Memoir 10: I defend the Free World

 Not me.  Wrong war.

I was just the right age for the Korean War but, like so many of my contemporaries, I avoided the draft by going to college.  (That was not the main reason I went to college, of course, but it helped.  At that time nobody decided to take a year off, grab a backpack, and tour Europe.  If you tried that, and you were male, chances were that you found yourself with a backpack – and a rifle – touring the mountains of Korea.)  Also, many of my contemporaries who finished college at that time avoided the army by (a) getting married, and (b) going to graduate school.   I was married, yes, but – having graduated in a subject I had no desire to pursue,  there was no graduate program in my immediate future   Thus I was dismayed to find  myself a private in the U.S. Army in September of 1955.  I served until early summer of 1957, when they let me out to return to Stanford to study geology.  My serial number was (is) US 56 264 356 – seared into my memory.  I will forget my SS#, my home address, even where to find the nearest toilet - before that number disappears from my brain.

When I was called up for my physical I had high hopes of being classified 4F – which meant: “we don’t want you”.  No such luck.  Even though my left ear didn’t work and my eyesight was crappy, I qualified.  So, that very day, I found myself at Fort Ord, near Monterey, California.  And then it really got weird.

It seems that the army was planning an “experiment”.  They were investigating whether it was possible to cram all the stuff you were supposed to learn in the regular eight-weeks of basic training, into four weeks.  For the opening round of this experiment they assembled a full company of college boys, supplemented by a few high school kids who had scored exceptionally well on their army “I.Q. test”.  Some of the guys in my company had been sitting around for three or four weeks, pulling details like hoeing weeds, while waiting for the company to fill.  I wasted almost two weeks that way myself.  Then we got started.

They had picked a special “faculty” for us, I believe.  First of all, behind every bush there was a major or light colonel in the medical corps – psychologists, I suppose.  Also, our drill sergeant was certainly handpicked –he was the most mellow drill sergeant the world has ever known.  They messed up with the company top sergeant, however – he was smart, omnipresent, and mildly sadistic.  I assume the company officers were similarly special, but they were august creatures that we hardly ever saw.  So we attacked the curriculum. 

Well, hell, there was a little stuff you might call “academic”, meaning it required you to use part of your brain, but it was trivial – totally no sweat.  But then there was the rest of the “curriculum”, which required things like good conditioning, reasonable hand-to-eye coordination, the quick recognition of which foot was “left” and which “right” – that sort of thing.  At this, I guess, we were terrible.  I will give you some examples.

One day at the rifle range we were prone, preparing to shoot at targets 200 yards away.  The targets were set up on a tall sand dune (Ord was essentially on the beach.)  Suddenly a jack rabbit broke from the brush at the bottom of the dune and ran diagonally upwards across it toward the top.  The thing must have had a death wish, because it ran right through the cluster of targets. Or, maybe it just knew its enemy.  All 40-50 of us (my company) immediately fired all our 20 rounds each at that rabbit. That’s a minimum of 800 shots, maybe 1000.  The rabbit survived.  It didn’t thumb its nose at us when it reached the top, but if it had had a thumb it might have done so.  For wasting all that ammunition we got to trot about ten miles in the hot sun, with full pack.

A personal story:  I am not what you would call a crack shot.  In fact, at shooting I am undeniably terrible.  So when the day came that we all needed to “Qualify” on the M1 rifle, I was bound to be a disgrace to the unit.  Not only can’t I hold a rifle very still, but I couldn’t even see the damned target!  They (the army) had taken away my civilian glasses and furnished me with a standard-issue pair, which were harder to break, I guess.  The only problem was that the prescription was wrong: I couldn’t see jack s---  beyond about 100 ft.  (They later straightened this out, of course.)  On one exercise I hit my target about 10 times out of 20 – but the guy next to me scored 22.  I had shot at his target part of the time, being unable to read the numbers designating which target was which.  Well, anyway, after a while it became apparent that everybody in the unit was going to qualify, except me.  That’s when the old, mellow drill sergeant rolled up to me (he was pretty fat) and said “Beck, do you want me to shoot this last target for you.”  You can guess my reply.  Well, when the signal sounded old sarge slowly lowered himself to the ground, got comfortable, fiddled with the rifle and then, only a few seconds before time was up, put 20 holes in my bulls eye.  So I got the marksman medal and old sarge was spared the humiliation of having an unsatisfactory platoon.  Thank God there are people like him in the U.S. Army.

