1970 Part 2: January-March: Debate

1970’s debate tournaments. Continue reading

In my last undergraduate semester at U-M I planned to spend a LOT of time on debate. This was my last chance to qualify for the National Debate Tournament, and I intended to make the most of it. This post has details about a few debates. If you need a primer on intercollegiate debate in 1966-1970, you can find it here.

I must describe our coaching staff in 1969-70. Bill Colburn was the Director of Forensics, but he no longer worked with the debaters or took trips. The Debate Director was Juddi (pronounced like Judy) Tappan, who was finishing her PhD. We had two excellent graduate assistants, Roger Conner, Mark Arnold’s partner in 1968-69 at Oberlin, and Cheryn Heinen, who had been a very good debater at Butler. Roger and Cheryn could probably have been a big help, but they were seldom allowed to go to big tournaments, and neither planned a career as a debate coach. Because the program had very few debaters, we hardly ever had practice rounds, and when we did, Juddi ran them. Cheryn did not work with us much.

Juddi

Juddi’s major contribution was to insist that I reserve the last thirty seconds of my 2AR to summarize the case. She was big on style and polish. No one else did this in 1970; time was too precious. So, on the affirmative we always had less time to present and answer arguments than our opponents did.

We received valuable help from an extremely unexpected source. In my senior year Jimmie Trent was a professor in the speech department at Wayne State University. He had been a legendary debate coach at (of all places) Emporia, KS, and was universally credited with introducing the Plan-Advantages form of affirmative case, which by my time had almost completely replaced the traditional Need-Plan format.

Jimmie Trent died in 2013. I found no other photos.
Jimmie Trent died in 2013. I found no other photos.

Jimmie had a big impact on my thinking about the negative. I was almost always 1N, which meant that I attacked “the case,” the reasons for adopting the plan. One of my principal weapons was “inherency,” which challenged the affirmative team to prove that the “present system” was incapable of producing an equally desirable result. Jimmie argued that this was an unreasonable standard. In his (and eventually my) way of thinking, both teams must defend an approach. The negative’s approach could, of course, merely allow things to continue unchanged, but it could not keep changing its mind about what that entailed, i.e., “we could just …” I did not immediately change my tactics on the negative, but on the affirmative I always tried to pin down the other team.

On the negative Jimmie recommended that we try the Emory switch when we thought that we could get away with it. Previously I was 1N, and I attacked the case. The 2N attacked the plan, arguing that it would not achieve what the affirmative claimed and that it would cause severe problems. With the Emory switch the roles stayed the same, but my partner became 1N, and I became 2N. We attacked the plan first and then the case.

This had many advantages. More of the plan attacks were “canned,” which is to say that they were the same for many different plans and therefore written out in some detail. Having the extra time to prepare for attacking the case was more valuable than for attacking the plan. 2N got more time when he needed it mostto rebuild his plan attacks after the affirmative had answered them.

Also, of course, it messed up the opponents’ strategy. Each of them was doing an unfamiliar task, and our approach also gave the 1AR only five minutes to rebuild their case and to deal with the defenses of the plan attacks. Finally, it let me give our last speech, and I was a little better at selling.

There is an obvious counter to the switch. The affirmative team can delay presenting its plan until the 2AC. One of Dartmouth’s teams tried this against us. However, the 1AC made no sense without the plan, and two or three minutes were still available when he finished. I had no trouble adapting. I just reverted to my old role as 1N, and the 2A, who had to present the plan in his constructive for the first time ever, had too little time to defend the case well.

A better approach, which we would have used if anyone had tried the switch against us, would be for the 2AC to present additional advantages of the plan after (or before) dealing with the plan attacks. Then, the 2AR can then drop some advantages and defend others.

We only lost one round all year when we switched. We met a pretty good team from Loyola of Baltimore at a tournament in Miami. They did not even try to defend their case in rebuttals. They only argued that our approach was unethical because it emphasized the “spread,” i.e., taking advantage of time limitations to present more arguments than the opponents could possibly answer. We had a very good set of answers to these arguments, but the judge voted against us on the ethics issue. The lesson we learned was to avoid the switch if the judge seemed too conservative. Loyola evidently knew the judge better than we did.

Our first trip in January of 1970 was the “East Coast Swing,” where we used the switch in every round except the one in which Dartmouth delayed presenting the plan. My partner, Bill Davey, and I were allowed to fly to Boston to participate in the tournaments at Boston College and Harvard. At BC we went 5-3 and narrowly missed qualifying for the elimination rounds. Because we did not have a long drive ahead of us, we decided to watch the octafinals. I watched Brown on the affirmative v. Southern Cal. Bill watched a different debate. One of the Brown debaters was visibly startled when he saw me enter the classroom and sit down. He nudged his partner and whispered something to him.

A few minutes later I found out why. Brown’s first affirmative constructive speech was word-for-word the same as ours! Evidently they had tape-recorded one of our rounds at some previous tournament and transcribed it. I have never heard of anyonein the previous seven and a half years of debating or the subsequent six and a half years that I coacheddoing anything like this. In disgust I stopped taking notes a few minutes into the speech.

Brown’s was a bad strategy. USC, which ran a similar case when they were on the affirmative, annihilated them. I was totally embarrassed that a team incompetently running our exact case qualified for the elims at this tournament, and we did not. I told Bill about it, but no one else.

In contrast, Harvard, which was the biggest tournament of the year, with over 100 teams in attendance, was our best tournament ever. In the prelims we were 7-1, losing only to Canisius on our affirmative. By the way we had an astoundingly good record on our negative all year. If we got to face Canisius in the elimination rounds, we would be “locked in” on our negative.

In the octafinals we faced an overmatched team from Boston College. We lost the coin flip (as usual; we only won one coin flip all year), and so we had to debate affirmative. It didn’t matter. All three judges voted for us.

The quarterfinal match against Oberlin was somewhat controversial. The Oberlin pair was Mark Arnold, whom I knew from our days in Kansas City, and freshman Paul Zarefsky, whose brother had been a champion debater at Northwestern, and he now coached there. We were affirmative again. The timekeeper was a debater on Canisius’s second team. We barely knew him, but he was friendly with our opponents.

The first two speeches delivered by Davey and Zarefsky were fairly routine. I was somewhere in the middle of my constructive when someone, I think it was Arnold, yelled out “Time.” The timekeeper was busy taking notes and had neglected to time my speech. He put up the 5 card, followed quickly by the 4. Arnold was sure that he gave me extra time. I thought that he cost me at least a little, and he certainly flustered me a little when 5 turned into 4 so fast.

