The Army (1956-1958)

DANIEL FORD'S BOOKS > LOOKING BACK FROM NINETY > CHAPTER 7

7 - The Army (1956-1958)

BACK FROM EUROPE IN THE fall of 1955, I lodged with Mom in Wolfeboro long enough to shave my beard and buy a nice 1948 Ford coupe for $275. I drove to Durham, where I'd graduated the year before from the University of New Hampshire, and which by now felt more like home than my home town did. I rented a room for five dollars a week. The student newspaper had no photographer, so I offered to provide photos for five dollars each and the use of their darkroom. The editor (a girl!) told me that an advertising agency in Manchester was looking for a copywriter, so I drove over there, and we agreed on fifteen dollars a day, three days a week, leaving me time to write a novel if I could think of one.

My boss was a delightful little Jewish guy. One day when we encountered a pretty schoolgirl, he elbowed me and said, "Now, that's eating stuff." I understood the concept, more or less, but was startled to hear it from a middle-aged man. Later he wanted me to write a Christmas letter to his clients without using the actual word. So I rhapsodized about the "holiday season," only to have that blue-penciled as well, since it suggested that the season was holy. I think we compromised on Winter Holidays. We were ahead of our time! My granddaughters are now in college, and they aren't given time off for Christmas and Easter, but for Winter and Spring Break, and Thanksgiving is known as November Break.

The Selective Service System -- not so selective, as it turned out! -- caught up with me in December. I had an induction date of Tuesday, January 3, 1956, which I suppose was designed to give me Christmas at home and a day to recover from New Year's Eve. So I packed up, rejoined Mom at her second-floor apartment on Lake Street in Wolfeboro, found a lad to buy my beloved Ford coupe, and had a great time skating with Harry Nash and his girlfriend. Harry was back at Wesleyan and bound for medical school, and he teased me about my date with the Army: "Kind of wondering what it's all about, aren't you?"

I was certain that I'd be scorned as 4-F, unfit for service. After all, I was effectively blind in my left eye, and I had flat feet! So it was with a fair amount of confidence that I packed an overnight bag and took a taxi to the county courthouse in Ossipee -- where Harry and I had acquired our driver's licenses in 1948 -- and with another lad was given a bus ticket to Manchester by way of Exeter. In Exeter we were told that the Manchester bus had ceased to operate as of January 1, and we were given a complimentary taxi ride and an overnight in a rather stolid Manchester hotel. When all this was done, one doctor said to the other, "Well, they don't march them as much as they used to." I was passed 1-A for service, which happened to few other of my classmates.

I survived basic training thanks to Seymour Major, a friend from UNH who unwisely told the truth when asked: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party USA?" I'd said No to that question, and would have given the same answer even if I'd had a CPUSA card in my pocket. In the 1950s, there was no way to cross-check such things. If the FBI had done a security check on every draftee, it would never had had the time to catch criminals or tap Martin Luther King's telephone.

As a security risk, Si would never be promoted beyond buck private, nor could he travel beyond the orderly room of Golf Company, 272nd Infantry Regiment, 69th Infantry Division at Fort Dix, New Jersey. (We merrily called ourselves "the Cocksuckers.") The training cadre -- the officers all white, the sergeants mostly black -- thought it hilarious that our company clerk was Private Major. Bless his too-honest soul, Seymour was good at his job, so he was allowed to do pretty much what he wanted, and he'd call me over to the orderly room for a typing detail whenever a speed march or some other impossible task was on the schedule.

My traveling companion from Center Ossipee was also in the orderly room from time to time; he was forever wandering off from training and being told to report to the First Sergeant. I don't remember his name; I'll call him Bradley. The First Sergeant (who was white) would employ Brad as a courier for the rest of the morning or afternoon, sending him here and there with some paperwork or other. When he didn't return, the First Sergeant dispatched me to find him, and he always was sitting in the tiny Post Exchange or whatever it was, a cafeteria with soft drinks and a jukebox playing "Little Band of Gold," "The Great Pretender," and "Blue Suede Shoes." A jukebox of the time held only twenty-four records, so as with my summer at Dockside and the dining hall at UNH, I heard the same songs so often they bored into my brain. I had a glass of orangeade with Brad, we talked about classical music (he knew a lot more than I did), and after awhile I took him back to the orderly room.

The First Sergeant went into outrage mode: "Where have you been? Why didn't you come back from Battalion?"

"You didn't tell me to come back," Brad said -- which was true -- and he began to cry.

"Stop that crying! Why are you crying?"

"Because I'm afraid of you, First Sergeant."

The sergeant sent him into the Captain's office, where Brad fainted. We heard him hit the floor.

