My Father's First Command: A Black Supply Company

Louis Armstrong Played for My Father's Soldiers at Camp Shenango, Pa.

My father, George Gussman, enlisted in the Army at the end of 1939.  He was 34 years old and at the end of his career as a middleweight boxer and a pitcher for the Reading Phillies.  He was the fourth of six sons of Jewish immigrants from the Russia.  They arrived at the beginning of the century.  My father and his older brothers only went to Boston Latin school until the 8th grade.  The younger boys got all the way through high school--business was better by that time for grandpa.

Dad was a warehouseman in a bad economy and the Army was a steady job.  He took a two-year enlistment which was to end in mid-December 1941.  Dad was packed up to go home in the second week in December.  He never left.

On December 8, 1941, all discharges were cancelled and enlistments extended for the duration of the war.

With war declared many rules changed and the Army sent George to Officer Candidate School.  In 1942 he was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant and sent to Camp Shenango, Pa., near Erie.  His first command was a black company, a supply company that also repaired stoves for camps and bases across Pennsylvania.

Dad kept a scrapbook of his soldiers which I am hoping to scan and post later this year.  Among those pictures is a picture of Louis Armstrong signed with a a note saying "To My Boy Guss."  It is one of the many pictures my father carefully kept from his first command.  Dad kept in touch with several of the soldiers he served with long after the war ended.

After more than a year in charge of the company in Shenango, Dad went to Fort Indiantown Gap where I serve now.  Then as a captain, he took command of 600 Afrika Korps German prisoners in what is now the Reading Airport.

It hadn't occurred to me until today, but it is possible my sons are related to one of my Dad's soldiers.  Most of his men came from Pennsylvania.  My adopted sons were born in Pittsburgh and Harrisburg.  It's not likely, but in a world so different from the one Dad lived in, there might be a direct connection between his first command and his son's family.

  

My People: Real Americans, Refugees Running from Killers

Millions of Americans came here from around the globe running from torment and death. They came here as my grandparents did, running from persecution and wanting a place where they could live and raise kids without being suddenly murdered in God's name or the Tsar's name.

My grandparents, Hyman and Esther Gussman, came to America from Odessa, Russia, in about 1900, coming ashore in Boston.  The picture above is one of the big reasons they left--pogroms by the Cossacks that killed at least a million Russian Jews.

It is clear when you look at other countries around the world that America does a better job of assimilation, of making immigrants into Americans, than any other country.

The reason, I believe, is that we have a common culture that is easy to understand and easy to adopt.

For good or for ill, the common culture of America is success and money.  To become American is to leave extremism and make money.  It used to be called making good.

In a cruel parody of faith, America even assimilated Christianity.  We lead the world in millionaire preachers.  Hellfire has almost disappeared from our pulpits.  Now the most popular Churches preach some version of health, wealth and success.  These Churches love celebrities and millionaires, and set them up as the Blessed, replacing the martyrs of the suffering Church.

My grandparents went from being oppressed Jews in Russia to being Americans.  In Russia a million Jews were killed for being Jews.  America takes people suffering under radicals of all kinds and gives them the possibility of health and wealth.

My father was the fourth if six boys born to Esther and Hyman Gussman.  In the names of the six boys you see assimilation. Beginning with the oldest they are Abraham, Emmanuel, Ralph, George, Lewis and Harold.  Every time my father spoke of his oldest brothers they were Abe and Manny.  The Gussmans lived on Blue Hill Avenue, a street known as Jew Hill Avenue at the beginning of the 20th Century.  In the 1920s, the Gussmans had 14 cars, trucks and motorcycles parked somewhere in the vicinity of the family home.  Hyman had a successful fruit business.  And his one return trip to the old country turned into two years of being hunted by the Russian Army.  He never left Boston again.

Although all of my uncles married Jewish women, none of my relatives were particularly religious. My mother was not Jewish.  Growing up we had a small tinsel tree Dad called a Channukah Bush.   My father stayed home from work on some Jewish holidays because the warehouse where he worked was owned by Jews from the old neighborhood.  But we never went to Synagogue.  We went out to eat.

My father's family are real Americans.  They went from a place where religion meant death, and they embraced life in America.  Grandpa ran a successful business most of his life.  My uncle Lewis went into the same business and became a millionaire when that was a lot of money.  Lewis, like my grandmother Esther, lived to be 100. All of the the other brothers had houses in the suburbs and families.

Of all the uncles and cousins in the Gussman clan, only my father and I ever served in the Army.  We both were very old soldiers.  The rest of the family, like nearly all well off families in the northeast, did not join the military.  I enlisted partly because I had heard my Dad's stories from World War 2 all the time I was growing up and it was clear they were the best years of his life.  I also enlisted because my favorite uncle, Jack, my mother's half brother, was on his third tour in Viet Nam when I graduated high school.  Jack was the coolest guy in our family by far.

