Smoke Em If You Got Em: The Rise and Fall of the Military Cigarette Ration

SMOKE ’EM IF YOU GOT ’EM

SMOKE ’EM IF YOU GOT ’EM

The Rise and Fall of the Military Cigarette Ration

JOEL R. BIUS

Naval Institute Press

Annapolis, Maryland

This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest.

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 2018 by Joel R. Bius

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bius, Joel R., date, author.

Title: Smoke ’em if you got ’em : the rise and fall of the military cigarette ration / Joel R. Bius.

Other titles: Rise and fall of the military cigarette ration

Description: Annapolis, Maryland : Naval Institute Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018019072 (print) | LCCN 2018028504 (ebook) | ISBN 9781682473603 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781682473603 (ePub) | ISBN 9781682473351 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781682473603 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Soldiers—Health and hygiene—United States. | Cigarettes—History. | United States—Armed Forces—Military life—History—20th century. | Antismoking movement—United States—History. | Smoking—Government policy—United States—History. | Cigarettes—Government policy—United States. | Smoking—United States—History—20th century. | Tobacco use—United States—History—20th century. | Cigarette industry—United States—History—20th century. | United States—Armed Forces—Health and hygiene.

Classification: LCC UH603 (ebook) | LCC UH603 .B58 2018 (print) | DDC 355.1/2—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019072

Print editions meet the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Printed in the United States of America

26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18 9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

First printing

For Leigh, the boys, and the Jewel

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

PART I. THE RISE

1.  Smoke Rising

I’d give a boy the cigarettes.

2.  The Damn Y Man

The American Army is thoroughly molly-coddled.

3.  General March’s Ration

Enlist and all will be well.

4.  The Greatest Generation of Smokers

Do you just assume that every soldier in the United States Army smokes?

PART II. THE FALL

5.  Operation Volar

The taxpayer was being taken for a ride in two directions at once.

6.  Soldier-Starters

The renewal of the market stems almost entirely from 18-year-old smokers.

7.  Health Care and the All-Volunteer Force

Promises have been broken.

8.  The Beltway Battle

Our industry is under siege.

9.  The Reaganomics of Smoking

An economic burden we can no longer bear.

10.  The Downfall

This provision [does not] deny a benefit to the military community, unless lung cancer and heart disease are benefits.

Conclusion

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank my professors, friends, and mentors Louis Kyriakoudes, Andy Wiest, Susannah Ural, Kyle Zelner, Bo Morgan, and Andrew Haley at the University of Southern Mississippi for their advice, support, and encouragement during the research and writing of this book. Additionally, I am greatly indebted to my colleagues P. J. Springer, Mary Hampton, John Terino, Jim Forsyth, J. T. LaSaine, Bill Dean, Sebastian Lukasik, Sean Klimek, Dan Connelly, Bob Mahoney, Jim Campbell, and Kenny Johnson at the USAF Air Command and Staff College for encouraging and supporting my efforts to become a better military professional, writer, teacher, and scholar. And I would like to thank the gentlemen of the Scholars Roundtable Book Club for making me a better person.

I give sincere thanks to Nadine Phillips and the interlibrary loan staff at the University of Southern Mississippi Cook Library for their professionalism, friendship, and support. I extend the same sincere appreciation to the staff of the Muir S. Fairchild Research and Information Center at Air University. I also wish to thank Mitch Yockelson at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, for his incredible help in finding valuable primary research for this book. A special thank you to my mother-in-law, Deana Brannan, who read early versions of the manuscript and provided valuable insight. Thank you Robert Proctor, Pete Mansoor, Richard Tucker, Tom Robertson, Chris Rein, Ronnie Betts, J. T. LaSaine, and Bob Wieland for reading portions of the manuscript and providing valuable insights as well. I also want to thank all of the students in my American Military Culture electives for offering your perspectives. A sincere thank you to Paul Merzlak and the staff at Naval Institute Press for taking on this project and helping make this story into a book—this includes Patti Bower, a remarkable editor with scrupulous attention to detail, and Stephanie Attia Evans, who steered the project through production. Thank you to the reviewers of the manuscript who provided sharp yet needed critiques. Your comments challenged me to be crystal clear about what I am, and am not, writing about.

