Before I Can No Longer Remember: The Great American Testimony, 1982-1985

Upon graduating from 'Madstop' - S.U.N.Y. Potsdam in the Spring of 1982, with a B.A. in English/Art, I found myself saddled with about $10,000 in college loans. New York State was experiencing high unemployment and the best my college degree was able to parlay for me in its economy was a 40-hour, 11PM-7AM, short-order cook position at Mario's Little Gem Diner in Syracuse. The job had its enjoyments and I learned to cook efficiently for groups. However, it paid poorly, I was living with my parents and driving a beater of a car, and the future looked like a big, meaningless void. And along came the payback cycle of the loans, which left me in a fix.

My childhood friend, Jim Irwin, had just enlisted in the Army and would be going to helicopter repair school after boot camp. He told me about the benefits and pay; far better than what I was making. I began speaking to recruiters to see what was out there for a college grad with my degree.

The Navy appealed to me most, to a great extent because I'd heard my dad's Korean War Navy stories for years, seen photographs and some funny 8mm footage from his travels, and had always admired the medals he kept in a cigar box on his dresser.

I won't go too deeply into the baloney (gotta get that quota to be promoted) a North Syracuse recruiter fed me about "the modern Navy" and it's "need for technical degrees" and how my education had little use to the Officer Corps. Suffice it to say that I signed up for a four year tour as an enlisted man, found out three years later that I had been the victim of recruitment fraud, and that "it would be dealt with"; this by the Navy Captain who I found myself, entirely by chance, eating lunch and chatting with one Saturday afternoon at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. He just happened to be 2nd in command of naval recruitment in these United States. I'd hate to have been that Senior Chief when he got called onto the carpet.

In April of '83, I got on a plane for the Recruit Training Center in San Diego, California. I was assigned to a "drill company", which meant that our company of 80+ guys would learn all of the gun twirling and flag marching stuff that would happen during the eventual graduation ceremony. This made things a bit more fun, as the time we spent doing this training circumvented doing something worse. Boot camp was about physical fitness, learning about the US Navy and its regulations and principles, learning how to accept and follow directions, cleanliness, developing personal responsibility, and putting a sharp point on one's coping skills. We ran, swam, marched, sang, stood at attention or 'parade rest' for what felt like hours, ate mediocre food, got yelled at, washed clothes, studied for tests, and were shepherded through a process that, in effect, built character and erased social distinction. I would recommend these lessons for anyone. They sure shaped some of what endures in me as useful. We graduated and were officially sailors, ready for "A-School', where we would obtain the foundations of our chosen job fields.

Next, off to the The Presidio of Monterey, located in Monterey, California, an active US Army installation that is the home of the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLI-FLC). I lived and mustered with about 200 other sailors, men and women, studying several languages through speaking, listening, and writing. We ate, discussed, worked out, and partied together. Intellect, youthful energy, and fun were in the air. Some of the best cookouts and pick-up basketball games ever took place in the shade of our barracks. Olympic amounts of imported beer were downed. Guitars were plugged in and noise was made. The Presidio is built high on a coastal hill, with the stunningly beautiful Monterey Bay below and pine trees and deer above. Idyllic. John Steinbeck wrote many of his manuscripts in a cathouse called Kalisa's down on Cannery Row. No longer a whorehouse, Kalisa's was now a great Greek restaurant with live music and poetry readings in the evening; with Kalisa herself still hostess of the establishment! I bought my first 4-track recording deck at a Monterey music shop and built my first homemade instrument in the Army wood shop on-post.

When I arrived, I didn't even know the real nature of the job I'd be doing for the government with the language, as it was classified and we didn't yet have "the need to know". Having tested with a high score on the Defense Language Aptitude Battery (DLAB), I was given the choice of any offered course of language study. What language should I choose? I took an opportunity to talk with the Command Master Chief, a 25+ year Russian linguist and asked him, if he could do it all over again and was in my position, what language would he have chosen and why?

He said, "If I were in your shoes, I'd choose Korean. It is the only language you can study here that sends you to a place where you can actually speak it with people. Russian, Chinese, and Arabic linguists never get sent to those countries to do the job we do."

