Veteran of four wars, four enlistments, four branches: Air Force, Army, Army Reserve, Army National Guard. I am both an AF (Air Force) veteran and as Veteran AF (As Fuck)
Saturday, December 17, 2016
Three Books About Before and After War by Kazuo Ishiguro
[I am reposting this essay because some ten of my posts are getting odd traffic. Just an experiment.]
This summer I have read three more books by Kazuo Ishiguro. I have just two books to go to read all of his seven novels and a collection of short stories.
The first novel I read, and still my favorite, is "The Remains of the Day." Like the novels I will talk about below, it is about life in the years before and after World War II. We see the world change and we see the effects when great men make great mistakes in all of these novels.
In the three novels I read recently, World War II is in the background, but we see very little fighting. We see lives changed, relationships made and ruined and the horror of war lurking somewhere just beyond the page.
Ishiguro's first novel,"A Pale View of Hills," is set in Nagasaki just after the War. The narrator is Etsuko, a young woman who has a troubled friend who is a single mother. The narrator eventually marries, has children, divorces and moves to England. The single mother, Sachiko, is erratic and Sachiko's daughter, Mariko, is very strange.
Occasionally characters in the story mention that some part of Nagasaki is looking more lovely than ever. No one says Nuclear Blast Site, but the park or garden they praise not so long before was the site of the single biggest bomb blast in World War II. The people of Nagasaki are trying to restore their lives under American occupation and with an invisible hazard no one really understands.
Was the troubled child a radiation victim? Did the narrator's daughter eventually commit suicide as an adult because of being born in Nagasaki just after the war? Losing the War, the Bomb, and American Occupation haunt the narrative and deepen the tragedy of this beautifully told story.
The second novel is "An Artist of the Floating World" The first-person narrator is an aging artist named Masuji Ono. The story is set in post-war Japan in an unnamed city. We hear the story of Ono's life in his memories and through conversations he has with old colleagues and with his family, especially his daughters.
Ono started as a commercial artist churning out paintings for sale to tourists. He eventually finds a "master" and spends several years with an artist who paints the pleasure world of Imperial Japan--Geishas and the places they work. As the war nears, Ono becomes political and is rejected by his master. Before and during the war, Ono's propaganda paintings have a wide audience, but in the Japan of democracy and US Occupation, Ono hides his paintings and his past. Again, the war is not at the center but hovers everywhere in the background. The "Floating World" of the title is the euphemism for the pleasure zones where men gathered for drink and games and women.
The third book is "When We Were Orphans," is a detective novel set in Shanghai in the years before and after World War II. We follow the narrator, Christopher Banks, from his childhood in Shanghai in the 1920s through the 1950s and the resolution of the mystery.
Christopher is the child of English expatriates working and living in Shanghai. His best friend is a Japanese boy, Akira, whose family is also in the expatriate community in pre-war Shanghai. When Christopher is nine, his parents disappear, first his father, then his mother. Christopher goes to England to live with relatives and grows up to become a great detective. On the eve of World War II, Christopher returns to Shanghai to solve the mystery of his parents disappearances.
Through Christopher Banks we see China torn by the communists and the nationalists and the horrible atrocities committed by both. We also see the beginnings of the Japanese invasion. The return of Akira to the story was the most implausible moment of an otherwise brilliant book.
As with "The Remains of the Day" each of these books present the atmosphere of the period before and following World War II from a very different perspective. For people like me who are interested in war and its effect on history, these books show how profoundly wars change the lives of those who survive the war, especially those on the losing side.
Monday, December 12, 2016
Recruiter Update and ASVAB Scores are No Help for Old Men
On Friday last week, I visited Army National Guard Recruiter SFC Doug Kicklighter. We were talking about one of my sons possibly joining the Army. Doug also let me know that I had mixed apples and oranges on the scores I used in my previous post on drill sergeants and recruiters.
A recruit must have and AFQT (Armed Forces Qualification Test) score of 31 or better to enlist. But that score is on a 99-point scale. I said it was on a 160-point scale like all the individual scores on the ASVAB (Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery). So the 31-point minimum is out of a possible 99, not 160.
Of the ten scores that make up the ASVAB, the one most often referred to is the GT (General Technical) score.
A GT score of 110 or above allows a soldier to qualify for any job in the Army.
I took the ASVAB test on April 18, 2007, to re-enlist after a 23-year break in service. I was 54 years old. When I finished the test at MEPS (Military Enlistment Processing Station) in Mechanicsburg, the Navy Chief overseeing the computer-based test stood up and shook my hand. He congratulated me and said, "You have the highest score of the year so far. These kids here right out of school can barely pass and here you are, a man your a.......I mean a gentleman like yourself outscores all these kids."
