“Don’t you dare come home with some slant eyed girl!”
Those were the last words I remember my mother saying to me as I stepped aboard the train that would carry me away from where I no longer wanted to be but not to where, had I been a stronger man, I truly knew I should have been going. I was a coward who would neither follow my heart nor disobey my mother.
April 1, 1969, nineteen years old, pissed off at the world like you couldn’t imagine, scared to my very core that what I was doing was completely wrong for me and believing that my options were limited to only one path, the path that this train would carry me on to Chicago, Illinois and the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. I was running scared because the only other option I could see in my college failed future was some rice patty in Vietnam and ducking bullets.
I didn’t believe in the war, perhaps more precisely how I perceived the US to be fighting or not fighting it, and my enlistment in the United States Navy was in no way my validation of anything other than the fact that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing in my life, for my life or to my life. No information, no knowledge, no insight is a dangerous thing for anyone but for a naïve nineteen year old coming from a small and nearly isolated town in south central Wisconsin the consequences can be potentially lethal if not bodily then certainly mentally.
The honest truth in that moment of stepping on that train was that the dreams of a boy were ripped away forever never to be replaced by anything much more than wishes and hopes.
I don’t remember much from that day, nothing about the train ride, who I sat beside, where the train stopped or how long the trip took. The next thing after my mothers’ words that I remember is being in a huge building with hundreds and hundreds of other “boys” and hearing someone way up in front of me at a microphone asking if anyone sang. Even in my ignorance I’d remembered hearing somewhere that you never volunteer for anything in the military but I found myself raising my hand.
A small room with a guy in a sailor’s suit not much older than me sitting at a piano and another guy in civilian dress were what I found next. Just like the days in high school with Mr. Segerstrom the guy at the piano played the scales and I sang the notes. In that moment in that little room singing scales beside a piano life had suddenly gone from overwhelming to rather comfortable. Next thing I knew I was declared a second tenor in a somewhat elite group consisting of sixteen recruits, The Blue Jackets Choir, and would spend the remainder or my time at Great Lakes singing for this, that and every Friday another graduation.
I would come to realize that I wanted to stay there forever but in a prior moment of fear and desperation I had made what would turn out to be one of many fatal errors in thinking that I would commit over the years to come. I had tested into the Navy’s Nuclear Electronics program which was a six year enlistment and I was to be trained in some of the most advanced technology of the day with the ultimate goal of serving my six year enlistment almost certainly aboard a nuclear powered submarine. The Navy wasn’t going to let me sing my six year enlistment away.
April 1, 1969 was a day of running away from what was an untenable reality to a totally unknown and unperceived future. Just a moment in time of doing what was the only thing I thought I could do and yet having no idea what the hell I was doing or what the consequences would ultimately be for me and others that would come to spend their days and years around me.
She wasn’t there that day, April 1, 1969, to watch me step on to that train and to leave her behind to deal with her own today and tomorrow. If she’d been there that day I’d not have the memory of my mother’s final words. I would have had her embrace, the smell of her hair, the feel of her skin, the vision of her beautiful blue eyes and auburn hair and the taste of her kiss. I’d like to think all these years later that had she been there that day standing beside me I might have actually screwed up the courage to say to all the world that what I was about to do was wrong, wrong for me in so many ways, and walked away from that train station with her hand in mine and the knowledge that what I was doing was the right thing for me and that in that moment I had passed from being merely a silly boy into the beginnings of manhood. But she wasn’t there and rational decisions were something I’d come to find I would seldom make.
No, she wasn’t there that day, April 1, 1969, and perhaps because of that there was nothing more that a silly boy could do but to use the ticket clutched in his hand and ride away from her with only his mother’s words echoing in his ears.
The thing is I’d actually known what I was doing when I did it otherwise I sure as hell wouldn’t have picked April Fools Day to leave my life behind and give it over to others that would try to convince me they had a right to it. Anyways that’s part of how I rationalize it away these days. It’s sort of like that cartoon I once saw of a mouse standing defiantly with the infamous middle digit raised in front of a hawk with talons spread wide and headed straight toward it; you may win but screw you anyways. And so not unlike that hapless mouse I decided that although that huge all powerful hawk did ultimately have the power to kill me “it” would never completely win and even more so take from me what I’d come to see as being who I wasn’t.
There are those who talk with pride of their years spent in the military serving “their” country and for each who makes that claim I tip my hat to them. For me the truth was that “my” country would have been more deserving of my admiration had it focused on things much closer to home, things that would have made a significant difference in the United States of America and not someplace half a world away. To this day I believe that for whatever reasons those that “lead” this nation have found it far more convenient to look outward rather than to look to inward. And so ultimately I fought against the system in my own pathetic way to the point that four years twenty seven days and twelve hours after April 1, 1969 I walked out of Brooklyn Naval Shipyard a “free” man.
To this day I find that I cannot forgive myself for the decision I made. Granted it was a decision made out of total ignorance and even at that I find it not that hard to look at others and wonder why in hell they didn’t say something, anything, and give me at least a little more to work with.
Others will tell of the positives that came from the years the government and the military stole from them but I will never be one to join that chorus. My song will forever be of loss, loss of so much that even today I find myself cringing at the thought of what I did in a moment of what I believed was the right thing to do, what was the expected thing to do, what was the patriotic thing to do. I will always tell anyone who might ever ask that I served for nothing and lost everything in return.
She’d served me Cowboy Coffee the night we met. In a moment she’d become my reason for being and the first time I’d ever truly understood what love really is. From that farm house outside a little Wisconsin town where we sat side by side drinking coffee one night to an evening in Charleston, South Carolina where we came together in an ultimate expression of our love for one another she had been my reason for being. She was all I cared about and all I wanted and when the talk of marriage had come up I said that I wouldn’t marry her until I could be with her all the time. It wasn’t what she wanted to hear and that day as I drove away from her parents’ farm house the words rang inside my head and cut clear through my heart.
I was home on leave and I knew something was wrong between us but it didn’t matter, I was back in Wisconsin, back on that couch we’d shared that first night, back beside her and things would be OK. Things had to be right; there were no options in my world.
“I have something to tell you,” she started, “I’m getting married.”
Yes I know, I’ve never been the sharpest steak knife in the drawer nor the brightest bulb around so my reply seemed completely obvious, “I know; we’re getting married.”
I don’t recall that there was a pause though I do want to remember that she looked away; “No, you don’t understand, I’m getting married to someone else. Someone I met at school.”
“They” had won in that instant though no one but I would have seen it in that way.
The only part of my world that I believed I still had any hope of holding on to had been ripped away from me because I was living in Athens, Greece thanks to the US of A and the one thing, the one someone that still meant something to me, was living in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. There was no way I could have fought for what I loved, what I wanted and what I needed. And so my world crumbled around me.
Today is yet another April 1, the day that’s been called April Fool’s Day, a day of fun and pranks and laughter more often than not at others’ expense, and a day that I will forever curse.
I followed my mothers’ bigoted demand and I brought no one home with me from where I’d been. No Asian beauty to go against my mother, no farm girl from just outside a little town in Wisconsin and no me.
Forty two years ago today I took a train ride away from me. On that day I was the April fool but it would take the passing of much time before I would realize just how much.
