The citizen army

...I said he had to be kidding...

...Seymour disappeared into the back...

...When the dead time finally came to an end, and fifteen or twenty of us changed into civilian clothes and went to the airport to fly home, a curious thing happened: a kind of silence fell...

...There was nothing to do, after all, but sit around and make jokes about the army and talk to each other...

...I yearned for it to end as prisoners in for twenty to life might urge the creeping minutes to hurry by...

...It is pure time, all duration without beginning or end...

...A group of fifteen or twenty moved on from Ft...

...For the most part I remember long lines of ultimate weapons outside the PX, waiting to buy Cokes and Yankee Doodles...

...We didn't have to report to the base till five, and found a bar to kill a little time...

...I waded through those two months as if waistdeep in water and I doubt life will contain another moment quite like the moment when I changed to civilian clothes and headed for Augusta to fly home...

...The people were simply amazing, the soldiers, the sergeants who trained us, with ribbons from World War II and Korea and stories from bases all over the world...

...Since then it has occurred to me that everyone I met in the army learned the same things I did...

...A lot of people seemed to gain weight...

...But the people stick in my mind...

...It seems such a small thing, but we looked at each other's coats and ties, the color of our shirts, the belts and pants, and knew we were all going back into our own worlds...

...This was 1965...

...At any rate Harvey had the mark of education on him, a large vocabulary and a seeming acquaintance with the names of quite a lot of writers...

...I had vaguely expected a certain rigor in basic training but Ft...

...I was amazed, half by the fact, and half by the astonishing intelligence which had allowed him to disguise the fact and still pick up so much information about the world by simply talking to people and listening to what they said...

...He used to ask what I was reading, wanted to know all about the book and its author, would come back to the subject in following days, comment on what I'd said...

...One or two were such innocents it was dangerous to let them out alone, but the rest knew who they were, what they wanted out of life, how to get it, why to join a union or why not to, how the system worked, which political leaders were frauds, and which not...

...A typical story, I expect...

...He had never been in a taxi...

...Outside the fence was a path, worn bare by the boots of trainees, and beyond the path was the scrub pine flatland of New Jersey...

...Hey, Charlie," we shouted...

...The depot was a perfect rectangle in a remote corner of the base, surrounded by a cyclone fence at least twelve feet high and topped with four or five strands of barbed wire...

...He had never known a white person Commonweal: 390 who wasn't a policeman, a school teacher, a fireman, or a Jewish merchant...

...We sent him back, waited at our end, peered into the gloom, turned up our collars against the cold, listened, heard nothing whatever...

...The sergeants had a tough time getting him to clean his rifle, polish his boots, make his bed, stand at attention...

...Richard R., a phlegmatic kid from Yonkers, shared a tour with Charlie...

...He had been stumped by the simplest of words like "rifle" and "boots" and "base" and "home...

...He had never been off the island of Manhattan...

...It had nothing to do with the war, or America's role in the world, or any sense that the military was a kind of organized denial of life...

...There was a heavy kid from Boston who was a plasterer, he told me what lath was, and said that was the right way to plaster a wall, and added that no one built houses that way anymore...

...I am forced to report that the whites of Charlie's eyes were round and vivid in the darkness...

...He showed me the discards in the wastebasket beside his table, perhaps thirty or forty of them...

...He whirled around...

...But of course Charlie made a caricature of being at attention...

...CharI lie P., for example, a black kid from Harlem, the first, and so far the only, I have ever met...

...He said Charlie never showed at the far end...

...Sergeant Patterson, also black, and perhaps the handsomest man I have ever personally known, would tell him to cut the kidding three times and then march up to him, immaculate and erect in his uniform, bring his face down close to Charlie's, and in a low, malevolent voice say: "P., I want that back straight, I want that gut in, I want those feet at exactly 45 degrees, I want that chin down, and I want your face absolutely blank...

...When he came to a word he couldn't write he scrapped the effort and started over...

...After we told him he was all but suicidal for a week...

...At the gate to Ft...

...Dix there was a huge sign reading: "The Home of the Ultimate Weapon"—meaning the combat infantryman...

...He conceded he could read some newspaper headlines, he could write his name, but that was just about it...

...He'd waited but heard nothing...

...The only change I'd make next time round, would be to insure that a way was found to include everyone—the cripples along with the sound, the scholars along with the truck drivers, the women along with the men...

...A round trip must have taken half an hour or more, most of it in the pitchdarkness between the floodlights...

...It was the National Guard or the draft, and I chose the Guard because I was in a hurry to get on with life, and two years in the Army, after six years of mostly false starts on the way to a BA, seemed a longer time than I had the patience to live...

...Until that moment, we all felt we were pretty much the same THOMAS POWERS Commonweal: 392...

...perhaps he didn't read well, but of course he could read...

...I didn't believe him...

...Waited some more, and finally came back to see if anything had gone wrong...

...It is the longest distance between two points, a kind of eternal bright, breezeless afternoon on the way to a PX movie theater, or the post library, or the bus depot for a ride into town...

...At one time I had worried the sergeants would single me out for having been to Yale and try to take me down a peg or two or ten, but that did not turn out to be the case...

...It had taken a couple of hours...

...There was Robert R., brilliantly funny, who had been an editor at Abrams, the art publisher, and Bruno S., who ran a jewelry store in Pennsylvania, and a tall, lanky Italian from the Bronx, desperately in love, whose orders sent him to Ethiopia where the Army maintained a huge radio-intercept station...