So, the unofficial verdict on my company was that it was the worst in living memory.  As one RA (Regular Army – not draftees) soldier explained it: When the army tells you to do something, you are supposed to do it immediately, without thinking.  You guys wrinkle your brow and ask “Why?”

Then after that I was sent to Ft. Sam Houston, Texas, near San Antonio, for my second eight weeks of training.  That wasn’t much fun, either.

At Ft. Sam I was trained to be a corpsman.  Corpsman sweep out hospital wards, make beds, and empty bed pans.  Because of my rock-bottom “physical profile” (remember the bad hearing and the glasses) it turned out that there were only two things that I could become in the army – corpsman, or supply handler*.  I might have chosen the latter but they didn’t give me a chance: I was ordered to Ft. Sam, to learn which side of a bedpan needs to be up.  I also learned how to unroll bandages, spoon-feed wounded soldiers – and even give shots.  They showed us some of the things an aid man would do in battle (these are the guys that go out to treat the wounded), but we were considered too dumb to actually learn these things. 

*Actually, this isn’t precisely correct.  I was offered the opportunity to go to OCS (Officer Candidate School) and become a 2^ND Lieutenant.  This always has struck me as strange:  I was too blind and deaf to be a regular soldier, but I could command a bunch of regular soldiers, maybe even in combat.  I might have gone to OCS were it not for the stipulation that I would have to give the army a full four years.   Forget it!

Well, some glimpses of life at Ft. Sam.

Mostly we had to learn a lot of really dumb stuff.  We did have some field exercises: Once I was sent out to pretend to be a forward observer, looking for tanks.  When I saw one I was supposed to radio in – and then get severally wounded.  I fell in my tracks, and sure enough a pair of aid men found me, put me on a stretcher, and hauled me back to a tent hospital, where I was spoon fed, had my “wounds” wrapped and re-wrapped – and narrowly avoided being given a shot – I threatened the guy who was supposed to give it with instant death, and we squirted the sterile water out on the ground. 

There is little positive that I can say about Ft. Sam Houston, except that the food was good.  However, once I was carrying my tray to a table, tripped, and spilled the whole thing on the dress uniform of an officer.  I expected death, or at least prison – but he merely glanced at me as if I was too contemptible to notice, spooned most of the mashed potatoes and gravy off his jacket, and went back to talking to his friends.  I got a rag and tried to clean him off, but he waved me away.  I suspect that he was looking forward to the day when he could leave Ft. Sam and get into some nice clean combat zone, SE Asia perhaps.

The only good thing about Ft. Sam was that we got a pass nearly every weekend, and my friend Sam Sims was going to college in Austin, which was not very far away.  We went to movies, drank a little beer – and even went to see some geology.  We didn’t pursue the local women: I was married, and Sims was shy.  Sam was getting his M.S. in geology there at U. Texas.  I believe that it was there in Austin that I began to realize that I might enjoy doing geology, too.  If you have read my bit on Caltech you already know Sam.  He was one of my lifelong best friends.

So, anyway, the eight weeks passed in what seemed like – well, fifteen  weeks – and at last it was time to be informed of our permanent duty-stations.  Recall that this was just at the tag end of the Korean War: an armistice of sorts had been signed and nobody was getting shot – but the army still wanted lots of “boots on the ground” in South Korea, Given that, probably 80-90% of my “graduating class” went to Korea.  God must have been on my side, however – I was detailed to the 2^nd General Hospital, Landstuhl, Germany!  Oh, joy, undeserved!   

That piece of luck made the difference between 18 very unpleasant months – and a lengthy adventure.  My wife, Virginia, joined me when her school year ended, after which we traveled a lot, cheerfully endured rotten housing conditions as only the young can do – and, generally had a ball.  It’s funny: When I think back over my years in the army all I remember is a general feeling of misery, boredom, and gloom – but all the vignettes that pop into my brain were fun!   I will now tell you about some of them.

However, before I go into life at Landstuhl Army Hospital, I ought to tell you about getting there.  From Ft. Sam we were put on a train and transported to Ft. Dix, New Jersey.  (Best institutional food in the world!)  Then, when a troop ship came in, was unloaded, and fumigated, we were marched on board – Class A uniforms, gear in a duffle bag.  The ship was at dock, the sea like glass, no breeze at all.  As we marched on board and felt the ship, not dock, under foot – about 20% of my fellow warriors broke ranks and ran to the rail!  And that gives you an idea about how the next ten days went.

