Wednesday, December 11, 2013

A Career in Uniform

  After writing about my maiden ocean voyage to Europe [1], I got an email from my cousin G [2], "swapping stories" by describing his own first trans-Atlantic trip.  It was courtesy of the U. S. Army on his way to a tour of duty in Germany: nine days in 1953 as an inductee, bunked in a "stateroom" with fifty others on cots stacked three high.  My own year-earlier trip now seems quite effete, but the comparison reminds me how lucky I was never to have been drafted.  In a strange way, as it turned out, the country was even luckier.

  I did have a career in uniform of a sort, which by default ended in my making my particular contribution to the nation's military.  That career started modestly when I was just 12.  I had joined the Boy Scouts immediately after America was drawn into World War II by the attack on Pearl Harbor, doing so because most of my friends did.  I was also attracted by the idea of wearing a uniform in those military-dominated times—although that brought an uneasy reminder to my mother of another uniform I would have to don if the war lasted long enough.  (It didn't.)

  There was also the excitement of automatically becoming a member of the Civil Defense Corps, a group being trained to respond to an enemy air raid.  When the sirens sounded, I was not to shelter in the central hallway of my apartment with my family, but to put on my uniform with a special lightning-bolt armband signifying that I was a messenger, and report to my assigned command post in New York City's streets.  Despite my mother's immediate anxiety about that role, the likelihood of an air raid was near zero, since it could only be done from Germany's sole aircraft carrier, which would have been detected long before getting within range of our shores.  Enemy U-boats were of course always present offshore, but they were more concerned with sinking ships than lobbing a few shells at cities.  Each "air raid" was only a test of the system;

  What could be more thrilling to a 12-year-old boy than being outside in pitch-black streets, delivering messages from one command post to another, notifying wardens of violations of the blackout, learning to distinguish between incendiary and other types of bombs and what to do about each, and generally participating in a war "game"?  

  Some five years later, the war over, my love affair with uniforms had vanished.  By then, I was in the Reserve Officers Training Corps in college, compulsory for two years, and had to wear a uniform on the three days a week when drills were held.  I could not have been a worse student in ROTC, getting in it the only C grades of my college career.  Faultlessly participating in lockstep drills on the parade ground was beyond me;  indeed, with my mind on physics or chemistry, I twice to my embarrassment dropped my rifle during a review of the regiment held in the armory for a visiting general from Washington.  (Do you have any idea how a dropped rifle echoes in an armory?  I can still hear the reverberations.)  Once, when disassembling a sidearm—supposedly I was to be able to do it with my eyes closed—I let go of some doohickey I shouldn't have, releasing a spring that, shooting across the room, almost permanently closed my sergeant's eye.  My marksmanship with a rifle was so poor that my allotment of bullets was sequestered for use by the rifle team.  And I cannot imagine how I did it, but I even failed an open-book exam on strategy and tactics! 

  So it was very fortunate for the security of the nation that I was able to opt out of ROTC at the end of two years, ending my career in uniform.  If I had been forced to stay in for four years, I would have graduated from college with a second-lieutenant's commission in the Army reserve.  My God!—who knows what military disasters might have been precipitated if I had been placed in the front lines in that capacity?  The country was much more secure for having had me in a support role in defense industries, as described in [3] and [4].