Chapter 2: SPUTNIK, THE DRAFT,
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Footnotes including new notes since publication
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See Section_01 "S.C."
See Section_02 "Greetings"
See Section_03 "White Resigns"
See Section_04 "Mr. Oread"
See Section_05 "Reception Station Scoops Up College Grads"
See Section_06 "This is Basic Trainin'"
See Section_07 "Prepare to Rush...Rush!"
See Section_08 "Special Training Company"
See Section_09 "A Direct Commission (for a BAD DETAIL
See Section_10 "McNamara and Remembrance"
See Section_11 "
See Section_12 "Is the Cold War Really Over?"
S.C.
Around
Not that it was easy to get comfortable. The Army sent us from the Entrance and
Examining Station in
---
Tuesday night, three days before, a college friend from GW had
come over, and on my last night of freedom we had played some games of
chess. I think I won the last one with
White. I also played a recording, on the
1962 Voice-of-Music stereo, of Haydn's exuberant 104th Symphony, the last
classical music I would experience for four months.
Wednesday, I took a Greyhound to
Thursday, we took some pencil tests, and then another quick
draft-type physical. Some of the recruits were tawdry indeed. One had walked in off the street, and just
said, "I just wanna join the Army," and had no idea what this was all
about. Some sergeant said, "Sign
him up for supply."
Around
three in the afternoon, we were sworn in by a Navy officer in a small
classroom. There were perhaps fifty of
us, going into all the services, most actually enlisted. Fortunately, the Marines were no longer
drafting.[1] There was one guy enlisting for his fourth
tour, and his fourth service, the Army this time. After swearing us in, the
officer immediately warned us about going AWOL, and then congratulated us for
being "in the Service."
We
had a couple of hours free, until the bus left.
The recruiting station gave us meal tickets for the Greyhound "Post
House." I actually felt proud to be
in the Army, like I had joined something and become bigger, almost like
marrying something. Technically, I had enlisted for two years, and would carry
a “Regular Army” (RA) rather than draftee (
I finally really did doze off, and when I awakened, the sign now
read, "
The bus driver took maybe fifteen more minutes finding the
Reception Station, and gave me another grace moment to relax in fantasy before
facing the demands of the world - but the opening rounds of Total Regimentation
went quickly indeed.
---
After an hour of Army life, you tend to feel you've been in the
Army all your life, like the previous world "on the outside" was
really a wet dream (climbing Jacob's
Ladder) from which you just awakened.
Actually, the first moments of “reality” were about what I had
expected. A babyfaced teenage corporal
yelled orders at us to file into a dingy auditorium, and pick up field
jackets. "You 'fuckers' (++no-goods++) from
We waited outside for a few minutes¾it wasn't too cold, perhaps around 40 degrees
F., but the air reeked with coal and sulfur.
In a few minutes, a Hispanic NCO (non-commissioned officer) wandered by,
and asked, "how many of you mans (sic)
has been to college?"
Everyone had advised keeping the mouth shut to overtures like
this, but the guy sounded sincere. I
spoke up. After all, in grad school a colleague had predicted, “they’ll put you
in charge of something.”
Perhaps I was duly rewarded for honesty. Ten minutes later, I
was "supervising" the punching of pasteboard nametags in a noisy shop
behind the clapboard auditorium. The
other soldiers actually did the work ¾ rotating a disk to the next
letter and slamming a press ¾ and I carried the tags over
to another desk and manually sorted them.
I enjoyed my thirty minutes of management-class prerogatives and
privilege, as if this could be lifelong.
It was almost as if the Army were poking fun at its own hierarchy of
command and narrow span of control, a mockery that would take hold in the
civilian workplace in grand fashion twenty years later.
Greetings
Almost two years later, as I prepared to stop playing soldier
and finally become a vigorous, independent grownup at twenty-six, I braved a
seedy
Military conscription and its “civilian” enforcement agency, the
Selective Service System, would provide the fulcrum for most young men’s
concern with the Armed Forces. During the 1960’s, compulsory military service
provided an electric fence adolescent boys would have to scale to get to enjoy
adulthood. Some would be sacrificed like chess pawns ¾ killed or maimed ¾ during their passages. The most gifted or
privileged might have a gate opened for them (deferments), or, if recruited,
given relatively (or even completely) sheltered non-combatant jobs. Unfit men
were “rewarded” by permanent exemption, a practice that amounted to reverse
darwinism. And women were not required to risk their lives at all. Only a
generation before, they had died often enough merely by bearing children.[2]
The general public is barely aware that every male is still
required to register by mail with the Selective Service System within 30 days
of his 18th birthday. The registration requirement ends at age twenty-six.
Selective Service information bulletins, available at any post office,
emphasize that “registering with Selective Service does not mean that you are
joining the military,” but also that “registration provides our country with a
means to develop and maintain an accurate list of names and addresses of men
who might be called if a return to the draft is authorized.”[3] Men would be called up by lottery, starting
at age twenty.
The Selective Service System is still very much alive, if not
entirely well, today. Its 1995 Annual Report shows that, while downsized, it
survived the worst of the budget cuts for FY 1996, and still employs about 180
civilians, 550 reserve military officers part time, and many “volunteers.” Selective Service cooperated
enthusiastically with my recent Freedom of Information Request, sending me
considerable historical information on the various draft status categories even
if they suspected I have political aims to put it out of business. The Service,
when it sent me my own draft status history, improperly included a sheet
showing the handwritten comparable history of a number of other registrants, at
least one of whom I remembered from high school.
In 1994, the Pentagon did a “bottom-up review” to update the
mobilization requirements for Selective Service. The government wants to be
able to induct recruits starting thirteen days after a mobilization order, and
to accumulate 100,000 recruits within thirty days, should the tactical need for
a draft arise. The Pentagon believes the current volunteer force could handle
simultaneous conflicts in the
The Selective Service System still vigorously defends the
legality of a male-only draft by mentioning the “continued restriction on women
performing duties involving direct ground combat.”[5]
The Selective Service Law, in 1996, still expresses the old national belief
that the survival of our democracy ultimately can require that men,
specifically, lay down their lives ahead of women and children.
---
Prior to the
Even during World War II, Selective Service maintained a long
list of deferments, including student and “essential” occupations (starting
with scientists[9]).
Conscientious objector status was recognized with variations allowing the
possibility of non-combat duty. Peace
Corps or
Today, we forget that marriage - “family values” - was for a
long time associated with special rights to avoid or postpone being drafted.
From 1948 until 1951, married men living with their families were deferred;
after 1951 (when
But President Kennedy would make a public show of wanting to
excuse married men from the draft, ironically as part of his nationalist
liberal agenda. In September 1963, a new Executive Order provided that 1-A
(available for immediate induction) single men and delinquents would be called
before 1-A married men, called “Kennedy husbands.”[10] In August, 1965, shortly after the escalation
in
I was oblivious to most of this, becoming much more preoccupied with
the double edges of student deferments, and with whether my past history of
mental treatment and statements about latent homosexuality could be used to
brand me for life if I was ever called up. The clock was indeed ticking on the
student deferments and the draft; first, deferments for graduate students
outside of the sciences were ended, and then most deferments were replaced by a
lottery system that would begin under Nixon in December 1969 and last until the
termination of conscription in 1973 after the peace treaty was signed
guaranteeing American withdrawal from Vietnam.
---
The other side of “liberal” government’s attempt to prefer
“family” men in draft selection would always be its inconsistent but sometimes
downright sordid treatment of homosexuals in the military.
Until shortly before World War II, the military never gave much
thought about gays as a nettlesome class of misfitted soldiers; it satisfied
itself with punishing homosexual acts. The Navy had developed its notions about
“sodomy” from old English seaman’s law; other services had developed their
punitive approaches to sodomy from a combination of martial and ecclesiastical
law. In 1919, the Articles of War were
amended to make “sodomy” a crime under military law. Assistant Navy Secretary
Franklin Roosevelt, however, would approve a purge of gays at a Navy Base in
As World War II heated up, the mental health industry was
selling the military on the notion of homosexuality as a “sickness,” and that
homosexuals could be identified and excluded or separated even while still
“latent,” before ever being caught in the act.
Until mid-1941, the Selective Service’s draft boards did the
screening for homosexuality and other “psychiatric disorders,” until this
responsibility was turned over to the military services themselves, who now ran
the induction stations.[11] At times, Selective Service enjoyed its
prerogative to turn over draft records of “mental” rejects to civilian
employers. Ever since, regardless of
military anti-gay policies, Selective Service has registered only men and
(until 1973) sent them to draft physicals regardless of sexual preference. Were
the draft to be reinstated, the same would hold today: gay men would be ordered
to report, but women would not.
Quickly, the Army and Navy would (somewhat separately) develop
complicated regulations and administrative procedures that honored
contradictory aims: to punish homosexual acts, to keep in the service straight
men who engaged in essentially “prison homosexuality,”[12] medically evaluate and exclude the sissy
“latent homosexuals,” but, as manpower needs intensified, “rehabilitate” and
redeploy “reformable” homosexual soldiers after all. With the mental illness
paradigm, it was less acceptable (and practical) to imprison gays, and efforts
focused on the degree of embarrassment the services could cause with a
discharge category, including the notorious “Section 8” discharges for essentially
moral turpitude or insanity.
At times, the military’s efforts to identify practicing
homosexuals became comical (if Gestapo-like and medically wrong-headed), by
testing suspect soldiers for their oral “gag” reflex, or ability to achieve
erections. In time, however, the military became more concerned with the
“personality” issues. A Navy directive in 1944 created for the first time an
administrative category of persons with self-declared “homosexual tendencies,”
or “latent homosexuals.”[13]
The military’s growing preoccupation with homosexual status would help create
the climate for my own William and Mary experience, including the Dean’s
“understanding” but intolerant attitude. Military correspondence would complain
that gays exuded a smugness and superiority complex ¾ artistic, intelligent, cliquish, a special
elite rather than a group of town queers ¾ that would undermine unit
cohesion.[14] Induction stations would sometimes question
male conscripts about whether they “liked girls.” At the same time, commanders
in the field, short of manpower (even as only about 25 percent actually saw
combat), often ignored all the regulations about gays. In quieter times, there
were sporadic but frightening purges. Marvin Liebman was “hospitalized” and
then discharged for when a letter to a gay friend was intercepted.[15]
Another soldier was discharged for running a gay newsletter for civilians.
By 1945, however, the Secretary of War had issued an order
reviewing all gay discharges with the idea of deploying men who had not committed
any “overt” acts, and the War Department even considered releasing convicted
“sodomites” to join units with other military prisoners. When it really needed
men, the military was not afraid of stop-loss.
After World War II, the emerging Cold War and paranoia of
McCarthyism would emphasize driving gays out of civilian government employment
and purging other fields (such as entertainment) more than the military.
Despite General Eisenhower’s awakening to the presence of lesbians in his field
units during the War, he signed as President an Executive Order in 1953,
directing the federal government not to
employ those guilty of “sexual perversion.” As a corollary, no person (military
or civilian, government employee or private contractor) known to engage in
homosexual acts could hold a security clearance.[16] The circular notion that gays were security
risks was fueled in a large part by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s desire to
cover up his own homosexuality and relationship with Clyde Tolson.[17] Circular myth held that effete homosexuals
formed underground networks that somehow ruled the world.[18] In fact, various witch-hunts, especially in
the State Department, had, even by 1950,
ferreted out gays by going after those caught in johns or bar raids and
offering deals to those who would “name names.” Government astronomer Frank
Kameny was called in by his superiors in 1957 and confronted with accusations
of his homosexuality by a former boyfriend and then fired. He would live
hand-to-mouth for several years, only to become one of the country’s leading
gay activists.
The military services, during the postwar period, would
gradually reformulate their regulations. They had just started the
uncomfortable process of racial integration, as ordered by a defiant President
Truman in 1948,[19]
against the advice of commanders who threatened to resign and who complained
that white men would not want to bunk with or fight alongside blacks. There were half-hearted attempts to adopt
and maintain a uniform no-homosexuals policy. In 1949 the Department of Defense
(DOD) issued a memorandum requiring immediate separation of “known” homosexuals[20].
In 1959, the DOD issued a regulation authorizing (less than honorable)
administrative discharges (without court-martials) for “sexual perversion.” In 1965, a DOD directive allowed
servicemembers faced with a less-than-honorable discharge for homosexuality
“the chance to present their cases before administrative discharge boards and
to be represented by counsel.”[21] By 1967, there had emerged a Committee to
Fight the Exclusion of Homosexuals from the Armed Forces; already young men
realized that homosexuality was indeed a dangerous “poison pill” for evading
the draft.
