Persistence |
Walter Gabrielson Painter |
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Chapter 3 |
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Third Life: 1958-61
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| Two things you always remember about your military service: (1) your serial number, which you need for a thousand different transactions and becomes engraved upon your soul forever---A03085949 and (2) what an insignificant blob of red meat you are. Especially me, who was recently a big-time Colonel. The Finnish people love to sauna in the winter, they get themselves boiling red hot from the steam, and then they run outside and jump into a lake through a hole they have cut into the ice. It is much like the transfer from civilian to military life. You have learned to LOVE your tender little life, they see it as currency to spend on their dance card. You have wound up in THEIR grasp, must live according to THEIR rules which are interpreted and enforced by THEIR people, with all the punishments and possibilities for conviction clearly laid out. There is a certain quietness and respect about military people because I think they all really, really know about their vulnerability. Of course you eventually get used to the system and even learn how to manipulate it to get what you want and to just get by without getting locked up. Since all large outfits are naturally inefficient there is plenty of room to operate. I would push it but I really wasn't an operator, I was too scared. Only really foolish people operate with impunity in the military and they wind up in Leavenworth, Kansas. You get your copy of UCMJ 1951 which is the official bible of the military outlining all the ways you can go wrong and how they can prosecute you outside the Constitution of the U.S.A. You are sworn to uphold the Constitution but you don't come under it. Very interesting. I entered in the fall of 1958 after serving as a camp counselor at UNI-Camp from the Religious Conference. I began at Tyndall AFB in north Florida which is serious redneck and cracker country. The concept was to turn me into a radar intercept officer. The idea was that I would sit at a radar screen searching for hoards of incoming bombers. Then I would scramble some fighters, vector them to the enemy and turn them in on intercept courses until they said JUDY (a secret code word which meant they would take over, shoot them down and save our democracy). This meant that I could put my feet up on the console and relax a bit until a radar-seeking missile came towards my station and blew us all to hell. We only learned about the last part out in the field. These radar sites were located in the U.S.A and other parts of the world in the most isolated, high, lonesome places they could find. They were on mountains, out on Texas Towers at sea (several went down), or in foreign countries where nobody wanted them and the natives became our enemy. Tyndall was my initiation into the real world of the military and it was relatively painless. It was near the beaches, I rented a motorcycle to get around on, would take T-33 rides when they were available and sit up at 30,000 feet and cool off amongst the white puffies. I was there three months and selected to go to Europe for duty after that. I went to Washington with two friends, we had an escapade with a speed trap in the middle of the night in Virginia but arrived safety in D.C. to see Uncle Ed. This was Ed Vallon, my Aunt Eleanor had married him and he was a diplomat. He served primarily in South America in Argentina and El Salvador. He was a tall, grey thin Jewish eminence with a touch of wry and quite bright. We toured battlefields, went to dinner, and hung out around Washington, he was temporarily in town on a promotions board and had some free time. I had never known someone like him--an intellectual, in government, somewhat of a pariah to the Minnesota crowd but handling it brilliantly. A very classy guy. Somewhere in everyone's life you come upon such a person, many times at a critical juncture and they make a difference. What it was I didn't know. I realized that I was heading for three years of tedium and backwater after the excitement of UCLA. I guess I needed to be reminded that all life was not frivolous, that I should be thinking beyond the service while I was experiencing it. I saw him one more time just after I got out of the service, he had moved to DC by then and I stayed a few days and it was as if no time had passed. He was high up in the corps by then, reporting to Kennedy many times a week on Caribbean policy. After I went back to LA, he went down to the Dominican Republic and had a terminal heart attack. Two weeks later Trujillo was overthrown. After Washington I got on an Air Force Constellation for Frankfurt, then down to Munich where there was a car waiting. This was suspicious because they don't have cars waiting for 2nd Lieutenants. They drove me up to Freising, about 60 km north and I reported to the commander at 10 p.m. that evening. He asked if I had a pleasant flight. I said yes. Did I enjoy Germany? So far so good. Did I play basketball? No. Oops. I didn't know, but I was on the way out. He was running a scam. Since there wasn't a war going on people had to come up with various gambits to get ahead in the service. His answer was to be big in sports. He created a basketball team for the site and it was pretty good, they even had their own DC-3 to fly them around to games. It took a lot of personnel to operate the scam so any warm body who DIDN'T play basketball was