RE-UPPING IN THE ARMY OF BILKO FANS

Changing the channels with a remote-control gadget is the only magic trick I know, and I practice it all the time. I have no doubt it’s one of the most frequent ways we all use television, playing rerun roulette to see what’s lurking up or down the dial.

The other day I caught a glimpse of Phil Silvers as Sgt. Bilko, engineering another of his ingenious scams. The show was black and white, of course, and black and white by now looks startlingly prehistoric. You are momentarily surprised that it has sound instead of title cards and a tinkly piano behind.

I felt a tug of sadness, because Silvers was an original, very individual comic personality who, before the series, enriched many a movie as a sort of one-man Greek chorus in big glasses and a bright suit.

He’ll be longest remembered as Bilko, naturally. It was as if everything before had been a kind of preparation for his time of triumph, and it was the perfection of his presence that turned a series called “You’ll Never Get Rich” into “The Phil Silvers Show.”

He was his own hardest act to follow, and so far as I remember, only his moments in Stanley Kramer’s “Mad, Mad World” fully evoked the top banana he was. There was talk of another television series in which he and his lads would belong to the Bel Air Patrol rather than the U.S. Army, but nothing, I think, ever came of it.

Part of the appeal of the Bilko show (1955-59) undoubtedly was that so many of its viewers were not more than a decade out of the Army. There was a special satisfaction in being able to laugh--from the deep, secure comfort of civilian life--at the tyrannies and lunacies of the military life.

This has been a time of 40th anniversaries: D-day in 1984, V-E Day and V-J Day in 1985 and, for a few hundred thousands of us at least, in 1986 the 40th anniversary of getting out of the Army (with vows never to wear khaki again; I thought of it when I bought my first pair of chinos).

Watching Silvers as Bilko reminded me that, back from Europe, I waited out the points system for separation at a camp in Georgia, in a company (it struck me later) that could have inspired Bilko’s outfit.

The top sergeant was a peace-loving Regular Army veteran with hash marks the length of his sleeve. Like Bilko, he played the military like a finely tuned instrument designed for his benefit.

The sarge earned many a free drink by claiming that in civilian life he was Jack Leonard, vocalist for Tommy Dorsey. In those days of records and radio, who knew? And the sergeant could deliver as many measures as anyone cared to hear of “Marie,” in a surprisingly pure tenor voice.

Our captain had been in civilian life a psychologist and personnel officer, a perfectionist martinet who, however, shared with his men a dislike of Army life that bordered on insurrection. One morning, finding that he’d been served fertilized eggs in the officers’ mess, he wrapped them in a napkin and marched off to post headquarters to demand that the mess officer be court-martialed.

With first pick of all the soldiers who came through for reassignment, the captain built himself a company of college types, law students, graduate students, the editor of a literary magazine--anyone who had seen the inside of a university, however briefly. I’m not sure there was anyone who could do close-order drill without tripping and falling, but it was the only time I ever heard the word dichotomy used in a barracks conversation.

One of the buck sergeants, who I think had been allowed to enlist for limited duty although he had lost an eye in childhood, was a Boston Irishman of a fierce and independent nature. He liked to sleep late, and even in our company of irregulars, his truancies finally earned him a confinement to quarters.

He retaliated with an angry poem, which was posted on the bulletin board and widely distributed. I’ve lost the copy I had, but lines from it have echoed in memory these 40 years.

Fie upon thee, wayward rover;

Didst thou think the war was over?

‘Tis not; it goes on as before;

The war is longer than the war . . . .

‘Twill aid thee not to humbly state,

They also serve, who fall out late.

There was much more, and I keep hoping it will turn up in an old trunk.

It would be unutterably wide of the truth to say I miss those days, but I’m not sorry to have experienced them, and I have wondered often what the captain and each of his lads have done in civilian life. And I have wondered as well if the Bilko show evoked their own memories of Ft. Oglethorpe.