Finally, a sincere thank you to my family, who supported me during this time. In memory of both my Dad, who was a great and humorous storyteller, and my Mom, who first told me that I was a storyteller. For my children, who understood my reading and writing in the bleachers and at the pool as well as the long hours hidden away in some corner somewhere; thank you, Jake, Brooks, Mary Jewel, and John Henry. Finally, I wish to thank my wife, Leigh, for hours spent reading, editing, critiquing, and discussing everything that follows—and for allowing me to find a way to turn every conversation to the topics and stories in this book. I will always remember late-night picnics in front of the library, decorating our den with my storyboards and Fort Desk, editing sessions at T Bones Records and The Depot Coffee Shop, and helping prop you up in a chair so you could read revised chapters while nine months pregnant—twice! I could not have completed this work without your abiding love—and music playlist. All errors herein are mine alone.

ABBREVIATIONS

SMOKE ’EM IF YOU GOT ’EM

Introduction

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

—President Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961

The American military-industrial complex and accompanying culture are most often associated with massive weapons procurement programs and advanced technologies. Images of supersonic bombers, strategic missiles, armor-plated tanks, nuclear submarines, and complex space systems clog our imagination. However, one aspect of the complex is not a weapon or even a machine but one of the world’s most highly engineered consumer products: the manufactured cigarette.¹ This book describes the origins of the often comfortable yet increasingly controversial relationship among the military, the cigarette industry, and tobaccoland politicians during the twentieth century. After fostering the relationship between soldier and cigarette for a half century, the Department of Defense and fiscally minded legislators faced formidable political, cultural, economic, and internal challenges as they fought to unhinge a soldier-cigarette bond they had entrenched.

This book is also a study in modern American political economy. Through this lens, one finds a paradoxical relationship among a host of characters possessing vested and varied interests in the cigarette enterprise. Whether bureaucrats, soldiers, lobbyists, government executives, legislators, litigators, or antismoking activists, all struggled over far-reaching policy issues involving the cigarette. The topic is important because the soldier-cigarette relationship established by the Army in World War I and broken apart in 1986 underpinned one of the most widespread social, cultural, economic, and health-care-related developments in the twentieth century: the rise and proliferation of American manufactured cigarette smokers and the powerful cigarette enterprise supporting them.²

For purposes of continuity and focus, the book treats the culture of smoking manufactured cigarettes in the U.S. Army, excluding other branches of service and modes of tobacco intake. Americans have a unique relationship with the Army, and in return the Army has had a broad and complex effect on American society, especially when considering cigarette smoking. The Army was the first to issue manufactured cigarettes as part of field rations and the first to demand cessation from a cigarette culture it helped create. One will find Marines, airmen, and sailors in this saga; however, the soldier, for the most part, stands as the representative of American fighting men and women in this story. One will not find a year-by-year account but the story of the rise and entrenchment of the soldier-cigarette bond from 1918 to 1945, followed by the demise and dislodgement of that bond from 1973 to 1986. World War I and World War II play prominent roles explaining the entrenchment of the soldier-cigarette relationship, which reached its zenith in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when the majority of American males were happy smokers. Important years such as 1950, when scientists definitively linked smoking with cancer, and 1964, when the U.S. surgeon general released the first general cigarette warning, are part of the story. However, the in-depth analysis resumes in 1973, when small cracks in this marriage start to appear. These cracks grew to deep fissures over the next decade, leading to divorce in 1986 and the dislodgment of the longstanding military cigarette culture.

From 1918 to 1986 the military established a powerful subculture of cigarette-smoking soldiers. The relationship was so rooted that after the 1964 surgeon general’s report warned Americans that cigarettes were hazardous to health, a further twenty-two years were needed to advance military smoking cessation as official policy, and an additional sixteen years to sever government subsidies providing soldiers low-cost cigarettes. The role of wars and the military in establishing and entrenching this American cigarette-smoking culture has often gone unrecognized. Using the manufactured cigarette as a vehicle to explore political economy and interactions between the military and American society, my purpose is to help the reader understand this important yet overlooked aspect of twentieth-century America.

PART I

THE RISE

CHAPTER 1

Smoke Rising

I’d give a boy the cigarettes.

