Harry and Me

    Harry S. Truman is my favorite President.. He was unassuming, tough, and morally impeccable. He wasn’t much of a speechmaker, perhaps because he didn’t have a platoon of highly-paid toadies crafting pseudo-Churchillian phrases for him to read from a flip chart (they didn’t have teleprompters in those days).
    In 1945 Truman was confronted with the most profound decision a man has ever been forced to make ─ whether or not to use the atomic bomb. Contrary to the fears of some and the moral qualms of others (including many who had helped create the weapon), he gave the go-ahead to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki thus presenting the warlords of the Rising Sun with a nightmare Hobson’s choice ─ shameful surrender or shameful surrender. With a single brutal stroke, Harry Truman had forestalled a reenactment of the battle of Iwo Jima on a scale 7,000 times as devastating, a scenario that would have led to the most horrific bloodbath in all of mankind’s sorry history as the American military machine burned its way across the sacred homeland of 80 million Japanese men, women, and children in a campaign that would have made Sherman’s March to the Sea seem like a ladies’ tea party.
    (As a reward for his wisdom and bravery, Truman’s memory is now sullied in Japan by the spiritual heirs of the very warlords that led their people to disaster, and in America and Europe by a cadre of intellectually and morally corrupt revisionists of the Che Guevara left.)
    For my money, however, the most important, axis-shifting action by the plain-spoken man from Missouri came in 1948 when, by executive order, he desegregated the armed forces of the United States.
    Prior to 1948, black soldiers were sequestered in all-Negro units that, typically, carried out non-combat support duties under the command of white officers,. In addition to being prevented from enjoying the dubious glories of dying in the trenches or being blown to bits by bombs and artillery, black soldiers found themselves relegated to the lowliest and most demeaning chores that attend the functioning of a modern army.
    Truman’s simple, straightforward executive order not only put the black soldier on an equal footing with his white brethren, but served to ignite the civil rights revolution in America.
    As a side effect, however, it also ignited me into the 522nd Infantry Battalion, Separate, at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, as the first white man in that all-black outfit.
    A circuitous trajectory led to my emergence as a hero of black liberation.
    The apotheosis got underway thanks to my Astoria, Long Island, draft board which dragged me out of grad school at the University of Wisconsin and thrust me, kicking and screaming, into the U. S. Army.
    After acing the Armed Forces Qualification Test (99th percentile) and Army General Classification Test (99th percentile), the NCOs at Fort Dix were so stunned by my brilliance that they assigned me to basic training at Indian Town Gap, Pennsylvania, where I spent 16 weeks learning how to pull the trigger of an M-1 rifle as a member of the U. S. Infantry.
    Following my sojourn at the Gap (AKA The Asshole of the World) I wangled an appointment to the Field Artillery Officer Candidate School at Fort Sill thereby delaying getting my frozen ass shot off in North Korea.
    I lasted three weeks in OCS.
    My major failing as officer materal was lack of loose neck skin, a condition that prevented me from forming the requisite multiple wrinkles beneath my chin when standing at rigid attention. Apparently the possession of sufficient under-jaw flab to create soldierly throat wrinkles is a tried and true way to sort out officer-material wheat from wimp chaff such as I. I suppose I could have disputed the point. Instead, I yielded to the battle-hardened expertise of professional soldiers, many far older and stupider than I, whose tolerance of abuse at West Point and the Citadel confirmed them as superb leaders as well as masters in selecting future leaders who, like themselves, were emotionally equipped to lead men to glorious graves and heroic deaths.
    After my ejection from OCS, I was interviewed for reassignment by a bird colonel with a proud southern accent. Despite my deferential manner, obsequious smile, and overall nerdishness, the bird took an instant dislike to me. Perhaps it was my New York accent. Perhaps it was his suspicion that I was averse to being shot at by gooks. Perhaps he was pissed off in general at being stuck in Lawton, Oklahoma, rather than being appointed to a regimental HQ near the Yalu River where he could oversee his troops getting their heads blown off by invading waves of Red Chinese. Most likely, however, it was the lack of flab beneath my chin.
    Regardless of motive, the outcome was reassignment to the 522nd.Infantry Battalion, Separate.
    The mission of the 522nd was to perform shit details for the post ─ guard duty, parades, KP for the ROTC faggots at their two-week summer camps, honor guards for visiting celebrities, politicians, and kindred idiots, garbage cleanup to keep the grounds spic and span ─ all in all a fitting operational environment for an all- black outfit.
    Unfortunately, though President Truman had decreed balance in the racial composition of the various sub-elements of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard, he had not seen fit to change their functionalities.
    I wish I could write of the tribulations I suffered at the hands of my black battalion mates as an innocent white lad from the slums of Queens, a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, the possessor of degrees in math and billiards from Cornell University, and the scion of a father who taught me to keep my sideburns short and of a mother who believed Joseph Stalin represented the Second Coming.
    What blockbuster novels I could have penned about my suffering.
    What a hard-hitting, socially-conscious motion picture Spike Lee could have produced ─ "Wite Boyz Indie Ah-Me" starring Denzell Washington, Harvey Keitel, Charlie Sheen, and Matthew Broderick.
    I would have been rich...rich...rich!
    Alas...nothing of significance happened after I joined the 522nd.
    Now and then, one of my fellow internees would piss me off and I’d tell him to go fuck himself.
    At other times I would piss off one of my fellow internees and he would tell me to go fuck myself.
    But, most of the time I and my barrack mates went our own unmerry ways as if we were ordinary people rather than (gasp) blacks and (gasp) whites. We minded our own business, farted quietly in our bunks, borrowed money from the same usurers, bemoaned the same lack of pussy, jerked off in the same toilet stalls, pissed into the same spittoons in the rec room, and checked off the same days on the same calendars until we could get the fuck out of the fucking army and go back to living the same useless lives that we lived before we were roped into the service.
    And on Saturday nights we’d end up in the same crappy bars in downtown Lawton smoking the same cancer sticks and drinking the same crappy 3.2 beer.
    Despite my lack of under-jaw fat I prospered while I was with the 522nd 
    I became an expert in the art of spit-shining.
    I learned that it paid to carry a clipboard wherever I went so that the duty officer would think I was busy.
    Within months I was promoted to Private First Class.
    After little more than a year, I achieved my lifelong goal ─ a second stripe on my shirt sleeve indicating Corporalship.
    (I sported the extra stripe for two months until I wittily suggested that Master Sergeant Posey fuck himself in the ass, a remark he took the wrong way and had me busted back to Private E2.)
    Word reached the White House of my stellar performance with the 522nd. Negotiations with North Korea took on new urgency and agreement was reached between the warring combatants. Although my role in ending the conflict was kept secret, I was rewarded with a three-day pass to Oklahoma City where I engaged in an unsuccessful attempt to locate and employ a prostitute.
    A few months later, my two years of penal servitude complete, I was granted an honorable discharge and presented with a set of dress ODs, an Ike jacket, a used horse-blanket overcoat, and a pair of combat boots. I gathered up my loot and hightailed it back to New York in my two-door Hudson Pacemaker to resume my life of decadence, hedonism, and slow-motion decay before some random NCO could order me to clean the officers’ latrine.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Posted by dome of glass at 7/7/2011 8:00 AM
Categories: Biography, Humor
Tags: Korean War desegregation Harry Truman
 

What did you think of this article?




Trackbacks
Trackback specific URL for this post
  • No trackbacks exist for this post.
Comments
Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Leave a comment

Submitted comments are subject to moderation before being displayed.

 Name

 Email (will not be published)

 Website

Your comment is 0 characters limited to 3000 characters.