The North Atlantic in February is not a pleasure voyage, especially in a big floating cavern of a troop ship.  We were given “berths” – hammocks, really, in stacks of four.  By day two more than half of my fellow “passengers” were near death.  Fortunately, I seem to be immune to motion sickness – and I was in a top bunk.  (You can imagine what it must have been like to be in a bottom bunk – at least until the soldiers above you were completely emptied out.  Some of those guys, I swear, never once left their hammocks.  When we reached Bremerhaven I imagine they just carted the corpses away.)

This being the army, we had to be assigned to some duty station.  I was lucky and ended up in the “vegetable room”, where the Philippine cooks prepared parts of lunch and dinner – and scrambled eggs for breakfast.  There were about ten of us assigned to help them, but all except me were near death.  That meant that I was given the duty of assembling the emptied crates and boxes, hauling them on deck – and throwing them overboard.   (Normally we weren’t allowed on deck, but – as I said – I was lucky.)  The cooks didn’t give a damn where I was, so I would just snuggle down in a coil of rope somewhere out of the wind and spray – and watch the boxes recede into the distance.  When I couldn’t see them anymore I would go back below, gather some more detritus, and do it again.  That way I avoided watching my fellow soldiers struggle with nausea while cracking eggs. 

There are many more vivid scenes of this time of life that flash unbidden across my mind, but I will spare you.  For instance, you don’t want to know what it is like to sit at the breakfast table eating eggs and bacon – and watching the guy across from you attempt his first meal in, maybe, three days – with a fork in one hand, and a paper bag in the other.  No, you really don’t want to know.

But, we got there at last.  Now to return to the main narrative.

I will start with some of my misadventures before Virginia arrived.  I thought of myself (at age 23) as a hardened beer drinker, but I had not reckoned with German beer.  It was available only in one liter bottles, it seemed. These cost one mark – about 25 cents.  Unless we had screwed up monumentally, every weekend we were off from Saturday noon until Monday morning.  Thus, on Saturday evenings a bunch of us would walk down toward the town (the hospital was on top of a hill), past houses filled with loudly accommodating women – and into a “Gast Haus”.  These places featured German beer in liter bottles, an “om pa” band, and a few women looking for company.  I would invariably tell myself that one bottle would be enough - but it tasted so good, and I was having so much fun, that I would order another, and sometimes even a third.    Thus it was that about midnight we would stagger back up the hill, through the M.P. gate, and into our barracks.  I would get into bed, close my eyes – and then, of course, the damned bed would begin to sway back and forth and perform acrobatic tricks.  Three or so minutes of that and I was down the hall, my arms around a toilet – where I would spend most of the night.  Then I would keep to my bed most all day Sunday, trying to get over my head ache and persuade myself that I could make it to the mess hall.  Invariably I swore that I would not do that again, but the next weekend, of course – I did.  Virginia’s arrival got me out of the barracks and saved me from a sure death from alcohol poisoning.

One time several of us somehow acquired use of a vehicle and took off Saturday noon for Heidelberg.  We split up: I think they were looking for girls, but I was trying to study Heidelberg culture or history, or something like that.  However, I drank my share of beer, and I can’t remember much of what happened into the evening.  However, I do remember being part of a wedding celebration, sitting at a long table, linking arms with two German guys on either side – and singing what might have been traditional wedding songs – in fluent German!  I don’t have any idea how this came about.  All I remember is the bride smiling at me.  I thought she looked like and angel!  We got back to base about sunup, drove through the gate, flipping off the M.P. in charge, and got into bed.  You can guess where I was three minutes later. 

Finally, Virginia arrived, and I was saved. 

We lived in the archetypal “cold-water flat”, in this case the basement of a modest house along a main street of Landstuhl.  The owners spoke precisely no English, and my German was even worse than that.  I can’t remember how I found the place, or how I managed to get it rented, but I did.  Communication eased up a little when Virginia arrived: her parents had spoken a lot of German, and she recognized a few phrases.  Still, we got by on sign language and facial expressions for most of the time we lived there.

So, this “apartment” had – if I remember correctly – a coal stove for heat, room for a bed, a table, and a few chairs – and a bathroom containing a toilet, and a sink.  The sink, however, emitted only cold water.  We heated water on the coal stove – and took “sponge baths”.  For cooking I seem to recall a sort-of hot plate.  It was amazing how content we were in that primitive dump.

