Whether you call him a simple peacekeeper or raise his stature by regarding him as a minor proconsul, the generous American soldier with his PX rations and leftover food can work wonders in an occupation of a quasi-military nature. Getting along with the locals is a familiar army doctrine of necessity. It is sometimes cynically known as “winning hearts and minds,” a public-relations phrase used in Vietnam (nothing could help in that predictable lost cause), but it did succeed in more practical ways in the liberated countries of Europe during the second world war. The bread and wine handed to the American riflemen in return were the Roman laurels for their time.
It’s too late to challenge the wisdom of United States forces on the ground in the former Yugoslavia. We’re there. But there’s reason to hope that human encounters between soldiers and civilians–especially children–can help to influence pacific attitudes on higher levels. No NATO edicts are required for the armed forces of any country to bond with people. Kindness works best by instinct. With luck, acts of generosity can speed the American departure sooner than later, leaving a spoor of good feeling long after the GIs return home.
Reading the latest dispatch about American troops greeting the people in unremarkable towns and on numbered hills without names in Bosnia, I was reminded of John Hersey’s idealistic 1944 novel, “A Bell for Adano,” which fictionalized his keen observations as a correspondent in wartime Italy. He and I happened to be there at the same time during that summer of invasion and conquest in 1943. The novel describes the efforts of an army major, while serving with the Allied Military Government, to restore normalcy to a small town in Sicily and, by doing so, gaining friends for the American cause after the downfall of fascism.
“He was a good man, though weak in certain attractive, human ways,” Hersey wrote in a prescient foreword. “What he did and what he was not able to do in Adano represented in miniature what America can and cannot do in Europe. Since he happened to be a good man, his works represented the best of the possibilities.”
To be sure, the sentimental Italian-American army major from the Bronx got his fictional Adano a new church bell by hook and crook and endeared himself to the townspeople. And (something I had forgotten until I reread the novel for the second or third time), he also encouraged the equal distribution of chocolates that were tossed by soldiers like grenades at the street children.
Although every major military operation includes civil-affairs personnel concerned with social and economic matters–whether in wartime Sicily, occupied Okinawa or peacekeeping Bosnia–the training and rule books cannot cover every contingency. In Europe, the natural generosity of the GI turned out to be something of a secret weapon. At the end of every chow line there were three large garbage cans–the first for leftovers, the second for soaping mess kits, the third for rinsing. Hungry mothers and children would scoop the slops out of the cans. This humiliating process was too much for many well-fed U.S. soldiers. They began to place their leftovers directly into outstretched hands and into homemade containers.
Similar gestures of good will happened all around the newly liberated lands. Many incidents involved the unofficial sharing of food with starving and underfed families. I can still see the line of youngsters who waited outside the grungy Albergo Elena, on Julius Caesar Square in Palermo, where our staff slept and ate, when I was managing editor of Stars and Stripes, the army newspaper, in Sicily.
The proprietor of the requisitioned third-class hotel threatened the children with the wrong end of a broom handle, ordering them not to dare approach the Americans. Leaving the restaurant after lunch, we evenly distributed our unfinished loaves of white bread and slices of spiced ham to their outstretched fingers. With four-letter words he didn’t quite understand and crossed-arm gestures that he surely recognized, we let the owner know that what we did with our food was none of his damn business.
Surprisingly, our own stolid mess sergeant, a sullen jerk, informed us that it was against military regulations to give army rations to civilians. When he tried to stop our burly staff artist from handing buttered bread to the skinny scugnizzi, the rest of us laughed and applauded as the artist, also a sergeant, delivered a shot in the head to the mess sergeant. That wonderful punch immediately changed the rules.
At Christmas and other holidays, we invited a dozen of our neighborhood regulars to sit down with us for dinner inside the restaurant. The hotel proprietor fumed at the idea of serving the ragged children. Naturally, we took pleasure in his discomfort. I noticed that after a few bites of turkey, one of our favorite youngsters, a sweet 10-year-old boy we called “Cocky” because he was cross-eyed, stopped eating. His half-starved stomach couldn’t tolerate that much food all at once. Afterward, the youngsters rolled up paper sacks to hold their own secreted leftovers, plus our scrounged extras, to take home to their brothers and sisters.
Whenever I read of another generation of winter soldiers camouflaged in the mud or in a rice field in some Godforsaken place, tentatively reaching out to civilians, I think of “Cocky"and the other kids we fed bread and Baby Ruths. I wonder what they told their own grown-up children about the Americans who once befriended them with handouts, against the rules.
