Though I was eager to get back to The World and shed my fatigues, even before I was cut loose I felt grateful for my Army years. But I clearly didn’t belong in the Army or aspire to make a career of it, and during my tenure with the battalion, I had made this plain in any number of non-confrontational ways. (In other words I’d learned to be a sneaky little bastard in high school and perfected that art while Serving My Country.)
Going from one place to another around the barracks, I couldn’t help but encounter some officer, which required that I salute, which grated on me. So I cultivated the art of stealthily approaching officers from behind, and screaming “Good morning, Sir!” in my best drill-sergeant tones. They’d whirl, shaken, and find me standing at attention, quivering with obsequious fervor, my right hand rigid in salute. Pissed them off, of course, but there was nothing they could do. I was just going by the book.
In the field, the canvas, camouflage helmet covers, slotted for the insertion of twigs and brush to break up their outline (which, since we were mostly assigned to sit inside signal vans, no one normally made use of) proved too tempting for me to leave unfilled. By the end of the first day in the field, I’d be wearing these astonishing, Carmen Miranda-gauge headpieces. I could scarcely hold my head erect. Again, since that’s what the cover slots were for, no one could object to the obviously intended mockery of all things military.
I carried the same strategy into the post movie theater, to which we’d frequently repair after happy hour at the enlisted men’s club, where Johnny Walker Red went for 50 cents a shot. Before Beach Blanket Bingo or some other classic could begin, a film of the flag, flapping in the stiff breeze over a variety of evocative American landscapes, made a mandatory appearance, accompanied by a Sousa-esque orchestral rendition of the national anthem. Normally, we simply stood through it in stoic indifference, but one night, more thoroughly lubricated than usual, I suddenly launched into an impassioned, bass-baritone vocal. I was stunned by my outburst, hardly characteristic, as initially were the others in the audience, but as I reacher “the home of the brave,” they burst into raucous applause. This performance became, thereafter, almost mandatory, and I repeated it every time the movie changed. No one ever commented on it to me directly, so I don’t know if my parodic intention came through or if I became a sort of Kate Smith figure, but I expect the officers who heard about my melodic exploits didn’t have much doubt that I was casting contempt on the very Flag of Our Fathers.
If not contempt, I was feeling increasing skepticism about the current employment of that flag in Vietnam. I don’t know how in hell the post library had gotten so out of control – maybe David Schine and his asshole buddy Roy Cohn had been right about the subversives in the military – but our library contained not only the Vietnam books of Bernard Fall, but the English language edition of Le Monde, which was doing great reporting on Vietnam and Algeria in those days. Reading those two sources alerted me to the degree I’d been blinded by propaganda, and to the deeply anti-democratic nature of our engagement in Vietnam, not to mention the degree to which we were engaged in replacing the colonial empires of France and England with one of our own. I had been raised an idealist, a believer that my country stood for democracy and self-determination and all that jazz, and discovering that we were massively pissing on those ideals didn’t set well with me.
On the other hand, there was Sgt. Homer K. Hatori, whose signature I can perfectly reproduce to this day. Hat, as he was universally called, even by the officers, was a big Hawaiian lifer, a man for whom the Army provided a necessary structure – Hat liked a drink about as much as I did, and I’m sure he’d have long ago gone under to the stuff had it not been for his sense of duty to his employer. I never heard him talk politics, so I don’t know how he felt about Vietnam, but I do know how he viewed authority. He believed it existed righteously and should be respected. Orders were orders, and you damn well followed them. He believed his job was to carry them out.
That’s not to say he was some sort of caricature of a military automaton. He recognized that many directives from above were unrealistic at best, idiotic often. He didn’t mind saying as much, because he made it clear from day one that for him and therefore for us orders were orders. Insofar as they became his orders, he also made it clear that anyone in the company was perfectly free to question them – down behind the motor pool, in person, to him directly. During my year and a half in Germany, no one ever took him up on the offer, because no one doubted he meant it, and no one was crazy enough to want to take him on. For one reason, because he also made it abundantly and frequently clear that he believed his job was to stand between his men, the officers, and any other potential enemies, and to keep them from being screwed or screwed with.
His authority, then, stemmed from complete self-knowledge and from his assumption that his troops would accept that authority because he was always willing to back it up himself, in person, right now, if need be. He didn’t rely on his rank, or on the higher ranks, or on anything, really, but himself. He was a whole man, and he figured he was all he needed. For the rest of my working life, he was the leader against whom I measured other purported leaders. Damn few of them ever began to stack up to him
.
So when he put me up for Sergeant, it came as a major compliment from a man I’d come to respect and love. I went through all the preparations, polishing, starching, polishing, picking the brains of previous candidates to learn what kinds of questions might be asked at the promotion interview, more polishing. . . . As it turned out, my promotion was doomed by the one question nobody’d warned me about.