Somehow, before Virginia arrived, I had managed to buy an automobile.  It was a 1954 Volkswagen bug.  (We took it home with us and had it for quite a few years.  It was a good car.)  It was quite unlike any VW bug most of you will ever have seen.  For instance:  it had no gas gauge.  There was a “reserve tank” of a few liters.  You simply drove until the car gave signs of running out of gas, and then you kicked over a lever to access the reserve.  This worked fine – so long as you remembered to kick the lever back after your next fill.  If you didn’t, you did quite a little walking.  I can’t tell you how many times I made this mistake, but it was more than once.   Another peculiarity of that machine was its turn-signal mechanism.  If you wanted to make a turn you toggled the appropriate lever – and an arrow-like object about eight inches long popped out from the side of the car, pointing in the correct direction.  They weren’t lighted, but they did have reflectors.  We G.I.s called them “machs nix sticks”, implying that they were highly unreliable indicators of the driver’s intentions.  Amazingly, the U.S. let that car into the country.  When we were repatriated we picked up our VW in NY City, drove it through Manhattan, and across the country.  It was our only wheels for several years thereafter.  It got maybe 25 miles to the gallon, which I considered amazing at the time.

Before I get into our various adventures I should tell you about the general “geo-political” situation.  The Cold War was in full swing, and the Russians had an enormous army just across the border.  While we were in Landstuhl the Hungarian people revolted against their Moscow-imposed Commie leaders, fought bravely, radioed the “Free World” repeatedly for help – and got stomped.  We (America, mainly) had been urging the Soviet-dominated states of Eastern Europe to “rise up against their oppressors”.  When they did, we chickened out and let them die.  The painful fact was that we didn’t have the necessary resources in place to take on Moscow, and also that the American people were sick and tired of war.  I have to admit that, fundamentally, I was glad this was the case; I had no desire to get my butt shot off!

To give you a feel for the situation:  About once each month we had things called “alerts”.  Alerts were make-believe invasions.  They were declared randomly, and theoretically nobody knew they were coming.  The way I would learn that an alert was on was, first, by hearing the jet fighters from Ramstein Airbase (a few miles to the west), heading for the eastern border,  roaring so low over the hospital that the windows  would quiver, and, second, watching and hearing all our med-evac helicopters take off and head east.  The field hospital people responded to an alert by loading their gear on trucks, to await deployment.  As I will explain later, I was assigned to the Personnel Department.  Our job was to load all records on some trucks – and skedaddle to western France!  There was no question that, if the Russians attacked, we were going to retreat.  Oddly enough, this didn’t bother us (young folks) at all.  The officers may have worried, but not us. 

So, now – how did I end up in Personnel?  Well, the times then were quite different than I’m told they are now.  Your average soldier was – let’s face it – not very bright.  Many (most?) hadn’t finished high school, and I suspect that a lot of them had never even started.  For instance – on the troop train from Bremerhaven to Landstuhl I spent a long time and considerable effort explaining to some of the guys that they didn’t use dollars in Germany, and that what they did use (the mark) was worth about 25 cents.  This one kid kept saying: “I don’t get it!  You mean in this country a dolla ain’t worth a dolla?”

So, anyway, it happened that when I got to the Landstuhl base they were in need of someone to be the Officers Pay and Allotments clerk.  I may have been the only person in the bunch who was comfortable with reading, let alone arithmetic.  They actually ASKED me if I wanted to work in Personnel, rather than on a ward, sweeping and emptying bed pans.  Naturally, I said “yes”.  My only regret from that decision was that I had to wear my Class A (dress) uniform to work, instead of the comfortable smock-like- things that everybody else got to wear. 

As officer’s pay clerk I helped a lot of young doctors with their pay problems.  Most of our doctors were captains; they were just out of medical school and using the army as their internship, or something like that.  The RA (regular army) docs were majors and above; the base commander was a full colonel.  The base commander’s wife was head of nursing – she was a lieutenant colonel.  We called her Mrs. Colonel Hays.  She took a liking to me after I fixed some problems for her; she used to pay me social visits in the office!  This may have helped preserve me from the wrath of my superiors- and wrath, truth to tell, sometimes would have been justified.  Mrs. Colonel Hays was a nice, sweet, grandmotherly type.  Her husband, however, was an austere and dignified, unapproachable old gentleman, with whom one did not screw. 

One benefit of my job was that I got to know so many of these young captains.  Most of them were married, some with kids.  They lived in on-base housing which had, amongst other marvelous things, showers and genuine kitchens!  Virginia and I baby-sat quite a few times, while they toured Europe.  We probably would have done it for nothing.