expendable, particularly single ones. They didn't have to pay single officers a dislocation allowance, so he could easily move me and try for a replacement that COULD play basketball. I was kicked up to Ramstein AFB and learned Offensive Radar. Later on I heard he was cashiered but it was too late for me then. Offensive Radar became very offensive to me after I learned what it was. It was a kind of special radar, with a narrow, small beam that could acquire a fighter or missile with a special little black box, that was deployed out in the field on trucks. You could acquire a fighter with a nuclear bomb or two on board, and "fly" him from the ground, direct him to a target and on your command he would drop the bomb and get the hell out of there. So my nice little plan of a military career went from flying airplanes, to being a Public Information Officer (explain how important the national security angle is to a town that a plane has just crashed into), to being a Radar Intercept Officer (good jumpshot notwithstanding), to being a bomb dropper and a participant in the whole entire horror of the cold war! How had I gotten into this? By being stupid and just going along. Anytime you put your life in somebody else's hands you have to believe they will never care about it the way you do. I was lucky, I actually never had to go to war. But it got close at times. For the first six months Germany was an immense excitement. Truly, a foreign country with a strange language, different food, a bizarre history. It even looked different. Different smells, a high school class in a bierstube celebrating something, drinking beer out of a giant glass boot. Diesel tractors hauling loads of rutabagas and potatoes. Fast, whispering trains. Humming cobblestones. Timbered buildings, Wood or coal-smoke odors. People mostly wide, brown, gray, black with string grocery bags go to a different store for every separate grocery. Fat pink kids in strollers with white tires. Married men lift their hats during the Sunday walk. Many, many uniforms. Drone who put down the barrier at train crossing had a uniform. I went to Munich and ordered my first new car, a VW with sunroof that cost $1200 in 1958. Drove over to Dachau, 10 km down the road. I couldn't begin to feel the horror, it was more like a movie set with flowers instead. My father's prison camp was somewhere close, I never found it. I was ordered to another radar school. At Ramstein we were driven up to a site in the clouds every day and taught the mysteries of the AN/MSQ system. We were on a mountain, inside of which was a huge man-made cave from where the Germans ran WW II. Now we were there and it was business as usual. Three stories, supplies and air for months, big concrete doors, quite a setup. All the autobahns around there were runaways. I got so bored that I bought a paint-by-number kit and did the second painting of my life, but I didn't win any prizes this time. I finally got kicked loose from Freising (it has a college for teaching Brewmeisters and as a result there are excellent suds all over town) and wound up at my permanent station where I stayed for the rest of my tour. It was about 15 km west of Hannover and next to Steinhuder Mier, a huge, round lake that was a prominent geographical navigational point during WWII. The bombers milled around all during the war and never found this air base. The camouflage was terrific, all the buildings still had trees and bushes on the roofs. There was a big Officers Club visited frequently by Hitler, it had recessed panels where guards hid out. Down in the basement was a one-lane bowling alley for Hitler and vomitoriums; they are large sinks where folks could come down and puke up excess beer so they could go upstairs and tank up some more. So now it was for real. No more military foreplay. Detachment #7, 601st AC & W Squadron, commanded by Robert L. (Bob) Baron and wife, Jeanie Baron, Capt USAF, a couple of real loony tunes. Robert L. was an ex B-29 pilot out of work in the real Air Force so he got nailed to this godforsaken job. But, good COMMAND experience. Good for her too. Military wives wear the rank of their man and don't mind throwing it around either. Going from Aircraft Commander of 10 souls to 60 was a leap for Bob, but in his own chuckly, chickenshit way he did all right. He was responsible for us 24 hours a day, 150 miles from HQ and located on a German Air Base with whom he had to keep friendly. Not an enviable job. He wavered from too friendly to jocular to stern. Every month he and Lt. Heap (another pilot) had to go down to Frankfurt to keep their flight status up, drive a C-47 around for four hours and come back. I think Jeanie was bored. She flounced around a lot and came on to the new Lt's; so you had to watch her. We were a little too close and too much family to mess around, when Bob went flying the phone would ring and she would ask you over to fix the plumbing or something. Jesus. My main job was to pull duty on the radar site running practice missions with real fighters up and all around Germany all day long to keep them proficient in our horrific trade. We were scored by other sites and we scored them. The idea was to get very close scores, dropping an electronic bomb within a radius of at least 1,200 feet was considered sharp. Well, if it was nuclear it was close enough. We would do this day or night. One night a Warrant Officer at another site joined up to F-100's so well that the pilots had to punch out and it rained airplanes in Germany for a while. We also practiced deploying the whole site, which was a super