Marching Back to Health

Fifty years ago on February 1, I started Basic Training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. The skill I use the most from that eight weeks of learning to be part of a team is marching. In the past two decades I have been busted up pretty badly. 

In recovering from those injuries, I would square my shoulders, look straight ahead, take that 30-inch step and move out. After knee replacement surgery three years ago, my physical therapist was a young Marine. He taught me to walk again using cadence. 

In 2007 I smashed C7 and broke nine other bones in a bicycle race. For three months I wore a neck and chest brace. I walked at least three miles every day after I left the hospital. When I didn't feel motivated I would sing cadence in my head and walk very straight and tall. 

For an aging amateur athlete recovering from injuries and body repairs, marching the road to recovery has helped me recover more quickly.

50th Anniversary of My First Enlistment is This Month

 

Twas the night before Basic, and I drank way too much. 

I have no photos from my Air Force enlistment.

Fifty years ago today I arrived at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio. I was hung over with shoulder-length hair and at the beginning of an on-again off-again relationship with the United States military that would finally end 44 years later in May 2016.  The story of that first haircut is here. 

Since my first of my four different service branches was the Air Force, basic training was mostly marching and learning military culture.  We had one afternoon on the rifle range, one hike, and one meal outdoors--at picnic tables.  In the nearly three years of my Air Force enlistment I never saw C-Rations let alone tasted them.  Decades later I did a comparison of C-Rations and the current MRE meals that got 100,000+ views on YouTube. Here is the video.

When I left my home in Stoneham, Massachusetts, the Beatles were still together, Elvis was still alive, the Vietnam War was still raging, the Cold War was heating up, the draft was in its last full year, the Muscle Car boom of the 1960s was nearly over, and Donny Osmond had two songs in the top ten singles of 1971.  

Speaking of music, while my shoulder-length hair was shorn from my head in the Air Force barber shop, Merle Haggard's "Okie From Muskogee" played in the background. The only country songs I heard up to that point in my life were some Johnny Cash breakthrough hits that ended up on Top 40 radio, like "A Boy Named Sue." In one of the ironies of military life, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, was the place I trained to deploy to Iraq 37 years later in 2009. In one of the many coincidences of dates in my life, my basic training and pre-deployment training both began on February 1. 

In 1972, phones had wires and were often attached to walls. Every Sunday at basic training we lined up at phone booths to call home.  Cameras had film. Barracks had liars.  Extravagant liars.  My basic training flight was forty men either 18 or 19 years old, from more than twenty states across the nation, living in one big room.  Before lights out, we would shine our shoes in groups and talk.  Some conversations were about training or life in the barracks, or the food we ate, but when the subject was home, the lies swelled to the size of a Goodyear Blimp.  I wrote about those lies and how Facebook killed the barracks liar.  

When we marched we sang songs about killing the enemy, Viet Cong mostly, occasionally a Russian, we sang about our nearly infinite appetites for sex and alcohol, and we sang about Jody--the guy who was back home sleeping with our wife/girlfriend, driving our car, emptying our meager bank account, and in its best country version, alienating the affections of a favorite hunting dog.  

At my last military training school in 2013, we were not allowed to sing any of those songs.  All five military services were in our marching formations, and none of them were allowed to sing any marching song that could be considered sexist. And even though we were in two active wars, we could not sing about an enemy. Jody was off limits.  I wrote about the change in the songs for the New York Times At War blog.

The world in which I enlisted is gone.  I am writing this in a cafe in Paris on a computer with more processing power than the computers that put a man on the moon in 1969.  The flight from home to basic training fifty years ago was the first time I had been west of Cleveland or south of Pennsylvania.  It was my first flight on an airplane.  Earlier this month, my flight to Paris was the beginning of what may be my seventieth trip to another continent either on business, pleasure or a military mission.   

I have a love/hate relationship with the military. Three times, I got out, and said I was done: in 1974, 1979 and 1985.  Three times, I re-enlisted: in 1975, 1982 and 2007.  I finally left the Army National Guard in 2016.  Now I am far too old to change my mind again.  And I am happy with that.  I spent some of the best years of my life in the military, but even if I were not too old, I am happy to let the men and women born in this century defend the country.

 

Massive Fire Bombing of Stalingrad

On 23 August 1942, Nazis dropped thousands of bombs and thousands more incendiary bombs on Stalingrad at the opening of their attack.

The horror of fire bombing cities, slaughtering civilians in terrible infernos, was how the Nazi army began its attack on the city of Stalingrad.  The Luftwaffe flew 1,600 sorties on Sunday, 23 August 1942, dropping 1,000 tons of bombs and incendiary devices on the ill-fated city.

The dense black cloud from the fires rose more than two miles into the air above the ill-fated city. The fire could be seen to the horizon in every direction.

I just read a long account of the raid and its aftermath in the novel Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman.  A reporter and correspondent throughout the war, Grossman arrived in Stalingrad the day after the massive raid. He spoke to witnesses and saw the aftermath of the bombing.

