Notes in November 11

Always forgive your enemies--nothing annoys them so much.

Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900

From the Crypt to Cryptography, Part One

There are things that happened in my life that don’t fit into my self-concept and being a soldier in the U. S. Army is one of them. My son was a soldier for 20 years, a sergeant in the same Signal Corps that I briefly inhabited, but he is the real thing while I was a chimera.

For one thing, he was regular Army, while I was a visitor, volunteered into a special program that assured me that I would be a temporary draftee unless a great cataclysm occurred and I would be called up to defend my nation with my life.

As it happened, I lucked into one of the peculiar periods of peace that confounded our leaders and frustrated our war-mongering economy. Hey, it was 1958 and Korea (1950-1953) was an old nightmare and Viet Nam (1965-1975) was a noxious stew that was not yet on America’s backburner.

I have read enough novels to know that one usually blocks out catastrophic occurrences and they can only be recalled after huge outlays to psychiatrists or psychoanalysts. But, as you will see, I have no shell-shocked half-memory of being a simple soldier and the things that distinguished my brief military career, although unique, were generally unremarkable and non-violent. I simply had not chosen to remember it very well until today.

Most of it can be glossed over with a statement of facts: I was inducted and received at Fort Jackson, SC, marshaled, marched and mashed into shape on Sand Hill at Fort Benning, GA, and prepped, polished and popped out at Fort Monmouth, NJ a year later.

The aim of the Army was to make me a compliant, card-carrying killer, and I went through all the motions in unison with my squad, company, battalion, etc. I learned to dance with my M1 rifle and maintain it as clean and crisp as my closely-cropped head of hair and my neurotically neat foot locker. I learned to throw grenades into unoccupied bunkers, blast at pop up targets while running in formation (the Army had just replaced centuries of shooting at silly bull’s eyes with simulated battlefield situations), stab stationery dummies with my bayonet, and shimmy on my back in the mud under barbed wire while machine guns fired tracer bullets overhead.

I passed all my tests—even PT (physical training), sometimes at the head of my group. Because of my brilliant mathematical, logical and technological abilities (I jest), I was assigned after Boot Camp to the Signal Corps’ elite school at Fort Monmouth, a 40-week program that would prepare me as an expert in cryptography with a specialization in cryptographic machine repair. If anyone was swimming to be a fish out of water, I was headed for the ionosphere.

But let me tell you about the good parts of Basic Training. My skills at making my bed brought me to the attention of Lt. Chavez, the officer in charge of my unit. Chavez was of Mexican descent, I think. I know he was absolutely the neatest, most put together and GI little man I had ever—or would ever—meet. His uniform was always perfect, his brass brassier than anyone on Sand Hill (and there were thousands), the crease in his carefully tailored khakis sharper than a Moorish scimitar. Even his tiny black mustache above the lip of his perfectly burnished brown face was razor sharp and every hair on his head was always plastered in place—and remained so in the barracks, on the parade field, even in the swamps during war games. Explosions could not ruffle that man’s dementedly decent demeanor.

Chavez told me that he reviewed my record and that he had selected (in effect, commanded) me to represent my unit as our ambassador to the Columbus community. My duty was to attend a tea hosted by a bevy of Southern Ladies and Gentleman, smile, tell no military secrets, and try not to embarrass the U. S. Army in general and our Sand Hill unit in particular.

In return I got out of KP and much of my guard duty. I didn’t mind not having to peel potatoes for a while, but I sort of enjoyed guard duty and would miss it. I got to spend time alone and if challenged, I could proudly recite my Social Security number. Learning that number (it is still the only long sequence of digits that I can rattle off today) was one of the great accomplishments of my undiagnosed dyscalculia youth.

The tea was in a grand plantation-style house and there were many men and woman wearing white linen (I swear I remember and I am not making this up). I was wearing my dull green dress uniform, which always made me feel like an asparagus, and I admit enjoying being fussed over by several matrons who plied me with mint juleps. I had never had a mint julep and I was surprised by the amount of herbage in it. It tasted like salad steeped in lemonade.

Asked of my interests, I told me hosts that I enjoyed choral singing, oil painting and listening to Beethoven, Bach and Brahms (I decided against name-dropping Stravinsky). I thought that would make our hordes of killers being trained in their backyard appear more civilized.

When I returned and the reports were in, Chavez was pleased, although he didn’t tell me so. He did tell me that I was to be invited to try out for the Fort’s chorus: its director had apparently been at the Mint Julip affair. Passing the audition was a cinch. I was one of the few willing and able tenors on the base and I soon joined about 40 or so of my fellow recruits, many of whom were black and possessed deep bass voices, on the choral team.

As far as I remember, none of us could sight read music, but (after a few rehearsals) we could all belt out “Go down, Moses!” and other Bible Belt classics in hearty a cappella harmony. My free time and much of what would have been extra duty time at Fort Benning was spent entertaining the faithful in churches and the masses in concerts. I came across a photo (see below) of the chorus recently when cleaning out some old boxes and it sparked long-suppressed memories of how I sang my way through basic training.