"Faking," the First Sergeant said to Si and me. "I know he's faking." But if Brad were faking, he was good at it, and early in February he got a Section Eight discharge -- "mentally unfit for military service" -- while I continued in the mud and snow of the New Jersey winter, pushed and prodded and cursed by black sergeants who'd fought in Korea and knew that when untrained men went into combat, they were apt to throw down their weapons and run.

This was the first time in my life that I was bossed around by blacks or spent much time working with them. I liked the cadre well enough, though their command of English was extraordinary, saying "casuals" for casualties, "they" for there, and "has" for have. Of the M-20 bazooka rocket launcher, a sergeant told us: "They is the AP or anti-personnel round, and then they is the armor-piercing or AP round" -- really!

I was amazed by the stamina of the lads from Harlem, who after twelve hours of training would climb the fence and go carousing in Bordentown. My favorite was Private Porter, who either spent entire nights in Bordentown or else suffered from sleeping sickness. He'd fall asleep while marching, and one time he was dispensing potatoes in the chow line, and when I held out my tray, he just stood there with a ladle full of mashed potatoes, his eyes and mouth wide open, fast asleep. What with one thing and another, I'm afraid I didn't come out of Fort Dix as free of racial prejudice as when I arrived.

~ ~ ~ ~

If the U.S. Army had let me go on St. Patrick's Day 1956, when I graduated from Basic, I would have been a fairly useful member of the Army Reserve, because I accomplished everything it asked of me except the infamous speed march, and I even qualified as a Sharpshooter with the magnificent M-1 Garand. What a great rifle that was! Fortunately for me, and probably for the nation, I was never sent into combat, but if I had to do it, I'd want no better weapon than that never-jamming, rapid-firing (for its time), and happily-named M-1, the first in its field.

But that's not what happened. After a two-week furlough, which I divided between Wolfeboro and Boston (Emma and Tommy were now living on the back side of Beacon Hill, as were several other UNH graduates) I reported to the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Here I was to be trained as a radio broadcast specialist, and here we Psychological Warfare geeks served alongside the fabled Green Berets of U.S. Army Special Forces. And we shared a recreational center -- a twin of the Notch building at UNH -- with the equally fabled 82nd Airborne Division.

The Army that summer adopted a British-style tropical uniform of knee-length shorts and calf-high wool socks. Once, when entering the recreational building, I met two black Airborne troopers on their way out. They stared unbelieving at my shorts. Behind me, I heard one say to the other: "That PsyWar don't show me shit."

I think I know what I was doing that day. It seems that in June 1956, as Basia was graduating from the University of Manchester, a young man she'd met at the Polish Hearth Club in London proposed to her, and she accepted. I went to the enlisted men's club on Smoke Bomb Hill to use one of its coin-operated typewriters to compose a letter of good wishes. How that must have pained me! Enough that I banished it from my memory until we connected again in 2010.

That 82nd Airborne trooper was right, of course. Our uniform was absurd, Fort Bragg was beastly hot, and PsyWar was a waste of time. I did my best to make something out of it, escaping to New York City whenever I could cadge a pass from the company clerk and catch a ride with someone heading in the same direction. (We would rendezvous Sunday night at Grand Central, where I tried to sleep on a bench and MPs tried to keep me awake by whacking the sole of my shoe with a billy club.) I went to the ballet if I could find one, or to a play, and in this fashion saw Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit. I loved them both, especially Godot and the character played by Bert Lahr, whom I had last seen as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. Since I was still in my Faustian period, I especially liked the takeaway line: "One day we were born, one day we shall die . . . is that not enough for you?" Alas, not everyone in the audience agreed with my judgment: the couple in front of me walked out, there were a few boos at the curtain call, and Godot closed a few weeks later.

In June I hitchhiked to Durham for Joe's graduation -- 1,700 miles round trip -- and got back to Smoke Bomb Hill at two or three o'clock Tuesday morning. (That was the weekend I met Horace Lyndes, who later became a great buddy.) Another time I caught a hop in a C-119 Flying Boxcar to Grenier Field in New Hampshire by way of the nation's capital, which gave me the opportunity to use the relief tube to piss on the Pentagon. From Grenier, I hitchhiked the rest of the way, serendipitously meeting Billy Kenney in Navy whites in Alton Bay, bound like me for Wolfeboro.

This was all very well, but not enough to reconcile me to Fort Bragg, so I wrote to Senator Styles Bridges. If I must waste two years of my life, I pleaded, why couldn't I do it in Germany? A few weeks later I was called to Battalion headquarters. "So you want to go overseas?" the Major said.

"Yes, Sir."

That "overseas" had an ominous sound, as he no doubt intended. He folded his hands and looked at me. "Soldier," he said, "I've been in the Army for fifteen years. My dream assignment was always Japan, but the Army needed me elsewhere, so I never saw that country. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Well! I can put you on the next levy out of here, but it might not be Germany. It might be Greenland -- cold weather and Eskimos. And mosquitoes in the spring, do you understand?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Do you still want to go?"