Anyway, we won three of the five ballots. Oberlin had had a very good first semester, they had done well at BC, and Arnold was considered one of the best debaters in the country. He later coached at Harvard.

Dallas Perkins had a lot more hair and a few less pounds in 1970.
Dallas Perkins had a lot more hair and a few less pounds in 1970.

Our opponent in the semifinals was Georgetown, a perennial national powerhouse, represented by Dallas Perkins (who also later coached at Harvard) and Howard Beales. Once again we lost the coin flip. I thought that we debated pretty well, but all five judges, including Laurence Tribe, voted for Georgetown. I will always think that if we had won that coin flip, we would have won the tournament, but who knows?

Still, it was our best tournament ever, and I was the #5 speaker out of the 200+ who attended. Dartmouth also had a tournament, but we did not attend.

When I called Bill Colburn to pick us up at Metro Airport, I told him that we had dropped eight ballots at Harvard. He just said “Really?”, and I replied, “Yes, but the good news is that seven of them were in the quarters and semifinals.”

Hank Stram & the Chiefs matriculated up and down the field.
Hank Stram & the Chiefs matriculated up and down the field.

I remember riding home from a bitterly cold tournament on January 11. I was sitting shotgun and therefore had control of the radio. I found a CBS station, and we listened to the surprisingly calm voices of Bob Reynolds and Tom Hedrick. It was near the end of Super Bowl IV, and the Chiefs seemed to be running out the clock. The Vikings were thirteen-point favoritess, and so we all assumed that the Chiefs had just given up. Au contraire, mon frère! KC had pounded Minnesota 23-7. I knew that my dad and all my friends in KC would be ecstatic.

Juddi made all of the decisions about pairing and scheduling. Two of her decisions puzzled me. The first was to have me debate with sophomore Mike Hartmann at the most important tournament in the district at Northwestern. Mike was a really good debater, and Juddi must have wanted to give him some incentive for the next year. That’s fine, but we had never debated together, and he did not know our case. I would not have minded too much if it was another tournament, but Northwestern was perhaps the most important tournament of the year.

Mike and I won all of our negative rounds and two of the four affirmatives. One of the losses was to a good team. The other was to the worst team in the tournament from Northeastern Illinois University, which I had never heard of. Their record in the tournament was 1-7. The judge, whom I had never before seen, gave both Mike and me higher speaker points than either of the NEIU debaters (although considerably less than we received in any other round). However, he gave NEIU their only victory of the tournament. The text on the ballot was short and bitter: “I just can’t vote for this case.”

Sixteen teams qualified for the elims. We were seventeenth. You know what they say about horseshoes and hand grenades.

I think that 1970 was also the year that Bill and I flew to the tournament at the University of Miami. I remember that it was 70° warmer when we exited the plane than when we boarde. I also remember that right in the center of the campus was a huge swimming pool. The diving team was practicing when we were there. The centerpiece of the Michigan campus is the graduate library.

It was not a great tournament. My recollection is that the elimination rounds started at the quarterfinals, and we missed on speaker points. This was very annoying for a number of reasons. The first was that we lost a negative round on ethics, the only time that we lost when we switched and one of only a handful of negative losses all year.

The other annoying thing occurred against a weak team. The judge was a Miami debater who had graduated the year before. He came up to me before the round and told me that he knew the debate was a mismatch. He demonstrated a little sideways wave with his hand as he said something like “If I do this, cut it short. There’s no reason to prolong the agony.” I ended up cutting at least a minute or two off of my constructive, and I jettisoned the thirty-second summary in my rebuttal. We did win, but he gave us speaker points that were well below our average.

The third annoyance was that we had wasted time and money on this second-rate tournament. I don’t remember any more details about where we went and how we did.


Districts:I need to mention that Juddi and Jimmie tried for a while to keep their torrid relationship secret, but nearly everyone surely knew about it. At some point during the year they got married, and Jimmie tendered his resignation at Wayne State to become chairman of the speech department at Miami of Ohio. Juddi decided that she might be a political liability for us. She decided not to go to districts.

We had to supply two judges. Roger and Cheryn were chosen. This was fine with us, but it did not erase the last few months.

1970 was the first year that I seriously prepared for the district tournament. Roger worked with us quite a bit. We prepared by sprucing up our affirmative case to appeal to a more conservative audience and by working on how our arguments would work without the switch. We were too afraid of political consequences to pull the switch at districts. The only round that we had lost with the switch we had lost on ethics. We could certainly expect arguments like those in every round. Some judges might vote against us on general principles even if the negative did not make the arguments.

NDT

Some words of explanation about the District 5 qualifying tournament for the NDT are in order. The district was composed of four statesMichigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The national committee also invited seven additional pairs that did not qualify.

Northwestern was always a national power. Its coach, David Zarefsky, left his top team, Gunderson and Strange, at home because he was confident that they would receive an invitation to the NDT, and he was right. Northwestern sent its second team, Sitzma and Welch, to the district tournament. This was a break for us. We had beaten Sitzma and Welch all three times that we had met them during the year.

The district committee evaluated all the twenty-four teams in attendance. Six were rated A, six B, six C, and six D. Everyone debated two from each group.

Maybe we were not mentally in gear. Roger had tried to teach us to yodel, which he claimed was the best way to warm up. At any rate we lost the first round on our affirmative to a C team from Indiana State. Both Bill and I were just off. I thought that we had won, but I can understand why a judge could vote against us.

Then we met two pretty good teamsHample and Sproule from Ohio State on our affirmative and Sitzma and Welch on our negative. We mopped the floor with both of them, and they knew it. It turned out that they were our two A teams. This kind of surprised me.

The next three rounds seemed uneventful. The seventh round was on Saturday evening. We faced an obnoxious guy named Greg Rigo from Ohio University on our negative. I don’t remember his partner’s name. They were a mediocre team with a very standard case. We debated fairly well and pretty much pounded them.

Two of the judges had familiar faces. The third one, who voted against us, was someone whom I had never seen. He came from one of the very weak schools. This sometimes happens, as it did to Mike and me at Northwestern.

George

One of the familiar judges voted for us and wrote that it was not close. The other judge, George Ziegelmueller, was the long-time Director of Forensics at Wayne State in Detroit. In my four years at U-M he had NEVER voted for any of our teams. His ballot in this debate was incomprehensible.

When I started debating in 1966, Wayne State was a highly ranked national power. The team of Kathy McDonald and Don Ritzenheim had narrowly lost in the final round of the NDT two years in a row. By 1970 they were just another mid-level team. I am not sure what happened to them, but it must have frustrated George.

Needless to say the Jimmie-Juddi business probably did not sit well with George. A faculty member at his school, who had probably never helped coach any of his debaters, was giving valuable tactical advice to a rival school! This just was not done.