Okay, then – we went on trips ourselves.   That VW rolled over many of the roads of Western Europe.  We went to numerous interesting places in Germany on week-end passes.  (Being in Personnel I could almost always score a three-day pass.)  We also saw bits of France, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy.  Belgium, too, I believe – but never Spain, Holland or Denmark, to my current sorrow.  As a G.I., I could buy gasoline at any army base we went near, for next to nothing, which was very useful – the price of gasoline on the European economy was horrible.  We usually stayed in cheap but clean hotels, and ate in good but inexpensive restaurants.  The economic disruption at that time was such that people were happy to accept a pack of cigarettes as a substantial tip.  I could buy them for $1/case (or 10 cents/pack) at the P.X.  A German or Austrian would have paid at least a dollar for that same pack – and a dollar was a lot of money.  If they didn’t smoke, they could sell them.

Now for a few incidents from that time, related truthfully to the best of my ability to remember:

I remember one trip to some town in Germany when I produced a bottle of some kind of Teutonic fire-water.  We consumed it in our room overlooking a busy street – two busy streets, in fact – we were in a corner room – several stories up, fortunately.  My shy and modest wife – lacking my experience with fire-water – became, shall we say – somewhat disoriented - and began to lean out the window, accosting male passers-by.  (She had seen some real pros in action.)  I managed to get her under control before anybody took her up on her implied proposal!  (She will deny this, because she doesn’t remember.  But I do!)

We took one whopping big trip down to the south of France, then over into Italy.  I know we got as far as Florence, but I’m not sure about Rome.  We did visit Venice, and Milan – I remember seeing the Last Supper.  We went through Monte Carlo, and thus also must have passed through Genoa.  I know we went to Pisa, because we bought some gasoline there.  But our greatest adventure occurred in Nice, on the French Rivera.  

On that trip we went through southern France and over the Maritime Alps, heading for the Mediterranean.  On the way down the other side of the mountains the road went through a spectacular series of hairpin turns.  The sun was shining, the air clear and fresh, and I was maybe 23 – so I sailed down that road at top speed, down-shifting at each turn.  One particularly exuberant down-shift near the bottom did something fatal to our poor little engine – blew out the timing gear, I think it was.  We found ourselves about 50 miles from Nice, dead in the water.  Somehow – I marvel at it now – we managed to contact a VW dealership in Nice and get a tow.  The tow itself was one of the more frightening experiences of my life.  We were being pulled by a truck to which we were attached by about 20 ft. of rope.  When the truck slowed, I had to hit the breaks – very quickly.  And, of course, I had to steer.  It was sheer terror, but at last we reached the garage in downtown Nice.  And there our troubles took an unexpected lurch.

We were in France, and all parts for VWs were, of course, made somewhere in Germany.  This was about 40 years before the Common Market – and the French didn’t much like the Germans, to boot.  Consequently, the part had to be ordered from a German supplier, via Paris.  Transportation must have been by goat caravan.  We stayed in Nice for at least a week, probably more.  As a bad joke you might say “Nice was a nice place to be stranded”.  Not if you were nearly broke.

This was even before the day of “Europe for Five Dollars a Day”, and so playing tourist must have been very inexpensive.  But I was a damned private in the U.S. Army!  We found a clean but rudimentary hotel somewhere in the middle of town.  It had hot water for only a few hours per day, but the door locked and it had a bed.  We ate lots of bread and cheese, and drank cheap wine.  We spent a lot of time at the beach – I saw my first bikini there.  Nice might be a great place to stay if you had plenty of money, but we didn’t.  Finally, the part arrived, and we departed.  East through Monte Carlo (no gambling), and on into Italy.  Back through Austria, I think – we spent time in Vienna (boring) and Insbrook (mountainous and exhilarating) .   Did we do Switzerland that trip?  I can’t remember   Switzerland was close to Landstuhl, so we probably went there on another trip.  When did we go up to Belgium and Luxemburg?  Can’t recall.  We took pictures, but they are long lost.  One thing is certain: I wished I had stayed awake during all those History of Western Civilization lectures they had forced on us at Stanford.  Especially the ones on art.  I guess travel is wasted on the young.

So, anyway, life went on like that until it was time to go home and rejoin the real world.  Because I was married they flew me (and my wife, of course) home, in a prop airplane that had to refuel three times between Frankfort and New York – Shannon, Ireland; Thule, Greenland;  and Gannon AFB.  Newfoundland.  That may have been the longest air journey I have ever experienced, in point of time.  But we were young.  When we arrived they took all day to process my discharge papers, and had the effrontery to hand me a hoe and send me out to chop weeds!  I remember as a powerful liberating moment when, as the hour of my release approached, I pitched that hoe into the woods and walked away.  And the rest is history, most of which I have already recorded, have forgotten, or don’t want to talk about.