Was he serious about Greenland? I swallowed and said, "Yes, Sir."

I bought a red hardcover, German Without Toil, at the Post Exchange, and a few weeks later I was standing in line with my duffel bag -- I think on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River -- to board the troopship General Darby, bound for Bremerhaven. The man behind me was a small guy who introduced himself as George Araujo. "I'm not black," he told me. "I'm Portuguese." He was a boxer, it seemed, and a few years earlier had been a serious contender for the lightweight championship. I didn't bother telling him that I'd boxed for fun in high school. Looking at George, who had won fifty-eight fights, all but three by knockouts, I decided it was a good thing I hadn't tried out for the Golden Gloves. George had been New England champion in 1948, the year of my pretensions as a boxer.

We became good friends on the seven-day passage to Bremerhaven, and after all my study of German, he and I were directed to a sleeper carriage bound for Paris. When we woke up in the morning at Gare de l'Est, I was thrilled to be able to translate for my mates in the couchette -- triple-decker bunks on either side of a narrow aisle, the top two folding against the wall during the day -- who wanted to buy ham sandwiches and coffee, all that the vendors had on offer. With some others, George and I were sent to Gare d'Austerlitz and from there to the little city of Orléans. I was told to report to the orderly room of Headquarters & Headquarters Company, but George was put on a bus to another destination.

I soon discovered that we had just one black soldier among the four hundred men in "Head & Head," as it was called, the company that housed and fed and otherwise took care of the men who staffed the various offices in Coligny Caserne -- the policemen, lawyers, musicians, the whole panoply of the American military overseas, to a total of thirteen thousand officers, enlisted men, wives, and children in Orléans. But Hamp was a college graduate, so he was allowed to stay at Coligny Caserne. George Araujo, however, was sent to the boondocks. Orléans was supported by half a dozen outlying posts, just as we supported the infantry and armored divisions in Germany that were supposed to stop the Russian tanks, when and if they poured through the Fulda Gap to conquer West Germany.

Yes, we really believed that could happen, and indeed I would be the man charged with driving that belief into the minds of the men at Coligny Caserne. And, unlike most educated Americans today, I still believe that if the U.S. Army hadn't been in West Germany, the Red Army would have been. There seems to be something in the Russian gene that impels it to expand into any country unlucky enough to border it. Didn't it do just that in 1939? And do it again in 1945? And doing much the same thing today, with Mr. Putin messing with every small country within reach?

I saw George from time to time thereafter, when he came in from wherever he was stationed, but he was surrounded by a gang of white guys -- dodgy types, like race-track touts -- so we just exchanged a wry hand-wave in passing, in memory of the week we'd shared on the General Darby. Once, on shipboard, George had apologized to a card game for leaving it to join me in a walk around the deck. "I like this guy," he explained. "He's diffrent."

I was learning that the Army wasn't the best place to make friends, though Fort Bragg had been something of an exception. I often missed the PsyWar lads in the year and a half I spent at Coligny Caserne: Ted, the Harvard graduate who stuttered, or pretended to, so he became the center of attention, and who claimed to have read À la recherche du temps perdu in the original, seven books, three thousand pages, a million words; Glovsky, the artist, who made a running gag out of being the sensitive Jew ("Jews?" he would cry, if asked to pass the orange juice; "who's talking about Jews?"); and others of that ilk. There was even a kid from East Germany who'd slipped through the Iron Curtain and volunteered under the Lodge Act, five years in the U.S. Army and a fast track to citizenship.

Cowboy: interpreter, warlord, one more casualty

~ ~ ~ ~

Because it was twice the size of a normal company, Head & Head was commanded by a major, with a captain as executive officer, each a grade above the custom. I spent my first day getting outfitted at the Supply Room and squared away at Personnel. "You're in the orderly room," the supply clerk told me as he issued my field gear -- olive-green wool trousers and shirt, many-pocketed battle overalls, combat pack, half a pup tent, one tent pole, entrenching tool, bayonet -- all the stuff that would transform a bespectacled radio broadcast specialist into an infantryman if the Cold War turned hot. "We don't go to Training," he explained, "and you don't clean your weapon." He nodded at the armorer, who waved a carbine at me and put it back in the rack. I don't remember the serial number because I never cleaned it or otherwise cared for the thing.

