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Chicago, Illinois
The Military Disease
A strange, almost immediate phenomenon takes place affecting most men as they cross from civilian to military life.
Within hours of stepping from the comparatively relaxed ease and social structure of life as a civilian into the highly disciplined, well-ordered life of the military, though the man may be well educated, a second-year engineering student or a third-year economics major, single or married, with or without children, a regular or merely fulfilling his military obligation, an enlisted man or a draftee… Once that man crosses the line from civilian to military he, almost always, becomes infected with the “military disease.”
s warm air rises and bubbles float upward, the new inductee, intellectually, goes in the opposite direction and literately drops to the lowest possible level.
What is this military disease?
It is not physical.
Its meaning no longer the meaning, the military disease can best be described in a word, in one word: FUCK, and the derivatives of that word: FUCKED, FUCKER, and most especially, FUCKING.
Normally intelligent men whose harshest expletive in civilian life might be a reserved “Damn,” find themselves saying, without being aware, or if they are aware, without the slightest qualm, “Oh, fuck! That fucker just stepped on my fuckin’ shoe and I’ll be fucked if I didn’t just polish ’em!”
Usually, with most men, the corrective remedy is a short dose of civilian life, or a few minutes with the opposite sex.
When there is no mixed company, or a hint of civilian life, the military disease runs rampant.
June 27 Through August 3, 1950
Camp McCoy
Sparta, Wisconsin
The gray brick building housing the armory and the 33rd Infantry Division covered a full quarter-block on the southwest corner of Chicago’s Madison and Rockwell streets.
At precisely 0730 hours on the hot, muggy morning of Saturday, July 27, 1950, the drivers of a convoy of thirty-seven khaki and field-green camouflaged troop carriers turned the keys and stepped on the accelerators starting their Ford and International Harvester motors amidst a roaring and spewing of noxious gray exhaust. Thirty seconds later, the lead vehicle pulled away from the curb with a jerk, jolting the eighteen National Guard troopers sitting on wooden benches on either side of the canvas-covered truck.
The early morning trip through the West Side into the Loop encountered minimal traffic and arrived at Union Station at 0817 hours.
With another jolt, the trucks stopped in their assigned disembarkation area.
Jumping from his seat in the cab, the corporal assigned to each truck went behind the truck and, with an echoing clatter, “Fall in!” dropped the tailgate.
Swinging their olive-green, canvas duffel bags before them, the troopers lowered themselves off the truck and, facing the corporal, formed a double column.
“Tench, hup!”
Bodies straighten. Heels snap together with toes at a 45-degree angle.
“Dress right, dress!”
Heads turn to the right, right arms extend, touching the shoulder of the next man.
“Tench, hup!”
Arms drop, heads snap forward.
“Ri-ight face! Grab your bags!”
Lifted off the ground, the troopers hoist the bags to their left shoulders.
“For-ward harch! Hup, two, three, four! Hup, two, three, four!”
Approximately 672 soldiers formed 56 squads of 12 men each that comprised platoons Able, Baker, Charlie and Dog, which comprised about fifty percent of the Third Battalion of the First Regiment of the 33rd Armored Division, which merged with the second half of the battalion—from a south side armory—that even then were marching from the opposite end of the parking lot, into the train depot, through the gates and onto the outer platform.
Shoe leather slapping on concrete echoed as almost three-thousand boot-clad feet marched in place until they could file through the two bottleneck entries on either side of forty coaches of the train going northward… Through Chicago… Past Rockford… Out of Illinois… Into Wisconsin, where…
****
Two-hundred, forty-eight miles later, the train stopped to unload its military cargo at Sparta, Wisconsin, where the entire corps once again was loaded into troop carriers for the final twenty-eight-mile ride to the U.S. Army training facility at Camp McCoy… Where the convoy aligned along white-painted, concrete curbs. Ignitions turned off and, as though echoing, the clattering tailgates dropped in a semblance of unison.
Disembarking, the troops gawked at their new surroundings for a moment, until they’re called to…
“Shit!” Dropping his duffel bag off the rear of the truck, Mitchell squatted a moment looking about, then followed it down. “I’m glad that’s over. What a trip!” Bringing his arms together in front of his chest, making fists, he tightened then relaxed the muscles of his arms, back, chest and legs.
“Yeah, me, too!” Following Mitchell, Norman stretched, then pressed his fists into the small of his back.