When America declared war on Germany in April 1917, the manufactured cigarette was only slightly popular in America. Cigars, pipes, and chewing tobacco dominated the nicotine landscape. The first nationwide manufactured cigarette campaign prior to World War I (WWI) was R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company’s debut of the Camel cigarette brand in 1913.¹ The manufactured cigarette, as opposed to the hand-rolled, had first appeared in noticeable numbers when James Bonsack invented a cigarette rolling machine in 1880. James B. Duke’s American Tobacco Company bought the rights to this machine and began manufacturing cigarettes at a rate of 210 a minute. This allowed Duke to gain a monopoly on the cigarette market. By the time of WWI, the industrial cigarette machines were able to manufacture 480 cigarettes a minute; today these machines can make 19,480 per minute!²

These new manufactured cigarettes were easy to smoke, fairly cheap, and readily available. They were easy to smoke due to the relatively new flue-curing and blending process and were sweet, flavorful, mild, and deeply inhalable due to their incorporation of low pH flue-cured leaf blends. Seemingly a minor adjustment to the chemical processes, this mild, pleasing, and—most importantly—inhalable American blend changed the smoking world, taking it by storm. Cigarette historian Robert Proctor calls this industry innovation the deadliest invention in the history of modern manufacturing.³ The storm was only a spot on the horizon at the start of WWI; by the end of the war it was a dark cloud, and by World War II the storm had grown into a worldwide hailstorm of cigarettes.

Yet this hailstorm was in the distant future. Although R. J. Reynolds had an impressive, well-coordinated rollout of its smooth-smoking cigarette, the manufactured cigarette still only garnered less than 7 percent of the tobacco market on the eve of WWI.⁴ As it had been for centuries, the market was still dominated by cigars and pipe tobacco, followed by chewing tobacco and snuff.⁵ There are several reasons why cigarettes were not as popular as other forms of tobacco in early twentieth-century America. Retailers and traditional tobacco men thought they were cheap and poor of quality. One retailer, upon hearing of a cigarette ban in his state, exclaimed thankfully, I am tired of getting off my stool 250 times a day to sell a five cent package of cigarettes and then making only ten cents on the whole lot.⁶

Cigarettes were also seen as perverse and a moral and cultural offense.⁷ They were viewed as a form of tobacco consumption practiced by bad men and unruly boys. The highly influential temperance movements dominating the Progressive Era, both politically and culturally, lumped cigarettes with alcohol, labeling them both as a despicable vice. In progressive America, they became a symbol of seismic cultural alterations and the moral and cultural crisis in the nation and were associated with juvenile delinquency and criminal behavior.⁸

However, the most important determinant regarding cigarette acceptability hinged upon their reception by the cult of manhood that dominated American society during the early twentieth century. Among the refined and gentlemanly, cigarettes were juxtaposed against the more culturally accepted and masculine pipes and cigars, which were typically smoked in private rooms and gentlemen’s clubs. Many American men considered cigarette smoking an effeminate vice associated with immigrant city dwellers and those unable to exercise self-control.⁹ The literature on the cult of manhood is extensive.¹⁰ Consistent themes in this canon include the concepts of manhood and self-control; the comparison of the dominant American white male against the immigrant, non-American factory worker; and fears that white male virility was in danger. One journalist from the period, reflecting on the rise of cigarette smoking, commented that cigarette smoking was for a time considered a sissy habit associated mainly with factory-bound immigrant city dwellers whose work patterns drove a desire for a short smoke such as a cigarette offered.¹¹ A British general, commenting about the state of young men prior to WWI, criticized loafing, cigarette smoking, and gambling, all indicators of degraded self-control and a loss of the manly virtues. This particular general said young men of the time were pale, narrow-chested, hunched-up, miserable specimens, smoking endless cigarettes. In contrast to these cigarette smokers, he wanted young men fired with manhood, unmoved by panic or excitement, and reliable in the tightest of places.¹²

