The man who signed the order

There are only two documents in Jack Cline’s file from his eight months with the 136th Medical Regiment. One is a War Department sheet telling aviation cadets what to pack. The other is Special Orders 165, dated 19 November 1941 at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, transferring Private Alvin G. Cline in grade from Headquarters & Service Company to Company H. It names exactly one enlisted man — him — and three officers, in the signature block at the bottom.

For a long time that was all the band amounted to in the paperwork: a one-word entry on his officer personnel record, under principal duty. Band.

Then the photograph turned up. A panorama of the whole outfit, taken by The FotoStudio of Alexandria on 17 June 1941, four weeks after he came on active duty, with a caption inked along the bottom margin:

136 MEDICAL REGIMENT BAND · 1st Lt. Don G. Wingert, Commander · Warrant Officer Harold Reichart · Colonel Earl B. Bush, Commanding · Camp Claiborne, La.

The name in the middle of the signature block on that transfer order is Donald G. Wingert, 1st Lieut., Med. Adm. C., Adjutant. The officer who signed Jack out of Headquarters Company five months later was the man who ran his band.

And Harold Reichart, the warrant officer — the bandmaster, in other words, since warrant officers were what the Army made of bandmasters — is on the roster sheets kept with the photograph, in Jack’s own hand: Harold L. Reichart, Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Thirty-five men are named on those two sheets. Every one of their surnames was searched against all ninety-four documents in the service file. Not one appears. The band survives in a photograph, a penciled list, and a single word on a form — which is a fair description of how most of a life gets recorded, and why the photographs matter as much as the orders.

Still unsolved: nothing identifies which face belongs to which name, including his own.