I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else

by Danny Aiello

  We took the elevator to the fourth floor. The cops sat me down in a chair across the corridor from the injured kid’s room. They didn’t play good cop/bad cop. They were both bad.

  “If he identifies you, you’re going away for attempted murder,” one of them said. The two of them disappeared into the room.

  They must’ve let me sit there sweating for maybe five minutes, but to me it felt like hours. Then the door to Joey Ariargo’s sickroom slowly swung open. I stared at a form lying in bed, his whole head swaddled in bandages like a character in a cartoon. Whoever had done the job on Joey had done it completely.

  The door slammed back shut again. A few minutes later the detectives emerged. Without a word they lifted me out of the chair, one under each arm as if they were marching me off to prison. Down in the hospital elevator, through the lobby, and out to the street we went. They drove me back to school, still not giving a word of explanation.

  The cop up front spat out a single sentence: “Get the fuck out of my car.” It turned out that Joey Ariargo had not fingered me as his attacker.

  I could see how my life was going. Trouble kept showing up at my door. The next time the police visited, or the next time a zip gun went off, maybe I wouldn’t be so lucky.

  In my neighborhood, if you weren’t continuing on in school, or if you didn’t have a good job, you went into the military. I had dropped out of high school, and I didn’t have any employment prospects, so I bailed out of the Bronx and into the service. Two things happened almost at the same time in June 1950: I turned seventeen, and that same week, the Korean War started.

  My mother didn’t want to let me go. But she could read my future the same as I could. On January 5, 1951, I became the property of the U.S. Army. I didn’t even shave yet. For the whole time I was in the service, I sent home my Class Q allotment dependency checks to my mother. In my mind, I remained what I always was: a working kid. The army was just another job.

  My fight card was just as crowded in the service as it had been on the streets of the Bronx. The first tussle I had went down immediately after I enlisted, when I stood in a chow line at Fort Dix in New Jersey. We had just been processed and hadn’t even been given uniforms yet. It was raining and I had an army-issued poncho on, with civilian clothes underneath.

  A soldier tried to cut into the line in front of me. I reacted instantly and tried to throw a punch. It was a silly move. My arm got caught in the folds of the rain poncho and all I managed to do was twirl around like a dancer.

  Our sergeant saw it all happen. “Hold up, hold up!” he yelled. “You two, get inside, both of you!” The whole platoon trooped into the barracks. There the sergeant had the two of us fight over our differences with bare fists.

  My opponent’s name was Jerry Gitling. He was built like a wrestler. He was so muscular that if he had grabbed me and squeezed, he probably could have killed me. Yet I knocked him down with one punch. I knew I had hurt him very badly. Jerry struggled back up onto his feet. It was clear that he wanted to fight me but didn’t have a clue how to do it. I didn’t have to hit him again.

  That’s how it was in this man’s army. If you got into an argument with a fellow soldier, the sergeant made you fight it out. This was a regular occurrence for me in the service, but I was just doing what I had always done back home. Jerry Gitling, the husky guy I first faced off with, became one of my best buddies in basic training, though I lost track of him later.

  I was sent home on furlough prior to doing two weeks of advanced combat training at Fort Benning, Georgia. While back in the Bronx, I said good-bye to a lot of people. There was a lot of hugging and crying from Mom, my sisters, my brother, and many of my friends.

  When I returned to camp, my unit proceeded to Georgia and completed its combat training. I was summoned in front of the commanding officer with seven other soldiers from the regiment.

  “Men, your eight names were drawn from a hat,” the CO announced. “You are being cut from the mission.”

  I was stunned. In the course of training together, our troop had become very close. We knew we were going into firefights alongside each other. That kind of knowledge makes for deep friendships. Now those bonds were about to be broken.

  The whole process seemed totally random. My name was drawn from a hat? What was that all about? I had no idea why the eight of us, from among thousands of soldiers in the regiment, were chosen not to go. I began to feel like a punk. I imagined that the other men were thinking that we’d chickened out and didn’t want to go into combat, or that we’d gotten out of it because we had connections.

