What Ever Happened to...?

photo credit: Jerry Hoffman

I was recently commiserating with one of my salon compatriots about old friends and past companions. With our collective miles under the belt, we’ve both had many casual, close and a few profound friendships, relationships and acquaintances.

As readers of my past blogs know, I sometimes reminisce about past experiences, acquaintances, friends, and associates much to the chagrin of my better half. Sharon would say I reveal far too much personal information about myself (even though at this stage in the game, I don’t really care anymore). Despite the criticism, I find myself fascinated with the age old question of ‘what -ever happened to…’

While some of my friends won’t admit it, I do have a number who have acquiesced to ‘Facebook stalking’ and/or perusing ‘Classmates.com’ in hopes of finding old school chums, friends, associates, love interests and other assorted contacts made over the years.

My philosophy is that you leave something of yourself with everyone you come into contact with. Granted, you are a different person now than you were back then but if you have ‘history’ with someone even for a brief period of time, the connection is still there.

The categories where old acquaintances can be found are too numerous to list here. It really comes down to meaningful events in your life even if for only short periods of time. It’s different for everyone and could almost be seen as a memoir of one’s past life.

photo credit: Jerry Hoffman

One of my regrets is that almost all of those kids I hung around with through eighth grade have long since scattered to the winds of time. It would have been so fascinating to find out how their lives turned out after life in Highland Park.

I didn’t reconnect with any of my Cretin High School classmates until well after our 50th Class reunion. Back in school, I had a small cadre of friends; all of them were on the college track in school. Then there was me; preordained to go into the trades or the service. Despite my councilors advice, I chose another track for myself. A few of us reconnected after the reunion and continue to this day.

The Army had a profound effect on me although I didn’t realize it at the time. My two year enlistment was ripe with hundreds of story lines, personal antidotes and character studies. Events happened and were forgotten only to resurface years later when nudged forward by a song, comment or photograph. It was a colorful kaleidoscope of military images buried deep in my memory bank. There were Drill sergeants right out of hell, bunk mates who were anti-social, lost young men, gung-ho John Wayne types, rumblings of a far-off war, and youthful lusting for the opposite sex.

And the list could go on and on. It was only a moment in time but there were enough instances of brain-burn images I still can’t shake. Over time, some of those images have become characters in my plays and novels.

Living in Europe on two separate occasions also supplied me with lasting memories of colorful characters, sad creatures and intimate cerebral partners for late night salons.

There was my old roommate I called ‘animal,’ who only lived with me briefly but even then left a memorable impression. Tiny Bailey, another lost soul from Arizona, who escaped an alcoholic mother to seek solace in Denmark but ended up leaving for Israel instead. The Guy from Canada who lived with a local family and was treated like royalty and Maria, my pal at the Danish laundry.

Then there were closer contacts that never went very far. For some that was a good thing. For others, I wish I was still in touch.

There was Heidi, the University student, who wanted more than just friendship. I demurred and dodged the bullet on that one. John and his friend from Amsterdam who were incredibly ambitious. I would really like to know if they ‘made it’ with their dreams intact. Wendy, a pen pal from Lincolnshire, England that I sadly lost contact with.

KTCA television was still evolving and changing from educational television to public television when I began volunteering there on the crew. I was the oldest among the gang but we had one hell of a time taping television programs and learning the trade. Management, always sequestered in the panel-boarded wing of the building, was the enemy because they were all older. Then there was that attractive blond receptionist who always had a smile for me.

Those memories ended bundled up as a play entitled ‘PTV’ for which I have high hopes in the future.

My film trip to the Costa Rican jungle lasted almost a month.  My fellow travelers and I endured three weeks of heat and humidity and deadly tree-hugging snakes. They were a crazy bunch of writers, photo journalists, adventurers and those two girls who didn’t hesitate to go skinny-dipping with us.

The Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting was less than ten years old and still going through its Camelot period when I joined their Programming Department. The station was a microcosm of very talented, creative types that came in every color, aptitude and disposition. There were the elite power couples, the talented producers and directors, some stoned-out crew members and numerous artists and actors who haunted those hallowed halls in the early days.

Over time, there were a number of interesting folks who rented apartment units from me. Believe it or not, there are a number of those past tenants that I would dearly love to hear from again. They were wonderful folks to know. Most were young and beginning their respective careers.