I worked for George for three and a half years in the late seventies. I never brought this up, and neither did he. In those years I confirmed my impression that George was not considered a good judge. His note-taking was weak, and he tended to get fixated on one aspect of the debate, even if the debaters did not emphasize it.

The eighth and final round was on Sunday morning. Unbeknownst to us Juddi had shown up for the coaches’ cocktail party on Saturday night. I am sure that she pumped everyone with whom she was on speaking terms for information. Outside the room of our last debate she showed up with a huge grin on her face. She told us that we were doing very well, but we shouldn’t be too overconfident We had also heard a lot of buzz in the hallways that we had blasted everyone on our schedule.

At any rate in the last round we were on the affirmative against a so-so team from Illinois State. Both Bill and I were superb. We obliterated them. I had absolutely no doubt that we picked up all three ballots. In fact, one of the judges, David Angell from Albion College awarded me a perfect score of 30 and wrote on the ballot that it was the best performance that he had ever seen.

All the debaters, coaches, and hangers-on assembled for the announcement of the five qualifying pairs. Juddi was all excited when we told her that the last debate was by far our best.

Next came the assembly. Five teams would qualify for NDT. It took them at least half an hour to process the ballots. The district chairman finally came out and began, “There was one team that was 6-2 but …”

I swear the following is true: I screamed out “Oh no!” and buried my head in my arms on the desk in front of me. Everyone looked at me as he continued, “unfortunately had too few ballots to qualify. So, let’s have a hand for the University of Michigan, 6-2 with fourteen ballots.”

We lost ten ballots, five of them on the negative. We had only lost one negative ballot in the second semester, and that was on ethics. We lost that first affirmative debate 3-0. OK, I can live with that. We beat both of our A teams and our B teams. We kept both Ohio State and Northwestern from qualifying. The critical round, though, was clearly the seventh. There was no way that we lost that debate. However, we also somehow lost three other ballots on our negative. This just never happened that year.

In retrospect I think that we should have somehow made it clear to the other schools that we would definitely not be using the Emory switch at districts. The other 23 teams that were going to districts probably wasted many hours trying to figure out how to adapt to our tactic. This could have irritated a lot of people.

We submitted an application for a post-bid, but I knew we wouldn’t get it. The district recommended the two Northwestern teams and Ohio State in a tie for first. They recommended us, but as their fourth choice. They thought we were only the ninth best team in the district! NDT only gave seven post-district bids altogether. The other three from our district all got bids. Once again we got the shaft.

Our performance at Harvard earned us an invitation to the Tournament of Champions. Juddi encouraged us to go, but I could see no point to it.

Thus ended my debate career. Was I bitter? Yes. I only had one goal, and I would never get another chance to achieve it.


Bill Davey made it to the quarterfinals of NDT in 1971. He is a professor at the University of Illinois. His very impressive biography page is here.

In 1972 Mike Hartmann also made it to the quarterfinals of NDT. He is a lawyer. His webpage at the firm of Miller Canfield is here.

1970 October-November Basic Training Part 2: Army Lingo

Army to English phrase book. Continue reading

The 3 s’s: Every trainee is expected to start every day with a shit, a shower, and a shave.

AIT: Advanced Individual Training conducted immediately after Basic. Each MOS had its own type of AIT. Mine was at Fort Gordon, GA. Each letter in the abbreviation is pronounced.

ASSUME: The favorite joke of Army instructors was that if you assume, you make an Ass out of U and Me.

AWOL: Absent without leave. An AWOL turned into a desertion after, as I recall, thirty days.

Basic: Short for Basic Training, which in the Army was almost never called Boot Camp.

Charlie or Mr. Charles: The Viet Cong. You never see the one who gets you.

Class A’s: The dress uniform. In summer it was khaki slacks and short-sleeve shirt, both starched and pressed. Winter was a dark green suit-coat with a tan shirt and a black tie. The hat was like a tent.

DILLIGAFF: Do I look like I give a flying fuck?

Duck: Member of the U.S. Navy.

EOD: Explosive ordnance disposal. The guys in these units searched for and disabled bombs and munitions.

ETS: Expiration of Term of Service: the date of one’s exit from the military. It can also be used as a verb, as in “I am ETSing next Thursday.” Each letter in the abbreviation is pronounced.

Fatigues: The olive drab denim work uniform. Pants were bloused above the boots. The hat was also OD. It was shaped like a baseball cap.

FUBAR or FUBB: Fucked up beyond all recognition or Fucked up beyond belief. Common conditions in the Army.

Hitch: The term of one’s commitment to stay in the military.

Jarhead: A member of the Marine Corps.

Jody: The guy who was hitting on everyone’s girlfriend at home and would inevitably seduce all of them.

Gig line:The edge of the left side of the shirt, the belt and the fly should always form one vertical line.

Guardmount: An inspection of equipment and uniforms before a duty shift.

Gung-ho: An adjective that describes someone who is unduly enthusiastic about things military.

Hospital corners: A way of making one’s bed so that the blanket is tucked in with folds at the feet of 45° angles and absolutely no bumps or wrinkles.

KP: Kitchen police. Some people in training are assigned to help the cooks, sometimes for punishment. I did this in both Basic and AIT. It is not the worst duty, but it is also no fun.

Latrine: Any place in which one is allowed to eject bodily waste. It could be a whole in the ground, a beautiful lounge, or anything in between. Bathrooms do not exist.

Lifer: Someone who intends to make a career out of the army. In 1970-71 this was a very pejorative term.

Light ’em up if you got ’em: The phrase used to announce a break in the field.

MOS: Military Occupational Specialty. Everyone gets assigned a particular role for training purposes. In the field you might get assigned to do something else. Each letter in the abbreviation is pronounced.

NCO: Non-commissioned officers are basically sergeants. Corporals may possibly qualify. SP4, SP5, and SP6 definitely do not.

OD: Olive drab was the color of fatigue pants and shirts as well as the field jackets. The summer dress uniforms were khaki. The winter dress shirts were khaki with dark green coats. We had no camouflage. I don’t know why the services shifted to all-camouflage uniforms.

Personal problem: Another favorite joke. If you complain about something to an NCO or officer, the reply is often, “That sounds like a personal problem. You should take to the chaplain.”

PMO: Provost Marshall’s Office. On Sandia Base this was police headquarters.

Reup: To enlist for another hitch.

RIF: The Reduction-in-Force policy (that almost no one has heard of) instituted in the early seventies that, among other things, chopped six months off of the active duty requirement for draftees. Each letter in the abbreviation is pronounced.