What good, after all, was a Sharpshooter armed with the United States Carbine, Caliber .30, M-2? In basic training, we'd been shown the carbine but not asked to fire it. "I could stand over there on that fence," the cadre instructor told us, "and you could shoot at me all afternoon, and you won't hit me." At Fort Bragg, I'd found how useless a carbine was, or at least the weapon issued to me: serial number 1048803. The magazine held fifteen rounds. I was rarely able to fire more than five of them before the bolt jammed open and I needed the armorer to fix it. On the plus side, it didn't make much noise and it weighed only half what the Garand did. And supposedly I could use it as a machinegun, though in the case of 1048803 that would only hasten the moment when the bolt jammed open and I'd be standing there with a five-pound extension for my bayonet

Fully equipped, though without a weapon, I reported to the orderly room, where everyone I saw was white -- the two clerks with Specialist badges on the sleeves of their Ike jackets, the five-striper Sergeant Brown who'd become my mentor and friend, and the six-striper Sergeant Smith. There were some Puerto Ricans in Head & Head, but no blacks except Hamp. (I assume his last name was Hampton, but if so I never learned it. We mostly used nicknames when addressing one another.) Even the cooks in the mess hall were white. They were French, as were the blue-uniformed women who served us in the cafeteria line and tidied up after us. I suppose this was a French equivalent of my Fulbright Fellowship: some portion of Marshall Plan money had been a loan rather than a gift, and it was now being recycled in the mess hall, pumping up the local economy while preserving France's supply of dollars.

Sergeant Smith paid me no attention. Sergeant Brown escorted me into the CO's office. I snapped to attention: "Private First Class Ford reporting as ordered, Sir!"

"Well, Soldier, we've been waiting for you for a long time."

"Sir?"

"Going to be a teacher, aren't you?"

"No, Sir."

He shook his head: this wasn't going according to plan. "Went to college, didn't you?" he said, as if playing his ace.

"Yes, Sir."

"Well, then, you're going to be a teacher! And we need a Troop Information and Education NCO."

He paused, so I gave him the expected answer: "Yes, Sir."

"Sergeant Brown will get you straightened away."

So now I knew about the Training that the Supply Room people wouldn't have to attend. Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, Sergeant Brown explained, I would deliver an hour-long lecture about current events and a topic of interest to the U.S. Army and presumably to the troops. Many of these were geographicalL Our NATO Ally: Greece, Our NATO Ally: West Germany, and so on. Others were hortatory: the Code of Conduct and what we were permitted to tell the Russians if taken prisoner.

Most of the sergeants in Head & Head were veterans of the Second World War, and some indeed had been officers who afterward had preferred being reduced to the ranks to the challenge of making a life in the real world -- a former chaplain included! Even Sergeant Brown, who was probably just my age, was a veteran. He'd served in Korea from the very first month.

"I was an MP in Japan," he told me. "When I landed at Pusan, they looked at my armband and said, 'We don't need anyone directing traffic. Everybody's going the same way -- south!' So they put me in a tank." His face was scarred with the pockmarks he'd acquired, driving a buttoned-down Chaffee that August, while I was getting ready for my freshman year at the University of New Hampshire. And he had a medical slip permitting him to wear street shoes with his field uniform: he couldn't wear combat boots because his feet had been ruined by frostbite in the November retreat from the Frozen Chosin, when I was washing dishes and cooking the occasional omelet at Dunfey's. "You can always take another step if you have to," he said. "I remember a guy with his left foot blown off, walking back from the Yalu. He just hopped along on his right foot and the stump of his left."

I learned more from Sergeant Brown than I ever taught my troops, two hundred men on Tuesday afternoons, two hundred more on Thursdays.

The Major, he also confided, was in much the same position as the former chaplain and many of the sergeants in Head & Head: he'd been promoted to the extent of his ability, or beyond it, and he'd served too many years at his present grade, so must either retire or accept a demotion to his highest non-commissioned rank. The Major was lucky in this respect, since he'd been a warrant officer before getting a field commission as a first lieutenant. A warrant officer was like a mule, neither one thing nor the other, rather like the Specialist Third Class I would soon become. A Spec Three had the pay and other privileges of a two-stripe corporal, but without any command authority. If the Russians did come through the Fulda Gap, and I found myself with my carbine defending Orléans, a real corporal could order me around as if I were still a private.

Anyhow, the Major outlasted me at Coligny Caserne, and his demotion was still pending when I left on January 4, 1958.

~ ~ ~ ~

The weird thing about life in the Caserne was how slowly it dragged through the day, and how swiftly the days -- weeks, months! -- sped by with nothing accomplished except the beer we drank in the NCO Club, the cigarettes we smoked, and the movies we saw, most often a Western, which we called a Shoot-'Em-Up. Some nights we cheered the cowboys or the 7th Cavalry, some nights we cheered the Indians. I should have been reading a book, or studying French, but somehow all ambition had leached away. There was a fairly good library at Coligny Caserne, but I couldn't interest myself even in the rubbish I'd formerly devoured, Lew Wetzel or the Robin Hood of Modern Crime or devastated England after Armageddon.

