I graduated from Northwestern in 1964 with no idea what to do next. I most certainly didn’t want to continue in academia. I knew what I’d be doing if I didn’t get married or hook up with a graduate school – I’d get drafted. I decided, in my half-assed fashion, to allow that to happen, and took a job painting for a veterinarian who owned a clinic/kennel and a house further out in the northern suburbs. This would keep me solvent, I figured, until Uncle Sam took over.
The veterinarian first assigned me to paint the second-floor shutters on his home, shutters with about 60 two-inch deep louvers per panel. Not easy painting, especially since I had to stand on the highest rung of his extension ladder in order to reach their tops, and I’d been severely acrophobic all my life. I remember straining up there in the grey autumn chill, sweating with fear, trying to get my brush into the corners of those accursed little spaces between the louvers. They used to advise confronting your fears as a means of conquering them. Didn’t work worth a damn for me. I’m nearly paralyzed by heights to this day.
When it began snowing, mid-October, I got a reprieve and started painting the interior of the kennel. If smellier and more deafening, this was still an improvement, since the ceilings were low and the kennel heated, and since the luncheonette in the nearby strip mall served a memorable lobster bisque at lunch (some luncheonette). That was the autumn the Beatles released “Penny Lane” and Strawberry Fields Forever,” and I can still put myself back at the counter of that little restaurant, hunched over the redolent lobster bisque, gazing unfocused at the steamed-over windows, listening to those remarkable tunes on the juke box, completely happy in the moment. I got home one evening to find my Greeting from Uncle came, and by mid-December I was getting on a midnight train bound for Louisville, Kentucky, which I fondly envisioned as the Sunny Southland.
In January and February, Ft. Knox was about the coldest place I’d ever experienced, including Chicago. On smoke breaks out on the rifle range, I saw Clark bars and Baby Ruths change hands for up to ten dollars. I made it through without getting sick, though, due to our company commander, a young Captain who’d graduated from Kent State and who’d learned to think clearly there. What he obviously thought was that if you got stuck commanding a basic training company, you were more likely to get promoted if you turned out the maximum amount of cannon fodder. So he’d arranged to make his company part of an experiment the Army was running to see if massive doses of sulfa drugs would keep the troops healthier, which, at least in our case, they did.
The Captain had other tricks up his sleeve to maximize our graduation rate. Instead of running his company for miles before breakfast, he only made us swing through one short set of overhead bars before lining up at the mess hall, where we could stand watching as other companies came dragging in from their five-mile runs, sweating and shivering.
When it came time for us to qualify on our M-14s, we marched out to the firing range and formed up. Our drill sergeants called out the names of the first contingent to fire, who happened to be the best shots in the company. They fired, all qualifying as Experts, and came back from the firing line and disappeared into the woods behind us, where they exchanged field jackets with some of the rest of us, re-emerged, fired under our names, went back to the woods again, changed jackets again, and so on, until they’d qualified for the entire company. I became a Marksman, though I couldn’t hit the side of a barn. I had to admire my Captain’s cynical ploy, though I remained grateful I didn’t have to fire that M-14 at anyone who could shoot back.
I learned a few other things at Ft. Knox. I learned the whole lyric to The Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” which must have been number one on all the charts during the early part of 1965 – at least, it was at Ft. Knox, where it played incessantly from every transistor radio. I learned how to shine up nickel faucet fixtures with toilet paper for the sake of inspections. I think I’d just finished doing that in the head in our barracks one evening and was sitting on my bunk, probably polishing my boots, when a little guy from New Jersey piped up, “Man, I can’t wait until I get some rank.” I asked him why that was, and his response, I thought, pretty well summed up the reason the human condition is the human condition. “So I can fuck over some other people the way they’ve been fucking us over,” he said, with relish at the prospect in his voice. I didn’t really get it. I hadn’t been enjoying getting screamed at and insulted and driven on forced marches in the middle of the night, or scrubbing urinals, or all the other standard humiliations of basic training. Why the hell would I want to turn around and visit these humiliations on other people? I wouldn’t, was the short answer.
I also learned that I might, in fact, be capable of killing, given the proper motivation. I was on furnace detail one long night with that same Jersey recruit. Every two hours we’d go out to the furnace room and fill up the furnace with coal. Made for a long night, but it beat guard duty, since the furnace room stayed plenty warm.
This night, along about two in the morning, we discovered that a toad had found his way into the furnace room and was squatting along a baseboard. My Jersey companion immediately proposed to catch the toad and throw him in the furnace, and I found myself standing over him (he really was a little guy) with my coal scoop raised, ready to drive him home. I told him he wasn’t going to do that and to get the fuck back to the barracks, which, filled with incomprehension, I’m sure, he did. I found the toad a better hiding spot, once the adrenaline settled down. I’d damn near lost that lovin’ feeling.
