ra1960652
There are two certain ways for a mostly innocent, very naive young man to receive an education not related to academic disciplines: military service and prison. The two methods have much in common. Shelter, food and clothing are provided, in return for which one is expected to follow a set of very rigidly defined rules and a relatively firm clock and calendar. There are, of course, moments of greater freedom in military life but for much of the time there is very little difference between the two.
I joined the Army less than a month after my sixteenth birthday and consequently was the youngest member of every group I served in for most of my three-year service. Especially in the beginning, during the rigor of basic training, being "the kid" in the group worked to my advantage, as did encountering men who knew and had served with my father. My initial training was at Fort Ord, California and despite my delight at finally escaping home, I arrived there in a state of fear and dread, a condition I suspect is shared by many raw recruits, even if macho code demands concealing it as much as possible.
My commanding officer there had served under my father in Korea but we had little direct contact with him and it was only when my father came once to visit that I learned they knew each other. The training itself contained so many experiences which were completely new to me that the novelty kept me interested and entertained throughout basic training and in the further training that followed. Several weeks into the basic course, I got a particularly virulent version of the flu which developed into pneumonia. I had attempted to treat it as a mere cold and continued to join in all the required activities, but one afternoon during drill practice, keeled over in a total faint and regained consciousness in a hospital with a young orderly rubbing down my body with alcohol in an attempt to reduce the fever. The moment I was feeling better, those rubdowns raised rather than lowered the fever, I think, thus extending my stay in hospital.
The one lasting effect of that interlude was the admiration I had for the young soldiers who were working as medics in the hospital, giving me for the first time the idea that I would attempt to join the Medical Corps. Perhaps partly as a result of a later training episode where I was so nervous about holding a live grenade, I dropped the thing and our lives were saved by the prompt reaction of the training sergeant, or my absolutely lousy ability to correctly aim an M-1 rifle, when the time came for post-basic assignments, I was given orders to join the Medical Corps at Fort Sam Houston, back once again to my birthplace.
I had wanted to serve in the medics as just an ordinary hospital orderly but I should have gotten lower scores on the aptitude tests, because I got assigned instead to training as a medical laboratory assistant. Since this was soon to make a major and lasting change in my life, I am at this distance grateful; at the time I was definitely disappointed. The training in Texas went smoothly despite my first and only night in a Texas jail (a story which has its place in another tale) and I was sent to on-the-job training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Everything that is memorable about that assignment happened off-duty and also belongs in another tale. Training completed, my first real job in the Army was at Fort McPherson in Atlanta. It was there I met Frances Dickenson, a career civil service worker whose task it was to teach me the preparation of tissue slides but whose lasting influence came from the time we spent together off-duty when she took me and another young soldier, whose name I cannot remember, and gave us generous doses of Southern hospitality and culture. For the rest of her life, she played a continuing role in mine, sometimes major, sometimes minor, but always there when needed.
I was greatly distressed when orders came to report to a field hospital in the little village of Munchweiler, Germany, and doubly annoyed to be sent once again to scenes of my childhood rather than getting a hoped-for assignment in Asia. As it turned out, the time in Germany was for the most part delightful. The hospital was a recuperation center, the doctors all officers doing their obligatory service and uninterested in military life, and we only had to play soldier a few times a year when we would evacuate the hospital and set up a genuine field hospital in the way it would have been done had the East Germans ever been silly enough to march across West Germany. I had a private room, acquired my first really good sound system and spent most of my money and spare time with music, both in my room and in the excellent concert halls and opera houses to be found in every German city or town of any size.
There were frequent trips to Wiesbaden, Frankfurt and Kaiserlautern; sometimes even as far north as trips up the Rhine to Cologne. I was at the time already much interested in the Paris of the 20's as well as the more recent icons of Parisian culture like Sartre, Durrell and Henry Miller, and trips to Paris were the most treasured moments of freedom. We were able to go there even on a three-day pass and one such trip is especially memorable since the fellows I traveled with were all far too drunk to drive us back in time so I had to undertake my first and only major driving expedition, somehow successfully getting us back to the hospital a few hours before our passes expired.
I fell in love several times during my two years in Germany, most of the time with fellow soldiers who were separated from their girlfriends and didn't mind, temporarily at least, a substitute. And I formed another friendship which lasted through the years with a young man from Seattle, Robert McMurry, who was even more innocent and naive than I. We, in turn, developed a delightful friendship with two young German lads, strictly Platonic, which resulted in being invited to their homes and giving me for the first time, despite the years I had been in Germany both as a child and as a soldier, insights into the German way of life. One of those boys, Rudolf Meier, was the son of a Nazi officer who had been killed in the war. Rudi delighted in showing me the treasured relics he had as memories of his father and in shocking his mother by playing Nazi military music for me. We continued to see each other from time to time in later years and he is one man I've always thought I must have known in other lives, perhaps in a more major role.
There was considerable pressure on me from family, friends, and the Army to continue my service when the time came to either extend my three years or return to civilian life. It was not a question I had to ponder; I had made the decision in the first few weeks of Army life that I would not re-enlist. I was returned to New Jersey for discharge and release into civilian life, a veteran of three years Army service but still unable to drink publicly in most American states and, in Hollywood, was denied entry to And God Created Woman with Brigitte Bardot until I went home and put on my uniform and was thus allowed to enter without ID.
After a brief visit to California, I moved to Atlanta, and my childhood at last was over.
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