Rock and roll: The setting on an M16 that allowed it to fire a burst of bullets when the trigger was pressed and held.

Salad: Slang for the oak leaf clusters worn by majors and lieutenant colonels on their epaulets.

SBNM: Sandia Base, New Mexico in Albuquerque.

SEAD: Seneca Army Depot, Romulus, NY.

Shit: In addition to usual meanings “shit” can basically refer to any aspect of a person, including property, or to the totality of the person. “Getting shit together” means preparing for an eventuality. E.g., ‘You better get your shit together for the captain’s inspection, or your ass is grass, and I’m the lawnmower.”

To “jump in someone’s shit” means to reprove someone verbally and vehemently.

Short: Having few days left in one’s hitch in the military.

Slick-sleeve: A trainee in Basic is a private with a designation of E1. He has no sleeves on his shirt. If he gets promoted, he gets one stripe and his salary goes up to the E2 level.

Slopes/gooks: Pejorative designations of Asians.

Spec# SP4, SP5, and SP6 are ranks that allow the Army to pay some people higher salaries without becoming NCO’s. They are officially pronounced Specialist 4th Class, Specialist 5th Class, and Specialist 6th Class, but everyone calls them Spec 4, Spec 5, and Spec 6.

An SP5 and a “buck” sergeant are both in pay grade E5, but an SP5 cannot jump in your shit if your boots aren’t polished unless he/she is your direct boss.

Strack: Describes a person who always strives to have his shit together. This could be a compliment, but it usually is not.

Weapon v. gun: The purpose of a weapon is to inflict severe bodily harm on an enemy. The purpose of the gun is, among other things, to inflict severe bodily pleasure on a friend.

Zoomer: Member of the Air Force.

1970 December: MOS, etc., and Leave

The end of Basic training and the transition. Continue reading

JetgunWe were inoculated every Wednesday. I dreaded these shots much more than anything else in Basic training. The last one was, by far, the worst. All the previous ones had been done by medics with guns. They took a split second. For the last one we got two shots, one in each arm, administered by doctors and nurses, and the needles were in our arms for at least fifteen seconds. The rumor was that these were black plague shots, but who knows? The sergeants and officers never told us, but they all knew what was coming.

plagueThese shots were right after lunch, and we had no training that day. We went to the barracks and sat on our bunks. No one had any energy, and most of us slept. They woke us for supper, but half of the guys stayed in the barracks.

I went to eat, but I felt terrible. However, while I was standing in line, my fever must have broken or something. All of a sudden I felt OK. I was still weak, but I did not feel ill at all, and I ate plenty of supper.

After supper everyone went to bed, many still in their fatigues. No one was fireguard. The drill sergeant awakened us in the morning. Everybody felt fine.

One of the guys in our platoon carried a photo of his girlfriend and his Corvette everywhere that he went. He also wrote a letter to her every day. She wrote back to him, but after a few weeks those letters ceased. Eventually, he received a note from one of his friends. It included a photo of his girlfriend with another guy. He was driving the Corvette. The guy with all these photos was miserable. No one knew what to say to him.

I don’t remember the name of the guy in our platoon, but I know the name of the guy in the photo. It was Jody. Jody was the guy who snatched everybody’s girlfriend while the poor sap was in the Army. We sang about him all the time when we were marching.

From the first day until the last our company was awash in rumors: We were all going to Vietnam. The war will be over soon. We will all be going to infantry or artillery or whatever. I never listened to any of this. I never told anyone about volunteering for Ft. Lewis. If I had, I would have been the subject of all kinds of rumors.

Our drill sergeant left in the fifth or sixth week, and he was replaced by another much more mellow guy. He wasn’t mellow enough to let us march to “Do wah diddy diddy,” but he almost never got angry at anyone (in Army terms, “jumped in his shit”).

On the last day we learned what MOS we had been assigned. You could easily tell from the ashen faces which guys had been assigned to infantry. They decided to make a military policeman out of me. I was to report to Fort Gordon, GA, for training.

FTLI was not select for the language school. More than a decade later I learned from our company’s accountant that he had attended the school at Fort Lewis at about the time that I was talking with the captain. Only one language was being taught there, Vietnamese, and only one MOS was offered to the students, interrogator. Furthermore, most of these interrogations took place in helicopters. I was quite lucky that the Army in its infinite wisdom decided not to accept my offer to go to Ft. Lewis.

At my last assignment at Seneca Army Depot I had access to the personnel folders for everyone on the base. I found in my folder that I had scored 72 on the language aptitude test. One very slow day I looked through the other folders and did not find a single score of ten or more.

I was not too surprised that I was not headed to language school.It takes a good bit of time to become even mildly fluent in a language. I was only scheduled to be in for two years. By the time that I finished the school, there would hardly be enough time for me to use what I learned.

I hated the thought of becoming an MP. I really dreaded the training, and I did not want to spend two years in law enforcement. I definitely do not have that kind of personality. If I had known that a large percentage of MP’s in those days were used as guards on convoys in Vietnam, I probably would have been terrified.

I don’t remember what MOS was assigned to anyone else, not even Rosey or Todd Pyles. I am pretty sure that I would remember if either of them had been assigned infantry or MP. It must have been something else.

To tell the truth I did not think much about any of the guys in our company, not in the next few weeks, not ever. If any of them were in our training company at Fort Gordon, I certainly did not hang out with them. Like everyone else, I was worried about my own future.

I did occasionally think about Pvt. Houston, the company fuck-up. I assume that he was discharged either during training or shortly thereafter. The Army has low standards, but I cannot imagine him in any position in the Army. The guy could no even get in line.

Basic training finished just before Christmas. The training at Fort Gordon would start shortly after New Years. We were therefore required to take part of our annual leave over the holidays.

Intercontinental Airport opened in 1969.

Intercontinental Airport opened in 1969.

My recollection is that the Army arranged our transportation home. Most of the guys in the company were from the South. Someone drove a handful us in an olive-drab bus to the brand new Intercontinental Airport in Houston. From there I flew to the far-from-new Municipal Airport in KC, where my parents picked me up.

I don’t remember too much about this period. I have a photo somewhere of me with very little hair standing beside my dad. I towered over him even though he was allegedly the same height when he entered the Army as I was. He weighed twenty-two pounds less!

My dad never talked much about his years in the Army. I knew that he had seen combat in the Pacific. I assumed that he was in the infantry, but he said that he too was an MP. I think that perhaps he did both.

Needless to say, I went to church with my family on Sundays and the two holy days.

My sister Jamie was halfway through her freshman year at Bishop Miege High School. She went out on dates a couple of the nights while I was in town. At her age I had not the slightest inclination to go on dates. Now that I think of it, I am pretty sure that I was still a Boy Scout, and there was no merit badge for dating.