  The unit was soon shipped to Korea, while the eight of us were sent on furlough once again. I didn’t want to return home. I felt it would be embarrassing. What was I going to tell my friends and family? That I didn’t go to Korea the last time, but I would be going the next time? Who the hell was going to believe me?

  While on this second furlough, my father gave me one last keepsake memory before I was shipped out. The incident is imprinted so clearly in my mind. I was in uniform in Times Square, walking down Broadway at Fiftieth Street. I remember being able to see the marquee of Radio City Music Hall, all the way over at Sixth Avenue. The movie The Great Caruso was playing, starring Mario Lanza.

  In one of those chance meetings that happen in New York, I saw my father coming up the crowded sidewalk. He accompanied a woman I didn’t recognize. When he saw me, he reacted as if nothing at all was wrong. He introduced his companion to me as Marge Fontane, one of the Fontane Sisters, a popular singing group of the day. My father seemed proud of himself.

  “She’s the lead singer!” he crowed, as if that fact would somehow impress me. I went home, feeling guilty for not telling my mother about this new “other woman.”

  When I returned from furlough a second time, fate intervened once again. The day before being shipped out to Korea, we were lined up for roll call. Another eight names were called out, different ones this time, except that once more, one of them was mine. Again, the CO said that these eight names had been picked out of a hat, and the eight of us were cut out from the rest of the regiment. The odds against my being picked twice were astronomical.

  Why was my name chosen, not once but twice? How could that be possible? I will never know. I also have no idea how many of those men I trained with wound up dying on the Korean peninsula.

  The news came down from on high that I would be transferred with my new regiment to Germany. I wasn’t too thrilled about that. I had thought I was going to Korea. That’s what I had volunteered for. Of course, we could still ship out to the war from Europe. In October 1951, we embarked from Norfolk, Virginia, on the General R. E. Callan, an old beat-up transport ship.

  The trip across the Atlantic to Germany was my first time at sea, and I immediately got sicker than a dog. Ten minutes out of port, I was ready to commit suicide. My bunk was on F-deck, the lowest part of the ship, which is actually below the waterline. All I could think of was going to sleep. I staggered down to my bunk, slowly crawled in, and lay flat on my back. I still clutched my rifle, which was drenched in Cosmoline lubricant and wrapped in plastic. The oily smell sickened me further.

  My CO, Captain Mitchell, came down to rouse me. “Private Aiello, get up on your feet!” he yelled.

  “I can’t,” I moaned.

  “Get your ass out of the rack or you’ll be court-martialed!” Mitchell shouted. He was screaming, his face inches from mine.

  I didn’t move. “Sir, let me die,” I said feebly. “You can shoot me. Feed me to the sharks.”

  “One last time, as your commanding officer I order you, Private Aiello—get on your feet!”

  “Sir, I don’t care if you’re the president of the United States, I am going to die here, and I don’t give a fuck!” I managed to further enrage Captain Mitchell when I tried to justify my actions, lying there in my bunk with my oily M1 carbine.

  “What are you doing with that weapon, Aiello?”

  “Sir, you told us i
f we didn’t clean the rifle, we would have to sleep with it. I’m sleeping with it, sir!”

  Mitchell never did have me court-martialed. He felt I was too sick to know what I was saying or doing. He was a good guy and I served under him throughout my time in Europe.

  The voyage wasn’t a leisure cruise, of course. As soldiers, we all had responsibilities to fulfill, the worst being KP—“kitchen patrol”: washing dishes, mopping floors, everything but the cooking. When it came to making three square meals a day, the army had other soldiers doing that. They called them chefs. After experiencing their food, though, I had another name for them.

