Requiem

It is January 15, 1991, the eve of the Persian Gulf War. A gentle but cold and biting wind stirs along Ponce de Leon Avenue, and my car is the only one on the street at 4:30 AM. It's a rather serene setting, but my thoughts are anything but composed, because my mind is filled with troubling and revealing reflections of my own life.

That old, vacant building there next door to what was once the only store Sears retail store in Atlanta - the glaring street lights disfigure its fading, red brick walls and cause the gray concrete framing around its bare windows to glow, almost as though the building itself were gasping to preserve the memories of the past. In 1960, that building was the headquarters for a number of military entities in the Atlanta area, and a number of reserve units met there.

I can remember every detail of the day I was sworn in the Army Reserve. It was in that building on March 6, 1960. I was in my last few weeks of high school, and there was a light covering of snow on the ground. I wouldn't exactly classify myself as a draft-dodger. I simply didn't want to remain in the uncertain status of waiting until I was 21 or 22 years old to be drafted and just wanted to get my military service behind me so I could get a job that would put enough money in my  pocket to have a car and a girlfriend. That was my only aspiration - certainly rather shallow and hardly accrediting itself to any sort of meaningful ambition.

I remember Barbara, the first woman I began dating when I returned from active duty and took the first job that was offered to me with no meaningful planning and no thought of where it would lead. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen - much the same as Angela Jennings in this book, but her temperament wasn't nearly as worldly. She had sharp, feminine features that were accentuated by the cat-eye glasses that were stylish in those days. Her narrow waist, full breasts and well-proportioned legs and hips captivated me both from the first moment I saw her and for as long as I knew her.

Fall has always been my favorite season, because it was during the fall of 1961 that I met her. How many times over the years have I thought of the soft touch of her hands and her overpowering spell each time I held her close to me. But I made the same mistake as Arnold Gray. I tried to start in the major league when I really belonged in the minors. Everything went very well at first, and I couldn't see the inevitable. She gradually began to lose interest in me, probably because I hadn't dated much in high school, because I didn't have a car, money or anything else to take me where I thought I wanted to be. I really didn't know how to act around a woman - especially one so attractive as she.

Then, there was a drug store there at the corner of Ponce de Leon and Monroe Drive. I lived with my mother and grandmother, and we didn't have a telephone in that old apartment house just around the corner. I was in the telephone booth in Mimm's Drug Store the night she told me it would be best if we didn't see each other any longer. I never realized until years later why she lost interest in me, but I guess that was natural for someone who had never had a girlfriend to simply take it she was just as interested in me. She wasn't under the same confinements as me, and had her pick of men. At first, she seemed to experience the same thrill as me, but there was no vacuum within her as there was with me. To this day, I really can't say if I loved her as I thought I did or if what I felt was only a false emotion and a natural consequence for someone who was so lonely.

As I turn onto Euclid Avenue, I remember those days when I was in Moreland Grammar School. I had a job at the Euclid Theater delivering circulars and would work behind the refreshment stand when someone was sick or on vacation. My mother was so amused when I got my Social Security Card when I was 12 years old. There's no telling how many miles a week I put on my bicycle delivering the circulars. I would leave one on every car window in the Kroger and Colonial parking lots and at every door in all the apartment buildings. A lot of them are vacant now.

Each time I drive down Euclid Avenue, I have this same feeling. It's hard to describe - partly reflective, partly nostalgic, but to some extent, there's regret. Almost everyday when I was a child, my grandmother and I would come up Euclid Avenue to the Colonial store in that building on the left. The little refrigerator we had in the efficiency apartment at 1048 Euclid Avenue wouldn't hold enough for more than a day or two. The old apartment building is directly across the street from Moreland Grammar School. I'm not sure how long the school has been closed; but as I sit waiting for the traffic light to change, I remember sitting on the apartment steps as a small child almost every night and waiting for my mother to come home from work. Almost always, would stop at Woolworth's on the way home and get me a 5 or 10 cent surprise. She and my father divorced before I was even born. He was much like Robert Mathis. He worked at the Chevrolet Plant and when I would visit him on the weekends, he was drunk more times than he was sober. I never knew if he enlisted or was drafted, but he flew 25 combat missions as a gunner during World War II. I'll give him that. He must have fallen in love with flying. It wasn't the same as Loren Wilson. My father fell in love with it during the war. He even got his private license after the war. I remember going up with him once. We almost ran off the runway when we landed. 

