"I Couldn't Be Better"

Hello, everyone -- Exciting news! We just found the volume that my mother and I made of Bill's various non-Frogs writings called "I Couldn't Be Better" so I'll be posting some pages from ICBB once I scan it in. The title comes from Bill's perennial greeting, which he modified somewhat upon entry to the Emergency Room in 2001 to which the admitting nurse said to the 90 year old World War II veteran, "Great. A wise guy." But they were all wonderful to him (although unsuccessful in their quest).

Anyway, here's the opening page of Chapter 6 -- Naples, Part One: October-November, the First Month

My first contact with the great city of Naples came somewhere near its very heart, the contact a few muffled voices in the gloomy dark sometime after midnight. The words were Italian. The voices came from faces in barely discernible bodies huddled beside dark buildings. My jeep came to a halt at a street crossing. There was silence. Then, "Americano?" "Si"

The bodies came to the side of the jeep. We spoke no Italian, they little English, but enough was exchanged to learn that the few remaining Germans had left the city early in the morning. In their leaving the Germans had heaped upon their former ally a burden of senseless destruction and heartless hunger.

At that moment and for the next two months I experienced a mixture of emotions about the Neapolitans. The mixture was many leveled, many-sided. It led to a confusion of reactions, a condition I shared with many American soldiers. On the one hand, the Italians deserved this punishment. They had cheered and strutted to a fat and pompous Mussolini. They had joined fates with Hitler. They had been our mortal enemy in North Africa and Sicily and were still fighting against us in Italy to the north of Naples. On the other hand, forgiveness seemed the larger need. In defeat, in humbled poverty, what can one do but present one's worst self. If some of the actions we were to witness in the days to come seemed like prideless beggary, if the life they lived seemed dirty and undisciplined, it was countered by a warmth of humanity, a wealth of smiles, and a vibrancy and passion for life not visible in every American.

My memories of those early hours and first days and weeks in

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Chapter 5: Tunisia, Sicily, Italy

Hello, everyone: Just to reorient you, Bill has got a long way to go even though he's already experienced the frogs. Here he is crossing the Mediterranean to Italy. -- SGP

Chapter 5

Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy

I was "dug in" on a long slope of a hill; at the bottom of it was the shore of the most magnificent sea in the world. In fact, the view I had from my two-foot-deep slit trench was really the twenty-dollar-per-day Riveria view. As far as I could see from two hundred yards up the slope, there was a vista of exquisite serenity, a body of water varying in degrees of color from blue, to lavender, to turquoise, with a gentle ripple of whitecaps on the surface of the water and magical blanco clouds in the deep azure sky above. The Mediterranean Sea, sea of history, was for us, too, a sea of some historic moment. We knew that one day soon we'd either fly it or sail it. We felt reasonably sure that we'd not walk it.

The city of Bizerte in Tunisia lay a mile or two around the corner of our slope. It was late August 1943. Bizerte was a city whose streets were being cleared of rubble and whose harbor, cluttered with sunken ships, was undergoing salvaging operations. Our jeeps were being conditioned against salt corrosion. Engine blocks and some openings were sealed shut. The exhaust pipe was given an extension that ran along the edge of the windshield to a point two feet above it. For an airborne outfit, ours, the 325th Glider Infantry, spent a great deal of time walking on the land and sailing on the sea. Current preparations suggested a sea crossing with a beach landing. This was the one maneuver we had not practiced.

Nights on the forty-five-degree-angled slope beside the transparent blue Mediterranean were pretty romantic, even from a slit trench. Girls were out that season, but radios were in. Possibly under the influence of the relaxed atmosphere of that part of the world, their volume was kept low and soft. As everyone knows who remembers the war in North Africa, it had about it a romantic quality unlike any war in any portion of the European conflict.

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Shower of Frogs -- the frogs

Excerpt from page 29 --

As we were driving back from Kairouan one afternoon, a dark cloud came over the camp and it rained water and hundreds of tadpoles, which squirmed around on the hood and floor of my jeep. We thought it very odd, being pelted by small living forms from the sky, each about half the size of the head of a pencil. By then we were so used to the strange sights of Tunisia that only later, when my honesty was questioned, when it was thought that there was upon me "the spell of Arabia" or that I had a Moses complex, only then did I search for the scientific explanation for this "plague" of frogs. Water, in being blown up from the ponds, also sucked the infinitely small tadpole. Fierce winds, common in Tunisia, blew both water and tadpoles some distance and eventually dropped the living matter with the rain.

