Major Conflict

by Jeffrey McGowan, Maj USA (ret. )

  I didn’t have to dwell on this for very long, I knew how much I still loved being a soldier. I loved getting up and going to work every day, and I was good at what I did. And though I’d been through a lot, not the least of which was a major conflict in the Persian Gulf, I still approached my job and army life in general with almost the same amount of boyish exuberance as I’d had when I first signed up. A part of me was convinced that I’d stay as long as they would have me, and that I could continue to ignore my personal feelings and desires, or at the very least, keep them safely compartmentalized, and still achieve professionally. And in my more confident moments I maintained that perhaps the ideal life I’d dreamed of, with a wife and kids and the whole bit, was still possible after all.

  But another part of me was now fully convinced that that just wasn’t going to happen, that my sexuality was fixed, that nothing was going to change. I was attracted to men—that’s just the way it was and the way it was going to be. My sexuality was, I realized during more lucid moments, something I was—essentially, constitutionally—it was the unchanging background color on the canvas of my life. All manner of things could be sketched onto that canvas, but the color of the canvas itself would never alter.

  And maybe it didn’t matter. I think having been to war allowed me to have a bit more compassion for myself. After all, did I really have anything left to prove? I’d met the greatest test of manhood there is, fighting in combat, and I’d passed—I’d done very, very well. I had done my duty. More than anything, I’d proved it to myself, I’d passed my own test, met my own standard. Having done that, I’d begun to wonder if the sacrifices I was making needed to continue indefinitely.

  The very night I returned home from Europe, my grandmother took a call for me. I was fast asleep, jet-lagged. In the morning she told me a “young man by the name of Greg” had phoned. I couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t left a number, so I called Doubleday and was given the number of the Scarsdale store. Apparently he was now managing that branch.

  “Doubleday Bookshops. Greg speaking, how may I help you?”

  “Torso!” I yelled into the receiver.

  “Jeff? McGowan?”

  “The one and only,” I said.

  “Oh, my God. How weird is that? It was totally a whim last night. I had no idea you’d just got home. I was having a few beers, and I thought about you and . . . I wasn’t sure . . . I thought you might be . . .”

  “Dead?”

  “Well . . . I figured you’d been in the war, but—”

  “I’m still kicking,” I said. “But I’m surprised you called. I thought you’d never want to speak to me again, after the way I treated you.”

  “We were kids, Jeff; that was seven years ago,” he said. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed hearing his voice again. He sounded exactly the same. It felt as if we hadn’t missed a beat, as if the years apart had suddenly vanished and we’d spoken on the phone just last night, after having left work together and hanging out in Grand Central, holding hands secretly beneath the fading vaulted ceiling of the old train station.

  I had nothing to do that day, so I decided to take the train up to Scarsdale to see him. My grandmother didn’t drive, and I, of course, hadn’t yet had the time to buy a car. A few hours later I was walking through the open door of the tiny bookstore next to the old Lord & Taylor on White Plains Road in Westchester. The store was empty but for a tiny old woman going through a stack of travel books next to the cash register. I asked for Greg, and she hurried toward the back and disappeared into a small stockroom. Greg walked out briskly, all smiles. He looked pretty much the same, maybe a little thinner, a finer pair of pants, perhaps, a more expensive tie. We shook hands and did one of those uncomfortable halfway hugs.

  “You can cover for me, Rita? We’ll be in the back.”

  “Go on,” the old woman said, waving her hand dismissively.

  “She’s a barrel of laughs,” I said, as Greg closed the sliding wooden door behind us in the little stockroom.

  “She’s great, actually,” Greg said. “The best.” He tapped out a Marlboro Light from a box of cigarettes sitting on a stack of Millie’s Book paperbacks, the Christmastime bestseller of that year written in the voice of the First Dog, Millie. “As dictated by Barbara Bush,” it said on the cover.

