Week of October 27, 2014
Army memoir

Today, October 27, is a very bright cold October morning, reminding me strongly of an October morning forty years ago, October 29, 1974, when I reported to the Armed Services induction station in Raleigh to join the Army. The memories flood in.

I had dropped out of Princeton in May 1974. My failure there was the immediate result of ceasing to attend class, caused by depression from working really hard in the dining hall to pay my way there without really knowing why I was doing it (my major was history but I had no idea where I was going with it), loneliness, and feelings of inadequacy (these people were so smart– I was smart too but didn’t have the drive to study). It occurs to me now as I write this that the fact that my father had remarried and his new wife was expecting a baby in July may have unconsciously contributed to my discouragement and feelings of worthlessness (he did later write of myself and my siblings from his first marriage as his “former family”). Anyway, I left when my mother called in May after the Dean of Students called her because I had made myself scarce (when I wasn’t working in the dining hall I usually hung out in the Public Library just down Witherspoon Street, no one could find me there). She said “If you are really so unhappy, why don’t you just come home?” I did.

Over the next five months I settled down some and looked for work, in sales, construction, and finally got a job as a taxi driver in Durham. I lived mostly with my mother in Chapel Hill but also with my father at his home out in the country. I was still pretty depressed and lonely. Taxi driving soon proved to be a dead-end job and demanded 72 hour weeks. I ran off once for a couple of days but came back. Generally, as I had at Princeton, I remained quiet and secretive.

The Army recruiting station was on Orange Street in downtown Durham and I passed by frequently. One day I stopped in – the war in Vietnam was winding down and looked like there would not be another shooting war again soon, what with the divided ugly mood in the country. Army pay was not great but it came with free room and board. Boot camp would toughen me up. And I could learn a trade or go to Europe. (I had studied German and most US soldiers in Europe were shipped there.)

The more I talked to the recruiter, Sergeant Bowman, the more attractive it seemed. There would even be money for college after I got out. I wanted to go to mapmaking or language school in California but there would be a wait to enlist of about a year. I knew it was now or never. If I signed up for two years they would pick the job but I could pick the duty station and I could pick Europe. I figured I was smart, surely they would not assign me to be an infantryman. That is what I decided to do.

My father had been one of the UNC campus leaders in the anti-war protests during the late 1960's and early 1970's. Although he had cajoled his mother into allowing him to volunteer in 1974 at 17, and had never surrendered his commission as a lieutenant in the Navy Reserves, all I knew was that he was totally against war. He attended Chapel Hill’s Quaker Meeting for a while and brought myself and my older brother Nick along, with the hope that we would catch on to Quakerism and become conscientious objectors (Nick had a high draft number and wasn’t going to be drafted anyway; Quakerism came for me twenty years later). How would Da react?

Sgt. Bowman visited me at Mom’s house, not Da’s, and she did not object or try to talk me out of it – she later said she did not like it, but she thought I needed to make a break in some way and this seemed as good a way as any. I did not tell my father right away. When I finally did, we were sitting at a picnic table outside his house on a sunny fall day. I can’t remember exactly what I said – I think it was something along the lines of “You know I’m not too happy driving a taxi. I haven’t been able to find a better job without a college degree and some experience. In the Army I can go to Europe.” He was totally taken aback – it seemed to me that his face turned grey.

He didn’t really try to talk me out of it, though. And when he saw that I really meant to do it, he accepted my decision fairly readily. I weighed 220 pounds after several years of relative sloth and depression, and I needed to lose 15 pounds to meet the Army’s maximum weight for my height. I got right down to it. That showed my parents my determination about as much as anything else. It took about a month. (I also had to get a letter from a psychiatrist that I was not suicidal. I did that, too.)

Da actually was the one who took me to the entrance station. And the adventure began. We arrived on a morning like this, bright and cold, as the sun was coming up. He drove off in his blue VW bug and I walked in.