The chain-of-command structure of the Armed Forces, however,
gives individual services and commands within them tremendous discretion in
interpreting many policy directives. For gays, this tended to encourage the
services to rewrite the details of their gay policies to their likings. In
1946, the Army actually experimented with allowing some gays (those not caught
in the act) honorable discharges. In
1949, the Army defined four categories of homosexuals. Class I comprised those
who had engaged in overt acts with aggravation, such as force, rape, or
involvement of minors. Class II comprised those who had engaged in overt acts
with consenting adults, in or out of the military. Class
The utilitarian approach of the military towards homosexuality
and its concerns about the public perception of servicemembers would continue
throughout the 1950’s and into the 60’s as public opinion of the military fractured over the Vietnam War.
The Navy would discharge only a third as many men per year during the Korean
War as in the year that followed the armistice at Panmunjon.[22] In 1954, the Navy entrapped and discharged
one’s of its most celebrated young physicians, Tom Dooley, when the rumors
about his homosexuality became too much; yet Dooley’s humanitarian service in
“Indochina” would provide military commanders with a warning preview of the
Communist aggression that would eventually lead President Johnson to his crisis
over Vietnam.[23]
In 1957, the Navy commissioned a study
updating its information on homosexuals in the military. The study
report, which became known as the Crittenden Report, found no reason to
conclude that homosexual men were inherently unfit for military service or even
for security clearances. The report also
contained a rather bizarre section of double-talk which conceded that the
military must not progress ahead of the civilian society it served on social
issues as sensitive and fundamental as sexuality.[24]
The
looseness of the military’s anti-gay rules and the military’s proclivity to
ignore the regulations when it really needed men, would, by the 1970’s, begin
to weaken (among more progressive circles) the public credibility of the
military’s ban, which the military had always feared it needed to retain public
respect. Nixon’s ending of the draft in 1973 and the sudden self-interest of
the military in replacing draftees with women (and the military’s quick
recognition that women could do the jobs) seemed to contribute to even more
softening of the military’s everyday attitude toward gays, and even
old-fashioned notions of military machismo. Even so, there were several
high-profile cases, such as Navy Ensign Copy Berg[25]
and Air Force Sergeant Leonard Matlovich. Berg’s lawyers would actually unearth
the Crittenden Report. In the 1970’s,
Judge Giselle would rule, in the Matlovich case, that military policy was
illegally ambiguous about when a servicemember must be discharged or could be
retained. Matlovich, already well-liked as an instructor in race relations,
would eventually win a large settlement and become the subject of a TV movie.
Throughout the middle Twentieth Century, from World War II
through the Vietnam War, the government would capriciously play with its power
over the lives of young men. It could draft them to fight into wars ¾ sometimes but not always necessarily fought
to protect the freedoms of the rest of us ¾ and then could label and
exclude certain young men as morally unfit to too “girlish” to fight and
therefore subsequently fair game for exclusion from many areas of civilian
life. The Armed Forces’ need for men where there were real wars to fight would,
of course, mitigate this temptation to government. Perhaps my comment sounds
paranoid, as politicians have always had other hot potatoes to play with
besides homosexuality. But, it is still a chilling thought: with a Selective
Service in place, the legal right to draft, and a strong political sentiment
today that known homosexuals must still be kept out of the military, a future
Administration, if sufficiently hostile, could still turn its guns and butter
against us “queers.”
This draft-and-gays conundrum raises a practical, psychological
question. Should men (other than those obviously disabled through no fault of
their own) be required to prove themselves as “breadwinners” and “protectors”
of women and children before they will be respected as individual adults, as
well as have their basic political citizenship rights?
A lot of “old-fashioned” people really believe that all
“able-bodied” men do owe such an obligation. But consistent with this belief
would be limited but mandatory military service for all men (maybe even women).
The Swiss do it. So does
Throughout the years following my debacle in college and
subsequent “hospitalization,” I would gradually show the world that I was not a
parasite. I would be no hero in uniform, but would at least take my turn as a
citizen “on call.” Only gradually would I question the moral right of the
“state” or of others to demand this of me for their own political purposes.
White Resigns
Filmmaker Ken Burns is right.
The sea-change that led to today's schizophrenic society had first been
seen in baseball.
In late 1957, both the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers
packed their bags and moved to
The worst days of McCarthyism, and the memories of the horrors
of war (both World War II and
Part of this, of course, was motivated by race. So some families
decided they would “legally” segregate themselves by moving away from their old
city neighborhoods, and businesses would inevitably follow. They would try to provide their children culturally
homogeneous and prosperous backgrounds rooted in family, financial stability,
safety, and cultural simplicity.
I continued to follow baseball ¾ the “new” Senators in the
1960’s. I still enjoyed the mere physics
of the game, the spectacle of the sliced or pulled batted balls in fight,
caroming off outfield “Green Monsters.”
And the team still gave me a geographic identity, as a part of a
particular community. The old team had already moved to
---
But just as professional sports began to reflect the
increasingly decentralized personal values of Americans by the late 50's, the
Cold War began to push the issue of sexual roles into two directions at the
same time. Since Sputknik, the
government had, by 1968, become absolutely eager to excuse promising young men
from military service if they could carry out critical research or production
in chemistry, physics, aeronautical or mechanical engineering, medicine, or,
just now barely visible as a career field, computers - and if they remained
politically loyal.
I saw this as an opportunity.
It seemed, nerds suddenly could be valued as they were and would not
have to prove themselves as macho men. Since
I had always liked chemistry (there was a copy of the 1928 edition of Smith's College Chemistry in our home),
I decided to go into it. Perhaps my interest was aesthetic; I was fascinated by
the colors and textures of various metals and compounds. My father wanted me to
stay in the sciences, and let my music and piano playing remain "an
avocation," for purely pragmatic, and probably patriotic, motives. A field
like chemistry would promise a stable career in, say, manufacturing or perhaps
pharmaceuticals, or safer yet, the Federal government. In the days before William and Mary, I saw
chemistry as an anchor into “reality,” a bridge between real recognition and
the cheaper attention that comes with self-effacement.
At the same time, the likelihood of war, and the need for men to
be ready for it, seemed to be increasing.
But now, there were going to be obvious exceptions to the ukase to
serve. And the tide was turning from excusing men because of their conventionally
expected roles as fathers and husbands to protecting the new model of
self-motivated students, scientists, and engineers.
Everybody believed that young men who didn’t date girls but
stayed home with their books, slide-rules, or chemistry sets turned out to be
better students. A major in the hard
sciences (at least, as compared to liberal arts or something like music) could,
even when carried to graduate school, keep a young man’s bod from getting torn
apart or scarred up on the “conventional” battlefield.
The unfairness of the draft would fuel rapidly growing
opposition to the war in
A new cultural divide was developing. Just as society was beginning to realize that
discrimination on the basis of race was wrong, a new kind of stratification
based not just on race, but more on economic class or background and
intelligence was forming, and was becoming legitimate in the eyes of government
and the ruling "industrial complex."
The Bell Curve[31]
would set up a privileged meritocracy. Getting married and becoming a parent
would not necessarily protect you, and adopting conventional family commitments
was beginning to count for less. That
animal recklessness that many young men exhibited and which had once been
necessary to provide for women and children, as on the American frontier or
perhaps today in volunteer fire departments, was now becoming a liability. If poor young men got drafted and went away
to war, big government might take care of their dependents with all those new
"Great Society" programs. Still, the privilege of inheritance and, to
a large extent, race, seemed a predictor of life and death, and expendability.
These circumstances, which I knew to be unjust, could remain hidden even in my
own mind.
The sudden recognition that many young women were capable in
science and math (going back to Navy Commander Grace Hopper, who had invented
several of today’s programming languages) and the encouragement for them to pursue science
careers, provided me with a welcome excuse for not wanting to court them. In 1957, a major women's magazine had
published an article encouraging young women not to go to college, because they
would be denying spaces for the men who were supposed to support them.
("Who would you rather have the degree, you or your husband?") Our high school Science Honor Society had
included one woman. Women, I thought,
wouldn’t need to be supported by men much longer. We could do what we wanted,
if we could just win one more war.
In retrospect, it seems shocking today that “national liberal,”
Democrat government should have been allowed to get away with playing political
games with the lives of its young men (often black), for ambiguous foreign
policies. Lyndon Johnson’s motive for murder was (we learned twenty years
later) apparently something as uncomplicated as not wanting to be the first
American President to lose a war in the morning box-scores[32].
Today, government plays with lives in more insidious ways. But, given the
currency of World War II, Korea, and more recently the Cuban crisis, it becomes
more understandable that respect for young men’s lives in a democracy like ours
(or, say, Israel today) would have been relative at best.
---
After I left NIH, I lived at home and went to school full time
(except I went part time the year I worked for National Bureau of Standards)
until I graduated from GW, with honors, in the spring of 1966. The four years went without incident; I never
talked about "it." Well, not
quite.
During that period, I redirected by career from chemistry to
math. I had been pretty awkward in the
lab at work, getting chewed out once for breaking a viscometer. At night, I was taking notorious Organic
Chemistry, and every Wednesday night there was a three-hour lab. (Organic is the kind of course where, if you
don't keep up with the memorization every day, come the first test, you'll get
a "big fat 20 just as sure as the sun rises in the east.") We had to
finish all our “preps” in the 16 sessions (with no make-ups), and I fell behind
quickly. One night I broke a beaker, and
cut the palm of a hand on it. A
chemistry professor gave me first aid to stop the bleeding, putting his arm
around me in an embrace of consolation.
I was already hopelessly behind on the lab assignments, and
decided the next day to drop the course and change my major. A couple of weeks
later, and a few days before John Kennedy was assassinated, I was sitting in
the canteen in GW's "firehouse" student union on
I mentioned the chemistry professor’s partial
hug of me. The rather homely student
gesticulated and talked about another professor: "He put his arm around me
once and I brushed him off. If he does it again, you think I wouldn’t go down
to the police station on
I jumped in my chair, but I dared say nothing! How can somebody get arrested just for being something? Or for an innocent, if careless, gesture that
suggests, but doesn’t prove, that he might be doing other things in his
"private life." I let it pass, though. Even living at home and
attending a school with a very practical administration, I sensed a danger.
Quickly, I would prove my acquaintance wrong on the value of a
degree in mathematics. My last
undergraduate summer, 1965, I got a summer job at the Navy's
Randy Shilts, in fact, reports that it was not unusual for
colleges through the mid 1960’s to conduct purges of practicing homosexuals,
and for campus police to call in students and force them to “name names” under
the threat of flunking out (and getting called up for their draft
physicals). At one school in
---
During my undergraduate days, I took up one other avocation (besides
music) which would quickly become important: chess. My father had taught me how to play, and I
quickly had learned some of the tactical fork and hurdle tricks and crude
opening traps. My father used to talk
about the power of "a pawn and a bishop." The GW chess club met on Friday afternoons in
the Library tower on
My own “career” bears that out. I have never had the time or
concentration to become a consistent tournament (as opposed to club) player. As
with music, I had too many interests to master just one and gain full
recognition for obvious accomplishment.
If I am “on,” I, like a knuckleball pitcher with his “stuff,” can be
very difficult for anyone to gain advantage over and beat. I have upset masters
and lost to C players[34]
in the same tournament! I am one of those players for whom, in any contest, the
lower-rated player wins almost half the time, and who often scores better with
Black. Playing with White is like having home-field advantage in other
“sports”; the privilege of moving first gives one an initiative to
“defend.” Losing with White is like
starting out in life with the advantages of good upbringing and still failing. Well, not quite - maybe resigning
(particularly as White) is just a lesson
in how good it can feel to yield to a better man.
Chess
theory development seems to parallel other moral issues and values in life. One notion in chess theory is “control of the
center.” But when is a pawn center strong, constricting the opponent and
keeping his minor pieces separated into isolated detachments on the edges of
the board, where they can get picked off? And when, instead, is the pawn center
just a sign of over-extension and weakness or congestion behind the lines? Or, take the notion of initiative, which
means control of the course of events. But many games are lost when pressing
for “initiative”; one burns bridges, and
leaves a critical square permanently weak as one advances past enemy lines.
Taking the initiative means commitment
and giving up some options, which one’s opponent can then reclaim in a winning,
if reactive, counterattack. Sometimes one plays “positionally” and forces the
opponent to declare his intentions first with a bad move. In purely psychological terms, one could
believe “Black is better,” or “less is more.” In the 1960's, “closed openings”
(particularly Queen Pawn Openings) were becoming popular; the theory was that
building up a position slowly, posing problems for the opponent and giving him
the opportunity to self-destruct, is more likely to succeed than direct attack.
This became a “moral” dilemma for some players, who preferred the direct
attacks in open games (as symbolized by 1 P-K4 with White, and the Sicilian and
Kings Indian with Black), as a way of keeping control over their situations, or
of asserting their “masculinity.” The more patient (feminine?) players would
let their opponents beat themselves.
The endgame provides another mirror for undeleting life. The
King, who has to keep his clothes on modestly early in the game, becomes a
formidable fighter on his own, like the scrambling quarterback. Positional
advantage often resolves itself as better King position (or “the opposition”)
in the endgame.
