An unflattering photo

I located this one quite by accident when I installed Picasa on my main PC.

You see, it catalogs ALL the pictures, not just the attractive or interesting ones, and, lo and behold, unflattering and even downright unattractive scenes can easily come back to haunt one.

The setting for this one was our back deck, and the occasion was the Trinity Lime Rock choir party during the late summer of 2005. I had been running around taking pictures of everyone else (that's become a preoccupation of mine since discovering digital photography) and suddenly, Courtney, one of the few kids present at this mostly adult gathering said "Hey, let ME take a picture of YOU!"

Well, what was I going to say, especially when the kid who posed the request had been my most faithful attender during the Summer Soccer program we had started that summer at Trinity, and had even gone and gotten me an ice pack when I pulled my hamstring trying to play an air ball like a 16 year old? And especially when the Rector was standing right there when she said it and would no doubt have backed the kid up 100%.

So, what I did say was "Okay, Courtney, you win. Go ahead, but just take one picture" and handed her the camera.

And this was the result. Thanks, Courtney! Even you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as my grandmother used to periodically say in contexts not too much different than this.

Hmmm. That probably works on several levels, as the lady (Grandma, not Courtney nor the Rector) was such a heavy duty member of the WCTU (stands for Women's Christian Temperance Union, for those born since, say, 1970) that she actually attended an international WCTU conference in Germany in the late 1930s as a delegate for New York State. And those were the days when you pretty much had to get on a boat to get to Europe! And that IS an alcoholic beverage in my hand, yes it is.

Well, some folks who knew me back when may recognize the pose, and even the hair length. I should probably have photoshopped the hair to a different color before posting it, but then it would not have been as humiliating. 

Cellphones come to Salisbury, CT

I read this morning in the Lakeville Journal that the chosen few in the center of Salisbury, Connecticut can now use their cellphones! After at least five years of delays of many kinds (including the inexplicable) the long-awaited Salisbury celltower went live last Thursday.

Out here, up a dirt road, in the howling wilderness of Twin Lakes, the situation is not as rosy.

After I read the article in the Journal about the new Salisbury cell tower being live, I grabbed the cellphone I bought a couple of years ago contemplating this great moment and walked up and down Between the Lakes Road seeking a signal. Even though I got no “bars” within a quarter mile of my house in either direction, I did successfully make a call from the junction of Between the Lakes Road and Twin Lakes Road (that's the nearest hard surface road), and was able to continue the call as I walked all the way back to my front door. However, the call dropped as soon as I walked inside. Attempts to re-connect indoors were uniformly unsuccessful.

I decided it was unlikely that the decision-makers would have much interest in us folks out in Twin Lakes, so I called Cingular customer service to see if there was some kind of repeater or signal amplifier I could rig up on a pine tree that might get me cell service in my home. They recommended that I get a newer, more modern phone (why did this not really surprise me very much?), and I took their advice.

After dropping $400 on a very fancy new phone that does everything but eat lunch (and may that too if I can only figure out the right buttons to press), plus all the desirable accessories, I brought it home and tried it out. Unfortunately, the situation was no better, but I am scheduled to receive several rebates sooner or later.

Given the number of years it has taken to get a cell tower in Salisbury, I’ve concluded that there’s no hope at all for officially sanctioned cell service in Twin Lakes in my life time. In considering the private sector as an alternative source, I know that nearby Lime Rock Park provides excellent cell service in their area and beyond, but we sadly do not have a race track up here.

Does anyone have a solution to the problem we have in Twin Lakes?

Gas Chamber

It's been a little while since I reflected on the beginning days of Army life, back in the mid 1960s, and the combination of very cold weather today with a slightly runny nose reminded me of one reasonably unforgettable part of Basic Training -- the gas chamber.

Although I noted that during the early days of the Second Iraq War there was great concern that poison gas or some other aspect of the CBR (stands for Chemical, Bacteriological, Radiological) weapon set might be used defensively by the Iraqis, and thus we saw figures garbed like spacemen prepared for the retaliation that didn't come, I'm not sure trainees are introduced to the subject of poison gas the way we were.