The entrance station had a big crowd of young men, and a few military guys. We sat around and got tested and examined, played cards, and hung around some more. Finally in the late afternoon we signed the enlistment contracts, swore the oath to defend and obey, and we were enlisted soldiers. Then we were flown out to Fort Knox for basic training. We loaded onto a dingy Army bus at the airport and headed out to the fort, arriving in the wee hours of the morning. That day started out with us being marched around the base from one building to the next, getting short haircuts and ID cards, and issued uniforms and blankets. Some of the guys had real long hair – they cried when the barber zipped it all off in 30 seconds. By the end of the day, we started to look almost like soldiers.  There was a training film that night and after 36 hours without sleep I dozed off. The drill sergeant noticed and drew a circle on the blackboard and made me stand with my nose in the circle until the movie was over. I was not in charge anymore, that was for certain. There was no easy way out, not for two whole years. I couldn’t just hide in the library. So I got down to it.

I realized even more what a different place I was in the second night when the drill sergeant asked the platoon (a platoon is about 50 men–four squads make a platoon, four platoons make a company) who had graduated from high school. About a third of us raised our hands. How many had been to college? Three of us. How many actually graduated? Just one (not me, obviously).  He picked four squad leaders and a platoon leader, mostly on size and his initial perceptions. We got up each morning at 5:00 a.m., ran to the chow hall (the company area was “Big Foot Country”–you had to run everywhere), did PT  (physical training), and commenced drilling and marching and doing weapons training and doing push-ups for the slightest infraction (“Drop! Gimme 25!”) and all the other things the Army expects recruits to do. By the time lights went out around 9 we just fell to sleep. Then the next day more of the same. Woke up in the dark, went to sleep in the dark, and stayed on the go pretty much all the time in between.

Boot camp did indeed toughen me up. Our platoon sergeants were Drill Sergeant Osborn and DS Byrd. They were men of war, tough, fierce and stern, but I had, and still have, tremendous respect for them. They were always in command and in perfect order; if they lacked integrity I never saw it nor heard of it. After only a week or so DS Osborn recognized I was probably going to make it. One day we were in formation and he told me, “Read, take the squad leader armband. You are a squad leader now.” Reluctantly I took the black band from poor Pope, who was as dumbfounded as I was. But I did well. I think that was after one night when our platoon had done something minor and he made us “duck-walk” (walk in a seated position) back and forth in front of the barracks. DS Osborn sent me on some BS errand which I quickly completed. I think he had meant for me to escape the torture of the duck-walk. The platoon was still outside and so I went back and rejoined them.  Another time Captain Johnson, the handsome, athletic company commander, started running alongside me as we ran around the parade field. He gave me a look like “What the hell is a dumpy guy like you doing leading a squad in MY company?” He ran us around the field about three extra times, staying right beside me, as we ran and sang the stupid songs the Army makes you sing. I kept up. I got respect. Another exercise was running a box of tank rounds (actually just cardboard tubes) through the woods. My partner and I were running along when the box, made of cheap wood, broke and gashed open the base of my thumb, tearing not only the skin but layers of muscle as well. I held the ripped flesh together and told my partner, “Let’s go and finish this.” We picked up the pieces and ran through the rest of the course. I dropped the box at DS Osborn’s feet and told him, “I think I need to get my hand stitched up, drill sergeant.” I was back on duty the next day.

The main thing I worried about that might keep me in boot camp was the overhead walk–hanging from the metal bars of a 20 foot ladder eight feet off the ground and walking hand over hand to the other end, turning around and coming back. The first few times I tried it I couldn’t do it. Every time I had a little bit of free time, though, I practiced on my own. I didn’t do great on the final physical test, but I passed, hurting hands and all.  After two months of boot camp I had lost about 25 pounds (even though we were on the go all the time, the food was so bad almost everybody, even the slim guys, lost weight). I came home for Christmas right out of boot camp. I don’t know who was prouder, Da or me, when I walked across the road from his house to church in my dress uniform.

