Books: The No-Glamor Boys

KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN—Walter Bernstein—Viking ($2).

“My name’s Harlow,” announced the lad who had just landed in the Fort Benning guard house. “I’m in very high spirits. The M.P.s picked me up because these are no days for high spirits.”

“Am I worrying?” asked the grimy little private hiding in an Italian shell hole. “I’m not the worrying type. I’m just curious. I just want to know when the hell I’m getting out of this hole.”

These are but two of the hundreds of G.I.s, some glum, some gay, whom Sergeant Walter Bernstein ran across in his three years as a correspondent for the Army’s newspaper Yank. From a draft board in Brooklyn, Correspondent Bernstein’s career in the Army carried him to Georgia, to Italy, and finally into German-held Yugoslavia, where he became the first U.S. newsman to interview Tito. In a tense chapter of Keep Your Head Down he describes his seven-day march to Tito’s headquarters and his meeting with the Partisans. But readers of Bernstein’s book, much of which was reprinted from the pages of the New Yorker, will value it mostly for the scissors-sharp silhouettes it contains of plain American G.I.s.

Courage & Cracks. Like Cartoonist Bill Mauldin (another Yank contributor) Reporter Bernstein presents his G.I.s with affection, understanding, some acid humor, no glamor. In foxholes and juke joints these free-&-easy democrats bristle with the sour, witty, aggressively individualistic, trigger-quick cracks that make the U.S. warrior incomprehensible (and therefore frightening) to his enemies. With a keen ear for idiom and a deft hand with dialogue, Reporter Bernstein has successfully put the G.I. gripe down on paper.

The Right to Gripe. Bernstein’s most unpredictable tour of duty was with the actors (as press agent) of This Is the Army. At drill, intimidated sergeants would hesitate to give the order “Fall Out” because of the three or four irrepressibles who obeyed by falling flat on their faces. One day an ex-vaudevillian was assigned to calisthenic drill. “Inhale!” he shouted. The men inhaled. “Outhale!” They outhaled. “Sidehale!” “What the hell is that?” a regular corporal demanded. “A new breathing method. Field Manual 36-B, with Kreplach.”

A paratrooper at Fort Benning said to Bernstein, “I wish to hell there was some other way of getting up here.” “Don’t you like to jump?” Bernstein asked. “I love to jump. I just don’t like these damned airplanes.” “I’m disappointed,” said another after his third jump. “You just come up and fall out. You don’t have to do a thing. A roller coaster is worse.”

Young Bernstein saw his fellow G.I.s in every stage of training and battle. The hardboiled humor that sparkles on his pages is an understated testament to their spirit and courage.

The air was full of the burnt smell of shooting and the men’s ears rang with gunfire on the day a small reconnaissance group raided a town in Sicily. As they moved cautiously along, Bernstein glanced across the street at a young private named Taylor. “Isn’t this like the movies?” Taylor said with a grin. “Isn’t this just like the movies?”

Whatever their tasks, Bernstein’s G.I.s are as American as hot dogs or a black-&-white soda.