Bouncing Down Memory Lane in a Jeep

I realized, with more than a slight tremor, that it was another of those divisible-by-5 anniversaries: 45 years ago Monday that I caught a train to Trenton and Ft. Dix, N.J., to go on active duty in the U.S. Army.

I’d had a head start on the memories a few days ago when I watched Neil Simon’s “Biloxi Blues” on cable, inspired by his own wartime training in Mississippi. Simon’s experiences were particular but also universal.

I had enlisted a few months earlier, when I was 17. If you joined something called the Enlisted Reserve Corps you could volunteer for induction when you turned 18, relieving your draft board of the chore. It did not delay the inevitable but gave you a spurious feeling that you were in control of it. I was part way into my sophomore year of college and even the Army seemed less formidable than the midterms that were hurtling toward me.

Today, living in a nuclear age I didn’t dream was dawning in mid-1944, with satellite television instantly reporting (for a while at least) an extraordinary populist revolution on the far side of the world, and with all the other technological wizardries of the day in place, the trip to Ft. Dix seems even longer ago than it was. I might have been joining Black Jack Pershing’s army, or Queen Victoria’s.

It was not a lark. The invasion of Europe was still a few weeks away, and so was the Battle of the Bulge. It was almost inevitable we would see combat, as most of us did, and that we had every chance of becoming one kind of battlefield statistic or another, as some of us did.

Yet what we were doing and why we were doing it was clear and unambiguous. It was a few years before we saw what a luxury our moral certainty had been. We hardly needed Frank Capra’s brilliantly made documentaries, the “Why We Fight” series, to tell us why indeed we were fighting.

But we regularly filed into the post theater at Camp Croft, S.C., during basic training to watch them and it is probably true that the films reconciled us, if anything could, to the 20-mile marches, the obstacle course, the prevailing red dust and the mindless discipline.

A news story out of Washington the other day said that Ft. Dix was on the list of military installations to be phased out, tidings I greeted with confused emotions. All the anxieties I was feeling when I first saw it are balanced by the exhilaration I felt when I went back to Ft. Dix to be discharged in 1946.

Three years later in 1949 I was a junior reporter for a magazine and I went back to Ft. Dix again, that time with a photographer, for an expose of landlords who were rent-gouging married GIs. One of the landlords came after us waving a shotgun; it was as if I’d never left the service.

As Neil Simon demonstrated, basic training--17 weeks of it when I came along--was the stuff equally of comedy, drama, romance (if you were extremely lucky) and farce. I never met the girl of my dreams, or even of my catnaps. But I made a quick acquaintance with a world I hadn’t encountered at college.

I shared the barracks with a lot of good old boys from the hill country of the Carolinas, who sang such anthems as “I Heard the Wreck on the Highway (But I Didn’t Hear Nobody Pray)” and “There Was Dust on the Bible, Dust on the Holy Word” in close and poignant harmony.

We were kids, as I was, all 134 pounds of me, or older married men whom the draft had then begun to call. What a lot of us had in common was that we played the trumpet. In one of those flights of the military imagination we were to be not merely infantrymen but would double as buglers, serving as messengers and code clerks between tootlings.

What this meant was that in addition to all the other exertions of basic training we spent the occasional afternoon off in the piney woods playing “Mess” and “Reveille” and “To the Colors” and other afternoons being lectured about a coding device that resembled a hand-cranked adding machine. We were lectured on it by the same corporal who in his sermon on first aid and hygiene warned of the dangers of “VEY-rious Ma-LEY-rius AEY-reas,” a twangy recitation I can hear to this day. I never saw a bugle or a code machine again, of course.

Memory works like a good silver polish, removing all the dark tarnish of anxiety, exhaustion, loneliness, even, to a degree, the recollections of pain and horror, from the wartime experience.

What remains is partly a burnished glow of pride in having met personal demands greater than (or at least dramatically different from) any that peacetime was to pose. What remains as well is a kind of focused nostalgia for the innocence, the certainties, the idealism, the shared and agreed sense of purpose, that now sometimes seem to have been delayed casualties of the war, a post-combat societal stress syndrome.

Remembering the pale and owlish young man who went rather incompetently off to Ft. Dix, I wish I could find him again, not only for his youth but for his still-undented historical optimism.