I don’t remember seeing any of my friends from high school over the holidays. I didn’t really know anyone in our neighborhood. Golf and house painting were prevented by the weather. Mostly I just relaxed and tried not to think too much about the next twenty-two months.

1970 October-November Basic Training Part 3: The Training

The actual training Continue reading

The first few days of our training were devoted mostly to administrative matters. We got our gear, found our platoon and our bunk, and had a few sessions with our drill sergeant to make sure that we knew how to stay out of serious trouble. There was a heavy emphasis on cleanliness. I have always been a slob, but I expected to need an attitude adjustment for a couple of years. The only part that really annoyed me was “policing the area” every morning. We all walked around the barracks and picked up trash, mostly cigarette butts discarded by the nicotine addicts who were enabled by the Army’s pricing at the PX: fifty-cents per pack.

Our chaplain resembled neither Fr. Mulcahy nor the Anabaptist chaplain in "Catch 22".

Our chaplain resembled neither Fr. Mulcahy nor the Anabaptist chaplain in “Catch 22”.

The only formal teaching that I remember from those first few days was a lecture by the chaplain. He inveighed for close to an hour about cursing. He was, not too surprisingly, against it. He was especially appalled by expletives that involved mothers. He spoke tenderly about his own mother, and he asked all his listeners to bring to mind images of their mothers before they used any kind of rough language.

I have argued that the 1095 oration in Clermont by Pope Urban II that launched the First Crusade was the most successful ever in terms of results. This speech by the chaplain certainly would rank at the other end of the spectrum. In fact, it is very hard for me to imagine that there could possibly have been more cursing in our company in the next seven weeks than there actually was. Virtually every sentence out of anyone’s mouth was replete with imprecations. The word “fuckin'” was the most common, and it was an ongoing challenge to insert it in the most unlikely place in the sentence. Consider this masterpiece: “What bullshit have they got for us this after-fuckin’-noon?” “Mother” was added perhaps half of the time.

Everyone took aptitude tests during the first week. I remember five of them: math, English, listening to dots and dashes, mechanical aptitude, and language aptitude. I hated the mechanical aptitude test. They showed pictures of tools with no scale provided and asked what they could be used for. If the tool did not look familiar, you could not determine whether its length was two inches or ten feet.

My dad told me that he had scored so badly on a similar test in World War II that they accused him of cheating on the other tests. No one called me on my score, but it was definitely out of line with the others.

The English and math tests were scored like IQ tests100 was average, 115 was one standard deviation higher, 130 was two standard deviations higher, etc. Together they are called the GT test. The top score was 160. I got 160 in English and 152 in math. I thought that I had answered all the math questions correctly, but I must have made a mistake or two.

The language aptitude test was limited to those with a certain minimum score on the English test. Around 20 percent of us qualified. The test presented a made-up language with a list of vocabulary and syntax rules. The language had no suffixes or prefixes, but it did have infixes that consisted of two or three letters somewhere in the middle of the word. They could change singular to plural, present to past, or anything that a prefix or suffix could denote in more familiar languages. I learned of infixes from the workbook for the linguistics class that I took at U-M earlier in the year. I enjoyed taking this test, but most guys spent a lot more time just looking dazed than answering any questions.

Afterwards, while we were waiting in placewhich we often dida sergeant called out an approximation of my name. He told me to report to a certain captain in the training building. The captain informed me that I had received the highest score on the language aptitude test that he had ever seen. He then asked if I would be interested in volunteering for the Army’s language school in Ft. Lewis, WA.

UpstartIgnoring the warning from my drill sergeant about the perils of volunteering, I told the captain that I would like to go to this school. I did not even question him about what languages they taught and what duties the people who learned them performed. I foolishly imagined myself as a translator attached to an embassy in an exotic location. Maybe I would prevent a war by avoiding the use of the inflammatory word “upstart”.

One of the first and most important things that our drill sergeant taught us was how to perform the role of fireguard. He showed us where the fire extinguisher was. He might have even shown how to use it. The most important thing was to wake everyone up if there was a fire.

My recollection is that lights went out at nine, and the day started at five. I might be off a little bit. During the lights-out period someone on each of the two floors of the barracks was required to be awake. There were four fireguard shifts every night lasting for two hours each. Because most guys were accustomed to staying up later than nine, the first shift was the most popular. I was accustomed to awakening early, and so when I had to stand watch I tried to get the last shift. The men on this shift bore the additional responsibility of waking everyone up, a task that I relished. My technique for getting everyone out of the sack was to walk up and down the center aisle banging two trash can lids together while singing “It’s another be good to mommy day” from the Captain Kangaroo show. You can listen to the official rendition here.

We began every day with physical training (PT). Mostly we did pushups and jogged. We also did the monkey bars and a few other exercises. I have always loved physical exertion, and this was one of my favorite aspects of Basic. I put on a little weight, but it was all muscle. At the end of training we had timed tests in all of the areas emphasized in PT. I did pretty well, especially in my weakest activity, the monkey bars. I had never been in better shape, and until I started running fairly seriously I did not reach that level again.

MyWeaponEveryone in our company was issued an M16, the rifle used in Vietnam. A high percentage of our training involved this rifle.

Here is how we learned that we should always refer to the M16 that we were allotted as a rifle or a weapon, never a gun: Each guy held the M16 in his right hand over his head. The left hand was on his crotch. Then we recited:
“This is my weapon” moves right hand up and down.
“This is my gun” moves left hand up and down.
“This is for fighting” moves right hand up and down.
“This is for fun” moves left hand up and down.

StrippedBefore we learned how to fire the weapon, we were taught how to disassemble it and then put it back together. This is called “field stripping.” We were also taught how to clean it. This was very important. In those days M16’s had a bad reputation for jamming in the field. I don’t remember anyone in our company having trouble, but once we trained with another company that had a lot of jams. Every rifle that I saw jam was full of muck. Those guys must have never cleaned them.

This is definitely not the way that we were taught.

This is definitely not the way that we were taught.

We got a fair amount of target practice. We were taught to keep the weapons “up and downrange”. It seems that most people now hold rifles with the barrel down. If it somehow fired in that position, the round would certainly ricochet off the ground in an unpredictable manner. If the rifle is held up, the bullet goes up. It will come down, but it will be traveling at terminal velocity, and the likelihood of hitting someone would be very low.

These rifles have no kick at all, and they are very accurate. I could consistently hit a human-sized silhouette at 300 meters, and I have terrible vision and coordination. I easily qualified when they scored us shooting at bullseye targets.

