The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo

me many questions about our missions, and I told him everything he wanted to know. I didn’t care that it was classified information. Enough close flak bursts had convinced me the Germans knew our altitude. Besides, I am loose-tongued by nature. Had I been captured, long before the Gestapo brought those blowtorches and pliers to my cell, I would have been known as Blabbermouth Hugo.
    The colonel reminded me very much of the actor Herbert Marshall. I envied his composure, his gentility, and easy good manners. Although in no way did he register amazement or disapproval, I imagined he found it strange that a nervous, over-talkative, boorish boy could be an American officer. I had the impression he found me interesting but decided that was simply his aristocratic training—always let the serfs know you have a keen interest in their lives. I hoped that some day I’d perfect my own composure and detachment. I wanted very much to be like the earl, or Herbert Marshall.
     
     
    Bob Mills, a pleasant, civilized young man, had attended Stanford University for a year or two. A bombardier, he had grown a long, handsome black moustache, and his warm, fluid personality got him elected president of the squadron officers’ club. He was given $500 in lire and the task of buying more liquor for the club. He was also assigned a jeep, and he asked me to go along with him to Barletta on the Adriatic coast where the liquor was produced and sold.
    Among other dangers our imaginations had created was the danger of bandits, and we took our .45 automatics. I had my gun (piece, if you’re still G.I.) stuffed in my right trenchcoat pocket, and I felt a bit like Humphrey Bogart sitting there in the jeep as the olive trees and grass and magpies passed by. Mills drove, the huge wad of lire tucked away on him somewhere. It was a good way to break the boredom, bouncing through the Italian countryside.
    Though, like most G.I.s, I couldn’t hit a cow with a .45 if I was holding her teat, the bulge and weight of the gun in my pocket gave me a sense of security. It is one thing to kneel, helpless, in the nose of a bomber jolted by bursts of flak fired five miles away by men whose names you will never know and whose faces you will never see. You trust to luck. You are not about to master your fate.
    But this was the earth and the gun was real. The bandits who came pouring out of those hills would be real and I would shoot them. I and Bob Mills and Humphrey Bogart in our trenchcoats. We would blast them with our .45s and they couldn’t help but see our faces set in resolve, our glittering eyes.
    We rolled into Barletta in about two hours, maybe less. The children picked us up and ran after us, filling the day with sisters for sale and pleas for cigarettes and candy. There must have been thirty already by the time we stopped at the distillery (perhaps not the right word), and more were running toward us. And great good soldier that I was, when I stepped out of the jeep my gun fell from my pocket and crashed to the stone street. I bent down to pick it up, and when I stood up the street was empty. Not a sound. Not a child anywhere. I stood in the eerie emptiness of that silent street and did not then comprehend what fear the war had put in those children. I wondered why they weren’t fascinated by the gun as, I was sure, American children would have been.
    You’ll notice that the men I wanted to be are strong men, men in control. Humphrey Bogart. Herbert Marshall. Each in his own way tough. My urge to be someone adequate didn’t change after the war. When I gave up fiction as a bad job and settled back into poems for good, I seemed to use the poems to create some adequate self. A sissy in life, I would be tough in the poem. An example:
    Index
     
The sun is caked on vertical tan stone
where eagles blink and sweat above
the night begun already in the town.
The river’s startling forks, the gong
that drives the evening through the pass
remind the saint who