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the administrator’s advice and went to the recruiting station to enlist in
the Army as a private.
Zinsser wanted to change his life and the Army was prepared to
cooperate. The New York City native trained at Camp Lee and Camp
Patrick Henry in Virginia, and then continued his sojourn through a
succession of Southern posts. "A collection of Quonset huts connected
by duck boards over water," he called them. He wanted to do more, so he
volunteered for overseas duty.
Again, the Army cooperated. He shipped out of Norfolk on a
troop ship, the USS General W.A. Mann, on a solo passage across the
Atlantic at a time when packs of U-Boats patrolled the coastlines of the
United States, Europe and West Africa. Not long into the voyage, Zinsser
says, "I woke up and we were near land. I saw a white city on a hill. It was
Casablanca." The sight of French-Arab Africa that day sealed in Zinsser
an insatiable hunger for travel and an abiding interest in Arab culture.
Zinsser was assigned as a clerk in an Army Air Corps unit that
provided direct support to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor
to the CIA. British Lancaster bombers and American B-17s and
B-24s flew off of the North African coast to drop supplies to partisan
units fighting the Nazis in Europe. Zinsser’s ambition and education
had guaranteed him a role. But while some of his Princeton classmates
would end up flying the bombers, Zinsser had another skill that was in
high demand: he could type. He became the squadron’s administrator.
In time, his commander had Zinsser typing out the officer’s memoir—a
somewhat less than strictly factual account of the commander’s wartime
exploits.
Across North Africa and on to Sicily Zinsser stayed on the
ground, filling administrative roles and gradually shifting over to intelligence
debriefing duties. He stayed with the unit when it moved to Southern
Italy, which Zinsser remembers as desolate and beset by grinding poverty.
As 1944 wore on, the squadron moved to northern Italy, but with the war
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