If Warren Cochran had been a little more cautious, a little pickier, or a little more suspicious, he would probably not have been in the army.
The name of the girl who got him there doesn't matter, since she barely comes into the story at all. The thing was that Warren spent some time with her on a blanket in the bushes off the road, and she came to him telling him that he got her pregnant. He had done what he could to prevent that, but you never know... When he suggested paying to remove the problem, she said no, she wanted to marry him.
Well, that he did not want. He was willing to pay child support, if it came to that, but he knew he did not want to face this woman every morning. He wasn't even sure why he had sex with her, except that she was there and he was horny.
So he decided to join the army and at least make it difficult for her. If she went to court, she could still get child support from his pay, but it would mean making her prove that he was the father -- which he was not sure of.
Between the time he joined and the time he left he heard from a friend that the woman had tried claiming pregnancy twice before, when she found someone she thought would make a good husband. And sure enough, he later heard that she never did start showing.
But by then it was much too late.
After basic training, Warren was shipped off to Spain. He was put under a disbursing officer, keeping books, making deposits and pay vouchers, and writing letters back to Washington on any problems.
Warren wrote the letters, that is, and got the lieutenant over him to sign them (or sometimes somebody higher up, depending). That lieutenant was... well, Warren couldn't see why the army took him or how he made officer, but he could see why the lieutenant was in the army. In civilian life, the man would have been on welfare or in a home. Warren had to explain the letters to him. Almost all of them, it seemed like.
Warren was at that job for a year, then an opening came up in a hospital pharmacy and somebody decided that since he had once worked in a drugstore he should go there. He didn't put in for it, but there he went. That job was a lot duller, but he stayed in better shape with all the walking and stooping and climbing he had to do.
That was another year. Then they put him in a warehouse for a while, both at paperwork and at moving crates. A couple of months before he was due to be discharged, he was sent on maneuvers.
Yeah, he had to put on a pack and march and sleep in a tent out in the rain and all of that. Not that Warren hadn't done it before, but this was the longest stretch of it he had gone through, as if the army decided that they had to live up to the cliche before they could let him go.
But we should talk about Spain. Warren developed this theory that the reason that we have had troops stationed overseas since WWII had nothing to do with defending this country, or those countries. Warren thought it's a social program.
You have a lot of young civilians who have never been out of the US, and probably wouldn't go under their own steam until they were middle-aged or older if at all. And then as tourists, so they only see hotels and museums. If the armed services send them over, they may really get an idea of what a foreign country is like, and that might influence their thinking. Even improve it in some cases, he guessed.
Warren found it easier to learn Spanish than he had to learn French in high school, partly because it would do him more immediate good, partly because people around him were actually using it. Talking to the senoritas when he was on leave didn't matter all that much, since many of them knew English, or at least the ones who would talk to the soldiers did. It did help to understand the comments they made to each other about GIs, though. Though that was largely slang.
The really outright prostitutes were easy to pick out (hell, they stuck out, not to mention coming at you) but a lot of the women angled for gifts before they would do anything. This was after the US started paying soldiers half-decent wages, and with the new pay and the Spanish prices, a corporal could almost afford to set up a woman in an apartment.
There were a number of local people who had jobs on the base or near it, jobs that would not have existed without the US military there, either because they were dealing with the army as such or with the soldiers as individuals. So in a way, the military bases also served as a sort of foreign aid -- more efficient than the State Department kind, maybe, because it actually went to the people instead of just the politicians.
Obviously bartenders, less obviously restaurant owners, launderers, and shop-keepers of different sorts, and of the people on the base secretaries, stock-clerks, whatever needed doing that there was no soldier to do at the moment -- or where the army felt it was just cheaper to hire someone.
Pilar Giralt was hired as a typist at Rota. She did not completely look Spanish, or not as you think of the Spanish as being. She was una rubia, a red one, which means not what we call a redhead but a blonde. And she was not quite even that but somewhere toward the yellow end of black-haired or maybe a dark blonde. Blondes are rare among the Spanish, but not so much that there isn't a special name for them, and for them to be chased after.
That they would have occasional fair-haired people is not surprising since Roman soldiers from all over were posted to Spain for a long time; sailors came by long before and after; and, going way back, the Beaker People traded from England to Spain, and who would be surprised at an English blond?
Spanish men are more blatant about chasing women than Americans, even young American soldiers, so Warren's own slow approach might have been more appealing than what she was used to. Also there was the religious question.
The picture you get of Spanish women being very protected from the world and tossed into a convent if they get too interested in men is not far from the truth. Another problem, in a way, that Pilar had was that she was not Roman Catholic. You hear of Spain as a Catholic country. Ninety per cent of it is; but that leaves four million people. Pilar had no idea when her family became Methodist, but it was at least a few generations back.
This meant that most Spanish men would not want to think of marrying her unless she converted, which was not a thing she much wanted to do; and that they did not respect her because she was not Catholic, but would only look on her as a fair game conquest.
Warren, however, was also raised nominally as a Methodist, and was quite willing to get to know her slowly. At first, at least, he was quite happy just to have someone to talk to. Her English was quite fluent, which was why she was hired as a typist at the base, and he was grateful after a while for the sound of a female voice in a language he could relax in.
Pilar was also chased by Spanish men for what they thought was her relative immorality. She was unmarried and living alone. The pay was better at the base, but not enough to support her family also, so she moved off the farm and into an apartment house near the base. The landlady there (though the Spanish men did not take her into their account) was a widow of some years who was protective of Pilar.
