Destined to Witness

  “You can start next Monday,” the personnel manager told me, and shook my hand.

  Monday, bright and early, I reported for work. The personnel manager introduced me to my new foreman, who explained what he wanted me to do, a rather simple operation of cutting lengths of raw pipe down to shiny bushings of specified dimensions. Although I hadn’t touched a lathe since I worked for Lindner A. G. in Nazi Germany, it took me only a short while to feel at home behind the cranks and levers of the machine in front of me. My mother was right, gelernt is gelernt (learned is learned).

  Before I had a chance to rejoice over the way things had turned out, the foreman informed me of a disturbing development. “I am really ashamed to tell you this,” he started, “but we have learned that most of the operators have walked off their jobs because we hired you. We never had a colored lathe operator before.”

  It was only then that I noticed that, with the exception of a few operators, the machine shop was empty.

  “I don’t want you to be upset,” the foreman continued. “You seem to be doing fine. Just keep working as if nothing has happened. In the meantime, management has taken a very firm stand and informed the operators who walked out that if they don’t return right after lunch break, they can look for other jobs.”

  It was not the first time since the destruction of Nazi Germany that I encountered racism again, only this time it was racism American style, in the reputedly racially liberal North. Recalling Charles Hanson’s and other American blacks’ admonitions in Liberia, I couldn’t say that I hadn’t been warned.

  At lunchtime I was sitting dejectedly beside my lathe, listlessly munching on one of Aunt Hedwig’s sandwiches, when several workers, including some women, stopped by to chat. They wanted me to know that they strongly disapproved of their colleagues’ action and told me to hang in there because not all of the people at the plant were bigots.

  That was encouraging news to me, but even more encouraging was the fact that gradually the machine shop started to fill up as workers who had walked out returned to their machines. The firm stand taken by the Woodruff and Edwards management, and with it common decency, had won out. Within a few days the incident seemed forgotten. At least nobody openly challenged my right to work in the shop. While I was convinced that the company’s action did not change any hearts, it certainly went a long way to change behavior.

  Aware of race bias in America, I had made it a practice to keep a low profile whenever Uncle Gust and Aunt Hedwig, or Johnny and Shirley, had visitors. Usually I stayed in my room upstairs while they were entertaining in the living room below. This went on for some time, until Uncle Gust noticed my absences at social gatherings and put two and two together. “Let me tell you one thing, Junior, and I’m not telling you again,” he roared. “This is your home. I don’t give a shit who doesn’t like it. The next time we have company, you come down and sit with us like everybody else. Anyone who has a problem with that is an Arschloch (asshole) from Pittsburgh and can go straight to hell.” Having thus laid down the law while at the same time demonstrating his German linguistic ability, such as it was, he slapped himself on the thigh, as usual, and shouted “Jesus Christ!”

  Uncle Gust’s plainspoken declaration went a long way to make me feel wanted and at home. It also convinced me that true human decency is not a function of education or religion, but simply a matter of the heart.

  Fall eventually arrived and it was time for me to enroll at the Aeronautical University. The school’s curriculum, which was intended to lead to certification as an aircraft mechanic, was divided into two parts, the theoretical part taught at the school’s main building, an old villa at Eighteenth Street and Prairie Avenue, in Chicago, and the practical portion taught in a hangar at Chicago’s Midway Airport, at the time the world’s busiest.

  Since I didn’t want to quit my job at the foundry, I had myself transferred to the second shift. This meant that I had to get up in the wee hours of the morning, catch the first commuter train from Bartlett to Chicago’s Union Station, transfer to a bus that would take me to Eighteenth Street, and attend classes until noon, catch a bus back to Union Station and board the next train to Elgin, work from 2 P.M. until 10 P.M., then catch the next train to Bartlett and walk about a mile to the farm, only to repeat the entire cycle all over again the next day. It didn’t take me long to decide that if I kept this up, I would simply die of exhaustion. But I didn’t know how to escape this vicious cycle and the dilemma I was in. If I quit my job, I’d wind up without tuition money and would be barred from school. If I quit school, I would lose my student status and be deported.

