How's Your Drink? - Eric Felten

[Walt's Daughter]

Hi folks! Just returned from our weekend trip to Lexington and Port Huron, MI to see a friend's Band, Redhill. My husband handed me the latest edition of the Wall Street Journal and said, here's another article on "your guys"!

 

HOW'S YOUR DRINK?

 

 

Here's to GI Ingenuity

By ERIC FELTEN

November 10, 2007; Page W7

 

"Of all the world's armies, the American army gets the best equipment," wrote GI cartoonist Bill Mauldin in 1945. "But we missed the boat on one thing. Every other army gets a liquor ration."

 

Mauldin was part of the otherwise well-equipped amphibious landing on the Italian coast at Anzio in January 1944. The assault caught the Germans by surprise, and the troops might well have charged deep into the Italian countryside. But the timid general in charge hunkered down on the beachhead instead, much to Winston Churchill's dismay: "I had hoped that we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we had got was a stranded whale."

 

KICKAPOO JOY JUICE

1½ oz grappa

3 oz grapefruit juice

 

Combine with ice in a tumbler.Pinned down along a broad stretch of coast for months, the American troops "were fixing up their own distilleries with barrels of dug-up vino, gasoline cans, and copper tubing from wrecked airplanes," Mauldin recalled in his memoir "Up Front." The result was a rough approximation of grappa. "The doggies called it 'Kickapoo Joy Juice,' " named after the fierce moonshine in the "Li'l Abner" comic. "It wasn't bad stuff when you cut it with canned grapefruit juice."

 

The grappa-grapefruit combination is not something I would have come up with on my own. But if you use some decent, professionally made grappa, the drink is downright tasty and a good way to toast America's veterans this weekend.

 

Mauldin immortalized the soldiers' effort in some cartoons, one showing a crew of scruffy dogfaces excavating a vast barrel of chianti that had been buried to hide it from the Germans. The barrel had been found with what the soldier in the frame calls the "Best little mine-detector ever made." Another shows a G.I. hard at work feeding chianti into a Rube Goldberg still.

 

As Paul Fussell notes in "Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War," troops "were so eager for drink that numbers of them consumed captured buzz-bomb fluid (i.e., methyl alcohol) and died." The problem of dubious alcohol substitutes was so acute that from October 1944 to June 1945, according to the Army's history of World War II medicine, "there were more deaths in the European theater due to a single agent, alcohol poisoning, than to acute communicable disease."

 

Even so, it would be a mistake to think that a taste for something to drink in the field is indicative of deficient soldiering. Stephen Ambrose recalled being at the 1999 Medal of Honor Society Convention, where the subject of Mauldin's cartoons came up. One recipient of that award offered that his favorite featured "Willie and Joe" expressing their horror at finding a winery wrecked by fleeing German troops -- or, as Mauldin had put it, "Them atrocity commitin' skunks . . . " The boisterous laughter in the room demonstrated that plenty of other Medal of Honor recipients shared the sentiment.

 

Given the danger of ersatz liquor, one of Kickapoo Joy Juice's main virtues was that it was "less corrosive than the bootleg stuff the Italian civilians offered," Mauldin wrote. "The local rotgut made many who drank it 'crazy' drunk, not 'respectable' drunk." Far better, thought Mauldin, would have been a military that provided its soldiers with a reasonable amount of decent alcohol. "Drinking, like sex, is not a question of should or shouldn't in the army. It's here to stay," he said.

 

In the same camp is Mr. Fussell, whose writings are informed by his own combat service in Normandy. He says that along with "plenty of badges and medals," other essentials for soldiers' morale have always been "ample access to alcohol and, when possible, non-infectious sexual intercourse."

 

The 1943 tract "Psychology for the Fighting Man," by Harvard Prof. E.G. Boring, noted that the Army allowed "men to drink at their own discretion so long as they do not disgrace themselves or the uniform" -- because the brass recognized that "to the man who is used to drink in moderation, a drink once and a while is a great comfort and pleasure. And the man who is on combat duty earns whatever relief and pleasure he can find."

 

What a difference some 60 years make. The troops now in Iraq and Afghanistan have found those desert postings to be particularly dry. So as not to offend Muslim sensibilities, these men and women are prohibited under the Pentagon's General Order No. 1 from possessing or consuming alcohol of any sort. There is plenty of nonalcoholic beer, and I'm told that the occasional full-test brew is enjoyed when in the company of European troops not under the same restrictions. (In Afghanistan, Army slang for beer is "Dutch MRE.") But NCOs regularly sort through the care packages their soldiers receive from home, checking to make sure that bottles of Scope actually contain mouthwash. If Mauldin were around today, no doubt he'd draw a few panels with Willie and Joan in Iraq, griping about the paucity of liquid refreshment.

 

This isn't an argument that troops in Iraq and Afghanistan should be lavished with liquor. Morale seems to have survived better than Mauldin or Fussell would have anticipated, and sobriety does have its operational benefits. "Alcohol makes a soldier less accurate in his aim," temperance advocate Ferdinand Iglehart wrote in 1917. He had a point. Even so, Americans now fighting abroad are largely forgoing that "comfort and pleasure" long thought an essential part of morale. It is but one of many sacrifices they are making on our behalf, and worth remembering when we raise a glass in their honor.

 

• Email me at eric.felten@wsj.com.

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1194641508...rnal_primary_hs