A few minutes later he walked over to me and said, "You know Mr. Gussman, with a GT score of 141 and an AFQT of 99 you qualify for just about any school the military offers." Then he smiled and said, "But at your age there ain't any schools will take you. Good luck. Damn good job."
He shook my hand again.
Age discrimination is legal in the Army.
Monday, December 5, 2016
Drill Sergeants and Recruiters: Enemies Forever!
In popular culture
around the world, drill sergeants or training sergeants are powerful and
terrifying.
Recruiting sergeants,
on the other hand, are the sales reps of the military: deceptive, pliable, apt
to promise much and deliver little.
These two types of
sergeants are in permanent conflict, but the real power, surprisingly, is on
the side of the smiling recruiter, not the screaming drill sergeant.
The job of recruiters
is to fulfill their quota of new soldiers, the raw material the drill sergeant
then turns them into the soldiers who will be the army for the months and years
to come.
For the drill
sergeant to do the best job, the recruiter should entice fit, smart, eager,
aggressive teenagers well brought up by loving parents. These new
soldiers will be mentally and physically ready to become the best soldiers on
the planet, striving with each other to be the best at running, shooting,
studying, cleaning and crawling through the mud.
This ideal situation
very occasionally happens, such as in the first months after America declared
war on Japan and Germany in 1941. Many of the best young men in country
from the very poor to the very rich signed up before they were drafted.
Those drafted, for the most part, did not resist the draft and these
brave young men defeated Germany and Japan within less than four years.
Take away the draft
and the recruiter has to entice soldiers to enlist. In an eternal truth
of military recruiting in free countries, the better the economy, the harder
the recruiter’s job. Currently, the U.S. economy is good enough that the
military is advertising enlistment bonuses. I read an article earlier
this year about the Army relaxing height and weight standards and adding more
training to slim overweight soldiers down. On Facebook recently, I saw a
recruiter passing the word that if you did not pass the aptitude test, contact
him, there may be a waiver.
For recruiters, the
lower standards are, the more bodies they get in the bus for basic training.
Drill sergeants then have
to take whoever steps off the bus and turn them into soldiers. Lower
standards mean they spend more time trying push the bad soldiers up to the
level of barely acceptable when they could be making the good soldiers better.
When I re-enlisted at
age 54 in 2007, the Army raised its maximum enlistment age from 35 to 42, which
meant I could get back in with eleven years prior service and a one-year
waiver. By 2010, the Army changed the age back to 35. It turns out
enlisting over 40 does not work out for most people.
At the same time, the
Army relaxed some of its education, aptitude and criminal standards because
recruiting was so difficult in the good economy of 2007. By 2010, the
economy sucked and recruiting was easier.
When recruiters met
their quotas with old and less qualified recruits, the drill sergeants had to
deal with pushing people who should not be there through their training
schedule.
Eventually, lower
standards entering the military mean lower standards in the military.
When my Army National Guard unit mobilized for Iraq 40% of the soldiers
flunked the fitness test. That is crazy.
When I saw that the
Army might accept lower aptitude scores, that was really scary. The
cut-off score now is 31 on a scale of 160. The aptitude score roughly
correlates with IQ scores. Can 31 really be acceptable? Can LOWER than 31
be acceptable? I don't think so.
Saturday, December 3, 2016
Does the Economy Suck? My Army/Civilian Pay Comparison Says YES!
In the early 1983, I was a 30-year-old Army Reserve tank commander and a dock worker at Yellow Freight Systems in Lancaster, Pa. For a drill weekend, I earned $180. At Yellow Freight I earned $12/hour with full medical, dental and even retirement if I had stayed longer.
Thirty years later in 2013, I was an Army National Guard sergeant and earned $360 for a drill weekend. My Army pay had doubled. Yellow Freight's Lancaster terminal closed years ago. But similar work in the Lancaster area pays $12/hour with fewer or no benefits.
In the 1980s, major trucking companies employed thousands of workers to transfer freight from one truck to another. Computers now consolidate freight in a way that needs far less handling and far fewer workers.
Most of the soldiers I served with in the 68th Armor in 1983 had blue collar jobs and earned a decent living, as I did, with their hands and backs.
Many of the soldiers I served with in the Army National Guard 30 years later were unemployed or underemployed. Some had volunteered for multiple deployments to get a year of full-time benefits and full-time pay.
By 1985, I had finished college and had a white collar job at Godfrey Advertising. I think the economy has been nothing but wonderful all of my life. I made a $1.60/hour for my first full-time job selling toys at Sears in Burlington, Mass. When I enlisted in the Army, I earned $283/month. By the time I left active duty in 1979 as a sergeant, my base pay was $5,000/year. When I was in Iraq in 2009 my pay at the same rank had almost quadrupled.
When I started at Godfrey Advertising I was making just under $20,000/year. Twenty years later I was a consultant with a six-figure income.