Home on leave after Basic, I got together with an old high school friend, Pete DeLissovoy. Pete had left Harvard early to take part in the voter registration efforts of SNCC in southwest Georgia. At some point he’d received his Greeting from Uncle. He’d reported to the induction center, all right, but then convinced his examiners that perhaps the Army would be better off without him. As the finale of his persuasive efforts, he marched out of the center into the street, clad only in nothing. “After Georgia,” he explained to me, “I didn’t feel I needed another democratic experience.”
Since I’d never taken part in team sports, gone off to any kind of camp, let alone risked my life registering voters, I felt I did need a democratic experience, and that the Army was providing me with one. Much as I admired Pete and shared his views, I still hadn’t realized what my government was up to in Vietnam, so I didn’t feel ashamed of using the Army for my own purposes, and I was soon off to the other side of Georgia.
Fort Gordon, Georgia, where I went for Advanced Training as a radio relay/carrier operator (somehow my tests gave the Army to believe I’d be good at this, despite the fact that anything involving electricity has always struck me as an unattractive and utter mystery), lived up to the Sunny Southland monicker quite convincingly. I still remember getting off the plane onto the Augusta tarmac on an April morning, warm, sunny, birds singing lustily. This was more like it.
To the extent that I was no longer freezing my ass off, it was. Two months worth of daily radio and cable classes left me ignorant as ever, but I did get an invaluable lesson in teaching from the main electronics instructor, Sgt. Cathcart. He was a tall, rawboned, redheaded man whose face resembled Alfred E. Newman’s, and Sgt. Cathcart delighted in contorting it into goofy expressions much like Alfred’s “What-Me Worry?” leer. Sgt. Cathcart evidently believed in the “spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down” theory, and while I proved impervious to the medicine, I hugely enjoyed the humor he brought to an otherwise tedious enterprise. Later on, I think the memory of his class informed my approach to classroom teaching.
This was the Spring of 1965, and the great Vietnam troop buildup was just beginning. I was the last person in my MOS to get sent anywhere but Vietnam (where my life expectancy would have been about three days) for a couple of years. Instead, I was sent to Germany on the USS Upshur. After 10 days aboard that overloaded troopship, we debarked at Hamburg and got on a train bound for Frankfurt, outside of which my new signal battalion was based. I remember marveling at the cleanliness and order of the small towns we passed through on our way south, every garbage can snugly lidded, every street and sidewalk swept pristine, flower boxes gracing every second-story window. Much later, I realized that my only previous mental images of Germany had been provided by war movies, so I’d believed it was always nighttime there, illuminated only by the flashes of exploding ordinance, and all the buildings smoldering remnants of their former selves. In fact, Germany looked like the small Michigan towns I’d been summering in my last two years at Northwestern, except far cleaner and more orderly.
We new fish were stuck for a few days in a huge, ground-floor barracks room, where I passed my time watching the antics of another GI, a skinny, poisonous little psycho from Alabama who passed his time clinging to the bars on the windows (the barracks was a converted POW camp) and screaming obscene, monstrous suggestions at the German schoolgirls walking by on the other side of the street. After he tired of this foray into international relations, he’d hop down, monkey-like, and complain about how unfriendly the Germans were. When I later encountered a fairly general hostility among the citizens of Frankfurt, I couldn’t much blame them, though I can’t say I enjoyed getting the shit kicked out of me on the street, which I did after confronting a bunch of German teenagers who were hassling another GI (who repaid me by driving off in his car as soon as I’d diverted the teens’ attention. So much for solidarity.)
When I got a room in the barracks proper, I would share it with a working-class guy from Cleveland, a friendly, gentle Pole from Chicago, and two black guys, one from Los Angeles, the other, magnificently named Oliver Wendell Holmes III, from Chicago. We all became friends quickly, as you learn to do in the Army. Ollie was a sweet young man, gentle and funny, a serial romantic. Every chance he got or made, he was off to the Frankfurt clubs, where, every time, he’d find The Girl of His Dreams, who’d shortly leave him in despair. One night, mired in his latest mournful stupor, he lay on his rack for an hour or so, until I finally asked him what was up. Slowly his head rose from where it had been resting on his forearms, and he said, “Life! Life, Mac! . . . Life! . . . Life! . . . Life . . . is a motherfucker!” His namesake never summed things up more eloquently.