Chess
games sometimes become ego battles, where the winner feels he has “demonstrated
his superiority.” The deterministic
quality of the game (when compared to poker, bridge, and backgammon - but not
to Go!) makes players see a contest as a test of personal power, or at least competence. One friend would become so “addicted” as to
flunk out at GW, and get drafted in 1967. He would write to me about his fears
of a ground attack on his Signal Corps bunker in
I spent a lot of time on openings in those days, as I tried to
define my own psychological identity by mapping it to the paradigm of the
chessboard. The world of sports and games provided a sense of stability; by
capturing our rooting interest, it models the “moral” battles of the larger
world with sacrifices, stolen bases, field goals, punts, and mates. Chess
opening theory, and conceptual understandings of “initiative” and space
advantage, would soon change rapidly, especially with the use of computers, as
would human social life in general. Deploying a chess opening repertoire for
the individual club player came to be like managing a baseball team’s pitching
staff. I didn’t like to hear proposals to let the visiting team bat last in
baseball, or force openings to be drawn out of a hat in chess tournaments. It
will be a personal loss for me if computers ever play chess out; now the
Chess, after all, is a model of teamwork - and even “unit
cohesion.”
In February 1966, I began working on a Master's in Mathematics
at the
Graduate school was a bit of an adjustment. The courses required a much deeper
understanding of the theoretical material, and the ability to apply theorems in
new settings, rather than spew the "proofs" (in the spirit of
syllogisms of “statements and reasons”
from high school plane geometry) from a textbook or lecture. A typical blackboard hour examination might
comprise four new "theorems" to prove, with solutions not always
easily motivated, any more than a chess problem "mate in five" is
easily seen. For recreation, I tried to
continue my music with private organ lessons, having been inspired by a young
organist I had met at the
One guy on my floor in
the dorm used to brag about "rolling queers" in
The second semester there, I had a freshman pre-med roommate.
Even he picked up on the homosexual theme, embracing me (with his legs) once in
jest and making jokes about a janitor who had supposedly been fired for giving
a student an earring. But this time the jokes were really “in fun,” and they
never created any real tension. I wasn’t going to let another “William and
Mary” happen. The largely female dormitory staff used to say about the student
help, “The boys are wonderful.”
The third semester, I finally had another math graduate student
(by request), a physical but normally docile fellow who would scream during his
take-home tests, “I cannot work problems!” but he always did. I would try to
draw him into debates about the unfairness of the sacrifice required by the
draft, and he would answer, “War is war, and anything goes.” Then how did an international tribunal have
legal authority to conduct the
I did
become close to several people, and eventually roomed for a semester with a
slender engineering student, Rick, who would introduce me to objectivism and
the ideals of author Ayn Rand. We formed
a little club that met in the cafeteria, or sometimes in the dorm stereo
listening room, and extolled the principle that most accomplishments that make
the world work for everyone derive from the initiative and efforts of one
person. I read The Fountainhead and
my roommate and I, as we talked before going to sleep, would enjoy mapping its
characters, the “heroes” and the “second-handers” (like Howard Roark and Peter
Keating, respectively) to real people we both knew. Our discussions got as far as the notion of
“self-concept” and the desire to break away from depending on the opinion of
others. Rick (enthusiastically heterosexual) may have been the first person to
articulate to me the notion that a person should set his own goals, regardless
of social approval. Enlightened “selfishness”
had become virtue. The idea that one owed service to others or to, most of all,
the state (that is, our country) as an underlying citizenship obligation, was
viewed as intrinsically evil. With Rick, and several other friends, I did a bit
of traveling out west for the first time, with two trips to the west coast and
one to
More concern about the draft drew out of this little
“fraternity” (which did include women). We sponsored informal debates about the
draft and deferments, with some speakers insisting that the draft was
absolutely immoral. Government has no right to force anyone to give up his life
or limb, let alone conscript into what amounted to at least temporary
servitude. “Enlightened self-interest” would lead men to volunteer to fight
together when their homes and families were really threatened. The University
never objected to these forums, since they were always orderly; there was never
the unrest that occurred on other campuses.
Sunday mornings, I would walk a mile into downtown
---
I had
been called up for my first draft physical in September 1964, well before major
escalations in Vietnam, during the year I was a part-time student and therefore
1-A (which meant, available for immediate induction). I had once discussed the draft with my
individual therapist after leaving N.I.H., and he replied, “I wouldn’t worry
about it. You’re being very cooperative with the draft board, and you’re not
qualified.” I didn’t worry too much
while working full-time that year; my attitude, after the
We
had been bussed to
At
that time the Armed Forces questionnaire included, as its last question, a box
to check off admitting to "homosexual tendencies." I did mark it, and wrote a sentence trying to
communicate what had happened at William and Mary. I was pointed to another table, where another
“doctor” questioned me only briefly, and I again stated that I had regarded
myself as a "latent homosexual."
I actually thought I was being honest. “That’s all I need to know,” the
doctor said. A few weeks later, I
received the results, a “4-F” classification, meaning not available for
induction under any circumstances. I might as well have been a girl.
Once
By 1966, the Armed Forces
had dropped any mention of homosexuality on the questionnaire forms. Unofficially, the policy had become,
"don't ask, don't tell."
However, the examination station had a copy of the records from my
previous physical. Once again, there was
a very brief interview. “We see you have a history of mental illness,” the
doctor said. “I don't know why they called you in.” But my draft classification was upgraded to
“1-Y,” which meant I would be conscripted only in a genuine “national
emergency.” As I rode back on the bus, I sat next to an Army PFC (Private First
Class) who assured me that Basic really wasn’t too bad, and that he was
starting Officer Candidate School (OCS) in thirty days.
Finally, in August, 1967, I was examined a third time in
As far as I know, no other person ever intentionally got his
draft status changed “recovered” from “4-F” all the way back to “1-A” and then
went into the military.
I applied immediately for temporary deferment to finish my
MA. But, later that fall, I
"volunteered" to be inducted right after graduation. I bragged about this to other students in the
dorm, who made light of the situation by posting "another" sign on my
dorm door, that I would turn into "cannon fodder" once
Curiously, the military, while I felt extremely apprehensive
about my upcoming “ordeal,” already had created a curious fantasy of honor in
my mind. Once I rode home from a weekend excursion on the bus seated next to a
sailor, and imagined I had indeed met a new friend. As we talked, I recalled
reading stupid things in women’s magazines like, “when there is an emergency,
look for anyone wearing a uniform.”
---
The view of the Vietnam War that came down to me, and other
conservative-minded people, both on campus at the University of Kansas and my
summer jobs at the Navy Model Basin, was that this war subtended a very real
eventual threat to the United States.
After all, we had been frightened by the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962,
and the Kennedy assassination (with all the attendant, Oliver-Stone-like rumors
surrounding Oswald's connections). A few
students I met at the
During those days, the mid 60's, government officials would
justify our involvement in
Also, at the KU campus, a provocative film, The War Game, was shown in 1967, where a scenario was presented in
which the Soviets invade along with the North Vietnamese, where tension
escalate and eventually lead to nuclear exchange; in a Hiroshima-like scene, a
small child is seen saying, "I don't want to do anything."
I was
starting to hear more about the student protests elsewhere, and actually wrote
the Associate Pastor at my home First Baptist Church about it from my dorm. He
wrote back that we had to trust that Administration officials knew what they
were doing. A majority had voted for Lyndon Johnson, after all; in a democracy,
we had to do what legitimately elected officials said when there was a peril
(aggressive Communism) that could endanger all of us. Barry Goldwater (thanks
to the Democrat ads) brought up images
of the black-and-white Hiroshima, Mon
Amour. Of course, none of us knew
what was really going on “over there”; we weren’t qualified to know. But we
could be made to give our lives if they said so.
All of this had me convinced, that to maintain self-respect --
to prove that I didn’t just ride on the generosity of my parents and fortunate
upbringing -- I had to attempt to serve.
But I was very concerned about what would happen to me once in the
Army. Since I enjoyed classical music so
much, I wondered what being around weapons would do to my hearing (artillery
being the worst). Campus doctors simply told me, “Make sure you have your ears
irrigated before you join the service.”
Unlike Bill Clinton, I didn't try to get a Reserves spot, and I wasn’t
going to leave the country , but if I could get a “safer” non-combat job in the
military, I would take it. One graduate student colleague would say, “Bill, you
want to serve without really serving.” Had I been getting married and ready to
father, like this colleague, I wouldn’t have invented the need to “serve” at
all.
The Armed Forces are divided into two classes of personnel”
commissioned officers, and enlisted persons[37].
Normally, to become an officer, one has to go through some special military
program, such as a service academy, a land-grant university ROTC program, or a
military OCS. I had heard that there
were direct commissions (not requiring special schooling from enlisted status)
for people with advanced degrees in various technical fields. I called a recruiter and left a message. One afternoon, I found a message in my dorm
mailbox, "there is no direct commission with a degree in
mathematics." (In later years, I
would report to a man who had enjoyed a direct commission for a master’s degree
in industrial engineering.) I visited an
Army recruiter in Lawrence, a big red-haired, freckled fellow who sounded
innocuous at first. "If you are
drafted, you would be taken to the Fort Leonard Wood Reception Station for
processing, and to be tested." It
sounded benign. He didn't talk about fighting.
But, regarding OCS, there was only Infantry and Artillery. "Well, they need leaders of men in
combat," he said. "But if you could sign up for three years, I can
guarantee you can stay inside as a clerk, doing paperwork for officers." I
digressed and inquired about becoming a medic. I wouldn’t have to work unarmed,
would I? “No, you’ll carry a small pistol, act like a cop.” If I wanted to play chicken and not fight
like a man, I could just remain a “private in the Army” and rest for a
comfortable three years.
I would even contact the Air Force, and brag about my
mathematics background as I looked for a safe slot. The recruiter wrote back,
“Maybe you would like to be a navigator.”
---
The draft would ultimately affect my teaching
assistantship. My first semester at
Kansas, I taught two sections of algebra, the high-school-level “Math 2”
course. This was remedial, not regular
college algebra; the grade counted, but the three credit hours were added back
into the graduation requirements.
Algebra invokes the manipulation of symbols as surrogates for
numbers or objects. When I was a child, the subject had sounded like a great mystery, doing
arithmetic or “figuring” with “letters” rather than numbers. Some people never
understand the abstraction, and stay back at the grade school level where you
never do your “number work” in ink.
Nevertheless, I tried to
start teaching the course with the logical foundation of definitions and
postulates such as the “commutative law” that would support all of the symbolic
operations in algebra. Later, I would ask other graduate students to sit in on
my teaching - one would lift his hand with baby-language questions starting
with “how come...??” ¾ and they would say I was
not trying to sell the students on what algebra could do for them. This was a
turnabout for me, from the times in high school trigonometry class, everyone
thought I would make a good teacher because of my style of working problems in
chalk on the blackboard. Now, I already embraced the notion that mathematics
modeled everything that happened in life, and was much more dependable than
people, even if it left some theoretical problems (like how many pigments it
took to “color” a map) unsolved. Mathematics could be a dependable friend, even
more dependable than chess. One could reduce any political problem, I already
thought, to “logic,” even my lingering doubts about sexuality. This didn’t help
me teach my impatient students how to translate those dreaded “story problems”
into equations.
I didn’t take attendance or grade homework, and told the
students that study habits were now up to them. Many of the students did very
poorly on the “hour examinations” and some openly said they were in school to
stay away from the draft. The
abstraction really seemed beyond some of them.
They had trouble even stating definitions (for example, of a
polynomial). By spring break, I had given two mimeographed tests (it was more
“hip” to write your tests on the blackboard!), and about half the students
received "down slips." I
caught one student cheating, having noticed his apparent copying and then
compared the test papers. I confronted
him when I gave the tests back; he confessed, and I told him that he would
receive an automatic F in the course (although this decision was mine). Later that day, he called me at the dorm, and
begged to come up and talk. He did. I sat casually on my twin bed, in underwear,
as he pleaded for me to reconsider, and to recognize that failing the course
and flunking out might affect his situation when he went into the Army, where
he wanted to become a combat journalist.
I would not relent. The
"intimacy" of the encounter was a bit off-putting and probably
embarrassing for him, yet it never occurred to me to think about, say, what my
legs looked like.
Neither George Washington nor the University of Kansas had implemented
a formal honor code. One English teacher at GW had insisted we return our term
papers so that they wouldn’t wind up in “fraternity files.” I had actually caught students at GW once
with a pilfered English exam and reported it to a professor. Generally,
students felt more comfortable knowing that exams were proctored.
Right after spring break, I was called into the mathematics
department chairman's office. I remember his words: “we have bad news for you.”
I was relieved of my teaching duties, although I was to be paid for the entire
semester; a substitute had already been assigned to the class that I was to
teach an hour later. There was no clear
explanation, but there had been many complaints about my tests. The new instructor did honor the “F” I had
given for cheating. During the following
academic year, I worked as a research assistant (Fortran programmer) for the
physics department, and then was invited to teach the same algebra course again
in the fall of 1967, my last semester there.
