A Taste of Peace

A Taste of Peace is the twenty-fourth episode of The Gallant Men. It was written by Ken Pettus and directed by Richard C. Sarafian. It aired on March 16, 1963.

Plot summary
Leading a charge up a steep hill near Casarano, Capt. Benedict is seriously wounded. A company medic decides to send him to a field hospital. Sam Hanson stops him on his way out to say Benedict is the one man the company can’t do without.

Benedict is initially resistant to medical aid, but a doctor informs him he’s not going to immediately return to the field. When Conley Wright pays a visit, Benedict reveals he was somewhat rattled by Hanson’s emotional remarks. Wright replies the captain has become indispensable to the men; beloved, trusted and respected. Benedict brushes off Wright’s analysis, but Hanson’s comment weighs on him.

One week later, back at the front, Cpl. “Lefty” Morgan complains about the incessant rain and Benedict’s absence. He seems unusually fixated on having Benedict around. Another soldier dismisses his concern as superstition. Hanson raises the group’s hopes that Benedict will soon return. Pvt. Gibson glumly informs the men Benedict is not returning, and in fact has been sent to Naples.

At the Allied military hospital in Naples, a Maj. McGowan reviews Benedict’s medical situation and asks about his sleep patterns and general feelings. Benedict grows suspicious and McGowan identifies himself as a psychiatrist.

Benedict suspects the company has had too long a run of good luck and worries the men will blame him for inevitable setbacks. Wright invites the captain to dinner at the press club that evening so he can introduce Benedict to Capt. Thorpe, a professor of constitutional law who works for the Allied Military Government (AMG).

At the press club, Benedict meets a female Army captain sitting alone. He complains that Wright has abandoned him to a boring evening with a law professor. The woman smiles wryly and informs him that she is Capt. Meg Thorpe, the expert Benedict was set up to meet. Benedict apologizes and joins her for drinks. Thorpe says she joined AMG to do some good and says her work will help win the war and establish postwar stability. Benedict misunderstands her point and reacts harshly, assuming Thorpe is demeaning GIs.

The two depart for a party being hosted by Thorpe’s supervisor, Col. Davenport. Benedict feels out of place among the AMG administrators and thinkers and is visibly uncomfortable. While Thorpe is engaged in conversation, Benedict slips out to a balcony. When Thorpe finds him, Benedict angrily complains about the intellectuals and calls Thorpe’s philosophy stupid. She slaps him and he leaves the party.

The next morning, Thorpe visits Benedict in the hospital and explains she and her colleagues don’t mean to trivialize the experiences, sacrifices and struggles of the infantry. Benedict apologizes for his behavior at the party. Thorpe says Davenport has asked her to travel to the village of San Filippo to investigate a problem; she invites Benedict along. Upon arriving in the ruined town square, Benedict says he and his men fought in the village and didn’t think about the damage they wrought as they worked to seize San Filippo from the Germans. While Thorpe attends to a matter inside the town hall, Benedict has a visceral flashback to the battle four months prior.

He is jarred out of his flashback by San Filippo’s mayor, Alfredo Palli, who remembers Benedict from the battle. Benedict is mobbed by village residents happy to be reunited with the American captain. At an impromptu honorary dinner that night, Palli thanks Benedict and his men for giving the people medicine, food and hope.

Back in Naples, Thorpe works to convince Davenport that AMG’s current administrator in San Filippo, Lt. Tuttle, is ill-suited to the task. She advocates for Benedict to get the post, which would require a transfer. Davenport cautiously agrees. Thorpe tries to convince Benedict to take the job, saying he’s done his share of fighting. Benedict bristles because his men won’t get the reprieve he’s being offered.

During a visit at the hospital, Benedict informs Wright he’s decided to take the AMG post. Wright says Benedict’s departure will hurt morale in Able Company. Though he asserts the men will eventually adjust, Wright questions whether Benedict is making the right choice.

