Category Archives: Americana

Korea 1964-65 Part 1

Americana, Korea

Recently, I started going through my old slides to have them digitized. The slides were shot on Kodachrome 25 and Ektachrome 100Plus and they are pretty soft and fuzzy compared to today’s digital images. So are the memories they evoke but, as I touch up the slides in Lightroom – a great software program – the memories start to get clearer also.

One group of slides memorializes a year I spent in Korea in a HAWK missile Battery overlooking the Yellow Sea ( humm? is that name racist or just a coincidence?). Actually, I didn’t spend all of the year at the actual missile Battery which we called The Tac Site and which was on top of a nearby hill (reached by the road at the far left in the picture above). Somewhere between one half to two-thirds of the nights that I was in Korea – at C Battery, 38th Brigade, Air Defense Command, or something like that – were spent at the place pictured above. This was lovingly called The Compound and life here was sweet (especially compared to life on The Tac Site). We had good food, were allowed to have women on base, had an Enlisted Men’s Club where we could see movies, and none of that was quite like it sounds.

The food in Korea was a pleasant surprise. While it wasn’t particularly interesting – before Alice Waters, most food wasn’t particularly interesting – we could get eggs cooked to order in the morning. Sometimes we had a delicacy called creamed beef on toast – informally known as SOS, Shit on a Shingle -that I found to be very tasty. It was very salty and fatty (think McDonald’s french fries). On Sundays, we often had barbecued steaks acquired by our mess sergeant by trading booze to some Air Force mess sergeant from  Osan Air Base. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, we had turkey with all the trimmings and mashed potatoes (actually, we had mashed potatoes with almost everything). I don’t remember ever having a salad.

Close to The Compound, was a small village called Nam Yang ri and in it was a small bar and women we, euphemistically, called businesswomen. Their business was us. At night, after work, or on a day off, we could go down to The Vill for drinks at the bar and/or a date. There were – it is hard to remember exactly – about twenty women and we all knew their names and, delicately put, their behavior patterns. The only names I still remember were Mrs. Song who went steady with our Battery Medic and Annie who was very enthusiastic about her job. It was, maybe, a fifteen-minute walk to The Vill and a date was – I don’t really remember exactly – probably less than five bucks (in those days a Private was paid, I think, $91 a month plus clothing and room and board with an extra $10 a month for being in a war zone).

As I recall, alot of guys went steady which cost about thirty to forty bucks a month (it was a sliding scale). Guys who were going steady were able to bring their girlfriends onto The Compound for a movie at the Enlisted Men’s Club (and drinks, of course). One nice perk, if that is the right word, is that a truck was sent down to Nam Yang ri at ten o’clock to bring the happy warriors back home. It was sort of like a taxi picking you up at a bar at closing time if the taxi was an open truck and you rode in the back (less comfortable in winter).

Our Battery Courier made daily runs to civilization, in this case, 8th Army Headquarters and our Ordinance Depot in Seoul, and the 38th Battalion Headquarters near Osan Air Force Base. All were considered distant places of unimaginable luxury. One was about two and a half hours away by 3/4 ton truck on dirt roads, the other, maybe two hours away and it required a full day pass to go to Seoul (where we walked around, gawking like rubes).

A couple of times a week, the courier picked up a movie that was chosen for us by some unknown force. Most of the movies were very mainstream and very pro-American – I saw Dr. Strangelove two days before I shipped out to Korea and, as far as I know, it never got to an Army Base – and they were always highly anticipated. I probably saw Mary Poppins, Hud, The Train, Charade, The Birds, Lilies of the Field, From Russia with Love, The Great Escape, and The Pink Panther. I don’t think I saw Tom Jones, A Hard Days Night, or The Pawnbroker in Korea. The major problem we had was that movies were starting to change to the widescreen format and that required a special lens because they were compressed on the film and had to be expanded back out to be shown. We did get the special lens but the room was not big enough and the lens could not focus that close. We ended up showing the movies in an un-expanded form which made everybody look extra tall and extra skinny. I do remember Cleopatra being a problem and some basketball picture with Jane Fonda where everybody was extra, extra tall. Still, it was much better than no movie.