The entire movement, from the armory on the west side of Chicago to this place in southern Wisconsin, had taken slightly under six hours, and now they might as well have been on the moon as here, in this camp, in their neighboring state.
From where they stood they could see row upon row of Quonset-like barracks. Each structure was separated from side to side by ten feet of well-maintained grass, and by 12 feet of black macadam that went from the front of each row of structures to the rear of the next row of structures. Turning about, looking in the opposite direction, was an enormous parade ground with a wood-tiered, white-painted review stand, and beyond, what appeared to be endless miles of plushy wooded, rolling hills.
The broiling sun shone in a cloudless sky. Countless swarms of gnats circled in mindless formations and the oppressive, mid-afternoon air fairly steamed with humidity and seemed to be alive with the urgent buzz of flies and mosquitoes.
“Fall in! Fall in! This ain’t no fuckin’ vacation! Fall the fuck in!”
Within minutes each contingent was marched to their assigned barracks, and throughout camp thousands of men were issued the same orders:
“Take your bunks in the same order as parade formation; column one to the right and column two to the left. Stow your gear under the bunk, take a piss if you gotta, and reassemble for chow in ten minutes. Dismissed!”
Before this weekend was over, the first and second battalions of the 33rd Division, U.S. National Guard, consisting of approximately four thousand enlisted men, officers and equipment, will arrive and occupy Camp McCoy for two weeks of field maneuvers and military training.
KOREA…
Korea was constantly on the minds of the officers and older enlisted men, most of whom were World War Two veterans.
Rumors abounded and scuttlebutt ran rampant.
“Hey, j’ya hear? We’re goin’ to fuckin’ Korea!”
“Bullshit!”
“Ain’t no bullshit! I heard it from a guy that knows a guy that’s a clerk for Captain Thompson, who’s on Colonel Black’s staff, who’s best friends with General Penston’s valet.”
“Bullshit! We got better’n four-hundred-thousand troops in the regular army and before they’d send this fuckin’, half-assed know-nothin’ greenhorn division they’ll pull some’a them fuckers outta Japan an’ West Germany and send them!”
“Bullshit!”
“Hey, j’ya hear? They’re extendin’ this here trainin’ exercise to fuckin’ three months an’ then they’re shippin’ our asses right over to fuckin’ Korea! I wouldn’t bullshit ya, man!”
“Bullshit!”
“We’re getting’ activated!”
“Hey, dip-shit, even if fuckin’ Eisenhower did activate us, by the time they finish trainin’ this here fuckin’ weekend warrior army, the fuckin’ Marines’n’regulars’ll mop the place up with them fuckin’ gooks, an’ it’ll be over before we even get there.”
“Bullshit!”
“Yeah, man, we’ll bomb the livin’ shit outta them yella, mother-fuckin’, nip bastards an’ never even have’ta step foot in the fuckin’, stinkin’ place.”
“They ain’t no fuckin’ nips, they’re fuckin’ Koreans.”
“Japs, Koreans, same fuckin’ difference; they’re all nips!”
“Hey, I hear ol’ Ike’s gonna drop a A-bomb on them fuckin’, slanty-eyed, commie, gook, sons’a’bitchin’ bastards.”
“Bullshit!”
“G’bye good ol’ U-S-of-A an’ hello fuckin’ South Pacific!”
“Bullshit!”
“How the fuck ya say ‘fuck’ in Korean?”
“Dumb, asshole, shit: fuckee, fuckee, suckee, suckee.”
For the younger troops, the kids who turned the radio dial when the news came on, the punks whose only interest in the newspaper was the sports and movie section, the radio schedule and funnies, Korea and the real concept of war was still a comic book and a movie where the good guys always win and the bad guys always lose and God, God is always on the side of us “good, red-blooded Americans.”
Norman Parminter and Mitchell Lipensky certainly fell within the punk category. They didn’t want to be activated, but if it did happen, “What the fuck can we do about it?” Norman had said. “And really,” Mitchell had replied, “it is the South Pacific, after all! And what could be so terrible? It might even be fun; no more school for a while, and soldiers in uniform always have girls to fuck around with. And when it’s over, say in, oh, about six months on the outside, and we do come home and go back to school, well fuck the football team! You’n’me, pal, we’ll be real heroes.
Oh, yeah!
And once again, a vigorous, emphatic…
Bullshit!