But the blue collar workers I worked with before I entered the professional world are making the same or less now than they did in the 80s, and with less job security. In the middle of the 20th century into the 80s, the American economy allowed almost everybody to make a living. Today's economy is skewed to the educated.
When I got back from Iraq in 2010, the state of Pennsylvania gave every returning soldier six months of medical care. They did it because half the soldiers returning from deployment had no medical coverage when they left active duty.
Capitalism pays for what it values. It is clear that 21st century America does not value blue collar workers.
Friday, December 2, 2016
Deer Pays Tuition for a Semester at Penn State
1976 Chrysler Newport, 2-door with 400 CI V8 engine.
The first deer I killed in Pennsylvania payed a full semester's tuition for me at Penn State Harrisburg.
When I left the Army in 1979, I needed a car. High gas prices made gas guzzler used cars ridiculously cheap. So I bought the car in the picture above for $800. This 22-foot-long, six-passenger car got 9 milers per gallon in town, maybe 17 on the highway at 55mph on cruise control.
A year after I bought it, I was driving north on PA Route 230 at night when a deer jumped from the side of the road into the path of my two-ton car. The white-tailed doe flipped into the air.
I stopped as fast as I could and walked back to the carcass. Within a minute, a blue pickup truck pulled of the road and stopped ten feet from the deer and I. Two big guys in coveralls got out. They looked at the deer, looked at me and said, "You want that?"
"No," I said.
The one on the right picked up the deer, carried it to the bed of the truck and tossed it in. The guy on the left nodded, walked back to the truck, climbed in, and they drove away.
The next morning I took the car to the local Chrysler dealer. They gave me an estimate for $710 for cracked plastic and chrome on the right side, plus a damaged headlight mount. Insurance pays in full for collisions with deer. I replaced and aimed the headlight, used duct tape to repair the body damage, and used the insurance money to pay for most of my $850 tuition the following trimester.
You could say I paid deerly.......
Tuesday, November 29, 2016
Oh Deer! Another Hunting Season Story: Skinning a Deer in Missile Test Bay
Sometimes the best tool for a job is a tool that is not
yours. So you borrow it. That’s why the first time I skinned a deer
was in a U.S. Air Force missile test bay on Hill Air Force Base in Ogden,
Utah.
Four miles north of the main area of the base was the
missile test facility on Hill. We had
equipment to shake, bake, heat, freeze, and simulate high altitude. We stressed missile engines (not warheads)
then test fired the engine bolted to racks.
The smaller missiles, like the Sidewinder, we fired right on post. When we fired one of the three engines of the
three-stage Minuteman missile, we fired on a range on the west side of the
Great Sale Lake.
To shake, we called it vibration test, the missile engines
we used a 300,000-watt electro magnet—essentially a really big speaker driver. Bolt an engine to this vibration machine and
it could be shaken back and forth, up and down, left to right fast or slow,
soft or hard, smoothly or with jerks.
Then we fired the missile on a test pad to see if the vibration broke
it.
To hook the missiles to the electromagnet we used a crane on
a beam running the length of the test bay.
One Monday morning we were waiting to see the week’s tests
when Sgt. Robert Reineccius whispered for two of us to give him a hand. We went outside and followed the sergeant
across the sand to the vibration test building.
Before sun up, Reineccius had backed his pickup truck into the bay,
hooked the deer he bagged that weekend to the crane and pulled the carcass all
the way up. Our job was to skin the
huge, stinking carcass before work started so he could drop the deer carcass
back and the truck and cover it with a tarp.
He really wanted that skin in one piece. So we climbed up on the test bed and started
pulling from the inside of the thighs where Reineccius had already slit the
skin. We pulled and twisted and pulled
some more. After twenty tiring minutes, the skin was on the test bay floor and
the sergeant was lowering the deer back into his Chevy pickup.
Reineccius covered the animal with a tarp. He would drive to the butcher at lunchtime,
but he had the skin now. Back in the 70s military, enlisted men did whatever
sergeants told them, even skinning a deer first thing Monday morning.
-->
Monday, November 28, 2016
Gutting a Deer in the Driveway in 1980
Today, my kids are home from school because in Pennsylvania,
school is closed on the first day of deer season. I grew up in Boston and spent most of my
seven years on active duty in the western United States or in West
Germany. In those places, deer hunting
was something you did away from towns and cities, often quite far away because
the deer were up in the mountains. Or you just could not hunt close to
populated areas.
In Pennsylvania, the city and borough lines are sometimes
where the hunting begins.
After I left active duty in November 1979, I lived in
Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. My
apartment was two blocks from the eastern edge of the E-town marked by the PA
Route 743 South.
