EARNING A LIVING
The last time I thought of myself as earning money was when I worked on a crew that dug up septic tanks in Ithaca, New York in the summer of 1956 or 57. It was extremely hard work in the hot sun with a jackhammer breaking into the tops of septic tanks for, I think, $1.88 an hour. I don’t know what happened to that money. My father was paying my tuition at Wooster College. Maybe some of that money went to room and board in the off campus apartment where I was living. All I really remember was the exhausting 8 hour days and the tensions with another jack hammer operator my age who wanted to be in charge.
After graduating from Wooster I hitchhiked around the country for 3 months and then went into the army for a two year stint. I got paid in the Army, I think a little over $100 a month, but I didn’t think of myself as working for the US Army and getting paid for my work. I thought I was doing a required two years of service. Every one of the college teachers my age whom I worked avoided the draft, but for some reason I had a selective service card and I thought it was expected of everyone and did it. And it only now occurs to me that I wasn’t as stupid as I’ve always considered myself to be for spending two years in the Army in my olive green uniform, saluting every officer I encountered, which is as close as I’ve ever been to living in a totalitarian state that was supposedly protecting freedom. I was neither stupid or smart, but it turns out that after I was discharged honorably that for the next period of years after the Vietnam War ramped up, just as I was being discharged, I didn’t live in daily fear of being drafted and dying in a ditch in Vietnam as my youngest brother, Richard was, and so many others. I had done my duty and didn’t have to escape. No trauma for me, the Vietnam war almost passed me by without my noticing it.
In addition, for the brief period that I was in the Army, the United States wasn’t at war with anyone. The Korean War was over and the Vietnamese war had not yet started. It never occurred to me that I would get shot at or shoot someone. I was a Medic in the US Army in Germany that was positioned to block the Russians from expanding their empire after the Second World War. As I imagined it, if the Russians had swept across the German border, 50 miles away, I would get into one of our ambulances and race toward France, trying to stay in our proper position ten miles behind the lines, and then hop on a boat when we got to Calais and sail home.
And it turned out that my Medical Battalion had nothing at all to do. The ambulance drivers polished their ambulances, the others cleaned the hospital tents and scoured the medical equipment for inspections, probably making the scalpels and other stuff unusable. My job was to type up (the one skill 4 years of college provided me) the daily morning report with no errors allowed (typing and retyping, it could take half the day) and keep track of the forms issued by the Army, including passes, which allowed me to be the only enlisted man in our unit to be able forge a daily pass that allowed me out of the barracks every night rather than every other night.
I rented a room in with a German family (not allowed) and filled it with books and a typewriter and got to know the German family well (I just visited them last year after 60 years). I really liked being in Germany, which the rest of my fellow enlisted men hated, spending all their time at the Dixie bar or the Mississippi bar drinking beer and consorting with whores on their every other night off.
And, of course, after I was discharged in Germany and stayed longer before returning home on a troop ship, I met Kathe, whom I married a couple of years later with Germany and Germany culture now becoming a great gift to me.
So coming back to where I started this post, being in Germany never seemed like a job for which I was being paid.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 