Actually, I have to admit that I had already had a very limited introduction to poison gas before the Army ever got its hooks in me. That had happened a year or two before, when I had been at a rally for peace, disarmament, civil rights, or some other cause that back then was viewed as disruptive and un-American, and probably criminal. I had not been close to where the police had gassed the demonstrators, and all I had really gotten was a whiff of the stuff as it drifted over toward us. I remembered the smell, but it made only a slight impression on me, really, since back then one expected to get one's lumps from law enforcement if one even looked like one was protesting. (Sometime I'll tell in detail what a nightstick feels like when applied to a shin bone, and how easy it was to have something like this happen to one -- but that was in the pre-Army days, and today we are on the subject of the gas chamber in Basic Training).

Interestingly, there is a strong similarity between the smell of the tear gas known as CN (which I think is now considered obsolete, having been replaced with a gas called CS) and the smell of soft coal that was used to heat the barracks at Fort Gordon. So, when I arrived at Gordon I had a subliminal reminder of smelling tear gas earlier.

We had been issued gas masks when we arrived at Fort Gordon, but we didn't have to wear them around until around week four. Until then, they were just one more item to be out of place or dusty or not properly closed during barracks inspection. However, when CBR training started, that changed too. Suddenly we were wearing the damned things strapped to our legs everywhere we went. When you ran, they flapped. When you crawled, they got hung up on the barbed wire and on anything else you were crawling near. When you did the overhead ladder, they had the tendency to pull your pants down.

We drilled putting them on. Someone would yell "gas" or "spray" (the two ways poison gas was delivered) and we were to immediately hold our breath, get out our gas mask (which we were not permitted to call gas masks; they were only to be referred to as "protective masks" but we called them gas masks anyway) put them on, and, by blowing out, clear the mask of any gas that might have come along when donning the thing.

We had a small joke that involved the litany we were taught -- and which a lot of Army doctrine tends to get into. The litany went: "What do you do when you see that the enemy is launching a poison substance attack?" "Yell gas or spray and put on our protective mask, then see if any of our buddies needs assistance." The small joke we made of it was, instead of yelling either "gas" or "spray" depending on whether we were being gassed or sprayed as the litany intended, we would yell "gas or spray". Those of us with college educations found this kind of literalism highly amusing, but it does appear to have lost a bit of its humor over the decades. Sorry about that.

Finally, after a week of build-up by our platoon sergeants, one day we were marched to the gas chambers. It was a cold day, and nearly everyone had at least the beginnings of a head cold, and the march to the gas chambers didn't help much.

There were two rooms in the "gas chamber" building. By squads, we were first told "gas" and, once we had reacted correctly, we were led into the first room, and a gas grenade was set off in the middle of the floor. Then we were told to remove our gas masks.

That was a shock. Tear gas really does make you feel bad. Your eyes burn like mad and tear heavily. The skin of your face burns. What's almost worse is that your nose starts to run rivers -- real rivers! One guy in my squad had a stream of what is indelicately called snot descending from his nose almost at once. The sergeant yelled "if that snot hits the floor, you're gonna lick it up!" The trainee somehow sucked it all back in and it never hit the floor. That's a pretty good trick while you're crying, by the way.

Then, after we all had a few moments of real discomfort, we were led back out of the room and into the fresh air. Interestingly it took only a couple of moments before our mucus membranes calmed down and we had the enjoyment of watching the other squads go through the process.

The other room, we were told, contained a lethal agent, and, if we did anything wrong in there, we would be dead. One of the other guys in the platoon caught my eye and mouthed "Right!" since we had earlier had a discussion among ourselves about how this gas chamber thing was probably overrated, and in any case the Army did not routinely kill off its trainees.

In any event, room #2 really didn't make enough of an impression on me for me to recall what the sequence of events was. I do have a recollection of the smell of chlorine -- probably meant to simulate chlorine gas -- around the area. It wasn't a very strong smell, and probably could be duplicated by sloshing some Clorox around on the floor.

That was pretty much it for CBR training. We came from a generation that had learned to "duck and cover" in elementary school in the event of an atomic blast, so there wasn't much to teach us there. We got some textbook knowledge of atropine, which we would be issued in the event that a real enemy might gas us at some point the the future, but we never saw the stuff in real life. The bacteriological part was not covered at all, as far as I can remember, or if it was, it was in a brief mention in a training film that I (and nearly everybody else) no doubt slept through.

