Early Life to Enlistment

I was born in a red brick bungalow on Oakland Avenue, a main thoroughfare on the outskirts of Helena, Arkansas, on March 3, 1925. The house sat high above a terraced front lawn that dropped sharply to the street. My father, the most fastidious man I ever knew, somehow enjoyed raising chickens as a hobby. They clucked away in a small backyard cut short by a towering orange cliff behind our house that was overgrown with dark green Kudzu vines.

Helena, a small town on the west side of the Mississippi River and about sixty miles south of Memphis, was the quintessential southern town. During the decades following the Civil War, Helena, surrounded by thriving cotton plantations and lumber mills, prospered and expanded upon its traditions of southern hospitality, lavish entertainment, and easy living. Words and phrases of those living in the heart of the fertile Mississippi Delta were spoken with the same deep southern drawl of those in neighboring Mississippi and Alabama.

My parents were married in June of 1917 during World War I. My father, James Miles Faulkner, was twenty-three and on leave from the Medical Corps. My mother, Louise Pettit, was seventeen. She was a beauty then and remained so all her life. With full make-up and coiffed hair, even at the age of 93, she still looked good. After arriving at Dallas's Baylor hospital in February 1993, and sensing she might be in trouble, she turned to my wife and said, "Ann, call my bridge partners and tell them I may not be there tomorrow." She died two hours later.

My earliest memory is at the age of four throwing rocks down to the street at passing automobiles. I swear I can still recall that sickening sound of the shattered glass windshield as I watched the car skid to a tire-screeching halt. The driver looked up, saw me, and jumped out, furious. I ran and hid behind some bushes and watched him storm up the long, steep row of concrete steps. He banged on the front door and demanded retribution from my father. My father was a stern disciplinarian, and I expected the worst, but was relieved to receive nothing but a stern lecture.

My father and my godfather, Warren Brown, were partners in the Brown- Faulkner Ford Motor Company dealership in Helena, where they sold more tractors than cars. Helena was a small town and everyone knew everyone else. To help boost sales, my godfather persuaded my mother to drive around town each year, smiling and waving at everyone to call attention to the newly arrived Ford models.

My mother, from Hot Springs, and my father would join large parties on the Mississippi paddleboats, dancing to the music of the all-black band led by W. C. Handy. The well-known Handy, still acknowledged today as the Father of the Blues, would lead his band as the boat pulled away from the Helena docks at dusk, roamed up and down the Mississippi River, and, after a night of dancing and revelry, returned to dock at dawn. Handy wrote many songs still popular today, including "The St. Louis Blues," and he frequently joined his good friend, Louis Armstrong, in New Orleans.

The word "babysitter" would have been foreign to my parents. Until the roof fell in financially in 1929, I had a nurse, Rebecca Leech. She was black, and my family called her "Beeka." My parents hired her when I was born, and she was then 17. According to my mother, Beeka and I would sit on the front steps every day, side by side, looking down at the cars passing by on Oakland Avenue, while wobbling our knees and sucking our thumbs.

During the prosperity of the late twenties, we moved further out to a new, larger house in Waverly Woods, a new suburban section of about fifty homes on land cut out of a dense forest. The house sat on a promontory with two other houses. Inside a circular drive, they looked out from different angles over the curved street to the surrounding heavily wooded areas.

I loved Waverly Woods. My older brother, Jimmy, and I would play in the forest of tall trees and underbrush that stretched behind our house. I would wander through, searching for "Jack in the Pulpit," and watch the haze develop and float above the ground as the older boys laid down smoke screens with newspaper-fired torches tied to the top of fence posts while playing war games. In wonder, I watched my father empty the lily pad- covered goldfish pond on the side of the house by sucking on a garden hose to set the draining in motion. I found a small tin star the size of a fingernail on the front lawn (probably from in a square of chewing tobacco) and was certain it had fallen from the sky. I would lie on my back on the grass and stare at the moving clouds. As a boy, I received a book with drawings of Charles Lindbergh, our national hero, and his Spirit of St. Louis flying machine. It was just three years after his historic flight to Paris, and he was still the most talked about man in America.

Inside our house on the sun porch overlooking the fishpond, I would watch the turntable spin on the upright Victrola and listen to the records, fascinated by the image of the dog, cocking his head into the speaker horn. Our tall, mahogany radio with its oval top sat on a table against the wall. In the late afternoons, we all listened, along with one-third of the nation, to "Amos and Andy," which began every sequence with the familiar voice of its announcer with his distinctive introduction, "Here they ah."

My father drove us all to Chicago during the summer of 1929 in a new, dark Lincoln sedan. Mother and Dad rode in front, while Beeka, who spent much more time with me than my mother did, would sit between Jimmy and me to maintain peace. At least that was the plan. The Chicago trip was a long and arduous disaster, made more difficult by my constant demands, always with the underlying threat of loud bawling. As we cruised over the two-lane highways, I would stand up behind my parents, calling for immediate responses to my thirst, my hunger, and my urgent need for the bathroom. For diversion, I would turn back and renew the ongoing tussles with my brother, all of this interspersed with the same question, repeated every few miles, "How much further is it?" On a long trip, a restless child is in total control.

At the Chicago hotel, my father learned that the New York Yankees were in town to play the Chicago White Sox and that Babe Ruth was on the roof and available for autographs. He took Jimmy and me up to the top deck to see him. Under an open sky above, we watched a small crowd of men, encircling, taking photographs, and laughing with the Babe as he stood alone, his back to the waist-high red brick...