Bert Moses, a journalist from this period, commented that "somehow or other, every good, decent and manly American instinct protests against the thing [cigarettes]…. The man with a cigar or a pipe loses none of his manly attributes because of the [cigar or pipe] habit."¹³ Cigarettes were for dandies and sissies.¹⁴ In 1920, responding to the increase in cigarette smoking, one observer concluded that WWI had changed the way Americans saw cigarettes: Ten or fifteen years ago, cigarettes didn’t have much of a standing in the community. There was a neat distinction between the man who smoked cigarettes and the man who smoked cigars or a pipe. That distinction seems to have disappeared today.¹⁵

Prior to the surge in cigarette smoking resulting from WWI, the anticigarette environment was bolstered by the overarching progressive impulse toward moderation, self-control, efficiency, and—in the case of some vices—complete abstinence. The progressives were determined to provide American soldiers with an invisible armor sufficient to make their morals and conscience impervious to the designs of the enemies of decency. The invisible armor discourse was first employed in a speech by Secretary of War Newton Baker in October 1917 when he stated, These boys are going to France; they are going to face conditions we do not like to talk about, that we do not like to think about…. I want them armed; I want them adequately armed and clothed by their Government; but I want them armed with invisible armor to take with them. I want them to have an armor made up of a set of social habits replacing those of their homes and communities … a moral and intellectual armor for their protection overseas.¹⁶ Juliann Sivulka, a historian of American advertising, says that moralists blasted cigarettes, referring to them as ‘coffin nails’ and ‘gaspers’ … [and] others held that cigarette smokers were most likely criminals, neurotics, or possibly drug addicts.¹⁷ Progressives’ and moralists’ concerns regarding cigarettes and vice in general, seen in Baker’s speech quoted above, were especially alerted when it came to the gathering of America’s boys for war.¹⁸

When Congress passed the Selective Service Act on May 18, 1917, drawing millions of young men for conscripted military service, progressives took extraordinary measures to ensure soldiers’ protection from the vices traditionally associated with soldiering.¹⁹ For example, Congress banned liquor sales and shut down slums around training camps. They made it a crime for any civilian to give soldiers alcohol; they could not even offer a glass of wine at Sunday dinner. There is scant evidence that the Army was concerned with tobacco or cigarettes at all in the months prior to America’s entrance into the war. This seems amiss considering that groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the AntiCigarette League, the Non-Smokers Protective League, and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) consistently targeted cigarettes as a pernicious vice during this period.²⁰

For example, the Army sent all potential citizen-soldiers a document to read before they arrived at training, describing what to expect of Army life in order to help alleviate fears and shed light on the unknown. In true progressive fashion, smoking, a vice that had not yet achieved derision on par with alcohol or illicit sex, is only mentioned in context to moderation. The Army instructed potential soldiers to cut down [and] get your wind if smoking immoderately was part of their daily routine. In the same sentence, it encouraged prospective soldiers to chew their food well … drink a great deal of cool (not cold) water … [and] don’t eat between meals. Finally, they encouraged moderation with tobacco, especially while exercising or marching—smokes were much more enjoyable if you wait till you can sit down quietly during one of the periods of rest.²¹ Certainly, there was no plan to issue the soldiers cigarettes as part of their daily rations; in fact, Baker specifically ruled against a cigarette ration. This was due to Baker’s progressive, clean, healthy living program as well as to the fact that, at this point, smoking cigarettes was not a major habit among the regular Army nor the potential conscripts. He did not see the point of expending government funds to procure such items for the soldiers.

WWI turned this relationship—at times casual, at other times hostile—between the manly cult and the manufactured cigarette on its ear. After the Great War, the manufactured cigarette in America soon became one of the most successful consumer items ever developed, making it a central issue to any understanding of twentieth-century American culture, society, politics, or economy. The passage of the cigarette from effeminate to manly occurred somewhere on the WWI battlefield, between no man’s land and the rear, as young American soldiers made their own passage from boys to men.