Past Girlfriends are always a topic of curiosity for most men. This kind of inquiry could seem awkward but it doesn’t have to be. For me, each of those women were charming, interesting, and a delight to know in their own way. They had names like Diane, Joyce, Sheila, Marti, and Susan. There were others but their names are less memorable and my time spent with them more easily forgotten. With each, we had some ‘history’ and it was good.

Where there was history, there are memories. The key here is to glance at the past but not to linger there. I think its human nature to want to know about past acquaintances no matter how close or vapid they might have been. They all were, in a way, a reflection of who you were at that point in your life. A point in time that can’t be returned, replaced or replicated.

But can still hold some poignant memories nevertheless.

Once a Soldier Always

Me by my locker in boot camp

I’d forgotten about that period in my life for such a long time. It was two years juxtaposed between stumbles in education and prying open the door on my lost years. Now it’s back in flavor whether the conflict in question is justified or not.

Back in early 1964 I had dropped out of the University of Minnesota before they asked me to take a hike. Two weeks later I got my draft notice but fooled them all by volunteering for the Army instead of having to wait around for several months before the inevitable.

It was two years away from home and my girlfriend, learning new skills and traveling the country. To be honest, I couldn’t wait to return to civilian life. Back then I looked on that period not necessarily with fondness but rather with an abject acceptance of it being a minor detour out of my life. Now with creeping age and reluctant maturity, I realize I answered the call from my country and did my duty…and I’m damn proud of it.

So much of that period of my life was re-captured and/or imagined in ‘Love in the A Shau’ in the persona of Daniel and his adventures in life and the military.

Me on the steps of the barracks

Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri offered up my first taste of ‘hurry up and wait,’ screaming drill sergeants, diverse interests and goals and a yearning for life back home.

Showing off my PFC stripe

           

The Presidio of San Francisco back then was considered the ‘country club’ of the Army. I grabbed every opportunity it offered me. College classes at night. A great part time job in an art theater in a sketchy part of town. A motor scooter to challenge the hills of the city. Tip-toeing through Haight-Ashbury and the wonders there. Wandering down the coast to Half Moon Bay, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito and other coastal communities. No serviceman had ever had better duty.

Life was so good there; I volunteered for duty in Vietnam because it was in a foreign land and included hazardous duty pay. The Army was getting 500 applications a month, but mine wasn’t accepted. Of course, they weren’t shooting GIs back then.

Fort Polk, Louisiana

                              

Fort Polk, Louisiana was the flip side of that city by the bay. It had to be some of the worst duty on earth. Summers in Louisiana are and were a modern day version of hell on earth.

Reading in a snow storm

Listening to the Beatles

                                   

Fort Lee, Virginia was good duty for a sergeant who was a short-timer and ready for a new chapter in his life. It was all coming to a close and I had no regrets. Then two weeks before my discharge the captain called me into his office and presented me with his best offer.

It seems he had been watching me and liked what he saw. Putting on his most father-like appearance, he confided in me. “As sergeant in just two years, I can see that you could have a great future in ‘this man’s army.” He threw out a few more platitudes then gave me his punchline. “Re-enlist now, son, and I guarantee we’ll send you to Vietnam.”

Mustering up my most sincere look, I politely declined, citing my enrollment back in college and classes starting in just several weeks. To be honest, I’ve sometimes wondered what my life might have been like if I had taken him up on his wonderful offer to tour South Vietnam between mortar rounds and sniper’s bullets.

After that, my life moved on and I forgot about those twenty-four months, 1964 through 1966. The bitter aftertaste of Vietnam lasted a long time for my generation. For me it was time spent out of the loop and living another kind of life.

Then eventually, some president found a reason to go to war again. We were off to the killing grounds for the next generation. Now the media and government PR machine embrace the military. “Thank you for your service to our country.” Sad but true, men and women go off to war and we’re back in the game again.

Spec 5 (Sergeant)

Politics aside, I’m proud of my time spent in the service. I wasn’t a ground-pounder or in Recon or Special Ops. Daniel got that out of my system and safely ensconced in my imagination. It was time spent in the service to my country and an opportunity to pay back my country for past generations.