  Just when I didn’t know whether I was coming or going, Aunt Hedwig handed me a letter that had just arrived. It was sent by a relative of sorts known far and wide as Uncle Sam. After what sounded like tongue-in-cheek “greetings,” the letter invited me to report for a physical examination at my draft board in downtown Chicago. It reminded me that when I received my U.S. visa in Monrovia, I had signed a statement directing me to register with the draft board upon arrival in the United States. This I had done. At the time I was informed that registration with the draft board was “merely a formality” since, as an alien student, I was not subject to the draft. Thus, I attributed the notice to a clerical error.

  But instead of being sent home as I had expected, I was examined, found fit as a fiddle, and ordered to report for active duty on February 19, 1951, well into the Korean War. On that day, despite the fact that I was neither an American citizen nor a permanent resident of the United States, my erstwhile wish of becoming an American GI finally caught up with me. I could have gotten off by calling attention to my student status, but decided to go along with the program, because facing bullets in Korea seemed preferable to dying of exhaustion during my around-the-clock commute. I also thought that serving in the United States Army would one day look good on my résumé when I applied for U.S. citizenship.

  Only nine months after my arrival in New York, I was riding a southbound train from Chicago to Camp (now Fort) Breckenridge, Kentucky, as a newly inducted recruit of the United States Army. If I still harbored any notions about the glamorous life of an American soldier, I was thoroughly disabused of them during the fourteen weeks of basic infantry training. I certainly found nothing glamorous about running until my tongue hung out, hiking until I had excoriated the skin off my butt and thighs, cowering in a foxhole while being run over by a monstrous tank, and crawling on my belly in a muddy field while .50-caliber machine-gun bullets whistled over my back.

  Efforts at transforming me into a soldier were momentarily interrupted when my first sergeant summoned me to the orderly room and ordered me to report to the provost marshal’s office immediately. Although I could not think of a single thing I had done that warranted my concern, I worried anyway, especially after a receptionist in the provost marshal’s office pointed toward two plainclothesmen who were waiting for me. Identifying themselves as INS officers, they had come to check on me because I had failed to make my annual alien registration report as required by federal law. They told me that my one-year student visa had expired and that for a while, I had been considered at large until they learned from my relatives that I had joined the armed forces. They then proceeded to scold me for my “negligence” and mentioned the possibility of immediate deportation proceedings.

  That did it. Releasing my pent-up anger, I told them to go ahead and deport me, since I was sick and tired of the army anyway. When I mentioned that joining the army wasn’t my idea, but that I was merely complying with orders sent by somebody who didn’t know what he or she was doing, they apologized. They told me that a letter from my commanding officer verifying that I was a soldier in good standing and a valuable member of his unit would satisfy the INS, at least as long as I remained on active duty. When I asked my commanding officer to write such a letter, he was happy to comply.

  Race relations in our integrated basic training companies were exceptionally good. We black recruits got alo
ng well with our white comrades-in-arms, and many interracial friendships were formed. But midway through basic training, I received a jolt that shattered one of my fervently held beliefs about the United States. One night, while pulling guard duty with one of my white buddies, he started complaining about the fact that the Jews in our company—about half a dozen—enjoyed duty-free time during Christian holidays as well as during Jewish holidays, while non-Jewish soldiers had time off only on Christian holidays. “I’m sick and tired of these fucking Jews,” he lamented. “I wish we’d do the same thing Hitler did in Germany and get rid of them.”

  I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. I had always assumed, quite naively, that the reasons America went to war against Hitler were to stop aggression, wipe out totalitarianism and racism, reestablish democracy, and free the Jews. Now an American used the same language of hate and intolerance that I knew so well from Nazi Germany. Anti-Semitism, I reluctantly concluded, was alive and well in the good old U. S. A.

  When I tried to persuade my buddy that getting rid of millions of people just because he begrudged them a few extra holidays was rather extreme, he told me that I was naive for taking the side of Jews. “You just don’t know them the way I do,” he insisted. “If you did, you’d know that they’ll steal you blind if you give them half a chance. I know. My father and I worked for Jews, and we rented from Jews.”