kind of foul up because driving all our sensitive electronic equipment around would mess it up and then it had to be fixed before it would operate properly so we weren't sending airplanes over Poland and starting WW III. We also had additional duties. Mine were: Motor Pool Officer. In charge of all the trucks and ground power units. I supervised a sergeant and six troops. They did a fabulous job but the paperwork was always behind and had grease stains. Funniest part of the motor pool job was getting fuel to run the ground power units. It got a little complicated. We were an American Unit in Germany in the former British Zone. We would buy diesel fuel from the British up north who measured in imperial gallons and were paid in pounds, shillings and pence. It was transported in liter form by the Germans who were paid in marks. We measured in U.S. gallons and had dollars. To do the paperwork on a load of fuel took an immense amount of work, about the same time it took to pump it out of the ground and refine it. Any officer on the site could sign the papers for it when it came and we all learned to run and hide when the German fuel crew came around with them. You had to sign your name over sixty times. CBR Officer. Chemical-Biological-Radiological, went to a little school at Ramstein for it. Later on, HQ wanted to know what our plan was so I made one up. Then they wanted to know where our shelter was, I said we didn't have one. They said we had to have one. I requested bulldozers, materials enough to build a shopping Center. They wrote back. We had a cozy correspondence for the next two years. It got about four inches high. When I left I turned it over to my replacement. Wonder how high it is now? Morale Officer. Ensign Pulver had that one and he was difficult to improve on. I started a small newspaper, I had a huge typewriter with a long carriage and I got some big paper and would type out the whole paper, make headlines, do drawings until it was done and then post it. It was more like MAD Magazine than a newspaper and everybody enjoyed it. I even got a letter of commendation in my file. Were they putting me on? Supply Officer. This was big. At the age of 23 I was personally responsible for $5,000,000.00 of assorted military property. Lose it and go to Leavenworth. Break it and go to Leavenworth. Lose the paperwork and go to Leavenworth. Of course the guys stole me blind. And, I originally signed for some stuff that wasn't right. For instance, we were supposed to have 60 pairs of rubber overshoes or boots for wet weather and deployment. So I counted 60 pairs. One wet spell I discovered that they were actually all right footers. You put them on and your feet all pointed to the left, made you drift a little left when you walked. How the hell did this happen? There I was stuck with 120 right footers. But I learned supply. I called around to find out if somebody out there was stuck with 120 lefties. Had to be somebody had the same problem I did. Didn't find a soul who would admit it. Something nobody wanted to admit to at all. Finally, my sergeant and I figured out the perfect gambit. We sent them down ten "pair" at a time for repair and vulcanizing. Said they leaked. In supply they don't give you back your material, they just give you some other stuff they have in stock. So eventually I got 60 pairs and passed my problem on to somebody else. That is what learning supply is. Eventually I was allowed to live off the base and I rented a room in Wunstorf from Herr Knopf who was a carpenter and had built his personal dream house. It was near the RR tracks and I could see VW's being shipped to the U.S.A. On Sundays we shared a schnapps and tried to climb through our languages to some form of understanding. I liked living in Wunstorf, it was almost like being a civilian again. I had to get a phone which was a problem but eventually it worked out. I walked the streets of Wunstorf with all these strangers and wondered what they were up to. The Taverns or Gasthouses are big, the men sit around and play cards with great joy. The women liked to go to Hannover and shop and then go to the KAFFEE house with its desserts, huge concoctions of whipped cream and cakes they would slaver over with great joy too. German women looked to be four feet wide, guys were thinner because they worked in the fields all day. Met few Nazis. Nobody was ever a Nazi. One old guy on a bench gave me the line one time, and a couple that I became friends with later admitted to being in the party. All the men still alive said the fought on the Eastern front. Must have made the war a lot easier on us. No Nazis and nobody fighting us on the Western front at all, how did they ever lose? So I was there and this was my life. Go to work, keep out of trouble, fight off boredom. Bought a trombone and took lessons. "Zugspitzen offen die oberlippen," he said. Blat. Never was much good. Bought an accordion, tried to imagine that I was in a real war and played sad songs. I thought I was disciplined but I began to slide. The military know discipline. The service has had centuries how to figure out to shape up young, feisty guys, punish them keep them in line, get the job done, get them killed, make their lunch. It is awesome to be a part of it. I have since read that the real reason soldiers do so well in combat, risking and expending their lives is not for god and country but for the unit they are in, for their buddies, their friends, and for the fear of letting them down. You become closer to your unit than anything you have ever been in before. It is like being