 All the years I was growing up, I never realized how little we had, because my mother and grandmother were so loving and unselfish, always placing my needs before their own. I'll never forget the day my grandmother died. I started going to church the next Sunday. I know it would have made her happy, if she could have seen my mother and I receive our first Communion at St. Thomas More Catholic Church.

A lot of things around Atlanta remind me of Donna. I was 36 years old when I met her, soon after her divorce. She was the only steady girlfriend I ever had, but after we had dated for quite awhile, it just wore out. I often think of her, not only because I knew her so well but also because she never knew how she drew me from the pit - much the same as that unnamed man Arnold Gray met at the Brown Derby on Luckie Street. Something like her only happens once in a life time, if at all. 

Then, there was Charlotte. I dated her for a short while just before she was married. If only I could have met her earlier. I know my life would have been so different. 

It's taken all of my 48 years to learn from life what's really important. I've never been more sure of what is truly meaningful than I am at this moment, but this belated recognition is more regret than anything else. As a young man, I was so resentful I didn't have all those things that many others had and quite predictably, I became very much an individualist, feeling I didn't need any friends. I used my own disappointments as justification for what I eventually became for quite a few years - not especially a bad person but one who many times considered his own materialistic needs before anything else. 

Those last few moments of my grandmother's life, seeing her lying there in her hospital bed and looking up at me with that same loving and unselfish expression I remembered from my childhood when we were together on Euclid Avenue, finally brought me to see myself for what I really was. I wasn't with her the last night of her life. I had a date with this woman I had met at the Domino Lounge. 

Looking back on my life, there's so much I wish I could change, but this morning, I hope I'll be taking the first step in setting straight something that has become very troubling to me these last few years - the fact I didn't serve in Vietnam. When I entered the Army Reserve right out of high school, my intention was to get out of the active reserve as soon as I could, but the change that began to unfold began almost immediately. I found myself admiring all those old soldiers I met on active duty, especially those who wore the Combat Infantryman Badge. When I completed my six years in the reserve unit, I really didn't want to get out. Instead, I re-enlisted and eventually enrolled in the Army Pre-commissioned Correspondence Course from the Infantry School at Fort Benning. There wasn't a day that passed for the next 2 years that I didn't spend several hours working on it. When I completed the course in 1970, I considered applying for active duty but couldn't bring myself to do that. The fact that by that time, there was so much protest against the Vietnam War gave me something of a premonition that making such a step wouldn't be an especially smart thing to do, so regrettably, I did nothing. 

For the next 2 years, I became increasingly unhappy in my reserve unit - more than likely because most of the people in it were very much the same type person I was when I was younger. There wasn't any combat arms units in the Atlanta area into which I could transfer. Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, had seen to that when the 81st Infantry Division was deactivated a few years earlier. It seemed the New Frontiersmen of the Kennedy Administration had this idea that all combat arms units should be in the regular Army and that the reserve should consist only of support units. In April of 1972, I decided to just get out altogether after 12 years and at the rank of Sergeant 1st Class. The last time I left the armory, I cried. 

When the United States began to send troops to Saudi Arabia, the disappointment I had developed in myself became worse. I remember seeing a picture in the Atlanta Constitution of the first soldiers that arrived in the desert, standing under an airplane wing to get out of the scorching sun. All those letters I had received over the years from Operation Skyhook II and the Foundation of POW/MIA Families maintaining that Americans were still being held captive in Vietnam began to haunt me all the more. I didn't want to believe it, but somehow, I did.

It was the last day in August 1990 when I went to the National Guard recruiter and told him I was 48 years old, had been out of an active unit for 18 years, but wanted to re-enlist. He wasn't encouraging at all, but began fumbling around with some sort of chart and told me if I could reach 20 years service time by the time I was 58 years old, I could re-enlist at no higher than E-5, if he could find some unit that thought it might want me, but at E-4 if he had to put me somewhere himself. I had been out of a unit for so long, my records were not on the computer system now in use, so I had to write the National Archives in St. Louis to recover them. It took several registered letters and several telephone calls to get anyone to even listen to me, but last December, I finally received what I needed. 

Taking the aptitude test was a very quaint experience. I was by far the oldest person in the room. There was an attractive woman wearing a very short skirt well above her knees sitting a few rows over. I was very distracted but still managed to score 5 points higher than what was required to attend Officer Candidate School. It was a lot better than I had done the first time I took the test and I was encouraged that perhaps I've learned something from life after all. 