  Somehow I survived the transatlantic trip. We docked in Bremerhaven, Germany, in October 1951. It was my first time on foreign soil. About three o’clock that morning, we were put on trains and sent to Munich. The trip was a long one, so the army provided Pullman sleepers. But I stayed awake for much of the trip, staring out at the countryside, fascinated.

  I will never forget the faint sound of the train running on the tracks, almost silent, whispering, totally unlike the metallic racket of trains back in the States. It was as if the wheels never came in contact with the rails. I was later told that when bombing raids took place over Germany, blackouts might render targets invisible, but sounds from the ground below could sometimes be heard, and those sounds became targets. So the Germans learned to muffle their trains.

  I had dark expectations of what I was going to see in Germany. World War II had ended only six years earlier, so what were the people like now? Without feeling? Still warmongering monsters whose leaders engineered the annihilation of millions of innocents? Such were my thoughts just prior to falling asleep riding through the heart of Germany.

  We arrived at our destination the afternoon of the next day. The army loaded us onto two-and-a-half-ton trucks for the final leg of the exhausting trip. As we traveled through the countryside, I noticed that the towns we passed seemed to be untouched by the war. Bavaria, in particular, was beautiful in the summer and even more so in autumn. The towering Alps were already capped in snow.

  My regiment was billeted at Warner Kaserne, outside of Munich. During the war, this place had been occupied by the SS, and only a few kilometers away was Dachau. One visit was enough to tell me everything I’d heard back home about the “Final Solution” was true. The revolting evidence of the Holocaust was enough to place the beauty of the countryside into sobering contrast.

  When I finally met some of those German civilians I had been so curious about, I was left with a welter of confused feelings. Many times I encountered wounded German war veterans, some of them blind, missing a leg, or having some other visible wound. Poverty-stricken, they begged for handouts, offering a piece of paper documenting their military record.

  The odd thing was, every single veteran could show evidence of having been wounded while fighting Russians on the eastern front. I could never figure out the truth of it. Were these disabled veterans claiming to have fought not Americans but Russians because they were afraid we would turn our backs on them? At first, I hesitated to help because of what I had seen at Dachau. Soon enough, though, the common humanity of their plight earned them my sympathy.

  * * *

  It was the winter of 1951– 52, and most of my time was spent out in the field, specifically in the district of Hohenfels, living in a pup tent and digging foxholes. I threw live hand grenades with fifty-caliber machine guns firing two feet above my head. It was the coldest I had ever been in my life, with the temperature hitting fifteen degrees below zero.

  The army didn’t change its expectations just because our asses were frozen solid. We performed the same tasks as we did in good weather. When it was time to eat, it didn’t matter if it was in the middle of a blizzard. We had to stand in the chow line, running in place to keep warm.

  Our rations weren’t going to win any taste awards. The exception was my first Thanksgiving away from home. The military did it up right, serving up turkey breast, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce. Of course, we had no teacups or pretty dishes, just our mess kits and our canteens.

  One afternoon during that first raw winter in Germany, a host of dignitaries arrived at camp for a parade and inspection. I stood in front of my battalion, holding the Stars and Stripes in parade rest position. General Dwight Eisenhower walked by and stopped in front of me, and I snapped to attention.

  “Where are you from, soldier?” Ike asked.

  “Fort Benning, Georgia, sir,” I said.

  “What’s a rebel doing in this Yankee outfit?”

  “Oh, no, sir,” I said quickly. “I only meant that I took my combat training at Fort Benning. I’m from New York, sir.”

  Ike looked me up and down and gave me a word of praise that I’ve remembered my whole life. “You’re a fine-looking soldier, son,” he said. Soon afterward he became the president of the United States.

  I made some great friends while stationed in Germany. Most of them came from New York City. Some had enlisted, others were drafted. Among my best buddies were Red De Filippo, Sal Portillo, and Tony Antrilli, a ranked boxer from Philly, with whom I used to spar. Some of my army friends, like Joe Zappala, I still see even to this day. Later on in civilian life, President George H. W. Bush appointed Joe as ambassador to Spain.

