National Affairs: A Simple Ceremony

As the band and the long columns of troops swung in review, the dust rose over the parade ground at San Antonio’s Fort Sam Houston. The man who took the salute, a lame, lanky, partially deaf General with a strained look about the eyes, was reviewing his last parade as an active officer. He was Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, veteran of 45 years of Army service, and the symbol of both U.S. unpreparedness and victory in the Pacific.

General Wainwright was just one week past the Army’s compulsory retirement age of 64. Since his return from a Japanese prison camp in 1945, he had done two tours of duty: one as Commanding General of the Eastern Defense Command, the other as Commanding General of the Fourth Army at Fort Sam Houston and the Eighth Service Command at Dallas. Actually, he had spent most of his time touring and speaking on Army promotion projects. Now he could slow down.

The retirement ceremonies were as spare and simple as the General himself. He made a short farevell speech, attended a reception, held a housewarming at the two-story, white stucco Wainwright house in San Antonio (named “Fiddler’s Green,” after the mythical heaven to which the souls of all cavalrymen are supposed to go).* Then it was all over. “Skinny” Wainwright was a civilian.

*The cavalry borrowed the name. Says Webster: ” ‘Fiddler’s Green’ is the imagined Elysian field of sailors and vagabond craftsmen, where credit is good and there is always a lass, a glass, and a song.”