Last Words Read online

  I gravitated to the black airmen, some of whom were from around my neighborhood in Harlem. Others came from the South Side of Chicago or the Hough neighborhood in Cleveland. I had more in common with them—jazz, R&B, stuff I could talk about. The white kids were mostly farm kids from upstate New York, Ohio and points west. No “bonding” with them.

  At this level your flight commander was the same rank as you. He too was going through basic training to get his one stripe. But if they’d had some military experience, like the National Guard, they were made flight commander. First among equals. Same deal as the pope.

  The flight commander had his own room to live in at the end of the hall. Ours was a big black guy, called Don, with powerful shoulders who’d been a swimmer in high school in Chicago. He was half full of shit but he did get to choose the squad leaders—the front-rank marchers, who led each column and had a little bit of clout. Don chose two black guys and me, because I was a cool guy.

  A lot of basic training is sitting through classes, listening to life-or-death lectures like how to behave in uniform. If you’re in uniform you never push a baby carriage. If you’re in uniform you never carry an umbrella. If you’re in uniform you always take off your hat indoors. You have to salute this guy and that guy. And lectures on military history: endless fucking battles, all of which we’d won.

  Don would give me off a lot of classes. I’d been selected for a more important mission. In the morning he’d hand me a list—my orders for the day: “Go down to the BX [the Base Exchange] and steal these records.” Don was a shrewd tactician: being a big-city kid, I was good at stealing. Being white, I was less likely to be scrutinized while browsing the racks. My skill put me in his good graces. He’d let me hang in his room after the other guys had lights-out, and listen to the records I’d stolen.

  One day in the BX on a search-and-acquire mission, I spotted this one-striper I could swear I’d met somewhere. Then it hit me: he was from my neighborhood and I’d scored pot from him once. He was a rank above me, almost a god: anyone with a stripe could order you to do things and you had to obey. Here was a real dilemma: does the Uniform Code of Military Justice allow me to approach him or not? Does it allow me to score pot from him or not? I needn’t have agonized. Apparently it allowed me to do both.

  He was in a different barracks, exclusively for one-stripers. I went to his room at a prearranged time just before lights-out. And I was blown away. Not only does this dude have a 45 rpm record player, playing a Stan Kenton record, he has a lit joint in the ashtray, casually left there between hits. Lit! Just sitting there!

  I’d never seen that before in my life. A joint had to go around fast so not a single milligram burned away. Forget ashtrays. You stood on the stoop and zipped it around quick, a process called “one and go” or “two and go.” He was just letting it sit there and burn! What a motherfucking classy guy! I bought a ten-dollar bag and some papers and that night I was the hit of Don’s room.

  Thus we skated through basic, serving our country by smoking pot, stealing records and giving each other colds.

  And they gave me a stripe for it.

  Next it was off to Denver and “set school.” Here you learned a set: in my case the K-2 bombing and navigation system used in the hot new B-47 Stratojet medium-range bomber. The B-47 was a brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose earlier World War II brainchild had been incinerating German and Japanese citizens by the hundreds of thousands from the air. (He was also the model for George C. Scott’s psychotic General “Buck” Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove.) By now he commanded the Strategic Air Command and the B-47 was key to his new mission of incinerating Russian citizens from the air. By the millions this time. My kinda guy.

  The B-47 was the first bomber in history that flew as fast as a fighter. It was also a high-altitude aircraft. So the K-2 system—which was analog—had a lot of navigational problems to solve in getting a bomb to its target and releasing it in a timely manner. It had to take into account factors like drift at subsonic speeds, ballistics, the nature of the casing, how the bomb fell and a host of other variables.

  You set in certain values at the beginning and fed in other values along the way: where is your BRL (Bomb Release Locus), your AP (Aimed Point) and your GR (Ground Range)? Then K-2 computed them and solved them so that the nuke would actually hit its target. I loved this shit, partly because I got to use my brain for a change but also because I found I loved data flow, the technology, the problem solving. And the jargon. There was one great acronym associated with the K-2: IRAN. Someone with a glimmer of humor must’ve come up with that. It stands for: Inspect and Repair As Necessary.

  Plus all of it was about one of my favorite things—bombs.