married to 60 strangers. You feel responsible for holding up your end, not letting them down. It really works that way. When you leave the unit you get divorced and it is a traumatic event. I guess you go on, join others, and rebound; but the first one is the strongest and most potent. The worst thing you can be in a unit is a stranger to it. It is better to be a part, even a fuckup than be above it or indifferent to it. Everybody knows all the time how everyone feels about this for there is a form of lateral nonverbal communication always in play. You sympathize with new guys because they aren't in yet. How hard are they going to try? Guys on the way out start disappearing before they are gone, they get short on their time left, they are shorttimers and become slackers, turning into pariahs when their orders come. FIGMO. FuckitIgot-myOrders! All this was amplified because we were isolated from our headquarters in Celle, isolated on a German air base full of strangers with a funny language, isolated within our little unit. We were a small ship at sea of teutonic and American indifference. We could drive up to Bremerhaven for a day trip to get supplies and hit the burger shop. Heaven. Home food. Buy scotch for $1.50 a fifth. They even had a PX, the ubiquitous store that follows soldiers around and offers incredible bargains on everything that you get and use for barter on the economy. But it was getting a malt or a burger that really made the trip. We had German cooks for our mess hall and tried to teach them to cook American but they never could. You never know how much your food means to you. GI STORY: When I was head of the motor pool my guys were called upon to do endless maintenance in the cold and snow, keep our lifeblood ground power going, drive the trucks to Celle for courier and support. They were good kids out of the south raised on cars and engines and threw themselves proudly into the unglamorous, dirty, endless work. They would get blasted by inspections because the bean counters from HQ wanted a cute little Texaco island that was superclean and the paperwork immaculate. We would pass. To get a little relief and keep up morale, I would take them over to "Moms", the local gasthouse they had appropriated as an official GI hangout and get them all drunk and wasted and drive them back to the barracks so they wouldn't get killed on the road. None of this is covered in the Officer's Guide. The distinction between Officers and Enlisted Men (EM) is necessary and a gulf necessarily exists. But there is a place where you have to take care of your troops. On the road, you see that they are fed before you are. You look for their transgressions and cover for them. You kick ass in private. Some offers never learn that and depend on their rank and position to demand respect and obedience. They get the minimum of response and work from the troops. If you want the best, you reciprocate and work for them as much as they work for you. My enjoyment came from travel. With my little car and four day passes, I could break loose from sodden, gray, rainy Germany to other vistas. I got one month a year leave and I took that in two-week increments. So, I went to Sweden to see my relatives. They took me outside of Gotenborg and showed me the railroad tracks my grandfather had worked on. Not exactly the Sistine Chapel but a reasonable blue-collar monument. Took a trip to Spain. Stayed in Barcelona for two weeks. Who was this Gaudi anyway? Flew to Greece after I broke my elbow arm-wrestling with the Crypto guy. Saw the light of the Parthenon and the starkness of the land. Incredible sky. On and on. I went to Libya for a month, dropped bombs in the desert. Went to Tripoli and hung out. Saw flies in the kids eyes as they slept. Poverty beyond imagination. Best four-day trip was to drive to Amsterdam for dinner, go down to Hook Van Holland and catch the night boat to England land in Harwich the next morning, take the boat train to London, stay with John Garrett and go to the theater, buy books, see movies and then the last day take the afternoon boat across the Channel, pick up the car and drive back to Germany and go to work the next morning! Gradually, I saw myself making choices. I discovered in Europe art is all around you. Europeans are smothered in art, they live in it, they go by it all the time. It isn't strange to them. They grow up with it and need it. That is what culture becomes, a necessity and a rich, textural part of your existence. We aren't anywhere close to that yet here. I would spend long nights on duty at the site speculating on what I would do when I got out. Sometimes I would panic. All those hotshots from UCLA were getting ahead! Of course. I was treading water in this backwater place, wasting time, losing three precious critical years. But I now see that I was making choices. I would drift to the museums. It is a natural tourist thing to do but for me it was more. I was fascinated by the power of images. Could I do this? I thought I might but then I would have to start all over again. I had spent five years in college already and it would probably mean at least four more. But this time it would be for real, at least I hoped. As a tryout, I bought a camera and shot pictures and learned how to develop and print. Went on to a Rollei which gave me a good sized negative. From photography I came up with only one good picture! Ironically, it was about the human condition, some people on a bench in Paris. But I found photography too limiting. You were just stuck with what you had on a negative and left with a little