Actually, now that I think of it, we must have seen something about "germ warfare". One of the guys in my platoon had been a bio-chem major in college, and might even have had an advanced degree in it. Anyway, when we got our post-Basic assignments, he was assigned to Fort Detrick, Maryland. I remember that I, for one, had never heard of the place, and I asked him what it was and what they did there. Well, he HAD heard of Fort Detrick before, probably in grad school, and told me it was where the Army creates germ warfare weapons -- "You know, like in that training film we saw." So I guess we did see a training film about the subject. I had learned pretty early on that I could tip my helmet liner down onto the bridge of my nose and go to sleep -- as long as I didn't drool or snore.

Gas chamber was an interesting adventure, if nothing else. I'm reminded of it whenever I smell soft coal smoke, even today. I'm thinking that it's one more part of Basic Training that one really ought to experience if one is ever going to be in a position where you might order the use of tear gas -- or some other CBR agent -- on someone else in later life.

In view of recent events, maybe I should discuss how the Army introduced us to shooting rifles next without anyone even getting hurt. More useful knowledge.

Why so many people don't like New Yorkers...and why it's not the New Yorkers' fault

This is a short segue away from the Basic Training chronicles to a topic that I've had occasion to think about since I've been living up a dirt road in the boonies instead of New York City.

My daughter, who has lived in Chicago for more or less the last decade, brought the topic up the other night when she commented that when people in the midwest ask her where she is from, and she tells them, accurately, that she spent her first 12 years in New York City and then moved to Connecticut, they look at her like she has a communicable disease. A very unpleasant communicable disease, in fact. One might almost say a loathsome communicable disease!

A few years ago, up here in Northwest Connecticut, there was considerable hue and cry about how the New Yorkers were ruining the place. How they talk loud, how they aren't polite, how they are willing to spend too much money for a house (as well as for almost anything else), how they try to get ahead in line, how they, well, fail to show proper deference to people who have lived here for years and years.

That talk largely died out -- perhaps as more and more people around here benefitted financially from the influx of New Yorker second homes -- but came to life again a few years ago on the topic of cellphones (which, by the way, don't work in most of our area because there are very, very few cell towers) and how New Yorkers talk too loud on them. At least where they can use them at all.

For many years I had thought of the anti-New Yorker sentiment as anti-semitism. However, having heard the same kinds of antipathy expressed toward newcomers from New York City by locals of all ethnic and religious persuasions, and having seen my co-religionists (Episcopalian, for the information of any who are curious) exhibiting all the same behaviors "locals" have historically considered distasteful, I decided a while ago that anti-semitism was a simplistic explanation and have been reflecting further on it. (In fact, some of the most obnoxious people I have ever met have been, like me, Episcopalian, and some of the most obnoxious of this group have NOT been New Yorkers at all. But I won't go there right now.)

First of all, I do think that there are a set of behaviors that tend to characterize many people who have lived in New York City for much of their life -- or at least for the most recent few years. They don't stand out in New York City, but up here, where there still are occasional dirt roads, they do seem noticeable.

I think that what makes a New Yorker a New Yorker is cultural. Yes, there is a heavy component of self-selection involved (I think that when the few people from the red states who decide to live in New York City make that decision it must be about as earth-shattering as if they were to come out of the closet -- and it does take a certain amount of guts coupled with the feeling that the present situation is intolerable to make either decision, I suspect.) but when you move to New York City you move into an environment that I have not seen elsewhere.

Most places the overwhelming social pressure is to conform to local norms. Social success most places in this great nation comes to those who are beautiful, athletic, and have the ability to parrot the local social, political, religious, and economic viewpoints so inoffensively that, were they not beautiful and athletic, they would be totally invisible.

In New York City, as long you are not striving to be a model or a prostitute or be picked up in bars without wasting time trolling around, nobody much cares if you are beautiful or athletic at all. In fact, nobody really cares at all about what you think unless it directly threatens them.

But what everyone in New York City does care about is what you want from them, or what you have that they want.

In what is fundamentally a rather small and crowded place, there is no time that one lives in New York City that someone else does not want what you have.

If you have a job in a large corporation and sit at a desk in the middle of a sea of desks, there are people who do not have jobs at all, or who do not have jobs that are as well-paid as yours who actively covet your job. If you sit in a cubicle, there are people out there in the bullpen who want more than anything else in the world to sit in a cubicle -- in YOUR cubicle.

If you have an office with walls that reach the ceiling and a door that opens and closes, there are people sitting in cubicles who want your office. If your office has a window, there are people with inside offices who want your office. If your office has a window and is on a high floor, there are myriad people who have offices on lower floors who want to move up.

