28043877
All of this week, we have been rightly celebrating our military heroes. I am especially grateful to the U.S. Air Force, which proved its resiliency when it survived my stint as an active duty reservist in 1961.
Back in the day, males were subject to the draft. You couldn’t get a decent job unless you fulfilled your military duty. So it was in March of ’61, after graduating college and a couple of brief broadcasting jobs, I enlisted in the Air Force Reserve. The enlistment required me to serve six months active duty and attend meetings once a month for five-and-a-half years. and what we gently referred to as “summer camp” for two weeks each summer. I didn’t know what I was in for, but neither did the Air Force.
By way of preface, know that at the time I entered the military, I may have been the most overprotected 23-year-old on the planet. Generally speaking, I had no life experience and my only skill was an ability to do basketball play-by-play and to deliver a convincing beer commercial (though I hated the taste of beer).
Basic training was held at Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas. The Air Force tried to gently ease me into the military life. Our unit was housed four to a room dormitory-style rather than in open-bay barracks. We were a medical supply unit. There was an air of civility about things when compared to the infantry. None of us smoked. We were all college graduates in our early 20s, including a guy named Wolf, who was German and a recent naturalized U.S. citizen.
I got off on the wrong foot during the first inspection shakedown when my paperback copy of “Exodus” was confiscated. In ’61, paperback was synonymous with pornography, according to the military (sorry Leon Uris). Several weeks later, while cleaning the lieutenant’s office, I noticed my dog-eared copy of “Exodus” had made it on to his bookshelf.
The Air Force assumed a certain maturity on my part. We were both to become sadly disappointed. Airmen were expected to hem their own fatigues (what without Mom helping?). I tried. I really did try. The result was that I sewed the cuffs of my fatigue pants together. My roommate Wolf became exasperated with my incompetence (did I tell you he was German?). He proposed to hem my fatigues if I would spit shine his shoes. A word about spit shining. The pure spit shine is accomplished by applying a thin layer of polish. You dip a cotton ball in water and rub the shoe surface until it is bright and shiny. What could go wrong?
Wolf curled into a corner of the room as lights went out. He used a flashlight to hem my fatigue pants. Meanwhile, I was busy on the other side of the room vigorously spit shining his shoes in the dark. To this day, I’m not sure why it happened. The following morning, Wolf handed me my finished fatigues and I gave him his spit-shined shoes. Only they weren’t spit shined; they had been completely stripped of any polish. Whatever liquid (alcohol?) I had used wasn’t water. Wolf taught me a variety of profane expressions in German that morning. Things got worse — much worse. I fell asleep on the top bunk facing the wall and woke up thinking that I was blind.
We rotated washing our underwear and socks. I used too much suds the first time and flooded our laundry room. The second time it was my turn, I mistakenly used alcohol instead of Clorox and it resulted in some nifty little holes in our undershorts. I was as bad marching on the drill pad as I had been on the dance floor in civilian life.
Our drill instructor made me a road guard. With white helmet firmly in place at the head of my unit, I made a column left when our sergeant shouted “column right” on the way to the base bowling alley. When I discovered that I was marching alone (my unit was off in the distance), I hustled to catch up with them. That’s when our drill instructor suggested that I desert (I would have if I knew my way home). My marching never got any better, even as a road guard. Marching in the streets of San Antonio, I failed to halt traffic (we were almost massacred right outside the Alamo).
As you might suspect, I wasn’t any better on maneuvers. On the obstacle course, four of us carried one of us in a litter with live fire above our heads. My team wisely decided to make me the guy in the litter.
I cut my finger on the lid of a can during kitchen patrol duty and bled into the applesauce. The cook told me not to worry because he was putting maraschino cherry juice into the applesauce anyway to give it some color. In the female chow hall during kitchen patrol duty, a female officer caught me offering a pretty WAF (Women in Air Force) an extra slice of pie. “You’re here to feed ’em, not f— ’em,” she said. A life lesson well earned.
Thank you, Air Force. We both survived.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview. com.
28043877
