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Affirmations
Pat Dixon
The pattern began to emerge, as a shrink told my first wife, while I was in the Army. He was judging from a case that’s still valid in my mind, though I see the roots of my “problem” as being deeper and somewhat older.
Fresh out of high school and newly wed to a classmate who announced-- erroneously it turned out--that we were going to become premature parents, I joined the service to learn about electronics and leadership while helping my country. After three years of training and duty as a squad radioman, I thought I was really moving up in the military world and decided to re-enlist. I was a corporal and had recently been recommended for promotion to acting sergeant. As luck would have it, my true stripes appeared two days before I was to sign the re-up papers.
“Fuzz”--as we called our newly commissioned ‘toon leader--had assigned me to collect donations from my squad for the Red Cross. When I turned the money in to him, the amount was more than any of his other three squads had contributed. However, when he asked me what the “percentage of participation” was, I told him the truth--it was about two-thirds.
“Corporal Brown,” he said with his sarcastic little college-boy smile, “that is just totally unacceptable. I want you to try harder. I want you to exercise some leadership here. Your squad needs to have one hundred percent participation--by noon tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, saluting him quite smartly.
Back then, most of the men in my squad were making barely $78 per month, and, like me, many of them were having big allotments taken out and sent home to wives or parents--and about a quarter of them had kids already. By next morning, however, I had collected an additional $14.75 from the squad and took it to the lieutenant with a precise calculation of the participation: 83.333 percent. I could have lied and said everyone had contributed, or I could have kicked in a couple more bucks of my own and thought of it as a “loan” I wouldn’t be repaid by the ‘cruits that hadn’t contributed. Maybe in a couple other alternate universes, that’s what Thomas J. Brown, Jr., did.
As others might’ve foreseen--but somehow I did not--Fuzz became furious with me.
“Corporal Brown, did I or did I not give you a direct order to get one hundred percent participation?”
“Yes, sir. You did, sir,” I said, knowing that it had really been phrased more in the form of a hope or a wish and not as a command.
“Why, then, have you failed me? Why is it that my other three squads in my platoon all have one hundred percent participation and all four of the other squads in the other three platoons of Delta Company all have one hundred percent participation--and all of the squads in all of the other five companies in our battalion have the same? Why is it that your squad is the only one in the entire battalion unable to do so, Corporal Brown?”
He might have asked about all the squads in all the other four battalions in our brigade, had he known about them as I did, and the answer would have been the same. I told him the literal truth.
“Sir, it’s because they’ve all falsified their reports. The NCOs collected what they could without squeezing the troops’ balls, and then they winked at their officers and said they had got one hundred percent participation, which is what the general wants--sir.”
For about twenty seconds Fuzz stared at me in silence.
“Do you know this for a fact, Corporal?” he finally asked.
“Yes, sir. After duty last night, sir, I made a point of asking direct questions in twelve day rooms and also at the NCO Club. My squad has absolutely donated the highest actual dollar amount and almost certainly has the highest real percentage on this whole post, from what I’ve heard--sir.”
“Corporal Brown,” he said after another thoughtful pause, “how difficult would it be for you to get one hundred percent participation, as I ordered you to do?”
Again, in some alternate universes, various Lieutenant Fuzzes might never have tried to push the matter further with me or else might have seen the reasonableness of Tommy Brown’s statement and backed me up--or maybe put in a few extra bucks themselves and lied to the C.O. about the participation. Or various Tommy Browns, if pushed, might’ve caved in--or might’ve pushed back harder, figuratively in some universes, maybe literally with his fists or a rifle butt in others. In my universe, though, I had my answer that suited me, and suits me still.
“Legally speaking, it’s impossible, sir. The only ways Third Squad could get that percentage would be if I illegally harassed some of my men who really can’t afford to donate--or else if I falsified my report to you, sir, which I am certain you as a commissioned officer would not ask me to do. Would you--sir?”