So I chose to become a Korean Linguist, in typical military obfuscation, titled 'Cryptologic Technician - Interpretive' in publications. I spent the next 60 weeks studying Korean language, culture, and grammar, 8 hours a day, five days a week. It was tough. The two Korean alphabets are either pictographic (Chinese - used in newspapers) or employ strange phonetic sound-symbols that are assembled on the page like complex fractions, rather than linearly as is English. INTENSE. Eight in our class graduated of the forty we started with. Waiting for the next Korean class to also graduate so a group could be sent to the next school, I was imported into a 'level two' Korean class for 16 weeks before shipping out for technological training in Texas.

Goodfellow Air Force Base is located in the western part of the state, just outside of a dust town called San Angelo. There, I was taught how to use a host of high-tech gear essential to the job and how to type 60wpm. We were in the DESERT. I saw snakes and jack rabbits out there while running the base perimeter that were monstrous. Living life near cities had always obscured the night's stars and I had never seen a sky so giant and clear. The food was dreadful and I will never be able to shake the memory of the huge keg of a breakfast cook in the mess hall who would, daily, shower the eggs and bacon she was flipping with a rain of sweat from her forehead. A Chinese linguist, Pete Nickless, turned me on to the music of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band during my six months there. What an epiphany! Every form of indigenous American music thrown into a blender and made into...what? Great stuff and really influential on my own slide guitar playing. I developed a burrito addiction, plowing through tens of them every week. There was a shallow river crawling through San Angelo that you could always see snakes in. The place was brown and dry; very like a scene from a cowboy movie. Towns-people and many of us from on-base would get together at a huge concrete sluice/dam that was nearby, just out of town. I had some extreme good times out there. Aerosmith and Zeppelin from boomboxes would bounce and echo like crazy in that place, and there was a long, smooth incline to the cool and calm water below. It reminded me of something from Clockwork Orange, minus the violence. Eventually, when our trainers deemed us capable of using the expensive equipment and not breaking it, we graduated from tech school.

Aircrew Candidate School in Pensacola, Florida's Naval Air Station came next. My Navy life was a slow and often arduous succession of trainings and schools. I opted for becoming an Aircrewman, it is voluntary, because the pay was better and the travel opportunities opened considerably. You'll notice that I'm not getting into any detail about my job. That is because I may not do so. Period. Until I die. That's just how it works. Our intelligence work was conducted from many platforms, military aircraft being one. There are things to know and be able to do when your job is on an airplane that could crash of be shot down. Swimming. Running. Not getting electrocuted during a rescue or drowned by your own parachute. Properly exiting an aircraft that is underwater (I almost drowned during this test, for the harness had a faulty buckle that got stuck and had to be cut by a scuba diver after I'd been under for over a minute and a half. Thank God for all the swimming I'd done at the Bayberry Pool as a kid!). We swam and we ran. We ran in dry sand, less traction. We ran timed trials through a tough obstacle course that involved climbing, crawling, balancing, dodging, and avoiding things. We studied necessary texts. And we slept like logs at night. Things like that. My mind was becoming completely able to not expect much enjoyment from work, but rather "to get through this and on to that, and then off-base tonight for some clams and beers." My parents had taught me "to cope", but the Navy was like a graduate course. Eight weeks later, we graduated and got to wear the winged uniform patch and embroidered ballcap representing induction to aircrew status. These things mattered and matter. My medals, ribbons, and letters of commendation signify accomplishment and having paid my dues to earn something. They remind me that I have been an adult and met a difficult criteria, not always possible.