While Benedict settles into his new office in Naples, the company retreats from Casarano. Morgan and six others get stranded in an abandoned house as German tanks move in. Pressed to make a decision, Morgan decides to make a “hail Mary” escape and the group bolts from the building. Morgan is felled by German gunfire during the attempt.

Davenport checks in on a restless Benedict. The colonel says he was a paratrooper before he was an administrator and his move to AMG did not make him feel like a lesser soldier.

That night, Benedict shows up at the front and warmly greets Kimbro and Wright. Kimbro tells him only two men from Morgan’s squad survived. When McKenna welcomes Benedict back, the captain falls silent and walks away from the men. Wright catches up with him and scolds him for not being upfront with Able about his new job, and not formally saying goodbye to men who like and respect him. Benedict doesn’t respond. He gets in his jeep and drives away, leaving Wright and Kimbro behind.

Upon his return to Naples, Benedict finds a worried Thorpe waiting in his office. He impulsively invites her to dinner and asks when he can go to San Filippo. Though confused and concerned about Benedict’s sudden excitement, Thorpe says he can start day after tomorrow.

On their way to dinner, Benedict and Thorpe encounter a disheveled Cpl. Morgan. He refuses Benedict’s insistence for medical help and tells the captain about the horror his squad endured during the escape attempt. Panicked and delirious, Morgan says he wanted Benedict to tell him what to do, and that he fears he let Benedict down. Morgan is taken to the hospital and dies overnight.

Benedict accepts bad things will happen to his men whether he is their leader or not, and he tells Thorpe he projected his own insecurities onto his company. He chooses to return to Able. Hurt but stoic, Thorpe leaves, telling Benedict to get to HQ and withdraw his transfer request.

Back in the field, Wright welcomes Benedict back. Benedict dryly replies “Yeah” before heading off in a jeep to assist Kimbro at the front.

G-2 Report

 * Writer Ken Pettus could have benefited from an atlas when he was assembling the script for this episode. Casarano, where the front-line action was supposed to have taken place, is nowhere near Naples. In fact, it’s in Salento, the “heel” of Italy’s boot. Salento was liberated by British Gen. Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army, not the American Fifth Army.
 * There are many towns called “San Filippo” in Italy, but Pettus may have been referring to a small village on a peninsula directly across the Gulf of Naples from Naples itself. The initial research to compile this wiki could find no reference to a battle in that community.
 * Oddly, some of the men of Able Company are wearing 36th Division uniform patches (an inverted arrowhead containing a T, for “Texas”) and others (including McKenna and Hanson) are wearing the usual Fifth Army patches. Able Company is supposed to be part of the 36th, but the men usually do not wear the division’s distinctive patches.
 * Benedict’s background maladies, as listed by Maj. McGowan: No appetite, loss of weight, general lethargy, and inability to sleep without sedation.
 * The Allied Military Government in Naples was established October 1, 1943, and ended on New Year’s Day 1946.
 * Did you notice DeForest Kelley as Col. Davenport? Of course you did.
 * This episode delivers a couple of true rarities for the headstrong captain: Benedict actually apologizes to Thorpe for his churlish behavior, and later in the show he admits he has doubts about his own leadership abilities.
 * In the third act, Hanson and Lucavich have a sublime conversation about cosmology that shows the closeness the two have developed since meeting. Lucavich, with evident wonder, describes the expanding universe theory confirmed by Edwin Hubble. Hanson wonders how the universe could keep expanding if it’s already infinite, and Lucavich shuts him up with a “What are you, a wise guy?” Hanson then tries to sneak a corner of Lucavich’s blanket, but the latter snatches it back.
 * The script advances a questionable military philosophy. The whole company seems to be too reliant on Benedict to make decisions. Morgan’s dependence, in particular, cost lives (including his own), all because Benedict wasn’t there to explicitly tell him what to do. In the episode’s epilogue, Kimbro likewise seems unable to make a decision without asking Benedict what he should do.