“McCollum . . . Why do you want to be a Sergeant?”
This elicited a very long silence as I struggled to formulate some kind of answer. Finally, I could come up with nothing but the truth. “Ummm…I don’t.” That was pretty much that. I felt terrible about letting Hat down, and got drunker than seventeen million dollars that night at the EM club and ran into Hat on the way back to the barracks and tried to apologize, but he just patted my shoulder and told me not to worry about it.
There were other memorable characters in that battalion. I remember the supply sergeant, Sgt. Swanson. I learned his story at some point. He’d received battlefield promotions all the way up to Colonel in Korea, then, when that conflict petered out, he’d been busted back down to Sergeant E5 again. This had embittered him, apparently causing him to resolve to put forth the absolute minimum for the rest of his career, and, indeed, no one ever saw him do a lick of any kind of work. He spent each day draped over the half-door of the laundry room, never speaking, rarely moving, except to groom his impossibly wide handlebar mustache, a major work of art.
I think the only time he was called on to play a soldier’s part was during a major Corps field problem which was begun when we all went roaring out onto the roads at 4 am in the most overwhelming fog I’ve seen in my lifetime. You couldn’t see a thing beyond the front of your hood except for the vague yellow swirl of your headlights. By the time dawn broke, all our vehicles had gotten utterly separated and utterly lost. I remember around 11 in the morning we found ourselves driving through the extremely narrow streets of the city of Mainz until we reached a major cross street. Two or three other trucks from our battalion all reached the intersection about the time we did, and we all sat there making meaningless hand gestures, since no one knew which direction we ought to take to get to our assigned field location. Things got so bad that even Sgt. Swanson got pressed into field duty later that day.
That same field problem created an opportunity for a couple of farm boy GIs in another platoon to shine. They got thoroughly, hopelessly, terminally lost that first morning and wound up somewhere out in the middle of farm country in the Taunus Valley, where their deuce-and-a-half finally sputtered to a stop, out of gas. One of them, a tall, Ichabod Crane configured chap from Indiana, made his way to the nearest farmhouse to seek aid. He spoke no German, of course, but somehow he communicated something to the farmer, who wound up taking the two GIs in. It was harvest time, and they knew well enough what sort of work that required and happily settled in to a spare room in the farmer’s house and helped bring in his crops. He had no phone; they had no working phone; but they were more than content, doing work they’d been doing all their lives, getting three squares a day and a warm bed at night. I think they stayed out there for over a month before someone finally spotted their truck on the side of the road and came out and got them.
I was relieved of my motor pool clerk duties for the last six months of my time in Germany, re-assigned to clerk for a staff sergeant of notorious uselessness who in turn had been assigned the task of creating a battalion-wide training schedule. Higher-ups in the Corps had, at some mysterious prompting, become concerned that while we were supposed to be undergoing continuous training in a variety of military subjects when we weren’t in the field, no training of any sort was going on. We were all down in the motor pool every day, trying desperately to keep operational. And so I became part of the first of many exercises in strategic planning I would endure during my life. It was fine with me – got me out of the frigid motor pool and into a warm office every day, where I worked on schedules for classes and ordered all sorts of educational equipment, such as wound kits for the first aid classes. (When they came in, all the guys had a great time playing with the sucking chest wound.)
After months of work, we came up with quite an ambitious training schedule and presented it to the Battalion Commander’s office, where it was received with praise and placed carefully in a cool, dark place, never to be seen again. The various company commanders had made it quite plain to their bosses that nobody had time for education, since, unless every swinging dick was down in the motor pool six or seven days a week, we would not be able to carry out any further missions in the field, nor to support the troops rushing to stem the massive Russian invasion our whole 5th Army was in Europe to counter. Because none of the WWII Era trucks would run, nor would the radio and cable equipment of that same era remain functioning. Ergo, forget the damn training directive – they’ve already forgotten it up at Corps.
My staff sergeant, I, and a couple of corporals had just spent six months of man hours creating a giant piece of fiction – with real elements, like those sucking chest wounds – that could be shown to any visiting brass who might believe their troops were anything but chess pieces or, worst-case scenario, cannon fodder. This experience prepared me well for all the committees on strategic planning and mission statement creation and the like I’d be sucked into later on. I suspect nearly all lives working in organizations involve some degree of required acting in plays pretty much everyone knows are plays, and this first experience of one enabled me to recognize the ones I had to endure down the line, and not to take them too seriously.
My Company Commander, during that obligatory re-enlistment pitch, tried to warn me that the play-acting I’d been engaged in wasn’t limited to the military. “You think it’s different out there, McCollum,” he said. “But it’s no different.”
Though I didn’t know it then, truer words were never spoken, except that, fortunately, Johnnie Walker Red didn’t go for 50 cents a shot out there.