My father holding me as an infant

This is the country of some long forgotten itinerant peasant who came over from France generations ago. An immigrant who brought his love of life and passion for work first to Canada, then Quebec and finally down through the generations to the Twin Cities. It was a grandfather, a father and finally the father of my children who now have children of their own.

In retrospect, my time spent in khaki was a small price to pay for what my country has given to me and my offspring. For all those generations and for me, it truly is the land of the free and a cauldron of opportunities for the taking.

45 Days to go

               

I did my job in the United States Army and I did it to the best of my ability. Two years is a long time out of a young man’s life. But it was time spent in service to my country.

I owed my country that much.

Last Chance Gasp

It was my olive drab trilogy.

Three Army bases that formed the nucleus of my two years of military service. In those three strikingly different environments, were three motley collections of soldiers who each came with their own unique storyline and take on life. They were either fellow draftees, R.A.s (Regular Army) or lifers who walked the walk and talked the talk. Among them all were the irascible characters whose actions and backgrounds are the stuff of legion and became fodder for a writer’s imagination.           

Presidio of San Francisco

Fort Polk, Louisiana

Fort Lee, Virginia

The Army bases came in three distinct flavors. First, the Presidio of San Francisco was the high point of my career there. Then Fort Polk, Louisiana during the summer of ‘65 became the lowest point. Sandwiched between that summer in hell and an early discharge came Fort Lee, Virginia.

Fort Lee provided the least memorable of my military experiences and yet in retrospect still garnered some poignant memories as well as some sad ones too. It was the last six months of my military life so it didn’t really matter where they sent me. Anyplace was better than months of ninety degree weather with matching humidity. Besides, autumn in Virginia can be pretty nice.

Fort Lee represented the last phase of my military existence.  It was all coming to an end and somehow I understood there was no going back to what used to be. My outlook on life had changed along with a renewed focus on education, travel and personal growth. Those changes were permanent.

By that point in my brief military career, the marching and inspections and KP were pretty much over. We couldn’t march outside because it was wintertime. There were few inspections and I was a sergeant by then so KP was a thing of the past.

My Army buddies and the assorted souls that inhabited that time period could fill the scrapbook of any aspiring writer. They were real and alive and as crazy as any comic book character. Some of them tortured souls and others just putting in their time. Each came with their own unique story to tell.

After I jumped the rabbit fence and made my way north, I heard from several other friends who had also escaped Fort Hell.

Max Camarillo (Mad Max) got out early to go back to school. He was one unique operator who truly knew how to game the system. He was Trapper John from ‘Mash’ and John Belushi’s (Bluto) from ‘Animal House’ wrapped up in one colorful character.’ In the Nam, he would have been a ‘dog robber’ providing much needed goods from unnamed sources. If you wanted it Max could probably get it…for a price. There were no moral scruples here. It was strictly business for Max.

Not surprisingly, there were no fare-well parties or blow-outs for Max. I’m told he simply was there one day and gone the next. No surprise. Nothing vanishes faster than a man who’s done his time in the Army.

There were several others that left around the same time. With them there was usually a brief flurry of activity, a few over-the-shoulder goodbyes and then silence as more empty bunks filled the barracks. There is no place more somber and solemn than a barracks room empty of old friends.

Another friend, mad-man Cornelius got an occupational discharge. Corny left even faster than Max. He didn’t even bother to get all the necessary discharge forms signed. He just signed them himself and left his bunk untouched. Minutes after his departure, it was stripped clean. His blankets, sheets and pillow became barter material for the newest resident ‘dog robber.’

45 Days to go before discharge from the Army

Like a lot of other servicemen, I’d promised myself I wasn’t going back home while I was on leave. The pain of having to leave home again wasn’t worth the few weeks spent there.

Staying true to that promise, I opted to spend the Christmas holidays with a friend in Pittsburg. Perhaps not the smartest decision I made since there was someone back home at the time. But I was young and dumb and pretty thoughtless when it came to relationships.

And like my weekend sojourns to Beaumont, Texas when I was in the southland I spent many a weekend in D.C. mingling with the masses and pretending to be a civilian. That was when you could traverse the mall at night or journey into the darker parts of town in search of a cold beer and not worry about getting mugged. The art galleries and Smithsonian and bookstores all provided a welcome relief from a year and a half of khaki blandness.