  Lighting the cigarette, he turned and was now facing me directly. I was stunned to discover that all the chemistry was still there. We tried to get a conversation going, but we seemed to be too distracted by each other, our bodies were like magnets, and soon I had my arms wrapped around his thin frame and we were kissing.

  The thin wooden door started to rattle and then slide open, and we jumped apart. Rita hurried in. “Excuse me, fellas, but all of Scarsdale seems to want Millie in paperback today.” She picked up the small stack of the little book with Barbara Bush in blue, holding Millie, the presidential cocker spaniel, and standing on a White House balcony. “Give me a drag of that,” she said, resting the stack on her hip and reaching out to take Greg’s cigarette. She took a deep hit and said, “Cute dog, but honestly, it’s just a little silly, in my view.” Little puffs of cigarette smoke came out of her mouth with every other word.

  “The perfect gift for the Scarsdale lady who has everything,” Greg said.

  “You know, she’s a Rye girl,” Rita said, referring to Rye, New York, the First Lady’s hometown, which wasn’t far from Scarsdale.

  “Yes, I know, Rita, you’ve told me,” Greg said.

  Rita chuckled and hustled herself, the stack of Millie in hand, back out onto the sales floor.

  Greg closed the door. He was smiling sheepishly now. “It’s probably for the best that she came in, Jeff.”

  “And why would that be true?” I asked, moving toward him again. It was so strange, how normal it felt for us to be doing this so soon after seeing each other again.

  “Let’s take a walk outside,” Greg said.

  It was an unusually mild afternoon in late October. The trees in front of the white Lord & Taylor building were shining bright orange and red and yellow in the autumn sunlight. Greg seemed a little nervous. He was virtually chain-smoking. He asked me about the war and Germany and Europe and the army, and I told him all about everything I’d been going through the last few years. I’d forgotten how easy it was to talk to him, and as we walked through the winding Scarsdale streets (down one called Winding Lane, in fact, Greg made a joke about it) I couldn’t help thinking about our time together seven years before.

  “So why was it a good thing that your clerk came in and busted us up?” I asked him, as we reached Scarsdale Village and the Christmas-tree train station.

  “I’ve got the virus, Jeff,” Greg said quickly, looking away.

  We hadn’t talked about AIDS at all. I realized then that part of the feeling of angst and frustration I’d sensed upon returning to New York had to do with the fact that the epidemic had by that time cut a huge swath of devastation across the city. Especially in the gay community, of course. Add to that a crack epidemic and a crime rate setting new records daily (this was pre-Giuliani), and it’s no wonder the city seemed desperate. And now Greg seemed desperate, too, and I wanted so much to be able to help him.

  “Oh, Greg,” I said, “I’m so—”

  “It’s okay, don’t say anything. I’m not sick or anything now so . . . who knows . . . some people don’t progress to full-blown AIDS; maybe I’ll be one of the lucky ones.”

  “When did you find out?”

  “Back in 1990,” he said.

  Walking back to the store, he told me all about his last few years, how hard it had been finding out, but how he’d tried to keep things in perspective and to keep on writing (he wrote short stories and was obsessive about keeping a journal). I felt terrible, but he remained so upbeat that after a while it rubbed off on me and I relaxed. When we hugged good-bye outside the store, I almost burst into tears. But he kept it fraternal, made it quick and not too close, and then kind of pushed me away, as if
he couldn’t bear being too close to me. We promised to stay in touch, but we didn’t. After about a year I simply could not try to get back in touch with him anyway; I feared learning that he’d died. And then after a few more years I just assumed that he was dead, and I regretted never having properly apologized to him for the way I’d treated him way back in 1985, when we were both so young and had our whole lives still so much in front of us.

