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Upstarts
The calculator had not yet been invented, so it all had to be done with pencil and
paper. I'll have to admit that I never learned to add, subtract, multiply, and divide with
any real assurance until I was 30 years old and had to do math in the middle of the night
in a haze of drowsiness.
Night duty was usually pretty dull, and I would have trouble staying awake. Lt
Col Peach, on the other hand, who could have slept all night, had trouble corking off. I
would be sitting on the handle end of a five gallon water can, leaning against a tent pole,
nodding, when Eric Peach would stick his head. through the tent flap.
"Bob. Bob! BOB! Wake up! What's all that machine gun fire?"
I would force my eyes open and listen hard. Sure enough, barely audible above
the hiss of the Coleman lantern, was a crackle of distant machine gun fire.
"Sounds like a long way off," I ventured.
"Long way off, hell! Sounds like a counter-attack! Why aren't the forward
observers doing something?"
I'd get on the phone and start ringing observers. It sounded as if it were off to the
right, so I started with the people with the 3rd Battalion. I got a couple of grumpy
lieutenants and a sergeant on different calls. "No, sir. Everything quiet on our front.
Nobody shooting here, us or them. "
"Can't you hear any firing?"
"No. Well, yes, but it's quite a ways off. I'd say maybe ten miles, at least. You
know how sound travels at night, sir."
I rang off and called the duty officer at United, the 344th FA Bn CP. They
supported the 358th Infantry, the regiment to the right, or south, of our own. "Hi. This is
Capt Moore, at Upstart. Anything going on in your sector?"
"Not a thing. No. Why?"
"I thought maybe I heard some machine gun firing from that direction."
"I can't hear anything ... wait a minute. Yeah, I hear it now. Very faint. Must be
twenty miles away, in the next division sector. Maybe the next corps. Say, you've got
good ears!"
I would thank him, ring off, and go into the next tent to report my findings to Eric
Peach, who would grumble and go back to bed. And by the time I had regained my state
of torpor, the next metro message would come in.
In the morning at seven, the rest of the staff would get up and go eat breakfast,
after which they would come and relieve me, or whoever was on night duty. Unless there
was some pressing need for him, the duty officer could take the morning off to catch up
on sleep.
There wasn't too much pressing need during this period, and there was time to
catch up on some light housekeeping, like going through all the mass of maps I had
collected to see what was there and get it organized so it could be found.
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