There was one Grey Line tour of New York thrown in but that only proved to me that the Big Apple was too big a bite for a Midwestern neophyte like me.

Every base has its own select group of entrepreneurs. Ours was no different. There was one lifer whose family lived in D.C. Every Friday night he would park in front of the mess hall and wait for eager recruits clutching their weekend pass. The cost was $25.00 bucks for a round trip passage to downtown D.C. Then a pickup nearby on Sunday afternoon.

The van driver was making a fortune each weekend just by driving home to see his own family and girlfriend. At $25.00 a head, five bodies each weekend, four weekends a month, he was clearing $500.00 a month and no taxes. And that was in 1966.

You could always tell when someone reenlisted. There was usually a new car, often a Chevy super sport or similar muscle car, prominently parked in the enlisted men’s lot. What most of those poor saps didn’t know was that their next assignment was usually Vietnam or Korea where their new cars would never follow.

Two friends stick out in my mind while I was at Fort Lee. Both were deep in their own inner turmoil brought on by reckless decisions and deep regrets afterwards.

 

The first was my friend Jerry or Gerard as he was known in his native Ireland. He had been in the U.S. Army for several years in Germany then left when his enlistment was over. His dream was to be a full-time playwright and novelist. But he said there were more playwrights in his native Dublin than regular people so he wanted to give New York a try.

He did so for a while and then decided he wanted to visit Vietnam as a reporter. So naturally, he enlisted again in the Army at age thirty. I could never wrap my understanding around why he re-upped. He was a brilliant guy, very quiet and probably gay which would have put him on unsteady ground in the 60s…in the military. Why he didn’t travel to Vietnam on his own, I’ll never know.

Nevertheless we had wonderful conversations at night, sitting around the office or sharing a coffee at the post restaurant. When I first meet him he was bidding his time at Fort Lee before his new papers came through and he was off to Southeast Asia. The times we shared talking theater and writing and story-telling still linger with me to this day.

While writing this blog I looked him up on Google. I came across a number of dispatches and newspaper articles Jerry wrote for Stars and Stripes from 1966 through 1967. I have no idea if he was transferred back stateside after that, got killed over there or just disappeared into that vast caldron called past friends and acquaintances. He was one of a kind. I treasure the few pictures I have of us together.

Another friend’s story whose ending remains a mystery to this day had to do with one hasty decision and six years of regret.

One of the first guys I met in my office was the staff photographer. We both shared a love of the Beatles, rock and roll music, travel and pretty girls. The Beatles we could listen to each night. Rock and roll followed us on his transitory radio. Travel for me were exaggerated tales of that city by the bay and my summer in hell. He hadn’t done much traveling at all.

The pretty girls were a figment of our lusty imaginations. At least for me it was. With exception of the girl back home, the imagination had to suffice where real wasn’t around.  His was a much sadder story.

Upon their graduation from high school, his girlfriend had traveled to Florida for summer work before college began. He stayed home and dreamt about their time on campus in the fall. When she returned she was two months pregnant from a foolish encounter on the beach with a hand-some lifeguard. My friend was devastated. His entire world had just blown up in his face.

Without talking to anyone, my friend marched down to the nearest recruiting office and joined the Army for a six year enlistment. Less than a month later, his girlfriend was back in his life begging for his forgiveness and understanding. She was willing to give up the baby if that’s what he wanted.

But it was too little too late at that point. By then my friend was in his first week of basic training and ready to kill himself.

Fortunately he survived that drama in his life and by the time we met he had resigned himself to five and a half years left in the service and the girlfriend back home who had betrayed him. We’d stay up late at night talking smack and expressing fond hopes for the future. I was always careful not to mention his remaining time in the service or that girl back home.

I never did find out if he got together with his old girlfriend again…or if he found someone else to fill that void…o somehow found peace with his five and a half years left in the service. I hope something worked out for him. He was a great guy; one of the nicest I’d met during that period in my life.

Several weeks before my discharge, the captain called me into his office. With patriotism and confidence written all over his face, he reminded me that I had volunteered for duty in Vietnam back in 1964. Smiling broadly, the captain assured me…no, he guaranteed me…that with my reenlistment I would be on my way to Vietnam within the month. He quickly pointed out that as a newly ordained sergeant this was my last great chance to continue a stellar career in ‘this man’s army.’

 I politely declined his most generous offer.