My first lecture was a disaster. I got through current events okay, but when it came to Our NATO Ally: Turkey, about twenty minutes into the hour my mouth opened and my mind went blank. I had nothing to say. Nothing! I stared at my two hundred trainees, and they stared back. Believe me, four hundred is a great number of eyeballs to wake from a doze and begin staring at you. The silence went on, and on, until Sergeant Brown levered himself off the wall against which he was leaning, and roared, "'Ten HUT! Diss MISS!" The theater emptied in a rush, as much a relief to my trainees, I'm sure, as it was to me.

When he showed up on Wednesday morning, the Major gave me the eyeball, and I dutifully followed him into his office. "Sit down, Ford," he said, the first time an officer had ever invited me to sit in his presence. He gave me a little pep talk, which mainly consisted of providing me with a joke about Elvis Presley that I should use on Thursday afternoon to get the trainees relaxed and on my side. (It seems that Mrs. Presley was upset that her eldest boy was called Elvis the Pelvis, since he had a younger brother named Enos.) I did tell the joke, though I prefaced it by saying that it had come from an officer, so I knew it was funny, and that did get a laugh, and I got through Our NATO Ally: Turkey without my mind betraying me.

As a lecturer, it seemed, I was a slow starter, just as my brother was slow to catch on with academics. Though he didn't fail his first year at UNH as he'd done at Alton Central School, Joe had been a C student as a freshman, a B student as a sophomore, and was now a magna cum laude graduate with a $1,500 fellowship at Harvard. What's more, as he informed me in a letter, he'd lost his virginity, I suspect with my friend Emma from UNH, now separated from Tommy but still living in their apartment on the back side of Beacon Hill. I'd introduced her to Joe on furlough between Fort Bragg and General Darby, and she became a great admirer of his poetry.

Joe had started slow and ended well, and that's how matters turned out for me as Troop Information and Education NCO. Things went especially well after Sergeant Brown tipped me to the movie archive. The U.S. Army had captured many Russian training films during the Korean War, given them an English-language voiceover, and distributed them to bases around the world. I loved those films, which instructed Red Army recruits how to fight from house to house in a city, how to cross a river without a Bailey Bridge such as the British and Americans used, how to cross a minefield, how to go to ground as a sniper invisible to the enemy -- great stuff! And the best part of those training films was that I could step down from the stage and take a seat in the front row (nobody sat in the front row where he could too easily be called upon) and watch the movie with everyone else.

The other days of the week, I was the third clerk in the orderly room, filling in when someone was on furlough or sick, pitching in when things got busy. Much of what went on in the Army had to do with a man's serial number (mine was US51330425, and I'll never forget it) and whenever I filled out the morning report or a three-day pass, I had to type one or several serial numbers. Most began with "US", because most of us were draftees and belonged to the Army of the United States. The sergeants of course were RA for Regular Army, and a few soldiers were ER for Enlisted Reserve. After a few months in the orderly room, I could touch-type the serial numbers as well as any of the girls in Mrs. Genowich's class.

And a good thing too, because I later had to spend a week in an office with an Addressograph machine, normally used for punching out mailing labels. A soldier somewhere had sued the Army for putting a P on his dog tag when he wasn't a Protestant but some sect other than Catholic (C) or Jewish (J) or Indifferent (Y) or None (X). Muslim, perhaps? As a result, the order came down that all dog tags must show the religion spelled out. Since like eyeballs, each soldier had two dog tags, this took me some little time in my private office with the clanging Addressograph machine. For fun, I recorded myself as ATHEIST. I loved to see an officer's eyes widen when he saw that during a company inspection.

Once it was a lieutenant colonel from SHAPE -- Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers, Europe, a post reserved for people with connections. (When Harvard expelled Teddy Kennedy for cheating, he'd joined the Army and was assigned to the honor guard at SHAPE.) To punish me for my disregard for religion, the colonel took my carbine, inspected it, and finding it faultlessly clean he fired the last arrow in his quiver: "What's the serial number of this weapon, Soldier?"

I had no idea, since the only time I ever saw the carbine was when I borrowed it from the supply room before an inspection. So I drew myself up and rattled off the number I remembered from Fort Bragg: "Ten forty-eight, eight oh three, Sir!"

His eyes narrowed. "That's not the serial number of this weapon, Soldier."

"Then it can't be my weapon, Sir."

It's amazing what you can get away with if you take a positive attitude.

The colonel held out the carbine and released his hold on it, hoping I'd drop it and could be punished for that, but I caught it before it fell, and he had to move on to the next man in line, no doubt wishing me dead. But what could he do? Demand an interview with the company armorer? He had a schedule to keep, and probably he wanted to be done with the inspection as badly as I did.