It was also better than spending the evening back at the barracks. My barracks was in the third building down from the top on the right side, in the picture at the top of the post. In the picture below of the inside of the barracks, my bunk was on the bottom left. Neatness counted, but, after we left for work, Korean Houseboys – they were really men, Jeez! the causal effrontery – came to work to clean up the area, shine our shoes, sort laundry, refuel the diesel space-heaters shown in the center of the picture, and, in general, make our life more pleasant.

To be continued…

 

 

 

Watching Downton Abby and thinking about Tocqueville and the Golden Globes

Americana, California, Film

Michele and I are now watching Downton Abby and I am struck by the sense of noblesse oblige that the  the aristocratic Crawley family carry. They are responsible for the people working for them, for their well being, for their jobs. Because everybody’s place in the world of Downton, both high and low, are preserved in amber – in amber light, atleast –  by their birth, all the change seems to come from the outside. Improvement is not judged in change but in the perfection of the accepted status quo. The aristocratic patriarchs are noble because, in a way, that is their job. As an aside, in a similar way, Kate Middleton’s only real job is to provide an heir.

As I remember it – and I might not be remembering correctly as it has been about 52 years since I read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America which I had a hard time reading, even then – Tocqueville, while thinking that democracy was the future and that the aristocrats would fade away, didn’t think it was all a plus. In general he thought that the drive for equality was a good thing, even if problematical, but that it reduced everybody to just grubbing for money. He was in America during the Andrew Jackson era and thought America had lost – or, maybe more accurately, never had – a sense of noblesse oblige. 

As an Northern Californian, I was taught to think of Southern Californians – especially Hollywood people – as being superficial with no sense of the noblesse oblige that we superior Northern Californians had. All they cared about was making money and looking good – and that often involved boob implants –  and they had no respect for the past or tradition (after all Los Angeles was just a collection of mud huts when San Francisco was having a World’s Fair). I think that there is some truth to this, but it neglects to cop to the otherside of that coin which is that Southern California, especially Hollywood, is probably the biggest meritocracy on earth.

Watching the Golden Globes and I am not struck by any sense of noblesse oblige but I am struck by the diversity of the party goers, nominees, and winners. I first met Ben Aflect – so to speak – as the townie in Good Will Hunting who urged Matt Damon to get out of town. I know that is not exactly who he is was? – sort of – but to see the change from that lost kid in Boston to best director at the Gold Globes is to see somebody who got there on merit. The same goes for  Quentin Tarantino, a highschool dropout from Torrance, who won best screenplay for Django Unchained. Sure it helps if you are gorgeous, especially if you are a woman, and Hollywood – all of Southern California, really – is obsessed with beauty but, as shallow as it is, it is much better than being fixated on a person’s grandparents as a measure of worth as is the case in Downton Abbey and San Francisco when I was growing up.

 

 

 

 

 

Gay marriage in the Marines

Americana, Politics, Uncategorized

According to Time Magazine, The Marines’ top legal officer has told all Marine lawyers that the corps will not support Marine spouses’ clubs that discriminate against same-sex couples….The Marines made clear discrimination isn’t an option they’ll entertain. End of discussion.

I think that most people – intellectually – know that the military is not a democracy, but I don’t think that most people really – emotionally – understand that, in the military, you do as you are told. It is not like a job, where you can leave if you don’t want to do what they tell you to do. In the military, basically, you do it or you go to jail. Of course it makes sense, many people would decline if hitting the beach first on D-Day were an option, but in runs deeper than that.

My first day in the Army started at 5 AM with a Sergeant – who I later learned wasn’t really a Sergeant but a National Guard Reservist Private First Class acting as a Sergeant –  waking us up by banging on a metal garbage can with a stick and screaming Get the fuck up. Of course we did, scared shitless,  and it made sense for us to get up. But, sitting here and knowing that he really wasn’t a Sergeant, I am pretty sure that – after the first couple of times, atleast – he didn’t really want to get up, at what ever time it took, to get us up at 5 AM.

Everywhere I went in the Army – until I became a Sergeant and the rules imposed on me changed – standard getting up time was 5:30 AM to get to work at 8 AM which was usually only a couple of hundred feet from where we slept. Nobody said being at work at 8 AM is the goal and do what you have to to be on time, the goal was getting up when we were told to. We could complain, and we often did, but we got up.