At the math department meeting that September, the chairman
reminded all the assistant instructors to be sensitive about the Vietnam War,
and that in giving out bad grades we might, in the minds of our students, be
“dooming” them to combat in Vietnam. “When in doubt,” he lectured, “it is
better to be a bit lenient.” This time,
I completed the semester of teaching without incident. “Boushka, you’ll get to burn ‘em again,” my
fellow instructors laughed, but the students did earn some A's and B's this
time. I actually graded the finals on the bus as I rode out to Denver to meet
my last roommate, Rick, for a final run-around before my transformation into a
non-human. The government had actually given me the power to decide, as I
graded those papers, who might stay in school or who might wind up on Jacob’s
Ladder. True, I had been a “hard math teacher,” but most of the failing
students were substandard in most subjects and, to the extent that in those
days, college was a ticket to a “professional” career, many of them didn’t
belong there - except to stay alive.
In January, 1968, I completed the work on my master's, including
a rather pedantic thesis on numerical analysis,[38]
typed out on my own Royal typewriter, with many mathematical symbols hand drawn
in black ink although the typewriter had been equipped with special integral
and lambda symbols. I gave a rather weak
oral exam, but in the deliberations afterwards by the “committee,” my upcoming
military service was a major controversy. I seemed so satisfied to stop with my
master’s. Already, everybody knew there
were no longer enough jobs in college teaching for all the aspiring Ph.D.
candidates, previously well motivated by the draft. Universities, under the
shadow of Vietnam, were designing end-stage masters’ programs (in sciences)
that made their students look good.
---
When I finished school and got back home, I went to another Army
recruiter home in Arlington. "What
happens if I just get drafted?" I asked.
"95%," he said, leaning over. "95% chance you'll
get 11-Bravo. That's Rifleman. Light weapons infantry. Because that's what
we need. But you can enlist for two
years."
"What happens then?"
"Still 95%, until you go for three." Choice, not
chance, was the Army’s mantra then. Today it’s, “Be all you can be,” if you’re
straight.
I called his bluff. The
next day, I signed up for two years, to go in on February 7. I was sent to the local police station, to
confirm that I didn't have a record. I
came back, and was given my enlistment contract, and a bus ticket. I even had an Armed Forces Service Number,
which I still remember: RA11937256.[39]
“God-damn”
Reception Station Scoops up College Grads
I spent six days in the Reception Station. The place was
surprisingly disorganized and squalid for a military facility. The barracks were run down, with peeling
paint and warped floors, the open bays cold and drafty with the smell of
coal. The latrines were filthy with
feces scum over the toilets, and no hot water.
Amazingly, there had been no attempt to detail recruits into cleaning
this mess up; it would have kept us busy and occupied. The Army obviously had
the resources to clean up its quarters; it obviously wanted to shock us into
accepting primitive living conditions.
We got only an hour in the sack that first night; just as we hit
the bunks, we heard a loudspeaker rousing the GI's (“Government Issues”) in the
next barracks, "you're going to Fort Gordon." It did seem like we were being processed for
subordinate life or slavery on another planet.
Friday morning, we were marched to the notorious barber shop. Actually, the military haircuts were not too
bad. We were allowed to keep about
1/4" of scalp hair, a short crewcut; we didn’t look bald.
We would sit around on our bunks, and there would be a cacophony
of gutter-speech and expletives. "Muvva fucka" (++Extreme profanity ++) seemed to start every
jive-sentence. Suddenly, someone would
call out, "formation," as other troops marched by; we would gather
our field jackets and ponchos (otherwise we still wore our civilian clothes for
a few days) and march to the next "pep talk" or to a meal.
Actually, once there was a real formation, on Saturday
afternoon. A cold front had come
through, and we stood chattering in the rain and wet snow (yes, it snowed four
times in South Carolina that February), as some NCO would call out "I need
some volunteers." We would all
raise our hands in unison, like we were saluting Chairman Mao. The idea, of course, was that this was no
place to become conspicuous, to remain an individual.
Nights, we would take turns on "fire watch." You would get up for an hour, and stand in a
corner, near the coal furnace, with an entrenching tool, and "watch"
over your “buddies” while they slept, peacefully. I pretended that I was
proctoring an exam as I stood, lost in my own preoccupations and entertained by
the stinging aroma of sulfur, and not just fart gas. I didn’t quite see myself
as one of America’s “fighting men.”
In the last couple of days, the pace picked up. On Monday morning, the temperature dropped to
a record low twelve degrees Fahrenheit, and I had lost my gloves. We were marched to chow, and by the time we
reached the mess hall, I was already shivering.
I went through the serving line, but passed out just as I was headed
toward a seat. This is the only time in
my life I have ever been unconscious. As
I awoke, I was on the floor, and a mess sergeant was shoving a cup of coffee at
me. "This will help settle your
stomach," he said. Had I actually vomited?
An ambulance came, I was imagining that there might be a quick
deliverance from this hell. But the
doctors at sick-call quickly pronounced me fit and sent me back.
Tuesday, we were trucked to the Quartermaster, finally fitted
into all our uniforms, and taught how to fold the clothes and stuff them in a
duffel-bag. The aroma of mothballs
permeated everything. The fatigues at
first were tight and scratchy on the thighs, but we quickly got used to them.
But they saved dessert for last.
We were marched to a theater, where were shown films and given
presentations about all the different Military Occupational Specialties
(MOS's). The Staff Sergeant would make
wisecracks about all of them.
"Computer programming, the school in Indiana is filled up for four
months." "Ordinance (sic), do you really want to be on a bomb
squad and get arms and legs and peckers blown off?" Then, we were given forms to fill out, and
list our first three choices. Fortunately,
the form included a space to list our education. Of course, I put down that I had completed a
Master's in Mathematics.
A few minutes later, the grizzled sergeant, who really did have
a lot of power in this area of the Army, bellowed out, "Hey, dunce, you
missed a college grad." I was
called over for a brief interview on my background. It looked like the Army would offer me a good
deal in the first inning.
This is Basic Trainin’ !
They piled us, now clad in fatigues, packs, boots, and steel
pots, into an olive-green canvas truck, closed the drapes to blindfold us, and
drove in circles for a while, and then to the other side of the post.
When the same sunshine broke through the canvas gates - call it an
airlock - we were effectively on a different third planet, with no Stargate to return.
They ordered us to jump out and race into formation and, like
Lot's wife, not to look around. My knee
gave way as I plunged four feet to a blacktop, caught a glimpse of eyebrowed
barracks, and limped to formation.
"Hey, soldier, get your head out of your ass," some
little sergeant screamed at me.
In a few seconds, I was somewhere in the vast middle-class of
the squad. "Now, you will stand at
attention, perfect, don't move a muscle. This ain't no god-damned reception
station; this is Basic Training!... Now, no matter what they told you, from now
on, you will address me as, 'Sir.' Is
that clear?"
"Yes, Sir!"
In the Reception Station, the NCO's had always screamed, "I
work for a living. I ain't no god-damned
officer, I'm a mother fucking sergeant." And we had been told only
commissioned officers are addressed with, “Sir!” So why were they confusing us? Only to
escalate our sensation of utter captivity, to impress upon us how far we had to
be broken down before we would become interchangeable parts of a fighting
machine.
In my mind I was prattling, the Army is leasing my body for two
years. It doesn't own me. I would impose
a mileage limit; I wouldn’t get traded in as mutilated goods.
Sergeant Hopkins went on.
"Until further notice, you will not leave the confines of the
Company Area." This consisted of four two-story wooden “eyebrowed” barracks, laid down fifty feet apart like
crayons, with an asphalt street in front, and exercise area with sand pits and
overhead parallel bars, then mess hall, and a “KP alley” (referring to “kitchen
police”) on the other side. We were on
"Tank Hill," named for the water tower perhaps a thousand feet in
front of us. A main street went down the
hill to the center of the post, with "company areas" laid out on both
sides, perpendicular.
So this was it! I was immersed into regimentation, a loss of
freedom, an eclipse of myself. This time, compared to the NIH hospital, I
really was imprisoned, ironically because my character was now good enough that
I could be trusted to carry a rifle and live with a military unit. It would be
a long road to get myself back. I would have to earn it.
The tension eased as we settled into our barracks. We were ordered to empty out our duffel bags
on the floor, as the cadre inspected for contraband. I actually got caught with a half-eaten stick
of Rolaids.
On the way to chow, we were made to process through the overhead
ladder - and I just could not do those “friggin’ bars.” Very quickly the cadre caught on and started
jumping all over me. "Hey, soldier,
where you from... how much education you got." ("Sir, I have a Master's degree in Mathematics.")
For chow, we would line up, and enter the mess hall five at a
time, after the cook called out, "Gim’me five." They made us call out our service numbers, to
“embarrass” the draftees and privileged six-month reservists (ER’s). The food, served on metal trays, was
generally rich and tasty, loaded with fats and cholesterol. The drill sergeants had already screamed at
the fat boys to go easy on the “starches” because a PT (Physical Training) test
would come shortly. They expected soldiers to smoke cigarettes, however. On the
first day of Drill and Ceremonies, they would show us how to field-strip an
expired cigarette.
After chow, we had fifteen minutes to make our bunks and get
ready for our first inspection, and I panicked.
I just couldn't remember how to make those hospital corners, even though
St. Jones, our twenty-year old platoon sergeant, had demonstrated bed-making
just before chow. An African-American
named Bill Lee, my upper-bunk mate, did them for me in the last thirty seconds,
as he warned me about the “stockade.”
I got through the inspection, as the assistant platoon sergeant,
announced, "Tonight, you will shine your boots, you will shine your
low-quarters, and you will clean my barracks."
I learned quickly, with everything stripped away, to look
forward to the smallest of pleasures, like sips at the water fountain.
---
Things did calm down the next day, Friday, as we finished
getting clothing and equipment. Friday
night, Sgt. Jones came by to demonstrate the proper making of bunks a second
time. After mastering hospital corners, you made a dust cover, and the last
blanket was folded in thirds, by trial and error, with adjustments by "cunt"
"++body++ hairs." Jones would
inspect us every morning during breakfast; a failed bunk wound up on the floor;
two would result in an Article 15 (non-judicial punishment).
But
Saturday was even more interesting. We first received a pep talk from the
brigade Sergeant Major. "This morning," he scowled, "a young man
walked up to me and pleaded, ‘Sergeant, I want a discharge from the United States Army.’ Now, men, the only way you will get a
discharge is to fulfill the two years if you were drafted, or three or more
years if you enlisted."
Again, if you were male, you owed your country your body for two
years before you had the right to be an adult.
And “telling” was hardly a feasible way out. My younger male friends,
who think they understand democracy, today have no real grasp of government’s
contingent prerogative to capture them and regiment their lives for two years,
and force them to risk their lives, in the community interest of “national
security.”
Then the Company, Battalion, and Brigade commanders gave their
pep talks. Each level had an "open
door" period, where anyone could speak to the commander in private,
without the normal chain of command. You
can confide anything during Open Door, they reassured us.
Saturday night Sgt. Jones gave us the details on
foot-and-wall-locker inspections. All of
this business about "all buttons buttoned ... some of you will be going to
Vietnam, and the only way you can stay alive in a combat zone is to learn to
follow every direction, exactly. If you
have to evacuate a post, you need to know exactly where all of your gear is,
and it has to be clean and maintained at all times." He summarized Basic
Training as having two objectives: learning to take orders, and to keep your
stuff clean when facing months in cramped, dangerous environments. He managed
to explain the combat infantry badge worn by most of the cadre as evidence of
service in Vietnam; he had not been shipped there himself, though drafted. He
actually would enjoy a duty station at Fort Jackson as a drill sergeant for
perhaps eighteen months.
Our drill sergeant gave us sensible advice. He claimed he had been a draftee, and been
assigned to Ft. Jackson as his duty station for two years as a Drill
Instructor. He had a wife and young son
at home, and I was impressed that he would spend a Saturday night on his own
time to teach us. He did care about his
men, and I understand when he got out he became a policeman in Columbia,
S.C.
Prepare to Rush..... Rush
!
During the third week of Basic, we did a relatively long march
back from "Individual Tactical Training," and the pace had relaxed a
bit, into an at-ease stroll among the sand and pine trees on a mild late winter
day. The march had turned into a Science
Honor Society hike, with an absence of mountains but lots of coastal-plain sand
and aromatic pine trees. Field First Sgt. Hopkins said to me, "see,
Boushka, this training isn't too tough, after all." Indeed, the videos of
today’s Army Basic make today’s regimentation (even given the “integration” of
women into the units) seem more overwhelming.
A few hours earlier, it would not have occurred to me to think
of Army Basic as a piece of cake, as I dove into the sand and skinned my knees
through my fatigues, and then got up with a thirty pound pack: “Prepare to
Rush!!! Rush!!! ... I liked the “night slaves” exercise better,
when we wave our hands lazily in front of us to feel for bamboo sticks and
other booby traps that really would flay your gams.