~ ~ ~ ~

For my first year at Coligny Caserne, I lived in a six-man room on the second floor of a big mansard-roofed building, one of three such buildings in the compound. The orderly room was on the ground floor, and I suppose there were other offices there as well. This was to the left of the parade ground, after I entered the black iron gates immortalized by Marcel Proust in The Guermantes Way: "I waited at the barracks gate, in front of that huge hulk, booming with the November wind, out of which at every moment -- for it was six in the evening -- men emerged into the street in pairs, staggering unsteadily, as if they were coming ashore in some exotic port where they were temporarily stationed."

The street was the Faubourg Bannier, and the "huge hulk" would have been my barrack, or the four-story building on the far side of the parade ground, which in my time contained our mess hall, NCO Club, cafeteria, library, and Post Exchange. A third and similar building completed the layout on the right side of the parade ground and was, I believe, entirely given over to offices. There were some smaller buildings too, including a theater and some prefabricated metal buildings such as I'd never seen before, a straight-sided variant of the Quonset or Nissen Hut.

When we weren't wasting time at the NCO Club or a Shoot-'Em-Up, we talked. Of all the deep philosophical topics at our disposal, a favorite was the question of our servitude in the U.S. Army. Was there any value in it at all? I argued that if the Russians came through the Fulda Gap, I'd be a negative factor, getting in the way of the real soldiers, like Sergeant Brown. And if the real U.S. Army didn't spend so much time, money, and manpower training reluctant draftees and afterwards looking after them, it would have the resources to mount a more spirited defense in West Germany.

This being the case, if we had the option of going to sleep for two years instead of being conscripted, would we take the offer?

"Well, what about furloughs?" someone asked. Indeed! We got four weeks off each year, eight weeks altogether, almost two months! Surely they would be deducted from the Big Sleep?

"And a three-day pass once a month!" said someone else.

"And sick days."

"And Sundays and holidays!"

"And nobody serves the full two years, anyhow. Everybody gets out a week or two early."

In the end, we calculated that eighteen months of sleep should take care of our active-duty obligation. (We'd been drafted for eight years, with six to be served in the Army Reserve after we got out.)

"Sarge," I'd asked a cook at Fort Dix, while I scrubbed the mess-hall floor beneath his boots, "when are you going to get out of the Army?"

"When they start training civilians," he said.

No, the cadre at Fort Dix wouldn't have agreed to our scheme, nor would Sergeant Smith in the orderly room at Coligny Caserne. Nor would "Engine Charlie" Wilson, the Secretary of Defense, and perhaps not General Eisenhower, now enjoying his retirement years as President of the United States.

But it's true that when I look back on Army service, it is the furloughs that I remember, and the weekend and three-day passes. There were a lot of passes, since I was in the orderly room and could type my own, then slip it in with other paperwork for the Major or the exec to sign. (Captain DeMarco was sharper than the CO. "Haven't you already had a three-day pass this month?" he asked one time, and I had to negotiate it down to a weekend.) We were seventy-five miles from Gare de l'Austerliz, an hour and a half by train, and among my earliest French phrases was "Paris, s'il vous plaît, aller et retour, deuxième classe." I found a great little hotel on the Rue Monsieur le Prince for a thousand francs a night, or two dollars and a half. (It might have been an earlier version of Le Clos Medicis at number 56, which today offers a winter rate of $120 with breakfast. There are a few other hotels on Monsieur le Prince in the same price range.) If it were a weekend pass, I'd take the room for Saturday only, returning to Orléans Sunday evening or tiptoeing through Gare de l'Austerliz after midnight and catching a few hours' sleep in a second-class carriage on the early-morning train.

I went to Le Contes d'Hoffmann at the grand old Opéra, now called the Palais Garnier. What a hoot that was! I had no suit and tie, so I wore my Class A uniform, Ike jacket with my Spec 3 insignia on the sleeve, walking up the grand staircase and beneath the grand chandeliers and sitting on a sort of stool in a box high up on the left, trying to remember how The Phantom of the Opera had turned out. (Which chandelier had come crashing down?) Hoffmann was a bit of a challenge. I'd seen the movie at the Franklin Theater in Durham and the real thing at the Sadler's Wells in London (now the Royal Opera House), but in Paris the language was French! I wasn't prepared for that, nor for the tenor, who was middle-aged and had a great paunch. I don't remember the soprano at all, nor the mezzo who is Hoffmann's faithful companion and muse.

Foolishly, Hoffmann was my last opera for a quarter of a century, and I limited my Paris theater to ballet, where language was no obstacle and I could pick out the prettiest ballerina and concentrate on her for the evening. I acquired a tiny monocular at the PX -- all I needed with my lazy left eye -- and could see the very sweat above her upper lip. The Opéra Ballet had an evening to itself every now and then, and the New York City Ballet came over one time to give us a dose of modernity, and all in Charles Garnier's opulent theater, the most gorgeous in the world.