Some of the Georgia units were already being called up, and the personnel in the recruiting office were being assigned other administrative duties. It struck me as rather strange that when the country seemed headed straight for war, the first thing the recruiting office did was to stop recruiting, but that's what they did. People were changed around, and my case was taken over by a smart-ass, black staff sergeant who told me that since I was on blood pressure medicine, there was no need for me to take the physical, because anyone on such medication would be immediately disqualified. After a number of discussions, all I could get him to say was, "My job is to get people in - not keep them out." I was still relying on my former record and had to go all the way to the IG to be permitted to even take the physical on the hope I could get an interview with some of the few combat arms units now in the area. I was hoping I could show them my past records and Infantry School diploma and convince them I wasn't the disarranged misfit that most of the people in the recruiting office seemed to think.

It seems almost obscene that the Military Entry Processing Station is in the Martin Luther King, Jr. annex to a federal building. Who knows to what extent the so-called "peaceful dissension" he led against the Vietnamese War encouraged the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese or how long such things prolonged the war causing our own leadership to lose commitment. It could have been because the war had been so terrible mismanaged, it was too late to try to hurdle the adverse public opinion the protesters had created. How many names on that wall in Washington might not even be there had it not been for them? A lot of people in Atlanta seem pacified at having King's name hung on a number of things around town, but it pissed me off to no end. 

Again, I'm the oldest one in the building, but none of the younger men and women sitting in the waiting area seem to pay any attention to that. They all are possessed in their own thoughts. A black Sergeant 1st Class walks by wearing the Combat Infantryman Badge, and I a feel the same admiration of him as everyone else I've seen with that award. A Navy petty officer behind the reception counter is obsessed with telling some of the younger men to take off their hats. That's all he says the whole time we're sitting there - "Take off your hat....Take off you hat."

Presently, I notice another man across the room who looks to be about my age. He's dressed in civilian clothes and is holding some papers, just like me. I wonder what his story is. 

We all move into the examination area and are sitting on a long bench parallel to a series of medical stations. I hear a very disagreeable voice with a Spanish accent saying, "Come in hear. Come in hear."

Suddenly, I realize the unkept-looking Puerto Rican woman in the wrinkled white coat must be a doctor, and she is addressing me. With a very rude disposition, she looks over my papers and tells me to strip down to my shirt and sit on the examining table. Without saying another word, she takes my blood pressure, listens to my heart, checks my prostate gland and goes through other procedures, almost as though she were examining some lifeless, unfeeling object, before telling me to get dressed. 

As I sit down, I ask, "What's my blood pressure?"

"It's high," she responds, again without looking at me. She still has said nothing of my age but leans back in her chair, finally looks at me and asks, "Why do you want to get back in the service? Do you want to go to Saudi Arabia?"

I'm not compelled to go into anything about my conscience or regrets and am beginning to tire of her rather unpleasant mannerism, so I simply say, "Sometimes, you have to do something you don't want to do. What's my blood pressure?"

A rather ridiculing smile comes to her face, and she says, "That's immaterial. If you're on blood pressure medicine, that's an automatic disqualification. How long have you been taking Vasotec?"

"About 5 years."

She doesn't say anything but directs me to the next examining station. I'm beginning to feel very bad - especially when I get to the hearing test booth and am told there are certain decibel ranges that I can't hear. The whole process takes about an hour and a half, and I'm again sitting in the doctor's office. She hands me the working copy of the examination papers to which a form letter headed "Medical Disqualification" is attached stating the reason is hypertension and going on to add the medical standards of the armed forces are designed to obtain recruits who can complete all aspects of military training and perform duty worldwide without excessive time loss due to medical problems. 

It's a very empty feeling I have, walking back to my car. I'm almost crying. Knowing that I've finally tried to do what I know is right is little consolation - especially when I know I can do the job. The simple truth of the matter is that, like many of the characters in this book, I've recognized all to late in life what mistakes I've made, and now, it's too late to try to correct many of them. This tormenting requiem before death will be with me until the day I die. I wanted so much to be a small part of the storied history of the American military. Maybe I can gather all these sentencing  reflections into a book and tell everyone who has ever worn the uniform in a time of conflict how much I love and respect them and donate what receipts that result from such an undertaking to the military disabled. My writing style is passé by today's standards, but it's the only means I have to tell them all I finally recognized my mistakes and how truly sorry I am.

END