“Well, Sergeant," I answered, "it shouldn't be like
Parris Island, a hundred miles away.
After all, the Marines are tougher than the Army." I had always
pictured the Marine Corps as the ultimate enforcer of the old-fashioned values
of male fungibility. Men were hazed and presumably taught to endure pain
without flinching (a true bodily insult), just like teenage boys in Sparta. The
whole idea had always sounded degrading. It’s better if the Marine Corps just
limits itself to “A Few Good Men.”
The sergeants would scream about jarheads the rest of the march,
but at the rest of the company. [By now, I had grown used to seeing their combat
infantry badges, evidence of sacrificial service in Vietnam, something part of
them but not of me.]
The leatherneck gambit wasn't my only gaffe that became
legendary with the cadre. A couple of
days before, in Pugil training, the company commander had spoken to me,
"You're one soldier I've been wanting to learn something from. Now, I'm sure you're going to be working in
Systems, but you've gotta learn to become a guerrilla fighter first. Every man
has to." A few minutes later, the
Battalion commander was observing us, including my getting whacked during the
exercises of mock "fencing."
Somehow, I lost it, forgot I was in the military, and blurted out
something like, "You must be a Brigadier General." I mixed up the fatigue silver oak leaf with a
star. I did hear about that one later.
Or, another time, when I was DRO (Dining Room Orderly) on KP, I
waved at another Captain as he entered the room between meals for a snack. I could be pretty unmilitary. Well, letting an undershirt show through
summer khakis was supposed to be unmilitary!
The cadre was always after me to "blouse my boots", and
straighten up the gig line, and get a closer (and perhaps dry) shave. But only once did my bunk get torn apart at
morning inspection. But I was developing a most unmilitary reputation, down to
my exposed undershirts, rumored to be loaded with lice.
Yet, the company XO (Executive Officer) -- a past history major
who would engage me in debates about the value of humanities versus the
sciences in chow line (I wonder if he yet appreciated “social sciences” from a
personal perspective) did have the
paperwork around for application for Direct Commission, and, based on my
degrees, encouraged me to apply one night after chow. I filled out the usual forms, and answered
some essay questions, the way I would have on a Va. and U.S. History test when
I would need a 95 to squeak an A in the course.
---
On a typical evening, we would, of course, maintain our foot and
wall locker displays, clean the latrine, commodes (without separate stalls) and
showers, and buff the floors. Sometimes
I was asked to sit on the buffer while another guy would operate it. The guys
called me "slim," "algebra," and even "slide
rule," the nerd with no “common sense.” The cadre soon spoke of my
deficiency of “social graces.” The barracks were always immaculate (unlike the
Reception Station), and reasonably warm, except when they made us leave the
windows open at night for "meningitis regulations." Oddly, radios were allowed, and one of the
"EM" (enlisted men), played the current rock songs on "WOCS,
Columbia, first in the Palmetto State."
I got tired of "Simple Simon," even as the other guys sang
along.
Lights-out was at 9:30. I
slept well, but would wake up around 1:30, and then 3:30 to urinate. By midnight,
it was cold in the barracks - the chill made me urinate more often - and
I wouldn't want to crawl out of the sack to sprint on the icy floor in my
tight, pissy longjohns to the latrine. I
would look at the Timex watch, and not want to go back to sleep, for that
dreaded time when I would have to get everything ready for inspection drew
near. (In civilian life, that is like
having to get up and go into work and prepare an elevation for production
before a time deadline, without making any mistakes.) Around
Of course, there was detail.
The detail lists, neatly typed, were posted outside the mess hall. They
were mainly two: Guard Duty, and the notorious Kitchen Police.
Guard Duty wasn't so bad.
The CQ ("Charge of Quarters) would get you up, and a pickup would
take you to a PX (Post Exchange) or theater
you would march around at sling arms for two hours. Then, the truck to pick you up was always
late. But KP was worse. You went in the
night before, right after chow, for "orientation." Next morning, the CQ tugged on you at 3:30,
which was sort of the phone screaming from a computer room in later years. You
faced an eighteen-hour day of, largely, boredom. More often than not, I was "side
sink" man. I brushed off and
pre-washed the trays, with the wash water constantly becoming soiled and
looking like vomit. "No, this ain't
no damn good," a mess sergeant would say to me. The KP's usually got to eat first, however,
and my appetite was enormous.
The training was a potpourri. A class might start when the Field
First Sergeant said, “welcome to your first exercise with Drill and
Ceremony!” Formally, there were
In between the PT and “academic subjects” we would sometimes be
marched to a nice, warm Post Theater for “Character Guidance” from a Chaplain.
But these sessions always started with wild cheering, screaming, and whistling.
Back in the barracks, we would sometimes get more of it. “E-4-1[42]
Better than the Best, to hell with the Rest!” became a bombastic mantra. You
were supposed to feel bonded to those guys in nearest physical proximity to you
- your squad, then platoon, and company. Propinquity counted for everything.
You could not choose to whom you would be loyal. But I quickly differentiated between
the men who at least respected me and those who didn’t. I felt I had no choice
whom I was supposed to respect. I never heard loftier moral concepts like
personal honor mentioned.
The chaplains gave me some opportunity for relief. On Sundays,
they would let us go to chapel, and then again on Sunday night to a “Sunday
school.” It was a kind of unofficial “post privileges,” even after one week.
“Sure, go to church!” Ever so slowly, it
seemed, I would reclaim my humanity, however reconstructed, and freedom. I
spoke to one of the chaplains and soon I was a volunteer organist for several
of the Sunday morning services. For postludes, I sometimes improvised on the
Mahler Adagietto, which had been
played frequently during John Kennedy’s commemorations in 1963.
The first PT "quiz" ¾ the Physical Combat
Proficiency Test, the PCPT ¾ had been given in the
second week. There were five events: 40 yard low-crawl (on a canvas mat),
run-dodge-jump, man carry, 1-mile run, and horizontal ladder. The ladder I still simply couldn't
handle. I couldn't even maintain a grip,
and kept falling off. I made a score of
190/500 on the test, when 300 was passing.
After the PT test, I heard the cadre mention a bad word,
"recycled."
Sgt. Jones, however, was
good enough to say, "Boushka made 190, but he was trying." The cadre never, to my recollection, indulged
in gay-baiting; I never heard anyone called a "sissy" or a
"fag." One of the soldiers, however ¾ a gangly black guy who had made a perfect 500
on the PT test ¾ one evening a week after
the test climbed up on my bunk, placed his hand on my chest (T-shirt still on),
and asked me to fellate him.
Immediately, in front of probably twenty witnesses, I screamed,
"take your hands off of me, or I'll have you court-martialed."
Uncharacteristically, I had acted like a Big-G gorilla myself, and had chased
off the puma. Had he forced himself upon me, however, I think the other guys
would have stood up for him, and I could well have been booted out quickly with
a bad conduct discharge. I would have been in the same position as a straight
female accused of lesbianism after refusing an “advance” from an aggressive
male.
After the first three weeks, we were allowed real "Post
Privileges" Saturday Night and Sunday.
I never realized how good it felt to have myself back. Having freedom felt good again, even if
liberty were only relative. My appetite
was enormous now. I didn’t need the nose sprays and tums. Sunday afternoon, I went to the Post theater
and saw Planet of the Apes.
The
first day of rifle range, in Week 4, was horrible for me. We spent it on the 25-meter range, and in
early 1968 we still trained with M-14's. (From the tower would come the
commands, "Firers, lock and load!
Squeeze those rounds off.")
The worst problem for me was the noise, and the plastic earplugs they
handed out did nothing because they wouldn't seal over. Shooting was not a problem, because the M-14
had an effective blast deflector; but coaching exposed my right ear to the full
piercing shock of my buddy's fire. At
the end of the day, the officers made us “swear” we weren’t carrying any ammo
out, just as they had drilled into us that one never takes an untested or
unmaintained rifle on a mission. When we got back to the company area, my right
ear was ringing horribly, with a deep, heavy, thuddy feeling, and I was running
a temperature. After chow, I was
starting to shake and went on sick call.
An ambulance came and took me away, and in the emergency room, the medic
said, "don't worry, you don't have to fake it. You're at 105 degrees."
---
I spent five mid-March days, from Wednesday night to Monday
afternoon, in the Ft. Jackson infirmary.
To date, this is the only time in my entire life I have been
hospitalized, besides NIH Ward 7-West. Although
the nurse interviewed me to make sure I wasn't delirious (as with meningitis),
and the Red Cross called my parents, I got better very quickly. The next day, the doctor said I had a “mild”
pneumonia and prescribed tetracycline.
The nurse would come by and try to make me take cold showers to get the
fever down. But by Saturday, I was
almost recovered. Some ward NCO would
come by and make us get up and wash down our beds as a detail. I was trucked back to the unit Monday at
noon, and cursed myself, that I was finally going to be able to do this
stuff.
Monday night, before chow, I heard some of my
"buddies" talk about the cadre having come by Thursday night and made
them retake the PCPT. Then, in
formation, they called out the names of five men who were to see the company
commander after dinner. Mine was the
last one called.
---
In the last few years, a lot of folks have had the experience of
being suddenly summoned to a superior's office, and wondering what ax will fall
and how they will cope with a life of much less. Actually, I fantasized that
the summons could have been regarding the direct commission application; maybe
nerdiness could win out even in the Army.
But we went into the day room as a group, and the first words
out of the Captain's mouth were like this: "While you're at Special
Training Company..." He actually started his sentencing with a
preposition. Then he called us in
individually, and played daddy.
"You have a wealth of education. I wish I had your smarts. But, some where along the way, you fell
behind in the courtesies, and you didn't build up your body. You've still got to make it as a guerrilla
fighter before the Army will let you get back to your computers."
"So what will I be doing?"
"You're not a motivation problem. You're not a discipline problem. You're going to PT platoon. But the commander is a guy like you. He has a master's degree. I think you'll get a long if you pull this
out." Yet, he talked like a teacher telling a pupil who would fail a
grade.
Special
Training Company
A third time, we jumped off a bus, and now a beanpole Staff
Sergeant Mears was eyeing about ten of us as we stood in formation in the chill
March early morning sunshine, our duffel bags and steel pots between us, as a
part of the formation. We kept our eyes
straight ahead; we didn't want to look.
"Where you from, Private Boushka," he yelped.
"Arlington, Virginia, Sergeant."
"You know what your trouble is? Too
much education."
I would quickly become known as "professor" in Special
Training Company. My squadmates had claimed I had no common sense,
but neither do computers. We were marched to our new quarters, a Tent
City. It looked like the setup after
Hurricane Andrew, with perhaps eight single bunks per tent on a concrete
slab. We were dismissed for a moment to
use the enormous communal latrine, and I was so shocked by the situation that
we actually urinated into the long washbasin before we figured out the birds
and the bees.
Shortly thereafter, we were marched to the day room, for a pep
talk by our new commander, Captain Blackstone.
He told us we could get out of here today, by passing the tests, or we
could be here a year. "There are no
passes in Special Training Company, no Post Privileges." That meant, my parents would not be coming
down at Easter; for a moment, tears actually came to my eyes. It seemed we were being quarantined from the
Free World until we demonstrated we weren’t cowards. From that cozy meeting, we
were marched immediately to another PT test, and then an "academic"
(actually, practical) test on other military subjects such as Drill and
Ceremonies. Actually, I flunked that
test, too, and stayed in "academic platoon" for a week. Then, I would move to PT.
My second day there, I
was called over to the "mental hygiene clinic." No one else was, and since the Army had
apparently lost track of my earlier draft physicals, the cadre apparently just
wanted to find out what I was. The
psychologist was one of the most perfect-looking men I have ever met ¾ if you want stereotyped Caucasians with
perfect faces and hairy wrists. He wore his dress greens (the Army’s equivalent
to the business suit). He said, "My job is to interview selected enlisted
men who have had difficulties adjusting to military life." I recall spilling out my worry that, because
of getting recycled, I could lose out on a better MOS and wind up in Nam. He couldn't say much. "I made it in eight weeks. I have heard of a few who have been holed up
here for six months." I suppose he
could have recommended me for a General Discharge, for some vague connection to
homosexuality. But I think he suspected
that I really needed to finish my obligation "with honor" if I was to
get on with life. “You can beat this if you hang in there.” Subsequently, I would look up the index in
Randy Shilts's book for his name. I
didn't find it.
A couple of days in
Some colder nights, cadre could come by our tents, and make us
unzip our sleeping bags to determine whether we had kept our fatigues on, or
really had stripped to longjohns.
"Get your clothes off, Horse," they would cackle as they
tugged on our nighties.
The third weekend, on Saturday night, rumors of a "Red
Alert" went around the camp, after the assassination of Martin Luther
King. Though there might have been
legitimate reason to expect trouble in Columbia (there already had been in
Orangeburg), the idea of sending Basic soldiers into a riot zone as a
"show of force" (Special Training, nonetheless), sounded patently
ridiculous. [A few soldiers did speculate that LBJ’s government and perhaps J.
