Free Honoring Sergeant Carter by Allene Carter

of the line of fire after a month on the front lines. Presumably Eddie returned to the academy.
    Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 created another opportunity for Eddie to test the limits of his father’s control and find another kind of life. Eddie went to the American consulate in Shanghai and requested to fight against the Italians in Abyssinia. By then Eddie’s military academy training and brief combat experience had earned him the rank of lieutenant. The consul was taken aback, and refused this brash request, instead offering to obtain a merchant marine job for Eddie on a freighter. Eddie accepted, and the elder Carter voiced no objection. The boy with the guarded, wounded look in his eyes, the boy who sang in the mission choir, the boy who had been beaten and run away, who was also the boy who had lost the person he loved most dearly, was now a nineteen-year-old young man who would make his own way in the world and find a new life for himself.
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    E ddie spent the next months on the high seas, traveling to Japan and the Philippines and eventually arriving in LosAngeles. The United States was in the throes of the Great Depression and times were hard for black men seeking work. Eddie found little opportunity and nothing to spark his interest. What did get his attention was news of the civil war in Spain.
    In 1936, a democratically elected Republican government in Spain was attacked by right-wing forces under the control of General Francisco Franco. A fierce and bloody conflict soon raged between Loyalist forces defending the republican government and Insurgent forces trying to overthrow it and restore the monarchy. Franco and his troops were heavily supported by German Nazis and Italian Fascists. The Soviet Union supported the republicans, while the United States adopted a noninterventionist stance. The Spanish Civil War, like the Chinese fight against Japanese imperialists, would be recognized by historians as a precursor to World War II.
    The war in Spain was on the front pages of newspapers throughout the United States. Eddie, a young man in quest of a meaning for his life, was drawn to the embattled republicans. Using his merchant marine connections he found a ship that took him first to Africa, then to Spain. Soon after his arrival he joined the Loyalist forces.
    Hundreds of other young American men volunteered to go to Spain to help the Loyalists, among them some ninety black Americans who fought in integrated units with white volunteers. Unlike Eddie, who was not recruited and who made his own way to Spain, these volunteers arrived in groups and were organized into what became the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The volunteers were mostly inexperienced, idealistic youths. Given scant training, they were thrown into combat against seasoned troops.
    Already trained in the military arts and experienced in combat in China, Eddie was better prepared than most of the volunteers to survive the horrendous conditions of the war. Many volunteers died, both from combat and the harsh conditions they encountered. Eddie himself was wounded. In the incident, which he recounted years later, Eddie was part of a small reconnaissance patrol, the only black person in the group. The patrol was moving fast when suddenly, coming over a rise of land, they ran into a German unit. The Germans opened fire, killing everyone but Eddie. Eddie was hit in the heel, but he managed to roll hand grenades down the slope toward the Germans and escape. Later in the war Eddie was not so lucky. He was captured by Franco’s troops and held in a prison camp for several months. Never one to passively accept his fate, Eddie somehow escaped from the camp and rejoined the Loyalist forces.
    In all, Eddie was in Spain for two and a half years, when his unit was finally forced to retreat into France. By early 1939 the Loyalists faced a bitter defeat as Franco’s troops, backed by his Fascist and Nazi allies, overwhelmed the republican