If you have industrial carpeting on your office floor, there are people with linoleum tile or raised floors who want to sit where you sit. If your office flooring is a cut above industrial carpet, there are many, many people who want what you have.

If you are standing on the subway at rush hour and the door opens, there are people on the platform who want the 48 square inches of floor you are occupying. If you are sitting on the bus, there are people standing right in front of you who want your seat. If you are riding in a taxi, there are the people on the curb who want your cab. If you are in a limo, there are people in all the other modes of transportation who want to be sitting right where you are sitting, even if it is motionless in traffic.

If you live in a 12 room duplex coop on Park Avenue, there are many, many people who want your living place. If you have a rent stabilized two bedroom, ditto. If you have a studio that you can afford, ditto. Furthermore, your landlord is among the population that wants your apartment, and is apt to be among the more vicious of those trying to get it.

If you are reaching for a quart of milk at the grocery store, there is someone else in that store at that very moment that covets that quart of milk.

It translates to intangibles as well. I won't belabor the obvious in terms of competition for recognition at work or for promotion. The competition for the scarce spaces in most Manhattan nursery schools is legendary, as are the spaces in the ongoing schools, both private and public (remember, please, that New York City has a hierarchy of public schools that parallels the private sector, and in which the competition is just as bloodthirsty.)

It's natural, in an environment where the sharks are continuously circling, that people feel a need to celebrate their survival.

This leads to conversations salted with mentions of what a person has, and frequently what they have gotten most recently. My wife still recalls a woman she met 25 years ago at our daughter's nursery school who introduced herself by telling my wife that she and her husband had a 12 room duplex on Park Avenue. Both of us have long since forgotten her name, but we both can still refer to her as "12 room duplex" and know exactly who we are referring to.

"My girl will call your girl" to set up a meeting is such an egregious boast (not only that you actually have a secretary or admin assistant -- a rarity anymore -- but also that you are so important that you do not need to abide by conventions -- and laws -- about sex roles) that one almost never hears it anymore. (If fact, the legal ramifications are such that someone who says it is weakening himself competitively. Thus, it isn't much said.)

It's dangerous for people who work for you to know powerful people, even if the powerful people your people know could actually help you. As it turns out, I met and had lunch one Sunday with Archbiship Desmond Tutu at a time when my employer was having problems not only with opening branches in South Africa, but also was attempting to deal with redlining issues in its New York City business. I was certainly in a position where I could have reached him on the telephone, and possibly have gotten an appointment with him for someone higher up in the corporation. When I mentioned this to the guy I was working for at the time, he reacted with visible horror. He immediately realized that I appeared to have a resource that emphatically trumped any resource he could muster, and he very quickly shifted me to projects where Archbishop Tutu could not be even remotely relevant. He was simply defending what he had.

People in New York City routinely work mind-numbing hours. The reason is not that they have more work to do than people in Peoria, but that any time they are not at their desk, or visibly incurring expenses on behalf of their employer, someone else could be cutting into their game.

Do you currently have a parking space that will permit your car to remain in situ through the next alternate side parking day? Well, don't move it, even for a moment. Someone else wants your parking place, and will take it in a heartbeat.

Got a subscription for a couple of really good seats at the opera or the ballet? Going to be away for the next season? Don't be a fool and let your subscription lapse even if you cannot attend a single performance. You will never, ever get seats as good again.

Got someone to clean your apartment who is honest, a hard worker, and shows up like clockwork? Have a friend who needs someone to clean their apartment? You're a fool if you even let your friend know you have such a resource -- they will find a way to hire that resource away from you.

Eternal vigilance is the price of holding on to what you have in New York City.

Honestly, anyone who can live for an extended period in New York City and not adapt to the cultural mores is either an insensitive fool or a saint -- and actually, most insensitive fools are able to catch on rather quickly.

From here, up a dirt road, I can't really take a particularly critical view of New Yorkers. They have earned their sharp elbows.

Live fire exercises

It does seem like Basic Training is easier to recall in reverse chronological order.

What I suppose was "the" highlight, at least for some of us, was the live fire exercise, which came in the final few days of basic. The essence of it was that in this one people would actually be shooting at you. Or at least shooting at where you would be if you happened to stop crawling and suddenly stand up.