I have no recollection of anything going wrong with our rifles. Nobody shot himself in the foot. No one lost his weapon. However, there was one occasion in which I feared that my goose was cooked.

We were out in the pine woods for some reason, and we had a very long break. The ground was covered with pine needles. I had already finished the book that I was carrying. I decided to strip down my rifle and clean it. When I went to put it back together, I could not find the firing pin, which is metallic and looks like a nail and a spring that is part of the “fully automatic” feature that turns the M16 into a machine gun.

My kingdom for a firing pin!

My kingdom for a firing pin!

Some guys helped me look for about fifteen minutes, but the thick cover of pine needles made finding the spring hopeless. Maybe my rifle was missing it when I got it; I would not have noticed. I could not understand why we could not find the firing pin, and the rifle would not fire without it.

The sergeant called us to “fall in” to formation for the march back. I was panic-stricken. My rifle would not work without the pin of course. I would be found out very soon, but at least we had no more shooting scheduled that day. I could not think of any way out of this that was not fraught with peril. I decided to wait until we got back to the barracks to decide what to do.

When I got undressed the firing pin fell out of my trousers. To this day I have no idea how it could possibly have gotten inside my pants (we had to blouse our trousers with cloth covered rubber bands) or how I could have failed to feel it. I was so relieved to find it that I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to work out the physics.

This episode says a lot about the mentality of trainees. How much could a firing pin cost? $5? Probably less; fifty years later one costs $8.99. Nevertheless, the idea of having to admit that I had lost such a thing was terrible to consider. I felt sure that I would have been browbeaten in private and probably humiliated in public.

After I put the firing pin in, the rifle worked fine as long as it was not switched into “rock and roll” mode, which we were never allowed to use. So, I was still in the clear until we had to turn in our weapons in the last week during the dreaded “white towel” test.

TowelsA sergeant sat at a desk with a stack of white towels. We all got busy wiping away every last speck of dirt or oil from our rifles. Finally a bold trainee sidled up to the desk with his stripped weapon laid out on a towel. I was waiting for this, but a handful of guys preceded me in line behind him. When the first guy reached the desk, the sergeant asked him if his weapon was clean. He paused, grinned a little, and then said, “I think so, sergeant.” The sergeant took a piece of the rifle, rubbed it on a towel, and made a smudge. Rejected. The next few guys made equally non-assertive responses to the sergeant’s initial queries, and their weapons were all rejected.

When he asked me if mine was clean, I loudly affirmed, “Yes, sergeant.” He replied, “Well, then turn the motherfucker in.” I quickly complied, and I felt a surge of relief.

A light bulb shone over the head of the guy behind me. When the sergeant asked him if his rifle was clean, he replied “Yes, sergeant” even more loudly than I did. The sergeant responded, “Well I guess I’ll be the judge of that, won’t I?” He quickly found a dirty spot and rejected the rifle.

After a few hours of this nonsenseall of these weapons were already very cleaneveryone’s weapon was accepted, and the whole company was joyfully disarmed.

We carried our weapons with us everywhere except on PT excursions. We were actually lucky. The M16 was much lighter than its predecessor, the M14, because in several areas light-weight plastic replaced steel or wood.

Don't stand behind someone with a LAW.

Don’t stand behind someone with a LAW.

The coolest part of training was the afternoon that they showed off some of the Army’s other weapons. We got to see a light anti-tank weapon (not a bazooka!). An armored vehicle was out in the field 60 or 70 yards away. An instructor put the tube-like LAW on his shoulder, zeroed in on the vehicle, and pulled the trigger. A rocket ignited in the tube and then slowly made its way to the vehicle. When it got to the target, it burrowed through the armor and then exploded.

M60The M60 machine gun was also impressive. It had so little kick that the presenter put the stock right in his crotch and fired off a burst. It goes without saying that we maggots were not allowed to get our hands on either of these.

The only face-to-face combat training was in the use of the bayonet. We learned that you use the pointy end to stab someone. You can use the stock end to bludgeon someone. We then showed that we had absorbed this lesson by attacking some straw figures. They did not let us use real bayonets.

I assume that this technique would come in handy if you were by yourself and your rifle was lost, broken, or out of bullets AND you had an opponent who was in exactly the same position. This happens pretty often in the movies. Who knows about real life? All that I know is that my buddies and I are ready for it.

PugilThe other half of the bayonet training involved pugil sticks, which are about four feet long and, unlike bayonets, they have padding on both ends. The trainers paired us up with someone about the same size. My opponent was the guy who played the country music station on his radio every morning. He was a little bigger, but I, the dorkiest-looking guy in the company, was more highly motivated. To everyone’s surprise I pummeled him.

By and large our outdoor training was similar to what was shown in the movie Stripes. There was one major exception. There was no obstacle course and, therefore, there was no tower in which our drill sergeant to climb and get blown up in.

CrawlInstead we went out after dark one night to a field that we had to crawl across with our rifles across our arms. Barbed wires were strung a couple of feet over our heads. At the far end trainers were firing (allegedly) live ammunition, including tracer rounds, a little higher than the barbed wire. To my knowledge, nobody in our company got hurt. I don’t remember whether everyone completed the task or not. I doubt it.

We also had a few other classes. I remember an outdoor class in which we were taught the rudiments of spotting different types of aircraft. What I learned from this class was that it was probably a good idea to save your ammunition for ground-based opponents.

There must have been others, but the only indoor classaside from the insufferable chaplain’s lecturesthat I remember was on map reading. I was astonished to discover that around half of the company was totally unfamiliar with the topic. For those of us who already knew how to read maps these classes were excruciating. I called them “nap reading”.

Several guys were indeed caught napping during indoor classes. Many had a difficult time adjusting to the routine of the routine of early lights-out and early wake-up calls. Also, the sergeants claimed that all trainees had a sleep button in their butts. Whenever they sat down they fell asleep.

Training was voluntary. The alternative every morning was to go on sick call. At the opening assembly, one of the sergeants would yell out “All sick, lame, and lazy report to …” A few guys tried this pretty often. I never asked them how it went.

I hated every minute of the experience, but Basic training had at least three beneficial effects on me. By the end I was in terrific shape. I learned that a moderate but consistent effort can produce a profound effect on your physical conditioning. I have never forgotten this.

Secondly, I got to know on fairly intimate terms some entirely different breeds of guys. To put it another way, the Army expanded my horizons. I don’t think it expanded them up, but any expansion helps.

Finally, I discovered that I was fairly gritty. I had a lot more endurance than most guys. I scored pretty high in the final physical training test. I more than held my own in most areas with guys that I would have thought were tougher than I was.