Entrenchment

October 1917. As his family back home readied for bed, Pvt. Jonathan Lee from the 1st Infantry Division of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) was on the move in France.²² Lee was part of the first American units marching to their assigned sectors on the Western Front.²³ For the AEF, this was a day to remember: the day American combat units first appeared alongside hardened British and French combat veterans. With three years’ fighting already under their belts, the Allies had fought the Germans to a standstill in several major campaigns, suffering millions of casualties. The situation was not favoring the Allies as the first American forces arrived. French units had already mutinied, and morale was at an all-time low.²⁴ Lee’s unit was part of the leading edge of what grew to a massive expeditionary force. In America’s thirty-two training camps, a multitude of conscripted soldiers were already in the pipeline.²⁵ The AEF struggled to obtain full strength and did not plan to reach the full readiness until the spring of 1919. Until that time, it was up to Lee and the rest of the AEF to provide relief to the Allies and join ongoing operations on the Western Front.²⁶

For this young American conscript marching toward the sound of battle, the sights, sounds, and smells were overwhelming. Warfare on the Western Front was a grueling experience, full of danger, deprivation, and isolation. Despite advances in technology, warfare was still essentially unchanged at its most basic level: While industrialization improved the killing capabilities of the army, in terms of both hardware and the wherewithal to keep its troops fighting, it did little to influence the way in which the average soldier spent his time, whether in or out of the line, largely because the stationary nature of the war.²⁷ Although he faced a combat environment churned by the modern advances in lethality, his was similar to the age-old destiny of millions before him: cold, mud, boredom, hunger, noise, and death.²⁸

As Lee moved forward, he saw lines of French soldiers slouching toward him, going the opposite direction. This war of attrition was a grinding schedule.²⁹ The Allied soldiers Lee passed had completed a four-day rotation on the front lines and were moving to the rear areas to rest and recuperate. They were burdened by their filth-soaked coats that weighed as much as fifty-eight pounds, with the extra accumulated dirt, grime, sweat, and caked-on blood.³⁰ They were chilled to the bone, some wounded, and others sick. They had left several comrades behind, buried in miry graves at the front, some having drowned in mud.³¹ Men were missing in their formation; they were returning with fewer men than they had deployed with a month earlier. Lee was aware of the grinding schedule, but he now saw the effects of that schedule firsthand as he observed these tired, worn men. He wondered if his training had prepared him for what lay ahead, or if survival was even possible.

Upon entering the reserve area, Lee continued forward in communication trenches running perpendicular to the front line. After moving through the support areas, he moved another hundred meters and encountered the Western Front for the first time. He smelled the front line long before he saw it.³² Years later, the stench still stung, as generations of WWI veterans recalled the smells associated with the Western Front. The sources of these pungent odors were numerous and unrelenting—namely, the smells of rotting flesh. As thousands of soldiers vied for ground in the several offensives of the previous three years, they were blown to bits by millions of artillery shells hurled into their slow-moving lines.³³ Bodies were torn asunder, human remains littered the churned landscape, and into this terrain were carved hundreds of miles of trenches, fortifications, and various other fighting positions. An eyewitness to the destruction of the land later commented that the ground had been so churned up and fought over that even the military graves and their occupants had long since disappeared. In a letter home, this observer said, It makes one think of the surface of the moon…. The only figure that comes to mind is that of the gigantic spoon furiously stirring a liquid earth until it becomes frozen or rigid, and then sprinkling over the top if it bits of wood, steel, bones, rags, and other debris.³⁴ The WWI battlefield was essentially an open grave.

One soldier commented, We all had on us the stench of dead bodies. The bread we ate, the stagnant water we drank, everything we touched had a rotten smell, owing to the fact that the earth around us was literally stuffed with corpses.³⁵ The smells of human excrement, urine, and mud added to the pungent aroma. British units, for example, detailed unlucky soldiers, known as shit-wallahs, to act as sanitation agents. These special details might designate a shell crater as the regimental latrine, simply covering it over when it was full. Sometimes empty ration tins were employed as toilet bowls and buried in mud when they over-flowed.³⁶ The effect was predictable, and the earth was rent with human excrement. The mud and squalor were so atrocious, soldiers urinated in their rifle barrels in a panicked effort to break loose dirt and unjam their main battle weapon.³⁷ Added to the smells of putrefaction and human waste were the body odors of thousands of soldiers who went weeks on end without showers, living under the acrid aroma of nitrate that hung in the air, the result of a million explosions.³⁸

