My Military Experience

As I reflect upon the days of my youth, a period of constant war, I can definitely see how the conditions and events of that time greatly effected my life. Joining the military when I was a mere seventeen was certainly not a rational or moral decision. It was a decision based upon ignorance, sexual immaturity, and a personal feeling of inferiority. I knew that I had made a grave mistake within days after I enlisted, but I was too young to face consciously the implication of my entrapment. Instead, I accepted fate and worked hard at becoming loyal to my captors. Unfortunately, or fortunately—whichever way you look at it—my long term subconscious mind did not completely agree with the whole arrangement. I began to develop a sense of inner conflict about the whole affair. In simple terms, I didn't like the military. I didn't like to march; I didn't like the restriction; I didn't like playing with guns; and I especially didn't like taking orders without my having a voice in the process. Frankly, there isn't anything I can think of that I did like except, maybe, getting drunk.

As I recall, I did enjoy getting drunk, or at least I thought so at the time. It was the one activity where I had plenty of friends and companions. It was a way for us interns to combat the terrible boredom and lack of meaningful purpose in our lives. It was also an effective way for us to blind ourselves to the reality of tomorrow. Some of us drank more than others. I was one of them. I don't think I ever left the base without drinking. Well, that's not completely true—nothing ever is the whole truth. There was a period of several months when I was stationed at Sandia, headquarters for Atomic Energy, located on the outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico that I found a more productive way of passing my time. As said before, music was my passion, and playing the piano my first earthly love. (Why I didn't go to a Music College right after I finished high school, instead of enlisting in the military, is yet another story.) Consequently, in order to satisfy my love of music, and my need to play the piano, I made contact with the Danfellizer School of Music there in Albuquerque. It was a beautiful private music school, housed in a magnificent old Spanish hacienda not far from Sandia. The director of the school was most understanding of my needs. Without more than a brief conversation—I don't remember if I played for him or not, probably—he gave me a key to the school, and invited me to come and go as I pleased, even after the school was closed, or whenever I would have time to practice. I remember one particular time when I was feeling rather low and depressed, and was unable to go to sleep. It was about 10 p.m., so I decided to leave the base, drive downtown to the music school, and play the piano. I loved playing the piano when no one was around, especially at night when all is still. Also, it was a time when no one was at the school and I could play the concert grand piano in the main music hall. As the story went, Jose Iturbi, the famed concert pianist and then popular Hollywood screen actor, had donated the nine-foot Baldwin piano to the school. Anyway, it was not long until I lost myself in a rapture of sound and harmony. I must have lost all sense of time, because all of a sudden I was startled by the director's presence. "OH!" he said, "It's you. I was wondering where all that music was coming from at two o'clock in the morning." Needless to say, I did not drink while playing the piano. It was a good experience.

But like all pre-dawn alcoholics, I was unable to maintain the status quo. It was not long until I was again closing the bars on a regular basis, and drinking myself to sleep. I had now been in the military for a little over a year and a half and the thought of having to serve another two and a half years was almost more than I could bear. It is what took place during the following months, though, that I have never been able to fully explain. As it were, a series of events transpired that led to my early discharge on the first day of August, 1952—after less than two years service rather than the expected four years for which I had enlisted. In the past, I have simply explained my early discharge to others by saying it was for medical reasons, which is both true and false. In today's world my problems ay well have been classed as medical, but in 1952 they were not. Back in 1952, if a military doctor couldn't find the answer to your problems in a quick 10 minute examination, he would quite often simply report that there was nothing physically wrong with this patient, it has to be mental. Many times he was wrong, just like today when doctors are more prone to take the opposite point of view: that everything has a physical root, and nothing is the result of mind or spirit. Actually, in both cases—today and yesterday—I would have been falsely diagnosed, as time has born out. The truth of the matter is that my problem was not only mental, but physical and spiritual as well.

However, it must be understood that when we humans are making judgments about other people, and even ourselves, it is always a complicated process, and that we humans rarely, if ever, have all the facts to the story. One of the better statements I have heard about words and language comes from a man I can no longer remember, who said, "The meaning of a word is what a man does with it." It is not what supposedly happened to me fifty years ago, therefore that is important, but rather what I did with the experience in the years to follow.

Of course, there was a lot more to my military experience than I have just outlined. I have no doubt that the experience was one of the main influences in my life. How could it be otherwise? It was a period of extreme abnormality in my life. From day one of my enlistment, my conscious—as well as my subconscious—knew that my intellect was in no way prepared for the present conditions and circumstances being set before me. In other words, from day one of my enlistment, I walked around in a mental stupor. But here again, words fail to depict my meaning. When I say that I walked around in a mental stupor, I do not wish to imply that I was always walking around with my head bent low completely self-absorbed in some depressing thought or mind set. Quite the contrary, I was always doing something for a laugh, or in process of doing some satiric act to belittle the system. For the most part, I was the life of the party, but that was not a depiction of my real self. It was a defense against having to face the god-awful feeling of complete and utter personal helplessness.

Joining the military service had relived my sense of isolation, and for the time being, at least, had distracted my intent awareness of self. The first year was spent in typical carefree living. Performing my duties when necessary, and sowing my wild oats whenever I could. From all appearances, this seemed to work, and were it not for an alien force which neither I nor the military understood, we may have lived happily ever after. The hound of heaven was upon my soul, and although I tried to adhere to the outer projections of man, the pain of separation from reality greatly reduced my ability to obey. The two-edged sword of fear and loneliness hacked away at my outer shell, and the bud of freedom began to blossom forth in the midst of confusion and hate.

To see God as an enemy is a terrible realization, and the only defense is to rationalize and drug the mind beyond the ability to care. I began to drink beyond the point of reason, and to search my mind for greater bodily pleasures by which to deaden the pain. The self, perplexed by the presence of two mighty forces—the inner and the outer—amassed its strength against the point of least resistance; in a moment of intense fury, I began to refuse and totally withdraw from the dictates of men. Without any previous disciplinary action, one day I began to slowly refuse to obey orders.

Neither I nor the military understood my reaction, at the time. If I were now able to defend the boy that I was then, there can be no doubt that new evidence would be presented in my favor. We judge what we know not, and we excuse what we know we shouldn't—certainly this was my pattern in the days of my youth. After twenty-one months of service, I was discharged under the label of "convenience of the government." I had been spared the terrible experience of choosing between my life and the life of another.

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