diddling around in the darkroom. I wanted to manipulate the image more. Could I do it? When I had a year left I became impatient with Germany. That which was initially strange and romantic became strange and boring. The weather was always the same, gray overcast. One summer there was only a week of sun. The ambience was gray, the clothes gray, the farmers with brown, ruddy red faces looking down, pigshit boots. I knew I was leaving in my mind. I had little more commonality with the group, and by this time, a large part of the people I had bonded with had left. A colorless major had replaced Bob. Even in retrospect Bob started looking good. Not Jeanie though. We were bored so we did practical jokes, there was a sheepherder on the base with dogs, a flock of sheep, the whole bit, his job was to keep the grass near the runways down. We had a parabolic antenna on top of the radar van which transmitted a beam when operational, but when turned off and when standing in front of it would project a voice about 100 yards through the air. We had a German-speaking EM get up there one day and project into space, out to the sheepherder that "HE WAS THE VOICE OF HITLER!" And, the sheepherder was appointed the new fuhrer to start the Fourth Reich!!! Very sick. Sheepherder went into shock and didn't come around the site after that. Our grass got very high. You go in the military and you never come out the same. It happened to me, it happens to everybody who experiences it, just a matter of degree. People who don't do it always wonder why they missed and they shall never know. The military is a secret fraternity and the secret lies in having gone through and survived it. When you are in the military you call people outside "civilians" which is an epithet that is comforting, much in the manner how Orr people describe and regard those who have moved to California or some other nice place. The military used to be a male provence, now you see the military glow in the eyes of women who are living and exulting in it. Their big complaint is not being able to get closer to the action so they can get promoted and have a higher risk of being killed. The military provides great adventure and great toys and considers your life disposable just like the plastic spoons they have in field rations. They are smart enough to concentrate on the young because they are impressionable and still fooled by their invincibility and will fall for about anything the military will throw at them. Traditionally old men start wars and young people fight and die in them. Management above field grade rank considers this an acceptable cost/risk benefit ratio. The military is a wonderful place to shape up young people who are ready to destroy their lives or to offer opportunity for those with none at all. Most of the military people come from the South or poor urban areas. There are few Harvard graduates except Norman Mailer. My experience with the military wasn't anything that ROTC or previous experienced had prepared me for, everybody had lied. That is an excellent lesson for youth to know about, the military always lies to you. Just look at their commercials and you can see. I was fortunate that I didn't have to go to war, but I also gave three critical years of my life away. You can't afford to resent it for that becomes who you are and a substantial part of your character. I feel with my military experience I bought and paid for the knowledge that in life you must at some time take control of your actions and your fate or, something, someone, some corporation, some religion, some perversion, some obsession or delusion shall do it for you. That was my big lesson, thank you United States Air Force. Later on I was so fortunate not to fall into the delusional fantasies of art studenthood, the teaching business or the continual obsessions of the art world. It seems much of life is simply not culting yourself down the slippery slope of becoming just another peel off label on a membership list. To identify, to believe in, and to be able to plumb your creative self is the alternative and most people never have the chance to do it for somewhere they have independently self-recruited themselves into some form of military mind. The last year ground on. We had incessant alerts. The Berlin Wall was going up, challenges to western presence in Berlin began again. Finally I got short, got FIGMO and I was gone! But not exactly. The Wall created international troubles, Kennedy was going to freeze all military people in place for an entire year as this played out. I caught a plane in Frankfurt, we went to Scotland and refueled and took off for the good ol' USA.! But, before we got to the point of no return an engine went out and we had to return to Scotland. Got it fixed. Off again and made it across, finally rolled into Maguire AFB in the middle of the night, I didn't even go to the BOQ, went over to the separation center and sat on the steps all night until it opened at eight. I was first one in with my orders. A clerk said they were expecting freeze orders any time. I said were they in now? No. Well then, here I am, these are my orders, get me out of there. OK. Hour later I was F R E E! Two weeks later a friend found out he had to spend another entire year over there. I would have died. It was finally over. All the way driving across the U.S.A. to LA I was looking in the rear view mirror expecting to see a trooper pull me over and say I had to go back to Germany! Sometimes a previous life can have very long strings. |
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