Edgar Hoover were behind the assassination.]
The PT platoon, itself, was not that bad. We probably had two calisthenics sessions a
day, and used a primitive gym, which we had to hose out and clean. This was no Bally's Holiday Esprit or
President's Turtle Creek Executive Club, as in Dallas, or Halsey Field House at
the Naval Academy. There was a power
circuit, with crude apparatus such as inclined-plane situps, back-pullup rungs,
parallel bars, a long horizontal ladder, and a medicine ball with which you
beat your buddy in the abs, and York barbell freeweights. Once, when the Post
Commanding General visited, we lined up along a wrestling mat and would
repeatedly take three simultaneous deep breaths and at the command,
"Hip," perform deep knee bends while slowly exhaling. The whistle would blow, and we would scramble
to our assigned exercise stations, yelling and screaming to demo our combat
esprit-de-corps. At the command,
"Work!" we would perform the primitive exercise until the next
whistle while yelling and screaming out of “esprit de corps” (or “unit
cohesion”). We had one enlistee
thirty-six years old (we called him “Paps”), who had apparently joined up
because of economic or personal hardship; getting to cooking school was going
to be a real achievement for him.
The Tuesday I passed the PCPT test, though, was a great day in
the sunshine. By now, I could do some runs on the horizontal ladder; I actually
had some “lesbian” upper body strength (to borrow a joke from a previous Los
Angeles police chief). I had played
Forest Gump for just three weeks. Sgt. Mears read off my time on the mile run,
"07:18". Back in tenth grade
Physical Education, after our first run of the 440, I had been so winded I
almost puked. I guess I had come a long
way. It had become gratifying, to get up
in the morning and have my legs feel so strong.
So, I had the run of the post for the rest of the week, until I returned
to my recycle company the following Sunday.
I got to hike half the post, over to Military Personnel Division, and
check on my MOS, which was going to be 01E20, Mathematician. Yes, I would be an
Army Mathematician, if I got through Basic.
There were other EM who were much worse off. One of them eventually got a Basic Waiver,
and another was almost autistic at times.
I tried to encourage him to try a little harder on the next PT test;
“you’ll feel good about yourself when you make it,” I counseled. Well, I had.
But this guy remained mute, like one of those patients at NIH. Why should he
believe my values, which now incorporated the Army’s? The other “recycled” men
showed the same effects from the cold as I did: hands chaffed, with the wrists
going bald and becoming shiny around the bony areas from constantly lowered
skin temperatures. I really noticed this
on the men that had been in Tent City for three or four months; they were
beginning to resemble walking corpses already. I wonder if this was an
effective way to stay out of Nam; I had my suspicions. The unfit wouldn’t make good fireplace kindling.
A
Direct Commission
(for a BAD DETAIL
My second company, B-2-1,
was located higher up on Tank Hill. I
was put back in the beginning of the third week, with that horrible Individual
Tactical Training again. This day wasn’t better; my body parts got scraped even
more. It was demeaning, but already I could see the way out of this.
I was given a single cot at the end of the bay; it straddled the
space between the two rows of bunkbeds.
Perhaps this singled me out, although my relations with both cadre and
unit "buddies" was much more comfortable. Still, some of them liked to kid me about my
diffidence and apparent lack of interest in female anatomy and lack of past
girl friends. I told them that I "sublimate," and then had to explain this “big word” that
dealt with directing sexual energies into artistic or intellectual pursuits
(and not just wet dreams). One private,
who claimed to have been a psychologist before getting scooped up, delighted in
analyzing my dreams, claiming that he could see my world "very
clearly." He went on, “if you’re different, that’s OK, because that’s
you.”
By Wednesday or so, it was clear that the mystery behind me gave
me a certain respect from the guys. I
became one of them quickly, if partially.
Some of them “knew” or suspected my fantasies, but my presence didn’t bother them.
A few days into the new unit, I was asked to type up a resume
and hand-deliver it over to the Military Personnel Division (MPD) for my
MOS. I remember typing it in the day
room, and carrying it with me all the next day on the bayonet course, before I
had the chance to walk it in.
One day, we took a break from training and spent an entire day
on "detail" - "special services" detail, in fact. We were supposed to chop up moist clay with a
hoe or log, so the clay could fill horseshoe pits. It was drudgery, and we were
bossed around by a civilian, a "recreational specialist." Once I complained that this was hard labor
for men in the stockade, and he came back with, "now, mathematician, you
say you are, you're supposed to work hard like other men. You're one of the
worst detail men I've ever met ¾ I'm fixing to report you to
your First Sergeant, who will give you an Article 15 that will ruin your
life."
As outrageous as was his threat, my heart actually jumped, the
way it had when the nurse in ninth grade had tongue-lashed me for
"speculating." It seemed like
an assault on my essential person.
Things turned around the very next week, though, as I was
suddenly invited to my direct commission interview, having been told to report
by our CQ to MPD on the first day of
rifle range. So I got to come to
reveille formation in dress greens, while my buddies wore fatigues.
The interview was bizarre, and a bit of a sham on my part. It
was not exactly like a master's orals. Three officers came out with pretty
blunt questions. "Why do you want to be an officer?” (I thought, that’s
like asking, why do you want to go to med school, and you’re not supposed to
answer, “for the money, stupid!”). “What leadership experiences do you have?
Student Council? Athletics? Are you a platoon guide or squad leader in your
basic training company?" They were
very concerned with evidence of leadership success in socially approved tests
of masculinity. There were no technical
questions, of course; even though I had arranged for my parents to mail me a
Xerox of my master's thesis so I could show it off. Finally, the issue of my status in Basic
Training came up - why I had wound up in
The six weeks in B-2-1 moved quickly, towards what seemed like
triumph. I made sharpshooter in the
Record Rifle Range (47/75), pleasing myself that I actually hit several
350-meter popups from the foxhole position.
Between qualifications, we would load bronze ammo clips. A radio was playing, and broadcasting news
stories that peace talks were starting.
Tears would come to my eyes that maybe this horror of Vietnam would soon
come to a merciful end, and we would be able to go back to our own more
productive lives. I did not yet know
about the severity of the Tet offensive about the time I started Basic, or that
several more years of war would set off social changes at home that would soon
define my whole adult life.
We went through the gas chamber - and all we had to breathe was
tear gas (no chlorine, which had been rumored), and it set off the most violent
coughing in my life. Many guys threw up,
but I didn't. We went on bivouac, an eight-mile hike through the sand hills and
pine trees, and we were zapped once by riot gas. I had a tent to myself (I was still a bit
churlish), and the tent fell down on me during the night in heavy rain. The next day, we went to night infiltration,
at Corrigedor Range. It was a rather
unearthly experience, but not really scary.
I lay on my back, inching my way across the abyss in the cool sand,
while red and white tracers flew over and looked like flying saucers. The whole “English Channel” crossing took
about twenty minutes.
After infiltration, the morale in the unit really perked up as
graduation and liberty approached. We finally
got passes, with 125-mile ranges. Some homesick kids had permission to buy
full-fare plane tickets back to New York, for a quick Saturday night and Sunday
morning. I stayed closer; I took a bus into Columbia, passing beautiful
Southern homes and azalea bushes on the way in. My old platoon Sergeant Jones
actually stopped me; he was patrolling the streets with an armband, “UP”
(Uniform Police). The Army does watch what its people do on
liberty. I went to a black-and-white but
Panavision movie, Truman Capote's In Cold
Blood. I ran into two guys from my
old E-4-1 company, both now in
I was still paranoid about the "final exams." I would practice D&C after dinner in the company
area. On the G-3 test final (mostly
“lab” practical tests on first aid, drill and ceremony, individual tactical
training, bayonet, and written tests on Code of Conduct and Military Justice) I
got 57/69. I made 357 on my final PCPT
test, including a seven-minute mile-run. Although some women would probably do
better than this, I had again proven that I could achieve decent success in PT
if I had to. I really could deal with
gym. Was the “physical weakness” of earlier days a sign of sloth, or lazy character,
or do I have some subtle genetic or congenital problem, that interferes with
“male” performance in physical strength? I don’t know, I think there is a
recursive mixture of both. Even today,
on outdoor hikes and runs, my performance is way below the level of most other
gay men (but there is no real “statistical” difference in athletic ability
between gay men and straight men).
We marched in khakis for our graduation, which seemed almost
like an academy matriculation. Then, we
had a company beer party, and actually had a softball game. I grounded out twice. The other guys arranged
themselves in daisy chains, singing "Nothing Like a Dame" and
"She Wore a Yellow Ribbon."
A few days before graduation, I had received my orders for Ft.
Myer, and my sheltered MOS. It was to be 01E20, “Mathematician.” It looked like I would stay out of Nam,
unless the political pendulum started turning back.
The last night, after graduation, I took an introspective walk
all around Tank Hill, proud that I had survived this ordeal, and would go home
feeling more self-confident and energetic than any other time in my life. I
would be free again - relatively.
I had a slight permanent ring in my right ear from the rifle
range, and it would not go away, but I would be able to enjoy my music. On a cool Saturday night, to start the
Memorial Day weekend, 1968, I was back home, with much to look forward to if
the Army didn't renege on its Faustian good deal.
McNamara
and Remembrance
For
the four warmest months of 1968, I was assigned to a "Force Development
Group" in the Pentagon, which had two other graduate-student types like
me, along with many civilians, a Colonel in charge and a
Curiously, since I no longer really had to, sometimes I actually
enjoyed playing soldier-boy. A few
nights I really did stay in the bay at South Post. A few of the men happened to be amused by my
chess playing, and my ability to beat them all simultaneously. The Spec-4's and NCO's had little partitions,
and would openly play rock music of the time, such as "Don't Let it Get
you Down."
Then one morning Sgt. Garcia, the oft-rumored
crumb of a barracks sergeant, held a surprise inspection and seemed terribly
upset for some unspeakable reason. Like
a cat, I decided not to stay there any longer.
Later that morning, I would learn that Senator Robert Kennedy had been
assassinated the night before in Los Angeles.
The mission of the Force Development Group was politically
controversial. It was supposed to evaluate the expected combat effectiveness of
various compositions of units, vaguely according to accepted "Operations
Research" simulation or optimization methods. Units were classified as Combat (such as
Infantry or Artillery, the so-called "combat arms"), Combat Support
(mainly, engineers), and Combat Service Support (everything else, such as
legal, finance, quartermaster, transportation, medical). Most of us coded key-punch sheets that would
later go through data entry and into a mainframe model that I never heard much
about.
In the meantime, I filled out the applications for a Top Secret
clearance. I was honest about the
sensitive questions (such as a history of psychiatric treatment). I was not
asked about homosexual tendencies.
None of us was terribly busy, so I had time to peruse through
down-classified documents. Particularly
interesting were war-game scenarios written during the Korean War, now marked
down to Secret. Various speculations
were offered about the eventual behavior of the Soviet Union; apparently, even
during the early 50's, the Soviets were further along in their own nuclear
weapons development than is usually reported. I often took the initiative to
hide out in the library, and track down other documents describing various
nuclear war scenarios. One, in particular, detailed the amount of destruction
at various distances assuming a megatonnage hit on St. Louis, a setup for the
1982 film, The Day After. I
discovered various studies of civilian evacuations in anticipation of nuclear
strikes, which usually pointed out the depressing conclusion that the
countryside was as vulnerable to death from radiation sickness as were the
cities from the blast. Only very recently have we learned that President
Kennedy had actually discussed evacuation before ordering the blockade that
ended the Cuban Missile Crisis.[43]
I can imagine us “mental patients” being shipped out of NIH for
“re-education.”
The other enlisted men would indulge in discussions, not only in
the common degradations of Basic Training, but also in the real motives behind
the Vietnam War. One opinion frequently
offered was that senior Pentagon military officers would deliberately cook up
wars to justify their own jobs. A term
frequently heard describing senior enlisted men was "lifers," men who
couldn't make it in the only recently more competitive civilian world.
Still, there was very little to do, and the speculations about
what was really going on continued. The
world view became more sinister. After
all, by now we all realized how awfully we had been creamed in Tet early that
year, 1968. Lyndon Johnson was not going
to run again ¾ an admission that we were
bogged down for a long time. All of us
were essentially conservative and "patriotic" (we hadn't protested
while taking advantage of deferments); based on what we were seeing, it seemed
that, despite the now publicized intractable nature of guerrilla warfare, the
war could be ended if we simply brought them to their knees with unprecedented
air raids and possibly tactical nuclear weapons. Although the evidence was hazy (based on the
documents available), it seemed to us that senior military officials believed
that such escalation would bring in not only the Chinese but also the Soviets,
and possibly provoke a nuclear showdown. There were also rumors of secret
treaties between North Vietnam and Communist China and possibly even the Soviet
Union.