  Seeing Greg again reaffirmed some of the changes going on inside me. And during that brief period between Germany and Fort Bragg, I managed to begin to see, for the first time in my life, the faintest glimmer of the possibility of life outside the military as an openly gay man. For the first time I didn’t instantly slam the door on that idea when it presented itself to me, though I did still close it, of course. However, I had no details; the possibility was so vague as to be virtually meaningless. I didn’t know how even to begin to think about my life as a gay man in an authentic way, in a way disconnected from the most typical preconceptions and stereotypes. And AIDS terrified me, of course. As a result, these fresh thoughts I had during quiet moments after my return from Europe and seeing Greg again remained strictly that—quiet and unexplored. The reality of army life still had no room for this, and I still wasn’t ready to leave. Changes were coming with the new president and the new era he’d usher in, but for now things were the same as they’d always been: one bad move and you were out. For now I’d hunker down and wait. Besides, my new assignment was at Fort Bragg, so an old dream was finally about to come true.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Flying Watermelons and Platinum Blondes

  I made the thirteen-hour drive down to Fort Bragg in my Toyota on the day of the 1992 presidential election. I had spent several wonderful weeks visiting my grandmother and friends, and I was ready to get back to work. I’d been assigned to the First Battalion of the 319th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment (AFAR). I’d finally get to become a paratrooper!

  I already had Airborne wings, having earned them at the basic Airborne course at Fort Benning, but there’s an important distinction here. Though I’d completed the course by doing five jumps successfully, and I’d been given the honorific “five-jump chump,” I was not yet a paratrooper. And I say that emphatically because being a paratrooper meant being part of a very special and elite community, with a culture all its own. To be a paratrooper was to be a member of the first unit that would respond when the president dialed 911. Anybody could get the wings; not everybody could serve in an airborne unit. I was on my way to meeting the challenge of becoming a part of that unique culture.

  On the drive down I-95 I listened to the election results as they came in and couldn’t believe what was happening. Things weren’t going all that well in the country—that I knew—but I hadn’t seriously believed Bush the elder would be a one-term president. Now it looked as if that might be a real possibility.

  Even as I tried to wrap my mind around the idea, I didn’t have a clue, of course, just how much things would change once Clinton was elected. He seemed so radically different from any of the five presidents I’d known in my lifetime (I was only four when LBJ decided not to run in 1968). My impression of Clinton had been almost uniformly negative, though this would change over time. As the hours passed, and the polls closed, and results trickled in, it became clear that the old guard was out and a whole new show was coming to town. Little did I know how much this change would directly affect the military and my own life.

  I was exhausted after the thirteen-hour drive, so when I arrived at Fort Bragg I checked in to the visiting officers’ quarters, Moon Hall, and soon found myself out cold in my room. I would stay at Moon Hall for another couple of days while I found an apartment and got settled in.

  Once I was all set up, the first thing I had to do was take the airborne refresher course. Basically, it was a whole week of dealing with the parachute—how to put it on and so forth, how to rig personal equipment, and a review of aircraft procedures in general. This was immediately followed by my first jump in almost five years. The first jump in the division was always a day jump as well as a “Hollywood” jump, which meant that I’d jump without a weapon or rucksack. Like my first five jumps at the basic course, it was actually a “night” jump since I closed my eyes as I exited the plane as well as for most of the way down, but I got to the ground safely.

  The next major event was the propblast ceremony, an elaborate ritual that every new officer has had to go through since it was first established during World War II. It is a rite of passage that makes you a part of the family—a “made guy,” if you will. Originally, the newly minted paratrooper would simply toast the Airborne with a drink specially made for the occasion, then do a parachute landing fall (PLF) from a table. A PLF is the method used to land so as to avoid breaking your back. It basically means hitting the ground and rolling, not trying to land standing up. Over time this simple toast and little mock PLF had morphed into an elaborate ritual that could take several days to complete.

  The propblast was scheduled for early December, and it would be a two-day event. The first day was a written exam on Airborne history, the second day was a practical exam. I passed the written with no problem and was told to report at three-thirty the following morning at the track across from our headquarters.