After a third pause Fuzz said, “Dismissed, Private Brown.”
Tops, our company first sergeant who had listened quietly to this conversation, gave me a half-hour head-chewing and a ten-minute ass-chewing and then explained why I would not be approved if I tried to re-enlist: I had a dishonorable, un-patriotic, un-military attitude. I tried to argue with Tops, but he’d hear none of it and looked at me as if I was the battalion idiot.
I suppose it was really all for the best that I didn’t re-up: four buddies I stayed in touch with, even after I began working towards my law degree, told me that later, as the Vietnam War got cranked up, they were expected to get one hundred percent qualification of basic trainees on the rifle ranges and did so by poking holes in the ’cruits’ targets with pens, pencils, and cartridges to raise the scores of those who failed--while their company officers and range officers calmly looked on. If I’d seen that sort of life-endangering stuff, I probably would’ve gotten myself sent to Fort Leavenworth for twenty years for unpatriotically reporting it to my superior officers.
My first wife’s therapist told her I was “frontal” and pointed to this “failure to adapt to the realities of our society” as my initial turning point towards my “self-destructive behavioral pattern.” Perhaps so, but the seed was planted at least three years earlier, at my high school class’s senior banquet.
During the banquet, which was held on a Thursday evening in the ballroom of a yacht club on the coast of Connecticut, various student groups and teams and individuals were recognized for their merits by our superintendent, our principal, and our school board--who all sat at a head table and made endless speeches about things past, passing, and to come. Ironically, my bride-to-be and I were both honored that night--for being among the five brainiest kids in the graduating class.
As the valedictorian, she would be recognized more specifically during the following Monday’s graduation ceremony, where she would give a pre-approved speech. On this evening she was called on by name and asked to stand up, and then the other four of us were also invited to rise as a group for some polite and very brief applause. The bulk of the evening’s recognition, of course, went to senior members of the school’s basketball and football teams, with the baseball team placing a poor third but still far in front of us five scholars. And Chess Club, which had the best won-lost record in the whole school, got even less praise and wasn’t asked to stand.
In those days, of course, it was illegal for teenagers to drink in public, and so nothing alcoholic was being served to us at our graduation banquet--which consisted of over-cooked vegetables, stale rolls, and a choice between pinkish chicken with a thick, pasty white sauce or dry, gristle-bound beef with soggy onions. I discovered by chance, however, during a pilgrimage to the men’s room, that most of my classmates had brought bottles of their own and had partaken therefrom with great liberality. In a pattern that they would re-enact with equal determination at Saturday night’s Senior Prom, many of them were making themselves varying degrees of mellow, belligerent, numb, and/or sick. While I was washing my hands, one member of the football team puked his partial denture into a toilet and flushed it down before he realized what he’d done.
I noticed, too, that some of the harder-drinking members of our semi-finalist basketball team were arguing about having run out of the liquor they’d brought with them and were debating how best to replenish their supply. A few suggested they forcibly appropriate the partially empty bottles of the men’s room’s other occupants, but I don’t know whether they acted upon that motion after I returned to my seat in the dining room. I briefly told my intended what I’d just observed, and we exchanged smug, self-righteous, self-congratulatory smiles.
About this time our superintendent of schools stood up and gave the climactic speech of the evening. He was a short, bald, heavy-set man with a plump face and an ever-present smile. His nickname was “Pops” among the students, and it had been so even when my parents had gone through the school system twenty-five years before me. Introducing him was “Big Jim Bob”--James Robert Harrison--our tall, muscular principal, he who’d patrolled the corridors of the school, swinging a twirler’s baton like a policeman’s truncheon, maintaining amiable iron discipline among scholars and non-scholars alike the past four years.