During the days that preceded it, there was much discussion among the basic trainees about just how close to a standing position you would have to get in order to acquire a machine gun round in the butt or head. Many theories were postulated. Some felt that the bullets would be coming over us at about 18 inches above the ground, and that as long as one stayed under the barbed wire we were crawling under, one would be fine. Others felt the bullets were about 3 feet up, so that if someone panicked and decided to get out on hands and knees, barbed wire notwithstanding, they would be safe. Another school of thought was that the bullets would be about six feet up, so that if someone panicked and decided to try to run out, they would be okay if the ran in a slight crouch.

One thing we all knew was that the live fire exercise was intended to come as close to what one might have found on a World War II battlefield at night (maybe a World War I battlefield, in no man's land, really) as was possible without destroying too much government property (meaning too many recruits).

Actually, by the time we had gotten to the live fire exercise we had already taken a certain amount of physical risk in the live grenade exercise, but I'll talk about that later.

As with many of the components of basic training -- and a good reason why no politician who has not been through it should EVER be permitted to vote on a resolution about war -- the live fire exercise was intended to be both instructive and psychologically supportive, while at the same time putting combat into some kind of perspective.

My recollection of the actual exercise was this:

First, it was night, and it was definitely dark out. They marched us a few miles, in the dark, of course (my father had an amusing anecdote from World War I about one National Guard division in France that carried flashlights while marching at night, and how they acquired the derisive nickname of the "flashlight division" from that episode). Of course this was not our first night march, and they have a beneficial quality all their own.

We arrived in an area of Fort Gordon where none of us could remember having been before -- and we had walked all over (or what seemed to constitute all over) that post in the preceding weeks (I can honestly say that the only times we rode anywhere in basic training was when we were going on or off post). Being in new territory at night, knowing there is going to be something really scary happening soon, has a certain effect on one.

Then, we waited. "Hurry up and wait" is a critical part of the basic training experience, and the way people deal with having to wait is frequently a good indication of whether they have been through basic or not. I attribute some of the decline in civility in America to the huge reduction in the number of American males who have been subjected to the patience-building process of basic training. But let it suffice to say that when you hurry up and wait for something genuinely scary to happen, the overall effect is magnified.

Then, out of the night, what seemed like 50 feet from us, with no warning at all, there was an explosion (actually, probably a 105 simulator, and most likely in a pit surrounded by sandbags for safety reasons). Then, some machine guns opened up with a few bursts, but not in our direction.

Finally, we were directed single-file into a trench -- a fairly deep one, probably reminiscent of a World War I trench. From where we were, we could see machine guns above us, firing tracers ahead of where we were pretty clearly going.

Then, we were told to get moving, to stay down under the wire, and good luck.

I seem to remember being in roughly the second wave that crawled out of the trench and into the field, under the machine gun tracers. That would make sense, since my name was Brown, which put me alphabetically in the third squad of the first platoon of the basic training company.

I was barely out of the trench when a 105 simulator went off considerably closer than the preceding one. It was a good reminder to keep my head down.

There are really two ways to crawl under barbed wire: on your belly (like a snake, as the sergeants used to point out), and on your back. When you low-crawl on your belly, you cradle your rifle in your elbows. When you crawl on your back, you lay your rifle on top of you with the muzzle somewhere near the top of your head. You can crawl much faster on your belly (in fact, the 40 yard low crawl was a timed portion of the Army PT test) than on your back, but you are a bit closer to the ground when you crawl on your back, because you aren't tempted to stick your head or your butt in the air.

I honestly cannot remember which way I crawled the hundred or so yards that the live fire exercise required. Probably a little of both. I do remember that the wire was probably as low to the ground as any we had encountered in basic, and I do remember bumping into a sandbagged area just as a 105 simulator went off in it, and reflexively rolling away from it, while feeling sand kicked up the the explosion falling on me.

I know that as I was reaching the end of the course, I did crawl for a while on my back because I remember watching the tracer rounds going over. My conclusion at that point was that they were about eight feet up -- in other words, the Army was not going to lose any recruits who might panic and stand up.

Finally, we got to another trench, crawled down into it, were told we could stand up now, and went over to the side, tracer rounds continuing to go overhead the whole time, and 105 simulators continuing to explode in the area behind us.

It would have been interesting to see the live fire course in daylight, but I'm sure that the psychological effectiveness of the exercise would have been greatly diminished had we done so.

Interestingly, there was virtually no conversation among us recruits either while marching back to the company area or after we arrived. Even the compulsive talkers had nothing to say.

Maybe I'll talk about gas or grenades next time.