There were of course less elegant weekends. Larry Hoff, the Head & Head mailman and our resident black-marketeer, drove us to Paris one time. After selling his month's cigarette ration -- four cartons of Lucky Strikes, somewhere near the grand old food market of Les Halles -- he drove north along the Rue Saint-Denis and turned right on the Rue Bondel. The little Opel boasted a sun roof, and our resident photographer, a tall lad named Ted, was ready to capture the beauties as Larry drove slowly along the street. The daylight, I'm afraid, did no favors to most of the women, though there was one, younger than most, who caught my eye. I confess I called her "Odette" in my mind, and the next time I was in Paris (with Bob Sampson from UNH, as it happened) I went looking for her with no success. On this first afternoon, our eye contact was broken when Ted stood up to take his pictures. Apparently this had happened before, because half a dozen poules rushed the Opel and and rained spittle on it.

Larry drove us other places, too, to the cathedral at Chartres, to gape at its glorious rose window; to Mont-Saint-Michel; and -- on a three-day pass -- to Switzerland. When Larry drove through a town that interested him, he'd toss his red Michelin guide to me in the back seat. "Here," he said, "see what that was all about!" In Geneva, we went into a workman's tavern where the proprietor served us a beer apiece and ignored us for the next hour or two, until we slunk away. I was delighted to discover that the Swiss postal service had a cheap rate for postcards if the message was short enough, so I bought five for a franc and mailed them to Mom, Joe, Emma, and a few others to tell them: "Swiss postcards are limited to seven words."

On another three-day pass, I went to London on the Friday-night ferry and back again Sunday morning. By the most amazing coincidence, I ran into Malcolm Hopson near Victoria Station, where we had the most glorious reunion. To think: I could have found Basia as easily! She was teaching Latin at a girls' school some outer borough, but apparently I didn't care to open that old wound. Indeed, so thoroughly did I bury the fact of her marriage that, though I must have remembered it in 1957, it later slipped below the surface. When we met again in London, more than half a century later, Basia showed me the letter I'd typed that spring at Fort Bragg, and that she had pasted into her wedding book. I was touched by the pretty sentiment: "I hope you have many daughters, and I hope they bring as much happiness to the world as you have brought to me."

~ ~ ~ ~

France had been humiliated in Vietnam when I was a senior at UNH, and it had left the country to its own devices shortly after, split between a Communist regime at Hanoi and a Western-style government at Saigon. Now France was fighting its last colonial war in Algeria, a struggle commemorated on every railroad overpass from Orléans to Gare d'Austerlitz. These were U-shaped black steel structures like the bridge Basia and I had crossed in order to reach Modane in 1955. The messages were in bold white paint, and they alternated: ALGÉRIE FRANÇAISE! on this one, FLN on the next. That is: Algeria is French! to support the French army, and Front for National Liberation to support the rebels. This is all we Americans saw of the war. Technically, Algeria was part of metropolitan France, not a colony, but the Algerians didn't seem to agree. They began fighting for independence soon after France gave up the fight in Vietnam, and they kept it up for years. Arguably, it was the nation's worst convulsion since the revolution of 1796, and among its casualties would be the Fourth Republic that had governed France since the end of the Second World War.

On a lighter note, there was the occasional white message: AMI GO HOME! This was of course aimed at the GIs of Coligny Caserne. It didn't trouble us at all, since we understood ami to be the French word for "friend," when the French (and Germans too, as I would discover) intended it as an insulting short-hand for "American," much as we had used "Jap" during the War.

I'd had two weeks' furlough after Basic Training and another two weeks before sailing to Bremerhaven, so it was 1957 before I qualified for another. For the first, a lad named Ryan and I took the train to Cologne and got on a Douglas DC-3 for the flight into West Berlin. I felt that we were recapitulating the Berlin Airlift of 1948-1949, when a plane landed every few minutes at Tempelhof, every day and every night for fifteen months, to fuel and feed a city Stalin hoped to add to his dismal empire. Even now, in 1957, East Germany was wrapped in darkness. Only a single bulb was lit in each town, and that at the railway station. Then we saw West Berlin, an incandescent riot of light. I heard the passengers gasp and marvel, even over the roar of the Wright Cyclone engines.

Even in daylight, West Berlin was magical. The main street was the Ku'damm, as busy as Times Square though cleaner and brighter, with Beetles and Opels, Jeeps and Chevy Bel Airs competing for space, and sidewalk cafes that served a raspberry-flavored beer that I remember as weiss mit himbeer. (The name seems to differ now.) When the magic faded, we could pass through Checkpoint Charlie to find ourselves in desolate East Berlin, where a woman or two crouched over a pile of fallen bricks and tapped with a hammer to rid them of mortar. This seemed to be the major industry in the Communist capital. . . . I wonder if those bricks were later used to build the Wall that would imprison a generation of East Berliners?