It did not take long for that first blush of enthusiasm to wear off and for me to realize that a lot of that constant activity and arbitrary punishments and special Army lingo and songs was a way of making the mind uniform and compliant to match the olive-green exterior we put on the first day.  The more I paused to reflect the more I saw through the mind games the Army plays. I abandoned the idea of going to officer school and began thinking about what to do when I got out. I became aware of how many days were left not too long after I arrived in Germany.

My duty station in Germany had plenty of hard-charging proud warriors, but it also had plenty of lazy time servers who knew they just had to keep their boots shiny and fatigues starched and stay out of trouble and they could do their twenty years and retire. I worked with a lot of these since I got assigned to work in personnel records, basically a clerical job. It was tough to take orders from some of them, knowing how little they really cared about the job from the way they talked to their buddies when the CO was not around. But orders are orders and must be obeyed. And there were plenty of more or less functional alcoholics and drug abusers, too, and people who thought of Germany as a prison they had been sent until they could go back to the “real world.” Fortunately for me in 1975 and 1976 there were also still plenty of collegians who had gotten their draft notices and signed up for an extra year to avoid being sent wherever the Army wanted them to go (anyone want to be a combat infantryman in Vietnam?). They were smart and though they mostly hated the Army they enjoyed being overseas and experiencing German culture beyond the prostitutes and Green Card gold-diggers and hash dealers. Most all of my friends in the service fell into this category.

And I was in Germany. There was so much to see and experience that was so foreign and exciting to me. I could read German pretty well when I arrived, and began to understand the local dialect after a while; I was much more comfortable than most of my fellow GIs. I spent as much time as I could off base, and when the opportunity came to move off post I did not hesitate. My friend Jim had space in his apartment and I moved in with him. We had a lot of fun and good times and good food (Jim really was the one who introduced me to really good food!) and drink (he did good on that, too) together. Jim hung out and spoke Greek with Forti at the Taverna Balkania while I listened to bazouki music and ate real souvlaki; up at the corner of the Jahnstrasse was a real Turkish coffee house full of real Turks; our downstairs neighbor, Herr Forbrich, was a pleasant man who had only returned to Germany from a slave labor camp in Siberia in 1949. I joined a German youth group. I still stay in regular touch with several of the guys from that group. They are fantastically loyal. I traveled a lot–New Years in Venice with Klaus and Wolfram, May Day in Basel with Oskar, trips hiking in the German Alps. Hearing a real yodel out of the fog on a snowy trail in the Alps thrilled me to the core. France was hardly more than an hour away–the horror of Verdun blew me away. I drank beer in village bars where German vets griped that Hitler screwed up, he should have attacked Russia and conquered it, and only THEN attacked England. And there was so much more.

I served my two years, to the day, to October 28, 1976. I was glad to process out at Nellingen Barracks, where I had processed in to my unit in Germany. I traveled around a while in Europe, looked unsuccessfully for jobs, and hung out in my little apartment, before coming home for Christmas 1976.

I tell people when I am talking about my time in the Army that it is like going to the dentist. You don’t like to be there, and it hurts a lot, but when you leave you are glad you went. That is how I feel. There were financial benefits, especially the GI Bill which carried me through law school. But more importantly I learned that I was going to be a leader. I took over the squad. I knew I could take charge of things. When the General ordered our slovenly little unit to do PT every day outside his office window, the CO put me in charge. “You’re kidding, sir,” I said incredulously, “I am supposed to lead these sergeants and career military men?” He just said that was his order (he already had his medical excuse in hand, it turned out). I obeyed. Because I also learned about doing my duty. Even if it is hard and contrary, I have to do my duty. I learned about getting things done in a big organization, and making friends and contacts to accomplish what I wanted done.  And as a bonus my German friends taught me so much about loyalty and openness to the world.

I was back home at my mother’s house in Chapel Hill in early 1977 trying to arrange the delivery of my stuff that I had collected in Germany from Fort Bragg. It required a number of phone calls and about half an hour of cajoling and arranging. When I finally hung up from the last call, she said, “You just are a different person. You spoke with so much authority. I hardly recognized you.” I probably would not have either, before I joined up.