  From the minute we arrived, the officers in charge peppered us with verbal abuse. The first event was a PT session that involved repeated sets of push-ups, followed by pulling a sled around the field loaded up with as many of the cadre as possible, all of them showering us nonstop with insults and abuse. That was followed by a nice roll in several large mud puddles covered in ice. For good measure we then had a good forty-five-minute session of rolling up and down the hills on either side of the track. By about six A.M. we were finished with PT and about to begin the gunnery portion of the day. After we were driven out to one of the firing points on the western ranges, we began unlimbering fully rigged howitzers as part of a competition to see which team could do it faster. We then spent the morning firing rounds. All throughout, any infraction—some real, some made up— resulted instantly in a flood of extreme verbal abuse and plenty more push-ups.

  By noon I was exhausted and had started to feel resentful. The whole process reminded me vaguely of some of the things we used to do at the frat house back at Fordham. Later on, after the Marine hazing incidents made headlines, the tradition of propblast along with all other hazing rituals throughout the military were banned. For now, though, I had to keep my chin up and get through the rest of this day so I’d be able to add my name to the book we all signed at the end, the book that every propblast “graduate” had signed for the last fifty years.

  The afternoon’s festivities were held where the Airborne refresher course had taken place, the most notable feature of which was a pair of thirty-two-foot-high towers, with cables extending from each to anchor on a fifteen-foot-high berm some one hundred feet away. Jumping from these towers while attached to a cable was supposed to mimic the feel of jumping from an airplane. If you can jump at thirty-two feet, the thinking goes, you can jump at 850 feet. Not everyone was convinced, but that was the idea.

  We were to be graded on our exits. This was supposed to be a pretty straightforward process. The grader would check to see that your elbows were tight against your sides and your feet and knees were together when you landed. Of course nothing was really straightforward that day, because the graders were intent on making the whole process as difficult as possible.

  I was getting it worse than most on account of one particular captain who seemed to take sadistic joy in busting my balls. Basically, he followed me closely the whole day just waiting for me to fuck up. I’d met him when I’d first arrived and was still staying in Moon Hall. One of my buddies from Germany had invited me to join him and two other people for dinner. The two other people turned out to be the sadistic captain, who had been commanding headquarters battery at the time, and his longtime girlfriend, a tall, striking platin
um blonde who drove a white Corvette. What I didn’t know at the time was that the sadistic captain, whose name was Ron, was on the verge of breaking up with the platinum blonde, whose name was Ruth.

  We had a good time that night, at least my friend from Germany and Ruth and I did. Ron was quiet and withdrawn all night, though he watched the three of us intently all through dinner. At the end of the evening, Ruth said that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had so much fun and that she wanted both our phone numbers. Normally we would’ve balked at this point since she was Ron’s girlfriend, but the way she asked seemed innocent enough, so we gave them to her.

  About a week later, she called, said that she and Ron had broken up, and explained that her birthday was coming up and she wanted me to come to the party she was throwing the following Friday. I said sure.

  So I went, expecting to do nothing other than socialize. It was a nice enough party, mostly army guys and their wives. Around eleven I figured I’d call it a night and made to leave; suddenly Ruth appeared, looking distressed.

  “Why are you leaving so early?” she asked. “Aren’t you having a good time?”

  “Oh no, Ruth,” I said. “I had a great time, thanks, just tired, that’s all. Thought I’d start heading home.”

  “Well, okay, funny man,” she said, smiling. “I . . . guess that’s all right, but am I gonna see you again soon? Do you want to go to dinner, maybe next week?”

  The following week we went to dinner and were having a great time until about halfway through the meal when she got very serious and started telling me about her relationship with Ron and how difficult it had been and how he hadn’t been very nice to her. I suddenly felt awkward and said nothing, sensing that she just needed to talk. When it appeared she was through, I tried to lighten things up, but she wanted to know all about me and my past. I told her about my childhood in Jackson Heights, about my grandparents, about Fordham and ROTC and Germany and the war. When she asked about girlfriends, I lied and said I still had one in Frankfurt. I did this not only to conceal my sexuality but also because I had no intention of dating a fellow captain’s ex just two weeks after they’d broken up. She took it pretty well, and we finished the night on a light note.