The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx by Arthur Nersesian Read Free Book Online

shot at once—he had never witnessed combat on the front lines. Most of the men in Mexico barely had guns, let alone uniforms.
    His mother never wrote, but he did receive letters from his sister Edna once a week, and on occasion Maria would drop him a postcard updating him on life back home. Several times she enclosed pictures that her daughter Lucre-tia had drawn at school. And it was through Maria that he learned that Mr. Robert had finally gotten his first big break, an appointment in the Municipal Civil Service Commission under the “boy mayor,” John Purroy Mitchel.

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    A s Uli wrestled with the various squares of netting and tried to shove through, he thought, A tank could tear right through this like wet toilet paper . With its steel caterpillar wheels, it could roll right over mines and through waves of enemy fire. The common belief was that it would quickly end the war.
    America needed to develop the basic models for a big tank and a small one, the Renault, and this required a complex compromise between British and French designs, as well as the work of over seventy subcontractors and five different manufacturing plants for final assembly.
    The entire process was taking so long that no one thought any of the tanks would actually see action during the war. Before the first American tank even rolled off the assembly line, the Germans managed to seize a British one; with their own modifications, the Germans started assembling their own battalion. Soon, the few American tanks in action began breaking down and Paul found himself sifting through stacks of incident reports late into his nights.
    A recurrent malfunction quickly became apparent during a spring offensive. The men inside the tanks were getting killed when mines exploded right through their floors. In the space of three weeks, eighteen tanks had been destroyed in the same way, killing more than thirty doughboys. Paul immediately requested to see the blueprints of these particular tanks.
    The outer metal skin of the tanks was supposed to be five-eighths of an inch thick, yet the actual thickness varied in four different reports, and two of the torn hulls measured as thin as a quarter of an inch.
    He contacted the military attache at the Byrd & Hale assembly plant in Cleveland, Ohio, and asked for confirmation of how thick the hulls of their tanks were. He was told they’d need three days to research that information.
    The next day he got a phone call from one Samuel P. Bush, who introduced himself as a government contractor.
    “How can I help you, Mr. Bush?” Paul asked.
    “I’m Chief of Ordinance, specifically small-arms munitions.”
    “You probably want Captain Reynolds. He’s the case officer who handles small-arms malfunction reports.”
    “No, I want to speak with you.”
    “About what?”
    “I just thought maybe I could stop by and we could talk.”
    “Fine.”
    At 5 o’clock, just before Paul was about to leave for the day, a swollen-looking man with a thick bushy mustache and a bowler showed up and introduced himself as Samuel.
    “So you’re a Yale man?” Samuel asked.
    “No, Princeton. How about you?”
    “Stevens Institute, but both my father and son went to Yale.”
    “Were you hoping to raise some money for the alumni? Cause I can give you my brother’s phone number, he went there.”
    “No,” the older man chuckled. Looking around the stuffy basement, he said, “Listen, I’m starving. Would you care to join me for a bite? I know a place near here that has great chops—Dutch’s.”
    Paul said what the heck, he was about to leave anyway. As the government contractor led him outside to his car, he explained he was there because of the phone call Paul had made to the Byrd & Hale assembly plant.
    “Oh, yeah, about the thickness of the hull of their two-man tanks. Why, did they contact you?”
    “Not officially, no. It’s just that I work with them a lot, and Shane Richards asked me what was up.”
    By the casual, unassuming