Resuming the thread about Basic Training

After a few weeks off trying to (1) mentally reconstruct the chronological sequence of events that happened forty years ago and (2) trying to figure out why the Bush administration is trying so hard to create an omnipotent Presidency when it's unlikely the Republicans can keep the White House next time (as long as they actually do permit an honest election to happen), I decided to go back to my reprise of basic training, and my defense of compulsory universal military service.

One of my clearest memories of basic was the very end of it.

We had been at Fort Gordon, GA, for around 11 weeks. We had gotten two weeks to go home for Christmas -- something we all really relished, by the way. Those of us who had been heavy and out of shape when we arrived were not heavy OR out of shape any more. Those of us who had been skinny and out of shape when we arrived likewise were neither. Our uniforms, which fit us reasonably well when they were issued in Reception Station, no longer fit very well.

The fact was that all of us -- including those of us who had played college sports -- were at that point in the best physical shape we had ever been and would ever be.

I'd also suggest that we were generally in pretty good mental shape at that point as well. Those of us who had been sheltered back home had spend a couple of months establishing ourselves as independent individuals. Those of us who had been bullies, macho men, whatever, back on the block had been taken down several pegs, as had the few among us who had come from situations of privilege (the truly privileged, or course, had beaten the draft entirely or had gotten into special units in the National Guard that somehow kept their privileged members out of such inconvenient duty as Basic Training) .

We knew about "special treatment" for the privileged back then, and we all mightily resented it.

Earlier in Basic, there had been some contempt for the RAs (the guys who had enlisted in the Regular Army for a term of three or four years) as losers, and for the NGs and ERs (National Guard and Enlisted Reserve guys, who were doing their six months of active duty and who would then return to their home towns for several years of monthly drills) as pansies. Those of us whose service numbers started with "US" (the designation of a draftee) were generally perceived as neither idiots (the RAs) nor sissies (the NGs and the ERs). But by the end of Basic, these distinctions had for the most part faded.

One memorable morning during the last days of Basic Training, formed up in the Company Area, however, the distinctions were suddenly back. This was the point where the First Sergeant called out the name of each member of F-3-1 (F Company, 3rd Batallion, 1st Training Regiment, if I haven't used that designation before) and told us where we would be going from there.

Sergeant Buza told us how this would work. He would call out a name, or a series of names. When he paused, the soldiers whose names had been called would double time to the barracks steps from which he was reading, pick up copies of our orders, and return to our places. There was to be no groaning, no cheering, no celebrating, and no reading of the orders until we were released from our formation.

First off, as I recall, was a longish list of NGs and ERs who were going to Advanced Infantry Training for eight weeks before going back home to their local units. Then came a list, mostly RAs, who would be going to Airborne School. (Although we had been offered the opportunity to "go Airborne" while we were in Basic, few of the US group had opted for this. Among the RA group, the fact that Airborne soldiers got jump pay had been an important inducement. I don't recall their being any NGs or ERs who came from Airborne outfits; thus none of them were in this group.)

Then things began to get more interesting. Most of the RAs who were going to be infantry soldiers were sent to other posts for their Advanced Infantry Training (AIT). However, the RAs who had enlisted for special schools -- and that was many of them -- were then called, along with the school they would be attending. There were three or four who were sent to the US Army Language School in Monterey, CA, for example. (Parenthetically, that was a formidable institution. A fraternity brother of mine in college had flunked out, with French as one of his multiple Fs. He had enlisted for language school, been taught French there, went on to finish his four year hitch, to return to college, major in French, take a doctorate in it, and eventually to return to the old college to become a full professor of French. That is what the Army Language School was capable of.)

We draftees were among the last to be called. I hope that I have not lost your attention at this point, because this is really the most important part of this article.

In the popular view, draftees are simply cannon fodder. If the popular view were correct, all of us should have been headed directly for Advanced Infantry Training, and then for line outfits where we would have been trigger-pullers. This is the point where the Army, in popular belief, is thought to take PhDs in nuclear physics and make infantry soldiers out of them.

The popular belief is simply untrue. If more than five of the 40 or so draftees in F-3-1 were sent to AIT, it would really surprise me. Let me provide a few individual cases I remember that illustrate the extent to which the Army made good use of the resources it got.

Jack J, a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, was sent to a Military Police battalion in Germany. No, he was not sent as an artist, but he was assigned as a sign painter. Not bad.

