When I Became A Liberal

In 1960 I was a newly minted Marine stationed at Courthouse Bay, Camp Lejeune, undergoing intensive training as a combat engineer. As I remember the day started with a three mile run (Whether it was before or after breakfast I don't recall) and continued in the field with high explosives, mines (We were the ones who put them in and took them out), and booby traps. We were also taught to make improvised explosive devices with whatever we had at hand. I remember booby trapping a box of nails thinking joyfully how it would shred a human being. We dealt in death and destruction, and were proud of what we could do. We never considered the consequences to ourselves -- after all, we were immortal; we were Marines; we had survived Parris Island. What could be worse? We never considered what the enemy would do to us, only what we would do to him. Maim him; destroy him. We were the force even Mao feared. We were the force the Germans in WW1 cursed as "Teufel Hunden", Devil Dogs. Sir, yes,sir, we were immortal.

One day a mate of mine returned from the base library with a book he had borrowed. He was a very bright kid whose father was a physicist at Oak Ridge. "You gotta read this," he said and handed me the book. I can still see his face clearly, though I can't remember his name. The book was "Johnny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo. I do recall watching the McCarthy hearings on television, but I had no idea of the Hollywood blacklist, still less of Dalton Trumbo, a guy with a funny name. "What's it about?" I asked my friend. "Just read it," he said. So I did. And I was stunned. I'd figured the book was some kind of boy's story, something you might find in a magazine like Boy's Life or Argosy. It was about page fifty when I realized what I was reading. The voice telling the story was that of a horribly wounded soldier, WW1, who had been in an explosion that had destroyed his arms, his legs, and his face. He had been reduced to a torso, a hunk of meat with a brain, no eyes, no mouth, unable to communicate, only to think. As he gradually discovers what he has become, so does the reader, and the shock of recognition absolutely stunned me. How that book ever made it into a Marine Corps library I do not know? My guess is that whoever ordered it had no idea what it was about. Just a good old book about a good old boy. Yeah, right. What it was was a devastating story about a man turned into a piece of meat, only with a mind that still worked, still thought, still remembered, still pondered, still cried out in the silence of his soul to be as he once was. It was an agonizing read, and the image of this poor wretch has never left me. It was the dawn of my personal politics. Gradually, the notion took root that I and my buddies, guys I had grown to love and trust more than anyone on earth, were merely pawns in the games of power brokers. What was engendered was not revolt but ambivalence, some of which is with me to this day so many years later. Being a Marine meant you had become a member of the greatest fighting force on earth. There were no Green Berets, no Navy Seals; there were only the Marines. And I was one. And I was so proud of it. Even today when I hear the Marine Corps Hymn tears come to my eyes. I straighten up. Do not mess with me. I am ready for battle. Note this: every American military unit has a song: Anchors Away, the Wild Blue Yonder, the Caissons Are Marching Along. Only the Marine Corps has a hymn. A hymn! Its final lines are, "If the Army and the Navy ever look on heaven's scene, they will find the streets are guarded by United States Marines." And yet. The older I became the more entrenched the idea that young men were sent to die for old men who wanted things their way. And yet. When I was at Yale in the mid-sixties I seriously considered going back on active duty. Semper Fidelis. Go figure.

Codger? Curmudgeon? Choose one. Uh, no thanks.

One day early last Summer Max and I sat on the front porch theorizing about why West Kill Mountain had thus far turned green only by its bottom half. It had been a brutal winter capped by a seven-foot blizzard, and both of us were ready for fat leaves and sunshine. The daffodils had flowered. The forsythia was a thousand bursts of sunlight. Lilacs were only two or three days away, but the top half of the mountain remained drab and barren. A few years ago a plague of gypsy moths denuded these mountains, and they looked like that. We felt we had been robbed of our spring. Caterpillars seemed to hang in mid-air, their silken threads invisible in the bright sun. Folks were burning larvae sacs out of their trees. They’d use apple pickers stuffed with burning newspaper to reach them. Then billions of black flies – I mean BILLIONS AND BILLIONS AND BILLIONS -- descended in an angry cloud to search and devour every morsel remotely resembling moth. Local scuttlebutt had it that the forestry department dumped them over the Catskills to counter the moths. There are lots of rumors, none of them corroborated, about what the forestry department does from bringing in wolves and mountain lions to problem bears from other districts. But, we were talking about flies. At least, the moths kept their distance. The flies infiltrated our wrap around screen porch with the skill of trained sappers and did their best to crawl into our ears.until one morning they were no longer there, none of them, none at all, not one. They’d disappeared as suddenly as they’d come.

So, Max and I, that early summer day sitting on the porch, unanimously decided that, since there were no gypsy moths around, West Kill mountain must be slow this year due to the penetrating cold. It took us two cups of coffee each to come to that conclusion. Then Andrea came running by.

Andrea is a model who lives a couple miles down the valley and runs the road when weather permits and sometimes when it doesn’t. She’s tall, from Oklahoma, a stunning mix of Black and Native American. Usually, we simply call out to each other, and she keeps going. This time she came up to the porch – the first time she’d ever done that – and she was laughing, pointing at me and Max and bent over laughing.

“Somebody ought to videotape you two,” she laughed. “Couple of local characters, all right. Couple of codgers like those guys from the Muppets.” She thought this was a riot. “I’m serious,” she said. “Talk into a tape recorder. I just know you got tales to tell. You’re livin’ history. Spill it.”

Um, wait a minute. Back up. Past beans, past living history, past stories to tell. Back. Back. Codgers! Hold it right there. Codger. Now, someone generations my junior might mistake me for one, especially if I haven’t shaved for a few days, but they’d be wrong. And anyway Andrea was looking at me through a screen that no doubt hampered her vision. The point is: I have worked hard at not being a codger, an ugly word, by the way. Codger. It sounds like you’re trying to spit up something. I like the word “curmudgeon”, its synonym, and, consequently, “curmudgeonly”. I like it’s sound and the odd way it looks, and, I admit, at one time I deemed it something to which I sort of aspired: the notion of the crotchety but lovable old geezer. I knew a guy named Bill back in Montana who aspired to some day be like his grandfather. The old man sat in the back yard with a .22 rifle and shot the pigeons that landed on the phone wires overhead. We laughed at such a cantankerous old fart, for that he was, but there was something in me that looked at this as a possibility. A cute, old guy, you know, a crank with a heart of gold. That guy.

One day – I don’t know if we were married, yet – but one day I was regaling Jamie with the notion of an old curmudgeon, convinced there was something endearing about it. I made sure to tell her about Bill’s grandfather. She reacted as if to a really vile smell. “What’s so cute about that?” she wanted to know. “You go that route, you go it alone.” I saw her point. I’ve got a notion of what I’d like to be as I grow older, but it ain’t that. If I ever flip old codger on you, kick my butt and tell me to act my age.