My aversion to Fundamentalism in any form, to religious extremism especially in politics, and to religion masquerading as science comes from my upbringing.  Because my family has kids later than most, I am just one generation away from people who escaped the Pogroms of Tsarist Russia.

My people run away from religious radicals.

When real Americans see fanatics, they change the channel.

Who Are My People?

When I was in Iraq, I started writing under the general title “Who Fights Our Wars?” when I wrote about the soldiers I served with.

At the end of June last year, I retired as a civilian.  In May of this year or next year I will leave the Army.  When I leave the Army, there will no longer be anyone in my life I am paid to hang around with.  Everyone in my life will be a friend, a family member, or someone I chose to associate with.

Which has led me to think about “Who are my people?”  So in the same way I have been writing about soldiers I served with, I will write about people with whom I share some activity, which means we share time and space together.  Some of these people are or were soldiers.  Some are not. 

I decided to write about these people because one of the reasons I had for going back in the Army at 54 years old was how much I missed the deep connection I had with some of the people I served with on active duty in the 1970s.

It turned out this ability to connect with people had to do with the circumstances we were in.  The regular Army puts people close together for weeks and months on end.  The National Guard brings people together for just one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer.  When we trained for and deployed to Iraq and really were jammed together, it should be no surprise to anyone that a 55-year-old guy does not quite blend into a group of 20 year olds.  Socially, I blended in like a Vegan at a Bull Roast.

So I have been thinking a lot lately about who my people are, what they do, what we do together. 

In his book “The Four Loves” C.S. Lewis writes about Friendship.  The key moment in finding a friend he says can be the moment of “You too?’  That moment in which we find someone else interested in something we thought no one else loved the way we do. 

So in addition to writing about the people who fight our current wars, or were ready to fight the Soviet Union, I am also going to write about people with whom I share one particular interest, even if the rest of our lives are very different.

Grace Got Married Yesterday

Today I got a wedding picture on Facebook posted by Grace Pak, front row, left.  She was married on December 31.  Earlier this month Lisa Vines was married. She is 6th from the left, next to the Marine, Tyler Giguere.  Ben Simon, fifth from the left, back row, next to me, got married last year.

I know it's not a crazy number of people getting married.  But almost half the class was married when we showed up so 30% of the class got married in just two years.  For that matter 20% got married since December 12.

Being in school with this group was a lot of fun.  I still am in contact with most of them through facebook, even Bill Howard who may or may not actually exist!

Congratulations to Grace and Cris:

To Ben and Heather:  

And to Lisa and Chris:

A World of Friends I Met in Iraq

Today is Fred Lameki's birthday.  He is my only Facebook friend from Kenya.  In fact, the only people I know personally from Kenya, Uganda and several other central African countries are people I met in Iraq.  Fred, like many people from Africa and south Asia worked on Camp Adder, Iraq, and at bases across the country making food and performing a hundred services for to keep the bases working while the soldiers patrolled the ground and the skies.

Most of the baristas in the Green Bean coffee shop were from Nepal, the affable Fred Lameki was one of the Africans who worked making designer coffee for soldiers.

As this new year begins, Iraq seems long ago and far away.  I am glad that with all the money we spent winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq, that some of it went to providing good-paying jobs for men like Fred.

Happy Birthday my friend.

I hope to see you again some day.

Year End Wrap Up: Exercise Turns Civilian, Reading Tops Riding

For the first time since I started riding a bicycle again in 1987, the total number of book pages I read exceeded the number of miles I rode.

This year I rode more than 8,000 miles, probably 8,300 by December 31, but I have read more than 10,000 pages in more than 50 books.  

Also, because I had trouble with my shoulder, I stopped doing pushups.  Every year since I re-enlisted I did more than 6,000 pushups, nearly 15,000 in 2011, but this year, less than 300.  

And I pretty much gave up running after the Ironman triathlon.  I also stopped swimming in September when I took four college classes.  But in the weirdest stat for the year, I swam more miles than I ran:  87 miles swimming, 74 running.  

The most troubling, beautiful, sad book I read this year was "Life and Fate" by Vasily Grossman.  It is the 20th Century version of "War and Peace" centering on Stalingrad.  

Eleven of the 52 books I read this year were written by Russian authors, but all were in English.  I am continuing to study Russian language, but not at the point where I can read Russian.  I can still read French well enough that one of the books I re-read this year was an abridged "Three Musketeers."  

Next semester I will be taking Russian language and 19th Century Russian Literature, so I will continue to have Russian in my mind.  If I leave the Army in May, I will definitely be riding more.  My plan will be to ride 10,000 miles in 2016 to get ready for racing in the 65+ category in 2018.  It's great to be the youngest in an age group!

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.