  I told the soldier that I didn’t care to hear any more of his bigoted ramblings. It took a while to readjust my thinking to the point where I no longer felt the need to idealize the United States. For the moment, I felt terribly disappointed and betrayed regarding my view of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

  Toward the end of basic training I was given further reason to be skeptical about the American way. When time came for us recruits to be assigned to permanent units, a pattern emerged. By the strangest of strange coincidences, all the white soldiers were sent to peaceful Europe, while all the blacks were shipped to places like Chonju and Kanggyong in war-torn Korea, where the odds of being returned in a body bag were exceedingly good. When some of us blacks queried our white company commander about this rather strange roll of the dice, he told us that racial bias had absolutely nothing to do with it and that the orders “came down from Washington” by people who had no idea whether the soldiers were black or white. Right! Sure!

  As a foreigner, I was not quite ready to shed blood for the United States, at least not before having lived in the country for a while and enjoyed some of the benefits of U.S. citizenship. Therefore, I frantically looked for a way to stay in the States a little longer. I was told that there were two alternatives that had priority over being shipped overseas: Officer Candidate School (OCS) and airborne training at Fort Benning Infantry School. As a noncitizen I was ineligible to apply for OCS, so I opted to volunteer for airborne training. This, I understood, was only a temporary solution, since airborne training lasted only three weeks and I had no way of knowing what other assignments would follow.

  A tall Mississippian by the name of Bill Toler had ridden the train with me from Chicago to Kentucky and during basic training had become my close buddy. Sharing my reluctance to become a statistic in Korea, Bill followed my lead by volunteering for the paratroopers. Neither of us had a clue what we had gotten ourselves into.

  At the first formation following our arrival at Fort Benning, a muscle-bound airborne instructor in a tight, snow-white T-shirt, starched fatigue pants, and spit-shined jump boots went nose tip to nose tip with me. “What’s that under your nose?” he bellowed.

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “All of you who are growing whatever it is you are growing under your noses have exactly ten minutes to get rid of it,” the muscleman hollered. After checking his wristwatch, he announced that the time was 820 hours and he wanted us back in formation clean-shaven at exactly 830 hours—“or else!”

  Like a stampeding herd of buffalos, I and all the other mustache wearers—which meant all of the black soldiers or, in effect, half of the platoon—made a mad dash for the barracks washroom, where we armed ourselves with razors, then hacked away at the mustaches that had been our pride and joy. Bill and I just barely made it back to the formation in time. Those who didn’t found out what the muscleman had meant by “or else!” They were ordered to do ten pushups for every minute they overstayed.

  After Bill and I returned from our first day of airborne training, which consisted largely of running until we were blue in the face, we carefully viewed our handiwork in the mirror and immediately went into shock. Strangely unfamiliar and bland, the images that looked back at us looked not at all like the dashing machos we had gotten used to seeing. When I tried to console Bill by reminding him that the clean-shaven look was merely temporary and that as soon as we were done with airborne training, we were free to grow new mustaches, he merely shrugged. Then he explained to me that for a black man to lose his mustache was a catastrophe, since black women like their men to have mustaches. “For a black woman, to kiss a man without a mustache,” he further explained, “is like eating an egg without salt.” I immediately got his point, and have worn a mustache ever since the army permitted me to grow mine back.

  Unable or unwilling to take the accelerating pressure of airborne training, Bill told me a few days later that he had decided to quit. I hated to see him go, as I had hoped we would go through military life together, but his mind was made up. His volunteering for airborne duty paid off nevertheless, since he was reassigned and shipped to a unit in, of all places, Germany.

  During three weeks of catching hell under Georgia’s blazing July sky while contemplating the inevitability of exiting an airplane from an altitude of twelve hundred feet, I, too, considered calling it quits. Our cadres assured us that if a parachute failed, we could always exchange it for a good one once we were back on the ground. This joke did little to boost my morale. But after a few pep talks from our airborne officers, I kept slogging along, more afraid of being called a quitter than I was of “getting wasted” in a parachute mishap. Under the relentless prodding of mean-spirited cadres who kept us trainees at the edge of physical and mental exhaustion, I mastered punitive pushups, the staple of airborne life; the PLF (Parachute Landing Fall); suspended harness exercises known for some strange reason as the “Nutcracker Suite”; simulated parachute jumps from 34-foot and 250-foot towers; and finally the real McCoy—five qualifying parachute jumps from an Air Force C-46.