After three years in the Army, I went back to college at Claremont in Southern California. At the time, Claremont had a policy – regime? program? – that required graduating seniors to pass two major tests to graduate. One was a one day test in our major and the other was a complicated, general, Comprehensive Test in which we were give a list of five books to read – and a week to do so –  and three days to answer the general question that constituted the test. The – hopefully – graduated seniors thought that it was unfair to pass every class four four years and then be washed out by failing an arbitrary, essay,  test. This being the 60’s, the seniors held a meeting to vote on protesting the Comprehensive Test by not taking it.

There were about an half dozen vets in the Senior Class. We were all older and we all knew the “reality of the real world”. We vets all spoke against and voted against the protest and the rest of the class voted for the protest. I was sure that Claremont would just say Fuck You, Get Out if we didn’t take the test. If this had been the Army, they would have put us in the Stockade but this wasn’t the Army so I figured they just wouldn’t graduate us. My mindset was an Army mindset, if somebody orders you to Jump, the only permissible answer is Yes, Sir! How high? End of discussion.

So, in 1948, when President Harry Truman ordered the military to desegregate, the military desegregated – grumbling and slowly because much of the military culture was Southern – and it was fully integrated by the Korean War. When I was in the Army in El Paso during the early 60’s, I could have a beer with a black guy in my local on-base enlisted club but not in town. I was not in El Paso when the civilian world caught up with the military but I expect to be around to see the the civilian world catch up with the Marines. It will be very nice to see.

 

The death of an old Army buddy

Americana, Psychological Musings, Uncategorized

I learned today that Jerry McFetridge died almost a year ago. I knew him as Brit McFetridge when we were together, in the Army – on a HAWK missile site – in Korea during 1963 and, possibly, 1964.  It makes me sad. Much sadder than I would have expected if I had thought about it a couple of hours ago. I am not sure why.

We were next door neighbors while we were in Korea. Next door neighbors in the Army – in this case, at least – means that we had bunk beds next to each other in the Fire Control and Radar Quonset Hut. In those days, individuals were sent to existing units overseas – and in the Korea which was considered a war zone even though nobody was shooting  – and our time in country overlapped. He rotated1 into Korea before me and, therefore, rotated out before me and while we were there together, we were good friends. In the sort of strange way that sometimes happens in a seminar, or the military, or on a sports team when the the only real connection is the shared activity.

Except in this case, we had almost the same interests. According to his obituary, Mr. McFetridge was remembered by friends as a hardworking, loyal and fun-loving man who enjoyed outdoor adventures. He paddled Western river rapids, backpacked along the Pacific Crest Trail and hiked the Annapurna mountains in Nepal. He traveled to Italy and Mexico, and he recently was preparing for a bike trip across Vietnam. I remember him as the guy in the picture above but, of course, he had really become the guy below.

I am not sure how I can miss a guy I haven’t seen in 45 years and who I really don’t know, but I do. It makes me sad. Rest in peace, Britt.
1. Rotated in is Army talk for He went to Korea.

My favorite news story this year…so far

Americana, Around home, Psychological Musings

The Palo Alto Daily Post reported that an Albanian couple and their daughter were arrested for shop lifting from – at? – the Nordstrom store in the Stanford Shopping Center. Apparently, when they were apprehended leaving the store, they tried to throw the merchandize back into the store and then they ran in different directions.

I know almost nothing about Albania except where it roughly is and that, over the last half century, a goodly number of Albanians have migrated to the – then – Serbian province of Kosovo (which always seemed to me as a place to migrate from). In my imagination, Albania is a poor country that looks like the picture above with the natives dressing in well-worn Western European clothing – much like people in the Caucuses – rather than colorful peasant clothing like Guatemalan huipiles. In 2011, Albania was named as a great travel destination by the Lonely Planet, so maybe it really looks like the picture below.

Either way, the the Barjaba family, of whom the patriarch is the chief executive of the Socialist Party of Albania and the Dean of the School of Political Sciences at the Mediterranean University of Albania, were engaged in a little informal wealth redistribution while visiting Palo Alto – which has to be richer than anyplace in Albania – to see their daughter who is at Stanford taking graduate courses in Democracy and The Rule of Law.