Moving on

I was in Japan last week (more on that later) so I'll just catch up with the Shower of Frogs by moving on to the next chapter -- Chapter 4 -- when the frogs actually appear.

Chapter 4: Kairouan and a Shower of Frogs

On June 15, I drove my jeep into a wobby C-47 and was flown a thousand miles over the Atlas Mountains. The flight lasted about five hours. When not asleep, I watched the green-and-brown mountains, some with small white patches of snow. We flew over the golden cultivated fields of Algeria. From the small window in the plane I could make out grove upon grove of what I later learned was a part of the main crop of Tunisia-the olive. We landed near a great walled city of white adobe houses with blue shutters.

I backed the jeep out of the plane, and we d rove some ten miles and set up a bivouac area within an olive grove near the small Arab village of EI EIen. We pitched tents under the wind-twisted olive trees, which, for all their short leaves, afforded some shade from the murderous sun. The large olive orchard was surrounded on four sides by a wicked cactus fence ten feet high. On three sides we cut an opening large enough for vehicles to pass through. This protected us from wandering camels and nomadic Bedouins. It also locked us behind a fiercely forbidding wall.

A few days after arrival, I drove into the large walled city with a huge mosque towering high above the wall and over all other buildings. Approaching the city, we whiffed the strong smell of sulphur coming from the graveyard near the edge of the city. Later we understood that this was a holy city and that many bodies, alive and dead, were brought here for burial, some above ground. The bodies were covered with sulphur. The city itself, with the walls, was, I now realize and did to some extent then, straight out of the Middle Ages. It is called Kairouan, a word derived from the Bedouin word caravan. The streets were unpaved and are still almost entirely unpaved. The whiteness of the houses, the whiteness of every single house, was, in the brilliant sun, a stunning

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Marnia-Oujda, North Africa

Besides this "trip", my father went at least four more times to North Africa later in his life -- not being all that adventurous (or perhaps it was my mother who wasn't), he didn't ever return to Algeria, but he and my mother went at least twice of Morocco, once to Libya (before Quadafi), and at least once to Egypt. Each of those trips has its own story -- my aged aunt who had polio as a child riding a donkey through the souk; dinner under the stars on the desert outside of Cairo and visits to the Temple of Dendur before it departed for New York; our plane being forced down by a sand storm between Libya and Egype. But none of those stories matches those of The Shower of Frogs.

A Shower of Frogs --- Chapter 3

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Marnia-Oujda

Whoever selected our campsite at Marnia in Algeria was well acquainted with Hell. He undoubtedly had been there and was determined to share his hateful experience with others. Gustave Dore, were he among us, would have been reinspired to illustrate Dante's Inferno.
Our campsite has been described as fla desolate, sterile, rocky, dusty, heat-scarred valley." Camp Marnia was an Arab goat pasture--a small valley that all day gathered in the sun's rays and kept out the cool breezes. For centuries, goats/ sheep, and camels, eating close to the land, had nibbled away all the green foliage and reduced the treeless land to sand, rocks, and scrubby grass. By now only goats found it habitable. Goats and my outfit, the 325th Glider Infantry. At Marnia, Algeria, and later in Kairouan, Tunisia/ there was established from absolute zero a bustling army camp.

As part of an advance party I left Casablanca and drove a jeep northward along the Atlantic coast to Rabat. Even from a distance we made out, against the blue sky, the peculiar thirteenth-century minaret, its tall, slender silhouette sharp and graceful in the gleaming morning sun. At Rabat a great sultan had once preached a holy war against Saint Louis. But Louis IX soon died of dysentery at Carthage, a ruined city in distant Tunisia. At Rabat we turned right and drove thirty-six miles to Meknes, where once 60,000 Christians were worked as slaves. Thirty miles farther east we circled Fez, religious/ scholastic/ and literary center of Muslim Africa. Here troglodyte women-femmes d' occasion (women at a bargain)-lived in caves outside the city walls and bellowed for masculine trade. We drove on to Taza. After driving over gently rolling country, we came to the Rif Mountains. Near Oujda/ an embroidery center/ we approached the southern slopes of the Atlas Mountains.

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