It’s impossible to repay my debt to this country

It was 50 years ago this month that I was discharged from the U.S. Army after having served three years on active duty.

Following an 18-month overseas hitch in Korea, I flew to Fort Lewis, Wash., where I turned in my uniforms, signed a stack of government paperwork and accepted my separation pay — $500 in cash.

With wallet bulging, I jumped aboard a commercial airliner at Seattle’s Sea-Tac Airport, landed in Orange County and moved in with Mom and Dad.

Welcome home, GI!

I secured a part-time job and signed up for spring classes at Orange Coast College. Though I felt totally prepared, life as a college student would take some getting used to.

The academics were fine. I was a disciplined 22-year-old who’d spent his time in the Army collecting experiences and planning for the future. But the social aspects of college life threw me for a loop.

I wasn’t used to the mores of an American college campus. In the early days of my return I found myself pining for my Army pals, for Army chow and for the predictability of regimentation.

My Army buddies had been closer to me than brothers. We shared everything. No masks. No artifice.

My college classmates seemed disingenuous and immature. I looked for other vets to hang out with.

I’d dropped out of OCC in February 1964 at age 19 to join the Army. Like Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who died while I was in basic training, I vowed to return.

Despite being recruited by the Army before my discharge to reenlist for OCS (Officer Candidate School) at Fort Benning, Ga. — a place I’d been stationed two years earlier — I opted to become a college student.

Unfortunately, Orange County, Costa Mesa and Orange Coast College had all changed.

South Coast Plaza was a massive shopping complex plopped in the midst of bean fields. I could scarcely navigate it. I’d cut my retail teeth on Army post exchanges (PXs).

OCC had doubled its student population — from 4,000 to 8,000 — in three years, and my friends were gone. They’d moved on.

At 22, I was one of the older students on campus.

I joined the school newspaper staff during my first semester and began writing news copy, features and editorials.

One op-ed revealed how socially inept I was. It was titled “Short Skirts Aid Failing Eye.”

I wrote: “It looks as if the miniskirt is here to stay — at least for another semester — and male members of the OCC student body must gird themselves for another painful semester of disorganization, discomfort, discontent and distraction.”

Ah, my first attempt at alliteration!

“Remember the good old days, men, when skirts draped the ankles and it wasn’t so terribly difficult to sit in a class and concentrate on the subject? But, alas, it seems those days are gone forever. The day of the slim ankle has been replaced by the day of the dimpled thigh, and, no matter how you cut it; the thigh is infinitely more interesting than the ankle.”

Remember, it was 1967 … I was fresh out of the Army, and this was a clumsy attempt at humor. I continued.

“It takes a will of iron to keep one’s eyes on the instructor and not the blonde cutie sitting … in the next (row). And, when at last you have been released from the steaming, smoldering classroom and allowed to inhale a breath of fresh air, what should greet your red, swollen eyes but … lasses gracefully pirouetting to class. It’s enough to shake even the most ardent bookworm!”

You will be surprised to know that that was not my final piece of writing. I continued to bang out “copy” on a keyboard for the next 50 years. Mercifully, I improved as time went by.

I ultimately adjusted to academe and graduated from OCC. I subsequently earned undergraduate and graduate degrees, and Uncle Sam generously supplied his G.I. Bill.

Today, I look back on my journey with the deepest gratitude. I can never repay my debt to this country.

JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.