The last phase of becoming an airman is completing P.O.W. Training in the California mountains. In three words: Incredibly Not Fun. SERE is a United States military acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, a program that provides military personnel, Department of Defense civilians and private military contractors with training in evading capture, survival skills and the military code of conduct. A "what if?" scenario, we were given tattered uniforms to wear, a knife and compass, and set down in the mountains. We were told that we were to avoid being caught, but not to get ourselves killed if we were "captured by the enemy". We were also told that being caught was inevitable. Humvees and other armed vehicles, firing blanks, we later found out, prowled everywhere, and the enemy (camouflaged Navy SEALS dressed as Russian soldiers) knew the lay of the land. We were given an initial clue to a second location, which would have a clue to a third and so on. Any of us (about 50) who located the "safe house" would be fed and sheltered for a spell. Two other guys and I made it to the safe house and had, maybe, three minutes to eat from a pot of cooked vegetables before the house was overrun and we, too, were caught. Without going into too much of it, the next few days were a test of each man's will to keep a secret, and to be taken to the place where you had to choose between injury and survival. One jarhead invited extra torment by getting his back up and sassing a guy they called "Bruiser" (Two days before while we were 'evading' in the mountains, the same Marine caught, cooked, and shared a rabbit he'd snared with some of us. Then, he put his hand up inside the skin, head still attached, and did a "puppet show" that had us rolling on the ground laughing.) One man tried to escape and ended up breaking his leg. I'll never forget the rice with way too much salt they made us eat. I spent the better part of an afternoon in a (working and ventilated) refrigerator, and another being thrown against a wall. It sucked, but we made it through the ordeal, and it was an ordeal.

Before 'shipping out', I had three days of "R & R" in San Diego during 1985. Besides the usual walking around between beers one does in a strange town, in the evenings I wrote this long, surreal narrative poem about my life and the changes I'd taken myself through.

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THE GREAT AMERICAN TESTIMONY

I. On Improvisational Living

I have thrown it with all my strength
it arcs around the planet in silent acceleration
over oasis and plant life
blowing hats and turbans from heads
then it reappears in my trouser pocket
the one with the hole in it

'Hello' is repeated over and over
while the other digits dance through
at a rate and intervals governed by temperature
something big and creamy is still knocking at the door
cold smoke anthems puff freely
beneath chairs and tables
an aluminum can keeps falling to the floor
with a luminous thud
between love and lust lies like,
but what lies between like and want?

more trips to the public urinal in the club
with those cigarette frigates and oysters
that won't go down
my feet fall apart slowly, like mica
and pack small windows into my shoes
in a place where wind erodes a bit of red sandstone
until it is the shape of a rose
and dinosaur fragments litter the site
of a faulty flashlight pool

now I'm in a favorite place
up there
on the very top of New York State
where a friendly princess in a rocking chair
smiles
asks how I've been
and sells me a book.

it's like apple and oranges
there are no truly red oranges
there are no truly orange apples
all red apples are apples
all orange oranges are oranges
apples are not oranges
and vice-versa
apples and oranges have this in common
we put them in our mouths
here's a seedless orange for you
do you have a wormless apple for me?

I am an American
I am an artist
I am an American artist
I am, therefore, at an advantage
you see, bad man only had one idea
some drone got himself a new attitude
and then got mad about it
"This cube is such a hell!"
at the hospital, a sign said
"Problems are 90% attitude
and 10% external occurrence."

the ears enjoy whales
the hole is tobacco-stained
foreign shapes come out of it
affection is inverted, heart-holes out
producing beautiful patterns on warped tablet
Mr. Lobster is getting pretty accustomed
to taking drugs which
never really brace him for that bathtub

men with birds on their shoulders
sit at an adjacent table
and let cigar smoke pour from their face-holes
some noble creature with buttocks
sticking out of its collar
is struggling with a necktie
as his bedecked wife paints
navy-blue eyeliner under her one brown eye

my skin is stretched and spread
over color zones
and feeds noisily
with all of its holes
snappin' and gnashin'
a blue pen goes dry
bringing to mind an easy metaphor
and her hair in candlelight
carp mimic salmon and dash their brains out
in currents of ill-positioned ego
and a very false sense of
"What the people want from their Art"
tears flow from rusty spigots
in their foreheads

"WHY HIM?!", she convulsed under his table
and said, "DON'T!"
too drugged to pause, he filleted the salmon
and drew from its ovary
a string of tiny human hands
connected thumb-to-pinky
the snack was re-hydrated and filled
with crunchy goodness
as I looked from a window in tears

a cork-board laden with notes
and photos
and clippings
rustles with the sound of a passing marsupial
a little pink beanbaby leans forward
and out come pink bubbles
to be carried away by doves
the Long Wait is a map
leading to an orchard
with friendly beasts baying in stereo

This is the Great American Testimony
No purple mountains majesty to speak of here
only farts and fools and futures
and countless false starts
You are proud of it
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On a Sunday, I got carried my dufflebag onto a C-130 for duty in the Pacific.
Oh boy.