We all rode a streetcar into Frankfurt on our first weekend off and went to the main PX, where I bought a Framus classical guitar for, I think, thirty-five dollars. It was a far better instrument than that price suggested, though I didn’t know that at the time – then, as for most of my life, I felt quite comfortable making snap decisions based on hunches rather than information, and this one panned out (as, I must admit, did many subsequent ones). I must have played it fairly often back in our room, probably the same repertoire I’d developed in high school – Broonzy, Josh White, maybe a few of the “folk” songs that had become hits during the Great Folk Music Scare of the early ’60s.
I’d read J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man in high school and that and Joyce gave me a powerful urge to see Ireland, and first chance I got for leave I headed up there. Ireland in 1965 was in the midst of its own Great Folk Music Scare, and there was traditional Irish music in many bars all the time. I discovered a group called The Wolfe Tones, followed them around, bought their lp, absorbed all the wonderful songs on it – Dominic Behan’s “The Ould Triangle,” “The Zoological Gardens,” “The Croppy Boy,” even a stray Scottish tune, “Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go?” There was music everywhere in the city. Crossing the bridge near Trinity University, I was stopped in my tracks by two Trinity students playing Bach two-part inventions on penny whistles, which struck me as the perfect instruments for the purpose. I’d be awakened at dawn each morning in my bed and breakfast by the sounds of a milkman singing along his route to the rhythm of his horse’s hooves on the cobblestone streets.
I took the night ferry from Dun Laoghaire across to Wales, where I’d catch the boat train back to slavery. The ferry left about 6 in the Northern evening, and daylight lasted until 11 or so that night. The deck was crowded with all sorts of passengers, including a wee old fellow in an ancient cap who entertained the deckfull of travelers with story and song far into the journey. But as night set in, more and more people were moving off toward whatever sleeping spots they’d managed to establish. Finally the old fellow looked up imploringly. “Don’t let it die!” he called. “Don’t let it die.” It perfectly expressed my feelings leaving Ireland, and I’m grateful I didn’t foresee the mad ruination to come, when Ireland fell victim to the counsels of the greedheads during the 1990s.
Dublin had proved as marvelous as I could have imagined it, and when I got back to the barracks, don’tya know, Oi was speakin’ with a moost Irish lilt and melody and pronouncing “fuck” “fook,” and promptly took to singing all the songs I’d acquired. All of a sudden I wasn’t trying to sound like a long-dead Mississippi levee-camp worker. Within days, my two black roomies had a new name for me – “The Irish Jig.”
The signal battalion I’d joined was in desperate straits. Its leadership for a number of years had let pretty much everything go to hell. For example, rather than getting the antiquated, WWII-era equipment and vehicles repaired or replaced, they’d simply phonied up paperwork to show the stuff was somewhere under repair and dumped the broken radios and trucks in the Mainz River. This left the battalion woefully under-equipped. That’s where I came in.
Keeping our remaining trucks and equipment in somewhat working order proved a demanding task. We didn’t have but a day or two off for the first six months after I arrived. Since we were a Corps signal battalion, we spent a great deal of time driving around Germany to support various V Corps field exercises and consequently making more repair and maintenance work for ourselves back in the motor pool.
My platoon sergeant and platoon leader were both very bright men, and they quickly figured out that I’d be utterly useless trying to install cable or radio networks in the field or working to keep the trucks operational in between field problems. So they assigned me to do a sort of clerk’s job, filling out the daily status report on all the vehicles and communications equipment, some of which actually remained in existence and at least semi-functional, and forging my sergeant’s signature on it. The equipment that had been deep-sixed in the Mainz remained on the books on eternal repair status. Nights, I treated myself to a ham and cheese omelet and fries at the little post cafeteria, or happy hour and succeeding hours at the EM club, talking endlessly of nothing over a sound track mainly constructed from the Beatles’ Revolver, the Stones’ “Paint It Black,” various country & western hits that you couldn’t avoid even if, as I still did, you looked down on them. Or I could walk down to the last room at the end of my hallway, where the lights were always out, the hash smoke was so thick you just needed to absorb it naturally to get high, and Miles latest foray into the modal, E.S.P. was always weaving its spell. I spent some time in our room singing the Irish tunes I’d learned, but a little of them went a long way with my roomies.
Those were long months down in the motor pool, walking around with my clipboard and report form creating an alternate reality for the higher-ups, under the leaden, low skies of Hoechst, harsh with the fumes from the I.G. Farben chemical factory and the chickens everyone kept in their little back yards. But the months passed by, and eventually I came up toward the end of my tour, and my company officers called me in for the obligatory re-enlistment pitch, which I imagine must have required them to reach some sort of pinnacle of insincerity in my case. I gracefully declined. I’d had my democratic experience.