...Finally a shape emerged, so slowly it was hard to make out at first...

...Where've you been...

...Outside someone said, "Seymour, I don't think you're going to like it down here...

...The people I met in five months in the army were simply amazing...

...It sounds strange to say, but I learned they were perfectly capable of running their own lives, needed no help from me or anyone else, had just as much to teach as to learn...

...He was quick, intelligent, sardonic and funny...

...There was Harvey N., a Jewish kid from Brooklyn and four or five towns on Long Island...

...After a minute or two we walked back and joined him, and when our beers were down we left...

...He said he was staying in the guardhouse, he was not leaving, we could send him to prison, he didn't care, he'd do KP for life, but he was not going back out into that gloom with the things...

...We were in Georgia...

...They started off at the same time, down opposite sides of the depot...

...I remember being startled by the whiteness of his fingertips and the palms of his hands...

...Writing a letter home," he said...

...At the four corners of the depot were other floodlights, but the far comers were so far away the light was lost in the intervening darkness...

...Called out and got no answer...

...Dix, N.J., in Februrary was a time of upper respiratory infection—everything from the sniffles to pneumonia—and the physical training program was cut back...

...He was extremely articulate and I figured he must have been to college, at least for awhile...

...One weekend we drove to New York, and on the long drive back the following night he made a confession: he couldn't read...

...Charlie approached, crouching down, rifle at the ready, but he approached backwards, one short slow cautious step at a time...

...Dix to Ft...

...Charlie didn't know where he was from...

...We all looked at each other...

...The sergeants and the other recruits treated college with great respect and the very word Yale seemed to strike them as proof of all but noble birth...

...The two months I spent in signal school at Ft...

...I don't remember running more than half a mile in one go...

...Whenever I read of proposals to return to a citizen army based on a draft, that is what I think about...

...This was in 1965.1 joined the army for National Guard training on February 7, 1965, the day the United States began to bomb North Vietnam, and I was discharged in June...

...I remember being struck that they broke down just about like any other group, with the same number of sensitive ones, the same number of smart ones, the same number of selfish ones, evaders, helpers, workers, shirkers, adepts, and oafs...

...Where's Ethiopia...

...One night I was part of a small detail assigned to guard a supply depot for ammunition...

...He was short and slight with a friendly, open, mischievous character like a puppy's...

...Not long after I ran into him in the library one evening and asked what he was doing if he couldn't read...

...He had never ridden more than two stops on the subway...

...The bar was dark, cool, and empty...

...Gordon, Georgia, where I was trained to operate antique switchboards, have the expanse in memory of whole decades...

...It was the time I begrudged, and the five months the country got seemed a lifetime in passing...

...Nothing whatever happened while I was in the army, at least not to me...

...Of course there was nothing to be done, and somebody else took his place...

...After a long while Richard came back looking worried...

...At the front of the depot, alongside the main road, was a small building which served as guardhouse, with a floodlight by the front door...

...He'd been with us 4 July 1980: 391 the day we first arrived in Augusta...

...There was Richard R., who fixed televisions, played brilliant poker with an impassive face, and disappeared into Augusta every week or two with his winnings to spend fifteen minutes with a 40-year-old blonde with a World War Two pageboy who charged extra to take off her bra...

...Naturally I protested...

...It was perhaps two sentences long...

...We were surprised, caught off guard, meekly ordered beers, said nothing...

...Everyone smokes in the army because there's nothing to do in the five-minute break every hour except smoke, make jokes, and tell people where you're from...

...Gordon at the end of basic training and I got to know them well...

...But Charlie and I talked and he told me two things: he had never before been in the woods at night, and he had never before been alone...

...He really was black, too, a deep ebony black...

...The truth was Harvey couldn't read...

...the young officers just out of OCS...

...This was hard for me to grasp...

...Until he joined the army, he said, he had never been below 110th Street...

...It was disorienting...

...There was Seymour, a black kid who planned to join the paratroops...

...Of two hundred recruits in our company perhaps a dozen had been to college at all, and only three or four had graduated...

...Not anywhere, not ever...

...The bartender wore a dirty short-sleeved shirt, and when Seymour walked in he said nothing whatever, just pointed at him, and then pointed to the dim back of the bar...

...There's things out there," he said...

...It was quite the other way round...

...He showed me the letter...

...Charlie could not be persuaded to resume his tour...

...We took two-hour turns marching down the path to the far end of the depot, then halfway in to meet the guard coming along the other side...

...Somehow he missed the opening lessons in reading in the first school, and failed to catch up in the second, and thereafter devoted his considerable intelligence to disguising the fact he couldn't read...

...It was cloudy that night and the darkness closed in around the depot like the gloom at the bottom of the ocean...

...I'd offer him the book when I was finished but he'd say no, he didn't think he'd like it, he was just curious what I thought of it...

...This was unusual...

...He said he was not kidding, and explained that he'd been to six different schools in the first and second grade...

...With the exception of the editor from Abrams, I had never met anyone like any of them ever before...

...Vigorous dissimulation, special pleading, artful evasion and a great deal of fast talking allowed him to actually graduate from high school despite the fact he could not read...

...The differences between us had suddenly asserted themselves...

...A kind of partial wall separated the front of the bar, bright with the sunlight through the open door, and the back of the long room...

...he asked...