Of course, there is little evidence that this claim was
objectively correct. Rather, this may
have been something military officers wanted to believe, as a justification for
their own roles. As long as we had to
keep 500,000 ground troops in Vietnam under the aegis of this "domino
theory", senior military officials had unbelievable personal power over
the lives of young men, the capability to decide who risked his life and who
was "too valuable" to be "sacrificed." [They could
rationalize our policies easily, by making claims such as the possibility Nato
could collapse if we failed in Vietnam.] Their power went way beyond the proper
boundaries of the military society; it dictated civilian priorities, as in
education and social "meritocracy" as well. The Soviets, they believed, would leave us
alone as long as our staying in the war really cost us something - like 50,000
young lives; that painful price (for our individualistic culture) would buffer
or limit our influence around this “Bamboo Curtain” and contribute toward a
credible balance. In this view, the war protesters, accused later by Nixon as
spoiled college-boy “scum” giving comfort to the enemy[44]
but in many cases motivated by religious and moral values becoming translated
by a freer society, may have stabilized things by demonstrating publicly that
the war, as long as it was stalemated like a locked pawn chain, caused
Americans (as well as Vietnamese) real, personal pain. Perhaps the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations really had underestimated the resilience of an enemy,
counting on our Kingside attack to get overextended and fighting trench warfare
behind its own lines. Perhaps, after the (barely) successful outcome of the
Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s people thought the nuclear advantage would be
like playing a chess game with an extra rook. If so, they forgot that two
connected passed pawns on the sixth rank win against a rook in the endgame! By
1968, we were no longer underestimating the enemy; we were overlooking our own
political and social vulnerabilities and lack of “concentration.”
In August one Wednesday morning, I received a mystery phone call
from a sassy clerk about the rumors that I would soon "no longer be
assigned to the Pentagon." I had met the clerk, I slender, precise and
slightly nelly guy once in the barracks. I asked him if he knew of a problem
with my Top Secret security clearance investigation.
“I can’t tell you what I know,” he said, “but I’d get ready to
pack my duffel-bag if I were you.”
The following Monday, the
colonel in charge of the Force Development Unit called me in, and suggested
that I look around the Pentagon for a transfer since billets in our staff were
to be eliminated. I was like a civilian
employee looking for a new position in a downsizing. Soon, I heard about another 01E20 slot in the
Office of the Secretary of Defense, where enlisted men from various services
worked together and wore civilian clothes, the height of status. I called
around and tried to set up an interview. But a few days later, the smart-ass
clerk called me again and told me he had orders in hand for me for Fort Eustis
("Fort Useless"), Virginia.
The Colonel called me in again and told me he was transferring me
because there was nothing here for me to do in the Pentagon.
Three months later, I would return to the Pentagon while “on
pass” and check them out. I would find I had indeed been replaced, and the new
guy would insist he couldn’t talk to me.
Was this the result of the security background investigation,
all the William and Mary business? I
checked the personal references I had given; none said they had been
contacted. No, I think I was perceived
as a troublemaker, someone who would find in these distinctions between
“combat” and “support” the political games the military was playing,
cultivating the belief that America owed the military the cream of its young
manhood as a source of indentured servitude and as "burnt offerings." They didn’t want to send me to a meatgrinder
I wouldn’t survive; they just wanted me
to go away where I could forget their game before my two years under military
control were up.
Safe
Place for a Chickenman’s Revenge
There
was one more bus ride, this time down into Tidewater Virginia, just past
Williamsburg, where I had experienced my debacle, on to an area called
"The Peninsula," between the James and York rivers. Fort Eustis was just barely inside the city
limits of sprawling Newport News, Va., no “metropolis.”
I was assigned to the U.S. Army Combat Developments Command
Transportation Agency (USACDCTA), housed in a one-story wooden building,
freshly painted white, without air-conditioning. There were two rows of desks, with a
Lieutenant Colonel at the end of each row; the Commander, a Colonel, and his XO
had plush offices in the back with window air conditioners. The staff consisted mostly of civilians,
including one who had been an 01E20 but actually stayed on when his draft term
was up. There were two lieutenants, a
major, and one other enlisted man, who had actually enlisted for three years to
get a "soft" job.
As at the Pentagon, there was little actual work to do. The main
concern would be - will I be left alone here for the sixteen months
remaining? Much of the time was spent
coding documents in to a library catalogue system called
"Spiral." But, in time, I did
get to code a simulation model in a proprietary language from Rand Corporation
called Simscript, but I don't think it ever actually got executed. As I
processed in, everybody seemed aware little was happening; the XO said, “we
expect you to make the coffee.”
We were billeted in a typical two-story eyebrow a few hundred
yards away. Now, we had private rooms, with a bunk and a slanted ceiling, and
walls of plywood boards painted green.
There were guys from various other units, such as the sister "Transportation
Engineering Agency." We even had a
few men who were
I settled in, and started spending a lot of time with my chess
books, reading Ayn Rand’s monumental Atlas
Shrugged, and writing my own rather autobiographical novel in longhand in a
composition notebook. It was supposed to
be our worst nightmares come true: a latent homosexual in the Army, himself
sheltered from combat fought by the “real” men,
discovers through his underground social connections an internal plot in
our own government to set off World War
The 1968 elections were a hot topic. Almost everyone supported Nixon, and believed
that the Democrats - even with a “liberal” President Hubert Humphrey - would
continue the war forever. The rigging of the platform and nomination process at
the Democratic Convention, as well as the police massacre depicted soon in the
X-rated film Medium Cool, were
already well known among this reasonably well-educated troops. The notion that Vietnam could some day
escalate to a nuclear confrontation, and bring in the Soviets as well as China,
was frequently mentioned. [Everyone viewed Russia as much more dangerous than
China, which in the view of some on the far Left was honestly trying to
equalize all its people and achieve some collective justice.] I still recall
the election night, when Humphrey had an early lead; but when I awoke around
The guys were very worried for their own lives if they got
shipped out again. With the exception of maybe one hot-head about to volunteer
for a second tour in Nam, everybody looked out for “Number 1.” Rumors were always flying that our barracks
building, with its private rooms, would be torn down, and that we would all be
moved "back to the bay" with Special Troops, where we would start
pulling KP and guard duty. That never
happened. We sought relief by acting out innocent college-boy jokes, almost
like we were a fraternity. We made up animal names (sometimes based on Saturday
morning cartoon characters) for various people in our units, such as
"Lizard, Ostrich, Ocelot."
Several of these were Second and First Lieutenants with advanced
degrees; the Command, curiously, put pressure on them to participate in the
local community Boy Scouts as scoutmasters
(The command certainly knew I was no role model for Boy Scouts.) One
rather cynical guy, a doctoral candidate who joined us shortly before I got
out, called himself “Rado Suhl,” after two famous physicists. I was called "The Chicken Man," or
"CM,” eventually even by the flag officers in the Command. Most of the
guys’ criticisms of my behavior, my tendency to boorishly “blurt out” what was
on my mind, tended to be made with a degree of outright kindness
I ruffled the guys’
sails by talking about the nukes in Russia and China, as I remembered reading
about them in the Pentagon, and then by sharing my handwritten novel manuscript
around quickly, just as I wrote it. Some of the guys took to my depiction of a
primitive, regimented society surviving in the ruins after the bombs. From the novel content and my nerdy
barracks demeanor, the guys concluded
that I was gay, just as they had in Basic companies. “Why do you cross your
legs in such a feminine way?” Even the
penmanship in my novel looked like a girl’s to them; boys write “regular.” I never told them directly that I wanted men,
but I certainly never denied it. With so much peril and danger ahead, the guys
admired my non-conformity to society’s rules, as if I were a kind of movie
anti-hero, like the little boy of the Tin Drum [46]
who refused to grow physically into a lobotomized, regimented adulthood.
Right before I got there, they said, the previous barracks
sergeant had been "quietly" moved off post because he had been
“caught” having a fifteen-year old boy living with him in his quarters. The fag
jokes quickly became more outrageous, if good-natured. We would imitate Tiny Tim ("Tiptoe
Through the Tulips"), and we made up "The Gesture" ("O Go
Way Butter-Fly" with a leeching tongue and exaggerated limp wrist. We made
fun of soldiers with high-pitched voices. Barry drew humorous rebukes in the
barracks for shaving portions of his forearms before giving blood; he reacted
with the stereotyped “lithp” (sic),
“Yeth!”
I gained social acceptance, already established by my “creative”
imagination, when I joined in the jokes.
I laughed with the “fags” that could either destroy or save the world (as in my
fiction), rather than at them. Somehow, the guys acted as if their connection
to me might save them. The jokes got
even more daring in the last three months before I got out. I would talk of male “hormones,” and the
other guys called me “hormone,” not knowing what the word meant but noticing it
sounded like “homo.” One of the more “proletarian” guys, when sufficiently
soused, claimed that even “queers” would wake up some day to their need for
women and then commit involuntary rapes.
One soldier and I would engage in skits about how a commanding officer
would treat a “queer” in his unit; then the soldier would parody the skit by
actually exposing himself to me. Another
one of the analysts actually came out to me in the barracks, and then two weeks
before I was to get out, one of the other field grade officers on post called
me in and made a sexual advance (placing his hand on my thigh), which I ignored
and handled by simply leaving his office. That proved it, of course; the senior
officers just pretended they didn’t
know. As for the females on post, the
guys characterized them as all lesbians with the most indecent expletives
imaginable; but they bore the women no direct animosity, they were just a
different species. In this era, male soldiers sought civilian girls (such as
William and Mary coeds) off post; they weren’t interested in WACS (not
“feminine” enough) anyway. The Army was still years away from experimenting
with gratuitously training the sexes together.
When the movie
We barely knew, then, that women were already making rapid gains
in the military. Over 260,000 served
during the Vietnam War, and 7,500 went to Vietnam itself.[47] Only almost three decades later would debates
erupt as to whether women had the upper body strength and aerobic capacity to
function as replaceable components of combat units.[48] What would matter, toward ending the draft,
or at least ending the sacrifice of young men, was that women could win
physical wars as well as those inside computers or on chessboards.
My squareness and my
reputation as a teetotaler probably increased their respect for me. Some of the
boys would “tempt” me with trying marijuana or shooting speed. “You’ll never
know, you’ll never experience.” I’d been high once, in a dentist’s chair; that
was enough. They’d claim pot heightened their visual awareness of details; and
I’d argue back that, at best, drugs made them into artificial selves and
personality fragments.
Toward the end, we got a new Sergeant Major, who wanted to bring
back more soldiering. All the guys referred to him as “Lifer Meese.” We had to paint our rooms and barracks for
the IG (Inspector General) inspection.
We had to qualify on the rifle range: and this time, we had to use all
the positions (including standing). I
boloed, although my records were falsified so that I didn't have to fire again.
Perhaps I committed a venial breach of honor.
My right ear started ringing badly again after the experience; for several
days, the ringing would intensify any time I bit down or clenched my teeth.
I also had to be reprocessed for my security clearance, just a
Secret. I wound up having to be
interviewed (again) by a base psychiatrist, who saw no reason why I couldn't be
trusted with classified information and seemed to sympathize with my
predicament. In my extensive spare time,
I searched for and read Army regulations concerning homosexuality. I was
already spending some evenings playing chess games with a civilian engineer who
had pretty well said he was homosexual (even dating a male sailor), and I
wondered if this legally still made me a Class IV “homosexual.” Then, I would
think, everybody knew. And nobody cared. William and Mary had kicked me out,
but the Army wouldn’t.
My official military
records show only my first Secret Clearance investigation, completed about the
time I was going into Special Training Company. No mention of my homosexuality
or psychiatric treatment appears anywhere. My DA-20 Form (Enlisted Qualification
Record) shows both “conduct” and “efficiency” to be “Excellent” at every
station, even Basic Training and Special Training Company. (Curiously, it also names my religion,
“Baptist”). My Freedom of Information
file from NIH shows that NIH reported on me just before my induction, and again after
my transfer to Ft. Eustis. NIH spoke of “identity confusion” and “obsessional
defenses” but never mentioned that forbidden word, “homosexual.” It suggested
that my difficulties were more significant in personal than in job performance
areas. Furthermore, NIH refused to comment on whether I was reliable enough to
hold a security clearance; it appears
odd on the forms that the military would ask a civilian health agency to take
responsibility for an area such as security - very much a matter of military
deference. The Army could pretend I had never “told.” Later, I would have a Top Secret
investigation for civilian employment with the Navy, and again not get the clearance.
The Naval Investigative Service answered my recent FOI (Freedom of Information
and Privacy Act) request with a letter indicating that the
I went home most weekends.
My father sold me an old 1962 Ford Galaxie for $300, and I was able to
get around the area. I began going to a
local area chess club and playing in quite a few tournaments. I set up and directed one tournament on post,
and the Army paid my way to play in the Armed Forces Championship at Fort
Meade. By now, various acquaintances, even in the Army, were following the
progress of U.S. Champion Bobby Fischer, who would in 1972 take the World
Championship title from Soviet player Boris Spassky. Even today, the World
Champion (from Russia) Gary Kasparov says that Fischer’s performance was
importance in giving the United States intellectual credibility in the
brainwork side of the Cold War. Over the next two decades, numerous
grandmasters from Communist countries would defect.