We five, we happy scholastically gifted five, were sitting together on the right-hand side of the dining room, about forty feet from the head table. We exchanged nose-wrinkled grimaces as we heard this strong man give a long litany of fulsome, lick-spittle praise to a corpulent little clown who scarcely had three contiguous functional brain cells. We may have occasionally joked about Big Jim Bob behind his back, but previously, I think, we’d all had a grudging and sincere respect for him and the way he carried himself--a bit like Fess Parker or Clint Walker, a couple of early television heroes. That night, though, several of us whispered “Suck-up” under our breaths during his introduction of Pops.
After Big Jim Bob was done, Pops himself was full of fulsome praise and windy platitudes. At one point I whispered to my intended, “The good news is, if the enemy ever capture him, at least they won’t get anything out of him.”
Pops’s speech ran approximately twenty minutes and might have run much longer. One of the minor stars of our quarter-finalist football team--who was half unconscious in his seat, just five feet from the superintendent--suddenly began acting like a one-man Greek chorus. At the end of each rhetorical pause by Pops, this bit player would chant in a loud slurred voice, audible to everybody, “Yesh-yesh-yesh-yesh-yesh!”
Although Pops’s eyes sometimes rested on this player and glared through his rimless glasses, he maintained his patented smile and continued his speech with a studied aloofness to the disturbing element. Big Jim Bob, though, looked considerably distraught and repeatedly tried to gesture something to various other football players at that table. They themselves, however, appeared to be enjoying their teammate’s performance, and they made no acknowledgement of Big Jim Bob’s cryptic gestures.
All might still have gone well and, for all I know, my own life might have taken a different turn, had not the manager of the yacht club suddenly stormed up to the head table and grabbed Big Jim Bob by the shoulder in an angry and agitated manner. Pops skipped a couple of beats to listen, and his smile half faded for just a moment. He briefly put his hand over the microphone and spoke rapidly to his high school principal, making some pointing gestures roughly in our direction.
In half an instant, Big Jim Bob was on his feet and walking towards us. He didn’t have his twirler’s baton in his hand, but there appeared to be murder in his eyes, and I’d never before seen him look so intent and serious.
In about fifteen seconds he reached the seats we were in and told the two of us who were males to get up and come with him. Gripping me and Charlie Swift roughly by our upper arms, he hustled us out the dining room exit and into the parking lot.
“All right, you little shits,” he said, breathing heavily the stale odor of alcohol in wave after wave, “who was it broke into the club’s liquor locker?!”
Was this man insane? We two students were both obviously sober. Neither Charlie nor I spoke. Big Jim Bob shoved us against the latticed wall of the garbage-can area, cracking some of the thin boards with our heads and backs.
“I don’t have all night! Who the fuck did it?” he roared in our faces.
“We don’t know,” I said, wincing. “My best guess, though, is it was some of those darlin’ basketball players who’ve been getting all the praise and applause this evening.”
This speculation caused Big Jim Bob explode.
“You little shits aren’t goin’ t’ get away with this sort of thing. I’m goin’ t’ suspend you both until we’ve had an investigation. Now, both of you get the hell off these premises or I’ll have the police take you in.”
Needless to say, Charlie and I left the banquet without giving anyone an explanation. Later, we and our folks tried to protest that we hadn’t done anything wrong, and the following August we were quietly sent our diplomas in the mail. When mine arrived, I was already married and taking basic in the Army.
That night of our banquet, I resolved that I wouldn’t take any more horse shit from anyone who was deliberately messing with me.
During basic and afterwards, I met a lot of military authority figures who’d given me stupid orders or who’d made honest mistakes in judgment--both of which I’d tolerated--but until I met Fuzz I had not had to deal again with willful, consciously malicious idiocy.
Who knows what I would have made of myself if I hadn’t been hassled and bent by my unprincipled principal? If I’d gone ahead unwarped, I might have gone straight into the college of my choice, become an ROTC lieutenant like Fuzz, risen to the rank of light colonel, shredded evidence for some president of the United States, lied to congress, and then become a state senator or a TV personality. I often wonder.