Jim (can't remember his last name), a political science grad with graduate courses in public administration, was also a big, hulking guy, and was sent off to MP School to become a Military Policeman.

Steve C, who had been an Engineer on the Erie Lackawanna Railroad when he was drafted, was sent TDY (stands for Temporary Duty) to the Transportation Corps training center, with a permanent duty station somewhere doing guess what? Driving trains!

One guy, whose name I don't remember, had been notably religious, although he was not an ordained cleric or seminarian. Sunday mornings, for example, when we got a couple of extra hours to ourselves that most of us used to write letters, sleep in, or generally goof off, this guy had always gone to church. Well, he was sent to Army Chaplain School to become a Chaplain's Assistant.

Another guy who had been a bio-chem major, was sent to Fort Dietrick, Maryland. That was the chemical warfare headquarters back then.

When my name was called, I heard, while double-timing up to Sgt. Buza for my orders, that I would be going directly to the 25th Administration Company at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. While Schofield immediately rang a bell as the site of "From Here to Eternity" the idea that I was going to an Admin Company, and that it would be in Hawaii, had me surfing back to my place in my platoon. It got a laugh out of the rest of the guys, and since nobody was much focused yet on the fact that Hawaii was closer to Vietnam than anywhere else anybody was headed, I actually got some scattered applause for my good luck.

The extent to which the Army was using their resources well was evident only after I found out what the MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) on my orders meant. It was 716.30. This stood for Personnel Management Specialist. In other words, the Army had decided that an MBA in Industrial Relations and Human Behavioral Systems belonged in Army personnel (that's pretty good to start with) but also that instead of going directly into personnel as a 716.10 (that's entry level), I would go into a classification two notches up the ladder (no additional money for this, but a job that presupposed both some knowledge of how to "do" personnel and the aptitude to learn the job via OJT instead of Personnel School). To say that this was a far cry from putting the Nuclear Physics PhD in a foxhole is to belabor what must be an obvious point.

Those are the ones that stick in my mind after 40 years.

They reflected an Army that was efficient, well managed, and able to make good use of resources it received.

As a postscript, all of us had originally been pegged with a "combat" MOS (really, a default MOS, probably to be used if they could not find some more specialized use for our talents), based entirely on our scores on the tests we took in Reception Station. My own combat MOS had been Heavy Artillery Crewman -- and I later learned that this assignment had been based on a reasonably high score in the quantitative tests; thus presumably qualifying me to calculate trajectories on heavy artillery (8-inch guns and larger) without significant danger of miscalculation. Significantly, even this was a far cry from the foxhole-bound 111.10, or Light Weapons Infantryman -- aka cannon fodder -- that you might have expected a draftee to carry as a default MOS.

Be careful what you wish for???

I haven't abandoned my series about the virtues of the military draft and how it was beneficial for me (and for countless others as well) -- I've just been trying to assemble in sequential order the events of basic training back in December 1964 and January 1965 so I can recount them as something other than a stream of consciousness.

I did have a thought this morning that I am sure was more shocking to me than it has been to others who are wiser and who no doubt thought of it years ago.

We hear at length today about government spying on American citizens without a warrant. The administration says it is A Good Thing. Indeed we have a Supreme Court nominee who seems to believe that almost anything the Executive branch does is A Good Thing.

Presumably, however, these folks would feel that these are only Good Things as long as the present administration is running things.

One supposes that if a Democratic administration were in place, spying on American citizens would become an Intrusion by Big Government and would thus become reprehensible. And by extension that anything that a Democratic Executive branch did would become by definition a Bad Thing.

The problem we are dealing with here is that of precedent, or, otherwise stated, "What's good for the goose is good for the gander." Another well-worn saying involves ownership of the ox that gets gored.

Now, there is no question that the Republican party has some truly brilliant strategists and tacticians, and some very verbally agile pundits as well. Is it possible that all of these smart people have not considered the possibility that someday, somehow, a Democratic administration might be elected that could use the Big Brother apparatus constructed by the present administration against the very people who constructed it?

It seems obvious that they have considered this eventuality. They are simply too smart not to have done so.

But consider the implications if they have, indeed, done so, and understand that eventually they may be the party out of power, and, realizing this, have decided to continue with domestic spying and promoting the notion of the Imperial Presidency.

Am I too cynical when I note that the only people for whom domestic spying and the Imperial Presidency are not ultimately problematical are those in power who do not intend to cede power -- ever?