The last weekend in June 1969, I went on a church retreat in
Orkney Springs, Virginia. Saturday
afternoon, we played a softball game. I
was the first batter in the top of the first inning, and on the first pitch, I
hit the ball further than any other time in my life, way over the left
fielder's head for an easy homer.
Everyone who had watched my boyhood was shocked, but I was still in much
better shape physically than any other time in my life. (That didn’t stop me
from booting a ground ball at second base in the bottom of the last inning,
leading to a 10-9 loss). Perhaps I was celebrating, psychically, what had
happened in New York City the night before.
But I could not imagine how the world was about to change because of an
obscure counterculture riot in Greenwich Village, which at the time I probably
would not have approved of; incredibly, I still thought of "overt homosexuals" as drag queens
or as men who wanted to become women; after all, all the jokes in the barracks
were just innocent fun. I also did not yet know that England had already
decriminalized sodomy in 1967.
That evening after the softball game, in fact, one of the Sunday
School classes put on a comical skit about one of the retreat “barracks”
(“Peterkins”), and someone said to me I looked better than at any time in my
life. Serving in the Army, getting “drafted,” had somehow been right for me.
Three weeks later, the world would witness another milestone:
mankind's first step on the moon, on another planet. If we could get out of
this war, maybe the world for our generation really would offer the unlimited
opportunity that I had dreamed of during my idealistic high school days. I quickly
saw the film 2001: A Space Odyssey,
and noted well the tender relationship between the two young men on the long
voyage to discover ultimate truth in space.
In just four weeks, twentieth century America, especially gay
America, had crossed a continental divide between a Before and an After. I
didn’t know it yet, that urban gay people would soon be left more or less alone
in their private lives as long as they didn’t “tell.” There would be a kind of troubled Promised
Land, a paradise ghetto, for me after I got out.
That August, about six months before “freedom,”
I began to explore the job market.
I began sending out resumes everywhere; and in time I did get invited to
a few interviews in various cities, all expenses paid. United Airlines flew me back to National
Airport in Washington for an exploratory interview, but then I received a rude
letter from them saying they had "other candidates" who were better
qualified. I was morbidly curious enough to apply to
Without much reflection, I found myself applying mostly to
defense-related industries, why I thought my mathematics background most
sellable. I did get a lot of canned replies, “your background is impressive,
but....” I wondered if my psychiatric
background was somehow hurting me, or if defense was already beginning to scale
back because of the unpopularity of the Vietnam war and the inflation it was
starting to fuel.
But soon I did have some good interviews. I visited the Heavy Military Electronics
Division of General Electric in Syracuse, and then the Rand Corporation (which
would eventually become involved in trying to lift The Ban) in Santa Monica,
California. I got two firm offers, one
from Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and another from RCA Labs in
Princeton, New Jersey. The RCA offer was
interesting. I was to be hired into
their adolescent Operations Research Career Program. I would have perhaps three assignments at
different plants during the first year, and then become a candidate for a
permanent position.
At the time, RCA was one of six companies in the "general
purpose" mainframe computer business.
The others were
My last month or so in the Army was a bash. A week before Christmas, I played in a
weekend chess tournament at a Holiday Inn in Newport News, scored 3-1/2 points
out of 5, and had the opportunity to play the reigning Armed Forced
Champion. I played the white side of a
classical King's Indian; my opponent made a dubious exchange sacrifice at the
end of the opening; I held on with a kind of "prevent defense" and
eventually counterattacked, finally sham-sacrificing my queen in a combination
that would get me to the endgame a clear bishop up. A crowd had accumulated around our board when
Black resigned. I felt like a celebrity
(legally, perhaps, a “limited public figure”). It was probably the biggest
"upset" I ever pulled off in my whole chess "career." In
chess, just like football or baseball, on any given day, in any given game,
anything can happen.
Our Command Sergeant Major Meese, offered the comment, as I
out-processed. “Boushka, I guess you’re just civilian-oriented.” Sure. Why would I want to stay in the
military?
Why does anybody? In one
more generation, I would find out.
Some years later, a friend in Dallas at their “gay church” would
relate to me how he had been discharged from the Army as a major after a Background
Investigation (for his position in a tactical nuclear weapons program at Los
Alamos) would reveal his “latent homosexuality.” In my case, the Army could have claimed that, after all, I never
demonstrated a propensity for homosexual acts; I didn’t fit the legal
definition of “gay.” Subsequent retrospect would show that the military had,
for the most part, often been more hospitable for reasonably well-behaved gays
than many civilian areas. When there was fighting to be done, the military
didn’t have time for the foolishness of gay discharges. When there wasn’t, the
idea that the military was supposed to make men out of sissies often prevailed
over the idea that the military should kick them out. Until about the time of
Stonewall, too many people believed that all men were “reclaimable.”
On
The Army had tried to teach a lesson similar to that of the
As I pulled away from the barracks parking lot and header for
the gate for the last time, the radio was playing the song, "Without Love,
I am Nothing at All."
Is the Cold War really
over?
Recently, I took a Sunday afternoon drive along various unmarked
county roads climbing up Laurel Ridge in Pennsylvania, an obscure area north of
the turnpike rapidly becoming settled with “exurbanites” who want the country
living with the income from corporate jobs in Pittsburgh. I drove up the ridge
where NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries claims
“something came down” in 1965, spraying hot metallic pieces covered with
hieroglyphics all over the ridge. The television program tried to market this
as Roswell II, after the New Mexico incident back in 1947 in which the Air
Force was accused of hiding the bodies of saucer inhabitants (the military
insists now this was a downed secret reconnaissance craft).
I talked to various residents of the area, and they told me,
“something came down that night, all right.” The government is still smug about
it, and keeps the area fenced off. “The
hieroglyphics were Russian Cyrillic, and what fell was pieces of a Soviet spy
satellite. Another little Sputnik,” the operator of a railroad museum told me.
If so, what does the government have to hide now?
On another weekend jaunt just before publication, I saw the
“Project Greek Island” government bunker underneath the Greenbrier Hotel in
White Sulphur Springs, W. Va., complete with House and Senate chambers and very
intimate, Army-style barracks for congressmen. It had been finished around
1960, during my Mr. Wizard days, and had been closed down only when the Washington Post “told” on it in May,
1992.
I had believed in the “Red Scare,” I had believed Khruschev and
his successors would try to bury us, and I (as well as most of my own circle of
friends) had believed in the 1960’s that we actually needed to “be there.” If
it was all a big lie, and it looks like it today, this government con job
indeed tore our notions of manhood apart and put them pack together,
differently.
Hamlet, remember (in Act IV, Scene 4), noted that kings,
patriarchs and imperial presidents - governments - send active young men in
droves to their deaths, and hold the accusation of cowardice over them as a
stick. Manhood - and honor - Hamlet thought, meant, at least, fighting back
himself at those who had attacked his family, rather than drafting others to
relieve him of the risk of valor. Honor, as an obligation to oneself rather
than to others, kept its distance from our national leaders. People were
learning it on their own.
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[1] There are five uniformed services capable of
combat: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard. The Air Force became
its own department shortly after World War II. The Marine Corps belongs to the
Department of the Navy. The Coast Guard belongs to Treasury, but comes under
control of the Navy during war.
[2] Old medical books used to refer to an entity
they called “childbirth fever.”
[3] Selective Service System, Bulletin #10, Dec. 1990, p. 1.
[4] Memorandum for Director of
Selective Service System, Assistant Secretary of Defense,
[5] Ibid. The Supreme Court
upheld the constitutionality of the male-only draft registration in 1981, with Rostkerv v. Goldberg.
[6] During the Revolutionary
War, there was enormous social pressure to “enlist.” George Washington actually
proposed a national militia of all adult males. William James wanted to draft
men to manual labor; Woodrow Wilson used sheriffs for mass round-ups of
conscripts. Even for a gruesome, political
war so frivolously driven by nation-states’ “entangling alliances,” there was
enormous patriotism among American young men, as demonstrated in the film Legends of the Fall (1994).
[7] Michael Ondaatje, The
English Patient (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 69. Ondaajte’s novel explores
the conflict between loyalty to loved ones and fidelity to moral values. See also Gregor Zeimer, Education for
Death: the Making of a Nazi (London: Oxford University, 1941).
[8] James Patterson, Grand
Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (London: Oxford University,
1996), p. 599 in a footnote from Charles Moskos, “From Citizens’ Army,” a paper
published by the University of Chicago.
[9]
These were largely the “deferred” draft categories starting with “2”; they
listed “civilian occupation” (generically), then patient care and divinity, as
well as students.
[10] “Effects of Marriage and
Fatherhood on Draft Eligibility, After World War II to Today” Selective Service
System fact sheet.
[11] Allan Berube, Coming Out
under Fire (New York: Plume, 1990), p. 18.
[12] Situational homosexuality,
referring to homosexual acts performed by otherwise heterosexual men when women
are unavailable.
[13] Ibid, p. 143.
[14] Ibid., p 157.
[15] Marvin Liebman, Coming
Out Conservative (San Francisco: Chronicle, 1992), p. 42.
[16] Very few people knew then
that one English gay man, Alan Turing, had almost as a team of one enabled the
Allies to break the Nazi codes during World War II, only to be arrested and
shamed for gay sex in 1952.
[17] Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming:
Gays and Lesbians in the United States Military , 2nd Ed (New York: Fawcett
Columbine; 1993, 1994), pp. 101-123.
[18] Enrique Rueda, The
Homosexual network: Private Lives and Public Policy (Greenwich, Devin
Adair, 1982).
[19] Truman, HBO Films, 1995. The second generation Japanese-Americans
(Nisei) were kept out of the military until 1942, and then out of combat until
the Army’s need for manpower overcame prejudice. The internment of civilian
Japanese-Americans during World War II was certainly one of our most shameful
episodes since Reconstruction, dwarfing even our treatment of
African-Americans.
[20] Rand Corp., National Defense
Research Institute, Sexual Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy:
Options and Assessment (Los Angeles: Rand, 1993), p. 6.
[21] Ibid, p. 7.
[22] Shilts, op.
cit., p. 70.
[23] Shilts, op. cit., pp. 19-21,
[24] Shilts, op. cit., pp. 281-283.
[25] E. Lawrence Gibson, Get
Off My Ship: Ensign Berg vs. The U.S. Navy (New York: Avon, 1978).
[26] Rand Corporation, op. cit., p. 85.
[27] Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns, Baseball (New
York: Knopf, 1994).
[28] The second team moved to
Texas in 1972. I have always been angered by organized baseball’s hypocrisy; it
still doesn’t want to field a team in the heart of a city whose residents are
70 percent African-American.
[29] Patterson, op. cit., p. 632. One of the
surveillance operations was called “CHAOS,” another was “COINTELPO”
(Counter-Intelligence Program). The liberals are just as guilty of this.
[30] Patterson, op. cit., pp. 628-633.
[31] Charles Murray and Richard
Hernstien, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
(New York: Free Press, 1994).
[32] On
[33] Shilts, op. cit., p. 40. Shilts goes on to tell the story of Danny Flaherty’s
Army and Vietnam service after his expulsion from college when turned in by a
fellow student for consensual homosexual acts (which then were not even illegal
in Illinois!) According to Shilts,
Flaherty simply just didn’t “tell” at his physical, out of patriotism and a
fear of embarrassing his family. My motives, by comparison, were more to prove
my manliness to myself.
[34] The United States Chess
Federation, in Newburgh, N.Y., sponsors most major tournaments in this country
and maintains a computerized rating system ranging from “senior master” down
through letters A-E, which rather sound like classroom grades to me!
[35] “Rumors” that various
commercial foods and drinks are spiked often float in black ghettos today.
[36] Michael Lind, "What
Bill Wrought," The New Republic,
[37] The Army also has a special
class of personnel called Warrant Officers for aviation.
[38]
[39] “RA” stood for “Regular
Army.” Since 1969, the military has used social security number as service
number.
[40] The treatment of prisoners,
such as pilots downed in combat in Iraq, has always been a grave concern and a reason
to keep women (and possibly “known” gays) out of combat. The Convention calls
for prisoners to give only name, rank,
and serial number.
[41] See the Red Cross CPR
Module, “Respiratory and Circulatory Emergencies.”
[42] Company; battalion; brigade.
[43] Ted Koppel and ABC Nightline,
[44] See David Mixner’s Stranger
Among Friends (New York: Bantam, 1996), pp 106-111 for a harrowing (or,
according to one friend of mine, “embarrassing”) account of how Nixon’s antics
against the war protesters ensnared gays.
[45] As in the H.G. Wells story, The
Time Machine.
[46] Gunter Grass, The Tin
Drum , English translation, most recent is
provided by (New York: Knopf, 1993).
[47] Harry Summers, “Sensible
Opinion,” op-ed, The Washington Times,
[48] Stephanie Gutmann, “Sex and
the Soldier,” The New Republic,