  Placed in among all these men from varying backgrounds, I began to feel my lack of a formal education more keenly. I resolved to improve my vocabulary, so I worked at educating myself. I got a dictionary and picked out four words a day to learn and use. Slowly, with small, tortured steps, I discovered the glories of the English language. I came to like certain words, like “tantamount,” “nomenclature,” and “rodential.”

  Then, and not for the last time, baseball intervened in my life.

  The regiment fielded a team that would play in a league made up from divisions that were stationed all over Europe. A certain Lieutenant Edwards from Texas became the reason I no longer had to go out on maneuvers. He was the manager of the 172nd Regimental Baseball Team.

  At tryouts, I so sufficiently impressed Edwards that he named me as a starting first baseman and an occasional pitcher. The years of stickball in the streets and sandlot baseball in Crotona Park had paid off.

  I learned the magical army acronym TDY—“temporary duty.” It meant no more marches, no more mess details, no more drudgery. When springtime came, my one and only military obligation was to play baseball.

  This was in the early 1950s, the period during which the Cold War was ramping up. There were almost as many U.S. soldiers in Germany as there were in Korea. To the quarter million American servicemen stationed in the country, we were their entertainment. I must have played a hundred games over the course of my two summers in Germany.

  My teammates and I had it made in the shade thanks to temporary duty. We got weekend and evening passes and spent a lot of time at Munich supper clubs, including one in particular, Studio 15, where all the beautiful German actresses hung out. The food in Germany was amazing. The Wiener schnitzel! And the bread and butter was like nothing I had ever tasted before.

  Lieutenant Edwards established one hard-and-fast rule. We held our baseball workouts across the street from the regimental barracks. If we were on the field when the regiment was headed out on a forced march, Edwards ordered us not to provoke our fellow soldiers in any way.

  “As they pass us, you will not look in that direction,” he said. “You will keep playing ball. You will make no eye contact whatsoever, and you will definitely not engage in heckling.”

  The enlisted men as well as the officers, he said, hated our baseball-playing guts. “They all want to do what you’re doing. And they want you to share their misery. If they have to go out on marches and maneuvers, why not you?”

  We did as we were told. It made me feel guilty, but not too guilty, and never for very long. I was enjoying the feel of a baseball bat in my hands too much to have any negative reaction to what was clearly a piece of good luck. I had jo
ined the military and was seeing the world, just like the recruiting posters had promised.

  But I could just imagine the conversations I would be having after my days in the service. “What did you do in the war?” “Well, I played a little ball.” That answer didn’t sound too good.

  I spent twenty-eight months in Germany. I left the States a kid, but I came back a man. In January 1954, honorably discharged from the army, I was back in the Bronx and wondering what the hell I was going to do with myself. I was always wondering that. But I was determined that my life would be different. My nickname had always been “Junior.” Now I insisted that everyone call me “Danny.”

  The reason you can’t go home again is that home isn’t the same as when you left it. The flight to the suburbs was beginning to hit my old neighborhood. I had an uncanny feeling that there were social forces afoot that I couldn’t quite understand. Where did I fit in? Ike was in the White House, and America appeared to have settled into a peaceful period of prosperity. But in truth, the economy was already in a downturn and jobs were scarce.

  I found myself back at square one. I felt restless. The streets were familiar but I had changed. There was more of me—I had filled out and come into my full height while I was in the service. I might have been tall, but I was still a bundle of uncertainty. I left the army as a corporal. That didn’t mean a hell of a lot in civilian life.

  I moved in with my mother in an apartment at 1419 Stebbins Avenue. Mom had more trouble with her eyesight, which she was losing to glaucoma. I think all those years sewing and doing piecework had aggravated her condition. My sister Gloria told me that my mother needed an eye operation. It turned out Mom had saved every penny of the dependent payments that I had sent home.

  “She wanted to use that money to buy you a car,” Gloria said.