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Upstarts
Naturally, Levine got quite a bit of mail in response, much more than those of us
who grudgingly found time to write our wives once a week. And so he kept track of what
his old friends were doing - who had a new job, who had been drafted, who was engaged
to whom, and the like.
After awhile, he began to get some very affectionate letters from a girl whom he
had thought of as a friend, but certainly not as a girlfriend. As her missives became more
and more intimate, he decided to cool things off by not writing to her as frequently as
before. That didn't seem to help: she kept writing to him even oftener and more ardently,
sometimes referring to steamy passages in his letters that he had no recollection of having
written.
Finally the truth came out. There was another Private Isadore Levine, stationed
somewhere in North Africa, and one of the girl's letters had been misdirected to him.
Isadore II seems to have been an unscrupulous character, who not only opened our
Isadore's mail (possibly by accident) but also used the return address to start a libidinous
correspondence of his own. How the young lady correspondent felt when she got the
facts can only be guessed.
Meanwhile, the time approached when Colonel Peach might have been repaid for
saving Levine from his fate with the infantry.
Brigadier General Bixby, the Division Artillery Commander, was a man who
wanted quick, if not simultaneous, response to his orders. Col Peach, his subordinate, was
a man who did not like to be hurried, especially if it involved missing meals or sleep.
It seemed to us that Bixby would phone down an order for us to move into a new
position (a complex operation taking several hours at best) and then jump into his jeep
and go to the new position to see if we were there and firing yet. And it must have
seemed to Bixby that Peach did nothing but drag his feet. The truth, as truth usually does,
lay somewhere in between.
After his brush with battle fatigue, Levine was in good health until early winter,
when he developed some small ailment, probably flu, and was evacuated to the field
hospital for a few days. The man who replaced him as journal clerk lacked both the
experience and temperament of a Levine, and since the war had warmed up about then,
no one took the time to supervise him. The journal had come to be taken for granted.
And just then an occasion arose when, due to a number of misunderstandings,
Gen Bixby and his executive, Col Theimer, thought that the foot-dragging had gone
altogether too far. Col Peach was relieved of command and sent back for reassignment,
together with a list of his shortcomings intended to end his career forever. That list was
full of unfair and self-serving errors in fact, and our whole battalion staff was agreed that
we had to write a response to refute it and save Eric Peach's professional reputation. We
remembered it differently than did Gen Bixby, and all we had to do was prove him wrong
by citing the actual facts as recorded in the journal.
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