1970 October-November Basic Training Part 1: The People

People I encountered at Fort Polk. Continue reading

Polk_SignFort Polk, which is named not for the U.S. president (which would be bad enough) but for a Confederate general, is near Leesville, LA.

I never heard anyone on the base call the town anything other than Diseaseville. That was cleverer than the nickname for the base itself, Fort Puke.

It was pretty warm there, even in October and November. That suited me fine.

These are close to what we wore. Snazzy, eh?

These are close to what we wore. Snazzy, eh?

Our first day was mostly devoted to waiting in line for haircuts and getting gear. You could tell the barber what you wanted: Class A (no hair), Class B (almost no hair), or Class C (a little hair). A few guys were stupid enough not to pick A. The sergeants made most of them go back in. Some ended up getting three or more haircuts. My military ID had a picture of me like this. I lost it in 1975 when I lost my billfold. Sue thought that I looked like a prison inmate.

Believe it or not, the measurements for my olive-drab (OD) trousers were 29-34. I wore nothing but fatigues for eight weeks. We were provided with an OD duffel bag in which to stow our gear. My name and Social Security Number were stenciled on mine. In the barracks we were each given a footlocker. Our army-issue stuff went in the footlocker in a precisely prescribed manner. Our civilian clothes and anything else we brought or acquired went in the duffel bag.

An important lesson we all quickly learned was this: Before you interact with anyone you must check his (there were no women to interact with in Basic training) sleeves and collar to determine his rank. Sergeants had at least three stripes. They were always addressed as “sergeant”. Officers had bars, oak leaf clusters (commonly called “salad”), eagles, or stars. They were always addressed as “sir”.

This is a true story. As we were waiting in line for something an officer asked one of the men a question. He did not like the answer and said “Give me twenty, boot.”

He was ordering the guy to do push-ups. The soldier addressed happened to be in great shape. He whipped off twenty and then said “Permission to recover, sir?”

The officer replied, “Sure, as soon as you give me my twenty. I didn’t hear anything.”

This time the guy called out “One”, “Two”, and so forth as he did his push-ups and then repeated the request to recover. The officer replied again, “Sure, as soon as you give me my twenty.”

My recollection is that the poor guy had done eighty or one hundred push-ups before he realized, after hints from the peanut gallery, that he needed to say “One, sir”, “Two, sir” and so on. Otherwise the officer would think that he must be responding to someone else’s order.

If you called a sergeant “sir”, he would undoubtedly say “I work for a living.” I don’t know what officers said if you called them “sergeant”. I avoided officers.

Our DS wore his hat much lower in front.

Our DS wore his hat much lower in front.

We met our drill sergeants. Ours was younger than I was. He wore his Smokey Bear hat tilted down at a very sharp angle. He gathered our platoon together at the very beginning and told all of us that we should never volunteer for anything. A few minutes later we had an assembly in which they asked for volunteers to give blood. Of course, absolutely no one in our platoon volunteered. The sergeant had to gather us again and tell us that giving blood was the one exception. Most guys then volunteered; I did not. My blood type is A+, the universal recipient. They never need it. Also, I have a rather severe phobia of needles. It was bad enough that we got unexplained inoculations every Wednesday. I was not about to volunteer for more skin punctures.

LoanOne guy in our company had completed his service in the Navy and reenlisted in the Army. He had to start as a private, but after training he was guaranteed the equivalent of his Navy rank. He ran a loan-sharking business for the other trainees. He would loan money until pay day. What were his rates? He kept it simple. “I give you one. You give me two on pay day. I give you five; you give me ten. How much do you need?” He had no shortage of customers.

There were more enlistees than draftees in our company. The enlistees were required to serve three years of active duty; the draftees’ requirement was only two years. However, the enlistees were allowed to choose either their first duty assignment (at least 12 months) or their MOS (military occupational specialty). Neither of these guaranteed that they would not go to Vietnam. Many of the enlistees were surprised to learn this when they got to Fort Polk. They had been bamboozled by a recruiting sergeant.

The recruiting sergeants in those days had high quotas for certain MOS’s. One, of course, was infantry, but it was difficult even for them to portray slogging through rice paddies under enemy fire as romantic, exotic, or practical. On the other hand quite a few guys signed up for another MOS: “helicopter repairman”. They probably envisioned themselves in a bulletproof hangar doing interesting work and developing a marketable skill. Unfortunately, these guys learned that their job had a co-equal assignment as tail-gunner on helicopters, and their survival rate was not high.

One guy, whose last name and home town were both Houston, was a very unusual case. He was a very dim bulb. He had red hair and wore glasses that looked like the bottoms of coke bottles. He seemed more like a cartoon character than a human.

Houston’s life ambition was to be a quartermaster in the Army. Army quartermasters are in charge of supplies. They distribute field jackets, blankets, etc. He had twice tried to enlist, but he had been rejected because of his poor vision. Jack Vance solved this problem in 1941 by memorizing the eye chart. I don’t think that Houston had the mental acuity to do that, but he somehow got in on the third attempt. A lazy or overly gung-ho person probably looked the other way at his physical.

At Fort Polk Houston was crestfallen to discover that his enlistment contract did NOT guarantee that he would become a near-sighted quartermaster. He learned at the end of training that he was actually assigned to infantry. I wonder what happened to him.

GrenadeWe spent one day learning about grenades. They have two safetiesthe handle and the pin. You first squeeze the handle, then pull out the pin, then throw it and duck behind something solid. A few second later the grenade is supposed to explode. You never check it. Ten or fifteen minutes would be reasonable for this lesson. We spent half a day.

Before we were rewarded with the thrill of throwing a live grenade, we had to demonstrate that we understood the technique by throwing a dummy. I was standing in line when Houston’s turn came. The sergeant handed him the grenade. Houston looked at it quizzically, squeezed the handle, pulled the pin, dropped it and then kicked it as he tried to pick it up. Even the Army would not let him throw a live one. Of course, the pencil-pusher who assigned him to infantry did not know about this episode.

One other person in our company was not allowed to throw a live grenade, my bunkmate, whose last name was Rosensomething. Everyone except me called him Rosey. I called him by his first name, Larry. He had a degree in music. Both of his parents were also musicians. He had NEVER played any sport. He had never even thrown a football, a baseball, or anything else. His best effort at throwing the dummy grenade might have gone ten yards. It was beyond pitiful.

Rosey had perfect musical pitch and a fine counter-tenor (higher than Pavarotti or Juan Diego Flores) voice. When the sergeants discovered this, they would often have Rosey call the cadence or lead us in one of our semi-obscene marching songs as we marched from one training area to another. They found this very entertaining, and they loved to showcase his abilities when we passed within earshot of other training companies.