In France, as American soldiers, Ryan and I were accustomed to being viewed with contempt, but in West Berlin we were heroes. How the world had turned around since 1945!

We flew back to Cologne and took the train to Copenhagen. On the overnight Gedser Ferry, we fell in with two Swedish nurses returning from an ingenious holiday in Italy: some American tourists had rented a car in Rome and driven north to take their flight back to the U.S. The car-rental agency then employed Ingrid and Kai to return it whence it had come, along with gas money and train tickets home.

Ryan fell in love with Ingrid on the overnight passage, and when I awoke with a stiff neck he an-nounced that we were going to drive the girls home. What, to Sweden? Yes. Well . . . why not? What was the point of being a GI in Europe if you couldn't drive two pretty nurses home to Sweden?

It worked out well for Ryan, and when he got another furlough a few months later, he headed back to Uppsala, where the girls worked at the University Hospital. He came back engaged to be married. For my part, I went to Frankfurt-Rhine Air Base and caught the first flight out, which happened to be a C-54 cargo plane for Madrid, which I was astonished to find in the throes of celebrating -- Columbus Day! I had a hard time adjusting to Spanish hours, with breakfast at nine in the morning and dinner at nine in the evening. I bought a ticket for the bullfight but it was rained out. I took the train to Algeciras so I could admire the apes in Gibraltar and cross over to Tangiers on what I fancied was the Captain's Paradise ferry. Tangiers struck me as not very much of a paradise, with far too many flies, and I spent only the one night. Except when I was on a military aircraft, I did all this in civilian clothes and with my American passport. I loved to add stamps to the pages, and I confess that in Gibraltar I took an afternoon walk into Spain, just to collect an additional souvenir.

Back at Coligny Caserne, I found our barrack and office in the throes of being remodeled, with the orderly room moved to one of those metal buildings and the troops sleeping at Harbord Barracks several miles away. We were bussed back and forth, morning and evening, and we slept in a vast room meant to be a ward for the wounded from combat at the Fulda Gap. For a week or two, I was the last man of a hundred or so to fall asleep and the second to wake up, a horrific routine. Finally I borrowed a cot from the supply room and hid it and my sleeping bag in a locker in our new orderly room. This proved to be an excellent arrangement. The mess hall, NCO club, movies, and library functioned as before, and few of the gang spent their evenings out at the barrack-hospital, so there was plenty to do, and I slept better even than in our former six-man bunkroom. I just had to be sure to get up at five, stow my gear in a locker, and disappear for an hour while the troops trickled in from Harbord Barracks.

In addition to the cooks and waitresses and other French civilians who tended to so many of our needs, security at the Caserne was provided by a company of Polish Guards, the younger men recruited from refugee camps in West Germany, though some of the older ones were veterans of the Polish army of 1939. They'd escaped to the West and served in the French or British army. One morning I chatted with a man who'd been captured by the Russians, put in a punishment battalion, captured anew by the Germans, who sent him to guard the French coast at Calais, where in June 1945 he happily surrendered to the English -- so the Guards were his fifth army, counting a year or two in the Polish Brigade of the British Army.

I loved talking to these men, and often in the evenings I met them again at their favored tavern on the Faubourg Bannier. It had a coin-operated turntable and a pile of records beneath a plastic lid with an arm-hole in it: you chose your record, put it on the turntable, put a ten-franc coin in the slot, and the turntable revolved, playing a polka or a patriotic song. As the evening wore on, the Poles got drunk; they danced with each other or the rare Frenchwoman who ventured in; they brawled; and always in the end they sat and wept for their lost homeland. They were wonderful. If I stayed too long and missed the midnight curfew at Coligny Caserne, they'd take me across the street and slip me through their own guardhouse.

So I was AWOL for the last few months of my Army career. Since I worked in the orderly room, this was no problem. When the Charge-of-Quarters came in with last night's bedcheck roster, I erased my name from the list of absentees. The CQs soon got used to it.

Looking back at November and December of 1957, I realize that my affection for these exiled Poles was likely a hangover from my love of Basia. And I now know that the rousing song they played so often was "Dabrowski's Mazurka," a hymn to the exiles who'd fought under Napoleon's banner at the end of the eighteenth century, after Poland had been partitioned and occupied by Russia, Germany, and Austria. What's more, Basia's name was actually mentioned, though I never caught it at the time:

Her father said to Basia, with tears in his eyes,

"Hear our soldiers, child, marching to their drums!"

March, march, Dabrowski, from Italy to Poland.

We will follow you, and win back our nation.

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