  I have never tried bungee jumping and have no plans to do so, but I’d bet its thrills are modest compared with the exhilarating, adrenaline-boosting feeling one gets from jumping into the prop blast of an airplane during flight. Although we had practiced it hundreds of times on the ground, it was an altogether different feeling when, after reaching our jump altitude, our jump master shouted, “Stand up!…Hook up!…Sound off for equipment check!” then ordered the first man in the “stick,” “Stand in the door!” and finally “Go!” The first time I hurled myself out of the gaping opening and into thin air, my exhilaration level—some call it plain fear—had reached such a pitch that I totally forgot to count the mandatory “one-thousand, two-thousand, three-thousand” before my main parachute opened. Within seconds I was relieved to discover that there are few sights, if any, more beautiful than a recently opened expanse of canopy above. After that, it was all fun, as the chute carried me rather gently toward earth and, having carefully maneuvered away from trees and other obstacles, I made a perfect PLF. Before long, parachuting ceased to be something to be feared, as we quickly became conditioned to fearing each other’s suspicion that we were afraid more than fear itself. At the conclusion of airborne training, we graduates stood tall in our class-A uniforms and our first pair of spit-shined Corcoran jump boots, while an officer pinned our silver airborne wings on our stuck-out chests; mine, I’m sure, stuck out the farthest.

  Following the completion of airborne training, I and six fellow jump school graduates were sent for perman
ent assignment to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the 82nd Airborne Division, which had distinguished itself in World War II in actions against the Germans from the Battle of the Bulge to the Battle of Berlin. Our new unit was B Battery of the 80th Airborne Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion, an all-black Jim Crow outfit headed by Captain Jefferson S. (“The Man”) Boone, the meanest-looking and -acting officer I had encountered since I put on a uniform. Short and paunchy, with a permanent scowl, he strongly reminded me of a black version of my erstwhile English teacher Herr Harden, that unforgettable character from my childhood. Instead of welcoming us, Captain Boone gave us newcomers a withering glance that sent shivers down my spine in spite of the July heat, then let us in on a little idiosyncrasy of his. “There are two things I hate from the bottom of my heart,” he announced menacingly, as if he had already caught us red-handed at both transgressions, “an AWOL and a VD!”

  My first night as a bona fide paratrooper was hardly more auspicious than my first meeting with “The Man.” Sometime after midnight, I was awakened by a tremendous racket. When someone turned on the lights, I saw two of my new buddies in a serious fight over who knows what. Everyone watched, but no one interfered as the two bloodied one another with heavy punches and kicks. Eventually, the fight ended after one of the combatants, Oscar Ford, picked up the other, Robert Stone, and threw him down a flight of steep barracks stairs. There he remained, moaning occasionally, but motionless. My immediate impulse was to summon help, but when I prepared to go downstairs I was told by my barracks mates to “stay out of it.” After that, someone turned off the lights and everyone, including the apparent victor of the brawl, turned in as if nothing had happened.

  I found it difficult to fall asleep, worried that the badly beaten soldier at the bottom of the stairs might not survive. But I need not have worried. The next morning before reveille Stone walked in, his eyes bloody and nearly closed from the fight. He carried a steel rod that he had ripped from one of the bunks. Before anyone realized what he was up to, he walked up to his enemy, who was sitting on a footlocker engrossed in shining his boots, and struck him from behind at the base of his neck. Without uttering a sound, Ford keeled over and fell facedown to the floor, where he remained as motionless as he had rendered Stone the night before. This time, a platoon sergeant appeared, and within a few minutes, an ambulance rushed the comatose Ford to a hospital while the MPs hauled Stone to the stockade, where he was held pending murder charges in case Ford did not survive. But in a few days Ford recovered, and Stone was released. To my surprise, both resumed their duties as if the whole thing had never occurred. The incident taught me one valuable lesson—in my new environment, people played for keeps.