignored the suggestion or
slammed on the brakes and slowed to a crawl. What Joe B. Davis did was reduce speed from
twenty-five to twenty and ask, "This OK, sir?"
At this point I began to realize that Joe B. Davis understood the same language I did, that
we were on the same wavelength. This insight was confirmed later in the day when I told him to
send a message on the radio. He sent it with the exact wording I gave him. My old driver had
always tried to improve and embroider. Once I gave him the message, "Safe to fire," to send to
fire direction center. He expanded it to "It is now safe to fire," and they scrubbed the mission
because the "now" sounded like "not."
The first thing I did when we got back to the command post was to demand that Joe B.
Davis be reassigned to be my jeep driver. The Headquarters Battery Commander, Captain Jacobs
(Jake), didn't want to, because it meant he would have to find a slot for the idiot who had driven
for me before, but I insisted and he compromised and gave me what I wanted.
From then on, Joe B. Davis (always called by his full name to distinguish him from Amos
Davis, a switchboard operator) was my Man Friday, jeep driver, cook, and procurer of eggs, until
the middle of the war, when I was kicked upstairs to S-3 and was no longer entitled to a jeep.
While I waited for the artichoke to cool, I looked around. The garden where we sat on the
ground by our tiny campfire was unkempt and overgrown. The people who owned it had wisely
departed some time ago, probably about the time the Germans decided to use the hill as a
defensive position. At the moment, the weedy ground was littered with twigs and leaves from the
tops of trees which had been clipped off in a neat Line by machine gun fire. Like trimming a
hedge.
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