Long Journey Home: Chapter 3, Call to Arms
Recap: Steve reminisces about his first visit to Israel, a four-month trip that took him all around the country, and the feelings it awakened in him.
It was 1965, and I had just returned from a soul-searching, life-changing trip to Israel where I came face to face with my Jewishness and felt the deep tug in my heart that has called to Jews over the millennia — Come home, come home. But that call didn’t overpower my very different life and background; I didn’t understand those feelings. Instead, I decided to join the United States Army and volunteer in the medical service corps in a Vietnam. The philosopher Plato wrote that a young man needed to serve his country, and Ernest Hemingway, one of my favorite authors, had seen his war, so I would do the same. Ah, the folly of youth!
I was so enthusiastic that when I broke a toe the night before I was to enlist, I just had it taped up — and hoped I’d be able to survive 20-mile marches.
I slid down the rabbit hole that was the army and entered a different world, where a long march with a broken toe was the least of my problems: They took my clothes, shaved my head, issued me an ill-fitting uniform, gave me a number, and worked very hard to break us down into malleable protoplasm.
It was December, a cold one, in Fort Gordon in Georgia, and they ran us twenty miles before seating us on freezing bleachers. Of course everyone got sick; one guy died of meningitis. They put up rubberized “sneeze sheets” to minimize germ spread, but a few days later, I caught pneumonia. I had to fight my way into the hospital — training was brutal, to say the least.
The worst part was that there were no explanations, why they subjected us to what seemed like mindless harassment and conformity to the Army way, even when logic dictated otherwise. It wasn’t until months later, after I unloaded my frustration on the lieutenant, that he explained that was precisely the point.
“You won’t have time to think,” he explained. “You have to act on reflex, or you’ll be dead.”
Theoretically that made sense, but I didn’t yet have the capacity to understand it. As I later learned, it’s the actual experience of battle that gives you a frame of reference and the ability to reflect — assuming, of course, you survive.
My plans for the medical service corps were another casualty to the reality that is Army.
“Son, here’s your gun. You’re infantry; you’re going to the ‘Nam!” I was told.
I became part of the newly commissioned 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry unit. We were nicknamed “cottonbalers,” after the same regiment’s 1815 battle with the British down in New Orleans, Louisiana. In the summer of 1966, we were sent to Camp Shelby Army Base in Mississippi, where it was beastly hot and humid, the armpit of the nation. We were “green” troops, and no one took training seriously; it felt more like cowboys and Indians.
After a few months, we got a weekend pass, and I went down to New Orleans. I ended up in a bar and started schmoozing with an older guy in a high government position. When I told him I volunteered for Vietnam, the conversational tone of our discussion changed dramatically.
“Don’t be foolish!” he said in all seriousness. “You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”
It was too late for me to change course, but the conversation did get me to thinking — and they weren’t pleasant thoughts.
Back at Fort Shelby, one of our training exercises was a live fire drill — we were in a pit, and they told us there was live ammunition flying over our heads. I spent my time there reading. I had secured a copy of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, and I sat with it in the bottom of the pit, flipping pages to the sound of gunfire overhead.
Perhaps the words of the hassid at the old bus station in Jerusalem still resonated: “What do you know of your own heritage?” What did I know of my People, of our trials through thousands of years of exile, of our soul?
Anne’s beautiful words touched my heart, the tender account of a young girl on the cusp of womanhood, so innocent yet enmeshed in the terrible grip of something I didn’t understand: evil.
“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart,” Anne wrote. These words haunted me, because her account brought to mind the Yad Kennedy Memorial, which I had visited in Israel. Set on a hillside off the road to Jerusalem, the memorial is shaped like a young oak cut in its prime. I remembered this while thinking of Anne — hair shorn, starving in a concentration camp, she perished before her time — but she believed in the inherent good of people, and in the innocence of my own youth, I desperately wanted to, as well.
It wasn’t until they named the soldiers who would make up an advanced unit to secure the area in Vietnam that reality hit home. They called my name, and I was instantly nauseated. That evening, I went into town, to a weapons store, and bought a backup pistol. While there, I held various knives, testing each one’s balance and feeling its blade’s keenness. I picked up a wicked looking black commando knife and tried to imagine using it, stabbing someone. It creeped me out, and I put it down.
A few weeks later, at the last gasp of 1966, we gathered our stuff and shipped out. From the frying pan and straight, I would learn, into the fire.
To be continued…