One day, I got home from work at noon. As I went up the outside stairs, my neighbor
across the alley, Jimmy, drove into his driveway with hooves sticking out of
the trunk of his Ford Falcon. I stopped
and looked.
He jumped from the car and yelled, “Gimme a hand, Guss. I have to gut this thing.” He pulled a big blue plastic sheet from his
garage. The sheet had brass eyelets so I
assumed it was some kind of shelter.
Jimmy spreads out the sheet, then pulled the deer from the
trunk. Jimmy dropped the six-point buck
with a headshot, so the body was intact.
Jimmy slit open the deer’s abdomen and we started pulling out
entrails. We shoved the organs and
entrails into a plastic bag then put the deer and the bag back in the trunk of
the Falcon. Jimmy sprayed the blood off
the plastic sheet with a hose then hung it over his fence to dry.
While we cleaned up, Jimmy said he saw the deer in a field
south of route 743 about 100 yards from the road. He pulled off the road onto
the edge of the road. The deer was in
West Donegal Township, so he could shoot.
He leaned on the roof of the Falcon and dropped the deer with one
round. Then he dragged the deer across
the field and drove straight home.
The whole job took about ten minutes, then Jimmy was off to
the butcher. I started back up the stairs. Jimmy had hosed off my hands and wrists, but
I need to take a shower and get the blood off my shirt in cold water. Then I needed to do my homework for the next
day’s class.
Being a good neighbor in Pennsylvania was different than in
Boston.
-->
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
Sergeant Bambi Killer: Nicknames Happen as Fast as Machine Gun Fire
From 1982 to 1984 I was a Staff Sergeant and tank section leader in Alpha Company, 6th Battalion, 68th Armor. For the last few months I was in that unit, I was "Sergeant Bambi Killer."
In the 80s, Army Reserve tank units fired twice a year. We had a full tank gunnery at Annual Training and a three-day weekend tank gunnery at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa., in the fall.
We fired both day and night on these ranges. In 1983, I was the NCOIC (Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge) of the range for night fire. At dusk on that October evening, I was in the tower above the range. Below the tower, our 17 tanks were lined up fender to fender waiting to test fire their machine guns before night fire. The crews got to check their guns in the fading light before firing at night with searchlights, both white light and infrared.
Each of the 17 tanks had 50 rounds for the M-85, .50-caliber machine gun and 50 rounds for the M240 coaxial "coax" machine gun next to the main gun.
As the light faded I gave the command from the tower to lock and load one 50-round belt of ammo for each gun. The targets were between 500 and 1200 meters away, clusters of olive-drab panels on stakes driven into the muddy ground.
I checked the range, picked up the loudspeaker microphone and said, "Ready on the right. Ready on the left. The range is ready. You may fire when ready." As I said the last words, a white-tailed doe jumped out of the woods and hopped into the middle of the 500-meter targets.
It seemed that all of the 340 tracers in 1,700 rounds of ammo converged on the spot where the white-tailed deer hopped into the middle of the targets.
I called "Cease Fire" less than a minute later, but there was no need. Each of the machine guns on an M60A1 tank can fire 50 rounds in 5 seconds. Everyone had expended ammo. The deer disappeared and I was Sergeant Bambi Killer for the rest of my time in 68th Armor. In the Army, nicknames can happen as fast as machine gun fire.
In the 80s, Army Reserve tank units fired twice a year. We had a full tank gunnery at Annual Training and a three-day weekend tank gunnery at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa., in the fall.
We fired both day and night on these ranges. In 1983, I was the NCOIC (Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge) of the range for night fire. At dusk on that October evening, I was in the tower above the range. Below the tower, our 17 tanks were lined up fender to fender waiting to test fire their machine guns before night fire. The crews got to check their guns in the fading light before firing at night with searchlights, both white light and infrared.
Each of the 17 tanks had 50 rounds for the M-85, .50-caliber machine gun and 50 rounds for the M240 coaxial "coax" machine gun next to the main gun.
As the light faded I gave the command from the tower to lock and load one 50-round belt of ammo for each gun. The targets were between 500 and 1200 meters away, clusters of olive-drab panels on stakes driven into the muddy ground.
I checked the range, picked up the loudspeaker microphone and said, "Ready on the right. Ready on the left. The range is ready. You may fire when ready." As I said the last words, a white-tailed doe jumped out of the woods and hopped into the middle of the 500-meter targets.
It seemed that all of the 340 tracers in 1,700 rounds of ammo converged on the spot where the white-tailed deer hopped into the middle of the targets.
I called "Cease Fire" less than a minute later, but there was no need. Each of the machine guns on an M60A1 tank can fire 50 rounds in 5 seconds. Everyone had expended ammo. The deer disappeared and I was Sergeant Bambi Killer for the rest of my time in 68th Armor. In the Army, nicknames can happen as fast as machine gun fire.
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