In addition to the smells, the other horror Lee and generations of WWI veterans vividly remembered was the fear and stress of the front lines. Their constant companions, fear and stress, were sustained by prolonged exposure to the enemy and the elements. Often living as cave dwellers, death’s men existed on a fine line between nervous breakdown and combat effectiveness. Death or maiming seemed to lurk around every corner. First was the combat death resulting from close contact with the enemy; killing was the business of warfare, and 50,280 American soldiers died in combat during WWI.³⁹ Upon hearing the screams of wounded men and seeing the destruction of poison gas and the results of shell shock, one observer commented on the brutality and waste of modern warfare, saying that "the thing hits you between the eyes…. As you watch it your mind revolts against the idea that this is the accepted and time-honored technique by which homo sapiens, on the pinnacle of creation, settles his little differences."⁴⁰

Lee spent the next four days on the front lines, often a mere one hundred meters from the Germans. He marked his time in constant vigilance. The environment was unforgiving and included both the harsh weather, which eroded their fighting positions and soaked their equipment, as well as the combat environment. On the front, where the compactness of opposing trenches made artillery problematic, more soldiers died from German snipers than from any other source: death could come at any moment.⁴¹

However, Lee also dealt with the fear and stress associated with the intangibles of war. If he refused to go over the top or advance from combat positions when the order came, the AEF commander, Gen. John J. Pershing, authorized officers to shoot stragglers or deserters on sight. One division commander permitted his officers to throw bombs into dugouts of men who refused to go over the top.⁴² In addition to these perils, he also had to face the dual threats of disease and accidents, both of which together killed 65,380 American soldiers.⁴³ If these factors were not enough to drive a man crazy, random death could come at any moment. A soldier might peer through one of the many lookout portals in the trench wall, as he had a hundred times before, only to have his eye, and then his head, instantly pierced by a well-placed shot from a German sniper. The results were horrifying. Historian Denis Winter observes that witnessing death in this manner had a profound effect on the soldiers, as there are references without number to the depths of fear soldiers felt when confronted with death in its most tangible form.⁴⁴ One soldier spoke of the sheer indiscriminate nature of the killing, recalling an officer who was struck down by a chance artillery shell while on a leisurely stroll in the woods miles from the front lines. Another soldier was killed when a stray bullet was cooked off in a fire, piercing the man’s gut. With his comrades helplessly watching, he died an agonizing death.⁴⁵

Such a dangerous and unpredictable environment meant that nearly everyone was on edge—especially at night. Shrouded in darkness, soldiers like Lee moved about the front lines at night calling out the watch word every five steps, weary of the nervous soldier who might shoot at them by mistake. Despite these precautions, many were killed by their fellow soldiers who mistook them for German raiding parties who came to kill them in their sleep. One soldier told a story about one of the finest sergeants in one of the companies, a man greatly respected and loved by all his comrades … did not respond to the sentinel’s call, and in a moment he was lying dead.⁴⁶ A particularly optimistic, if grave, soldier recalled that it was better to be shot at night by your own men because their aim was diminished in the low light conditions, and aid stations were relatively free at that hour.⁴⁷

While on the front lines, Lee was regularly awakened by the sound and smell of men and rats shuffling about. Rats and lice were omnipresent. The rats were enlarged from gorging themselves on human remains. Cats were deployed against these giant rats, and the cats were never seen again; they were presumed killed in action, eaten by their prey. Some were so familiar with the rats that they named them, not even phased when the rats ran across their bodies as they slept.⁴⁸

After four days enduring the front lines, Lee went through a back-out procedure as his unit moved to the support line for four days. He then moved to the reserve line for another four and finally emerged in the rear area, caked in mud just like the units he had observed a month earlier. As described by soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon, Lee had finally obtained what his animal instincts desired above all else: freedom from … oppressiveness.⁴⁹ The AEF soldier continued in this schedule until the war was won or he was killed or wounded—whichever came first.⁵⁰

To make matters worse, even when combat ended on November 11, 1918, the stress of Army service did not end. Rampant rumors frayed the soldiers’ already shattered nerves. Some were convinced they might go to Russia next to fight against the Bolsheviks. On top of the stress of uncertainty, Pershing added the additional requirement that soldiers had to drill at least twenty-five hours a week. One morale worker commented on the sheer absurdity of such a program: "Most of the men were not looking forward to any career as soldiers…. To see a Battery that has fired 70,000 rounds in the Argonne fight going listlessly through