At the start of training Rosie was in horrible condition. I was usually next to him when we jogged every morning. In our first run he was winded within the first minute or two. The sergeants made it quite clear that it was everyone’s responsibility to make sure that everyone kept up. I often had to help Rosey stay on his feet, but I did not mind at all.

On one of the final days he had to run a timed mile in combat boots. His time was twelve minutes plus, which is horrendous, but it was much faster than he could manage the first week.

There were three primary topics of conversation in our barracks:
1) How tough I am;
2) How fast my car is;
3) How beautiful my girlfriend is.
Lots of guys carried around pictures of #2 and #3. I had nothing to contribute to these conversations beyond “Nice.”

After a few weeks of Basic, everyone knew precisely where everyone else stood with regards to #1. At the top of the list was a rather small black guy from Chicago who was a Golden Gloves boxer. He was in another platoon. The most bizarre experience of the entire eight weeks was when I walked into the barracks on a day that we had off. Everyone was talking about how this guy from Chicago had punched me out. A few people were outraged because they knew that I would never start a quarrel. It turned out that he had cold-cocked a guy from another platoon. The victim wore glasses and was about my size (but heavier; everyone was heavier).

The guy in the next bunk (no clue as to his name but I can visualize him: a typical kid of 18 or 19 from a rural town) made everyone look at pictures of his girlfriend standing by his Corvette. Before he left she had sworn her undying love. He wrote to her every day. She responded. However, she stopped writing about the fifth week. Somehow he found out a while later that she was seeing another guy and even letting him drive the ‘vette. This guy wanted to go AWOL, but a few of us talked him out of it.

I had a lot of respect for one guy from Mississippi in our platoon. He was married and had a kid. He enlisted because he could not find a job in his home town. When we got paid (something like $125 per month), he immediately endorsed his check and mailed it to his wife. You could live on the base without spending any money, but a “roach coach” came to our company every day, and it was very tempting to buy a candy bar or a bag of chips. He never gave in.

The intellectual level of our company was low. On a day that we had off I went around to all four barracks to ask if anyone knew how to play bridge (which in the sixties and seventies was played by college students everywhere). There were at least three hundred people in the company, but no one admitted to knowing anything about bridge.

RebMy only real friend, other than Rosey, was another guy from Mississippi named Todd Pyles. He seemed like a pretty intelligent guy, but that did not stop people from calling him Gomer. He had attended Ole Miss for a couple of years, but he dropped out to join the army. His attitude could be summed up by his favorite aphorism, “They can kill you, but they can’t eat you.”

At the end of week six or seven we were allowed to go to a place on the base where you could buy a beer. I doubt that I had had two beers in my life before this, but when Todd asked if I wanted to go, I agreed. We sat down, sipped our Miller High Lifes, and solved a few of the world’s problems. At one point I asked him why he had dropped out and enlisted when he could have stayed in school and avoided the draft. He said that he had problems. I asked him what kind of problems. He replied, “You know, heroin.” That shut me up.

A couple of guys went AWOL. One fellow from our platoon who went “over the hill” was a Latino named Victor. He was caught a few days later and brought back. Our drill sergeant gathered us together and told us that we should welcome Victor back and not quiz him about his attempted escape. He bugged out again a few days later, and we never saw him again.

I spent most of my spare time reading murder mysteries. I also bought a couple when, after a few weeks, we were allowed to go to the PX. I was known in the company as “the guy who reads.” I always carried a book with me. We had plenty of free time, but it usually came in intervals of only 15-20 minutes. These breaks were announced with “Light ’em up if you got ’em.” We had to sit on the ground. I would persuade someone to sit back-to-back with me while I read a few pages.

Having seen nearly every episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies”, I knew that the species existed, but I had never encountered one. There were quite a few hillbillies in our company and one in our squad of a dozen or so guys. He had a radio that was set to a local country station, and he turned it on every morning. I started every day in a bad mood for eight weeks.

There were two other subspecies that were new to me: Cajuns and Creoles. Both were very difficult to understand. We had one of the former in our platoon. I could not understand anything that he said. One of the drill sergeants had a Creole accent, which for him seemed to mean the elimination of most consonants. On one occasion one of his troops was missing. He went around screaming what sounded like “Weh ih eye ann owns?” with a heavy emphasis on the last syllable. He meant “Where is my man Jones?”

There were, of course, quite a few black guys. There had been none in my grade school and only one in my high school. Of course, there were some at Michigan, but fewer than you might think. The black guys in Basic did not seem much different from the other guys, but they all called one another “Holmes” or maybe it was “Homes”. One thing that they were adamant about was their refusal to eat pussy, not that I asked about it.

I never witnessed any overt discrimination, but who knows went on when I was not around?

The First Sergeant in any company is called “Top.” I had a run-in with ours. We were strongly encouraged to purchase savings bonds. If everyone did, they would get to post a banner boasting 100% compliance at HQ. Myself and a few others were not persuaded by this line of reasoning.

Top called our obstinate group aside while everyone else was eating lunch. He seated us in a small grandstand at a baseball field so that he could explain why saving money was good. When he finished his spiel, about half the guys, fearful of missing lunch, signed up and rushed to the mess hall.

bondsI asked him what the interest rate on the bonds was. He said that he did not know. I told him that savings bonds at that time paid lower interest than savings accounts at banks. Elsewhere there were much better opportunities for saving than either of these. Both of these statements were true at the time.

He said that he did not believe that anyone offered a better deal than the United States government, a completely bogus argument. He also mentioned that the purchase could be deducted from the paycheck. This was a point, but if I was saving for a rainy day, I considered this period in which we were being paid so little to perform loathsome tasks to be a monsoon. I wanted access to every penny of my money.

Only a couple of us were left at the end. The lunch period was over, but Top got them to fix us something. I am not sure whether the others succumbed, but that banner never went up while I was there.

I had a similar experience with life insurance. The lady at the desk asked me if I knew what insurance was. I replied, “Yes, my father works for a life insurance company. I have worked at life insurance companies for three summers, the last two in actuarial departments. I have a degree in math, and I have passed the first two actuarial exams. I have no dependents, which makes me a poor candidate for insurance, and life insurance policies are horrible investments for someone like me.”

I suspect that she was supposed to press me to buy something, but she just let me go.

I kept a very low profile for all eight weeks, and I avoided any gathering that included officers or sergeants. In the eighth week one of the drill sergeants for another platoon in our company saw me in line at the mess hall. He challenged my right to be in line because he could not remember ever seeing me in eight weeks. The guys with me assured him that I was in their platoon. I was very proud of my anonymity.