I love the book and have written about it other parts of it here.  Stalingrad is Volume I of a two-part, 1,800 page novel about the central battle of the war in Russia. It is the War and Peace of the 20th Century.

I read Volume II Life and Fate three years ago. Volume I was not available in English until this year. For those interested in the war from the Soviet perspective, it's a great book.

Unforgettable Moment, B-52s Scramble, Hill Air Force Base, 1974

B-52 Bombers taking off on full throttle on Strategic Air Command alert

I was stationed at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, from 1972-74. Early in 1974, Strategic Air Command stationed a wing of B-52s on Hill.  

My duty station was four miles from the airfield on the north end of the base.  Sometimes I went to the hangar for electronic parts.  On a warm spring day, I happened to be in the hangar when I heard an enormous roar, then another, then another, and another.  

Six B-52s filled the air with black smoke and the howl of 48 jet engines on throttle. The planes took off one after the other less than a minute apart. When all six formed up in the sky above the base, the giant airplanes flew east toward the Rocky Mountains and disappeared.

It was magnificent.

I was 21 years old when those planes took off.  Those airplanes were about my age, first entering service in 1952, a year before I was born. Like me they have had a lot of maintenance, but still have an active life today. Some of them, like me, are in their 60s.  

The Topless Shoeshine Parlor: The Draft-Era Military Really was Different

After Basic Training, the Air Force sent me to a technical school at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, Colorado.  The base is now a community college, a golf course, and a museum of the many missile and weapons technicians trained there during Cold War. 

In 1972, Airmen with free time could take a bus or walk the 108 blocks west to downtown Denver.  The first time I went to Denver was in April. The weather was nice so ‘Bama (my basic training bunkmate) and I walked to the city.  A few blocks east of the base on Colfax was proof positive we were serving in a draft-era military composed of mostly 19-year-old single men.

We walked east past taco stands, pawn shops, pool halls, stripper bars, bars without strippers, tattoo parlors, burger joints, military surplus stores, camera shops, and other stores of interest to young men easily parted from their meager incomes.  At about the 9300 block of East Colfax Avenue, ‘Bama stopped and said, “Lookie here Gussman. Son. Of. A. Bitch.”

We were staring in the front window of the only Topless Shoeshine Parlor I have ever seen before or since. My 19^th birthday was still a few days away, so as far as I knew I was still the only 18-year-old virgin in the United States Air Force, or maybe in the world.    

‘Bama, being a man of the world, insisted it was a rip-off and we should just keep walking.  I took his advice, but as we walked away, I was twisting my neck farther than normal anatomy allows to look at the hypnotic motion that occurs when a woman wearing just a skirt rhythmically rubs a shine cloth on a boot.

Topless shoeshine parlors were a 1970s phenomenon. They were also part of the culture around military bases that began to disappear with the all-volunteer Army. From its beginnings with the end of the draft in 1973, the volunteer army recruited more and more married soldiers. With the bad economy of the 70s, especially after the oil crisis, the Army recruited men who needed medical care for their wives and kids.  All through the late 70s, the replacement soldiers who came to our unit fit this profile: 19-21 years old, married, one child, wife is pregnant. Like most soldiers, that young man was from the south or the west.

With more married soldiers, wives had more influence on the culture on and off the base. The stripper bars and other family unfriendly businesses moved away from the gate of the base.  It’s not like the soldiers stopped going to strip clubs, topless shoeshine parlors or pool halls, but with so many wives going on and off base, they went to strip joints away from the gate. 

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Our Former Allies: Training Iranian MIssile Technicians at Lowry AFB

Until the Ayatollahs took over in 1979, Iran was an ally of the United States.  They were a very close Cold War ally, bordering the Soviet Union.  Until the Shah's government fell, tens of thousands of Iranian soldiers and airmen trained in the United States.

For eight weeks in 1972, I was part of the training.

After Basic Training in April 1972, I went to Lowry Air Force Base near Denver, Colorado, for an 8-month missile electronics school.  The first eight weeks was basic electronics.  I learned basic electronics from a Ham Radio operator in the town where I grew up, so I tested out of the course, but had eight weeks to wait.

During that eight weeks, I was a tutor for lagging students and foreign students.  During the Spring of 1972, many of those students were Iranian sergeants.  They needed help with vocabulary in addition to the electronics themselves.  It was fun to be able to teach these older guys how a capacitor worked or how to calculate resistance and power in a circuit.

The Iranians really wanted to learn.  The chance to go to school in America was a big privilege, so these guys worked hard.  It was weird to have these mid-20s and older sergeants addressing me formally:  "Airman Gussman, may I ask. . . ".

Iran has always been and still is the most sophisticated and civilized of all the Middle Eastern countries.

The guys I trained would be in their 70s now, if they survived The Revolution.

Right now, Iran is the enemy and no one wants a nuclear Iran.  But Iran was our ally until their particular group of Fundamentalists took over.  They could return to sanity.  Some day.

Jet Porn: A-10 Thunderbolt II Ground-Attack Fighter Drops Bombs on Range at Camp Grayling MI

I shot these from the control tower of Range 40, Camp Grayling MI.