  I turned eighteen in May 1955, and having been in the service eight or nine months, I got to pick where I would now be based. Actually you got to pick three bases and they picked from those. I tried to get as close to home as possible. I chose Plattsburgh, New York, Columbus, Ohio, and some other SAC base in New England, at any of which I would’ve been able to defend sacred American freedoms like freedom of choice. Predictably they ignored all my choices and sent me to Barksdale Air Force Base, across the Red river from Shreveport, Louisiana, which, according to my friend José, was “the fucking armpit of the fucking nation.”

  I didn’t do much off-base socializing at first. The barracks life was pretty cool. It was three people in the room, your own single beds, and you could drink and smoke. If you had a Class A pass, you could leave the base anytime you wanted. So there was a certain freedom. I disappeared into my music, jazz and R&B. And before long I got to put my master plan into action.

  Every base has an NCO club and an officers’ club, but this was the fifties Deep South and segregated. So there was an annex in the club for black NCOs. Lesser mortals could also go there: one-, two-and three-stripers. That’s where I began to hang out. They had “radar” hotdogs: the franks had cheese injected in the center and were heated in some kind of radiation-powered oven—an early version of a microwave. Who knows how much radiation we ingested with our dogs? There was malt liquor and Carling’s Black Label and a jukebox and dances and other good stuff. There was me and a lot of black guys from various squadrons. I saw another white guy in there maybe twice. I was ostracized by the mainstream white culture in the barracks as being one of them “crazy white nigger-lover guys from New York City.”

  Socializing with black airmen came very naturally to me. On the Harlem streets I grew up on as a kid, we were cheek by jowl with blacks and Latinos of all kinds: Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and we all got along pretty well. We had to. I heard plenty of prejudicial and discriminatory remarks from guys on the corner and on the stoops in my teenhood. But they never sat well with me, they never took hold. When I heard “spades,” I started using that more, because it was softer than the prevailing slurs. The offhand racist remarks and attitudes didn’t go with the way I felt. My mother wasn’t prejudiced either, so it wasn’t in my background as it was for a lot of guys. (Although she leaned toward anti-Semitism. She referred to Jews as “Norwegians.” The code between her and her sister, Agnes, was: “Ag, couple of Norwegians on the bus.”)

  I once spent a night in jail just for being in a car with a black guy driving. I had a black roommate named Connie who owned a little car. Which was nice; a total reversal of what they’d expect down there. Walters, a white guy from San Jose who lived across the hall, and I needed a lift into town. We were going to a white bar and Connie was going to a black one.

  So a black guy is driving in Louisiana in a little coupe with one white guy sitting next to him and another white guy—me—in the back. We’re heading down Barksdale Boulevard toward Shreveport and suddenly there are two local police cars with lights flashing. They put us through the usual kind of verbal harassment. They had to treat us a little bit differently, because we were airmen. They knew they could harass us for one night and then our base would get us out the next morning. But for a few hours th
ey got to put us through some Southern shit, full of the usual hatred and insults.

  We wound up spending the night in jail, for no reason, except DWB and DWBWWG (Driving While Black With White Guy). They put Connie in one cell with the black guys, Walters and I in an adjacent cell. Through the bars we could talk to and touch the black guys. The window had no glass in it, because it’s a real sultry climate.

  I had three joints in my sock and they hadn’t searched us. So we smoked pot all night, in 1955, blacks and whites together, in the Bossier City jail. Blew the fucking smoke out the fucking window. That felt good!

  There was a freedom to hanging with blacks that ran counter to the structured life of the military. In one way it was part of my training for a comedic career, picking up a looseness and directness I wouldn’t have had if I’d stuck with “my own kind.” Plus the music led to radio and a stint as a deejay, which in turn led to my becoming a performer. In another way that rebelliousness ensured an impressive record of court-martials and near-court-martials.

  Barksdale was an SAC base with a lot of real live B-47s, each one of which was worth a fortune. In 1955 there was no nuclear triad yet, no land-air-sea capability. They were just beginning to build the submarines and they hadn’t yet dug the silos. B-36s had been phased out and the B-52s weren’t yet being delivered. So B-47 medium bombers were it: our only deterrent against the demonic designs of the Evil Empire. I was one tiny but crucial part of the thin line between America and Armageddon. Peace, as our psychopathic commander used to say, was my profession.

  You needed a SAC pass to walk the flight line, with your picture on it, and coded for whatever you were allowed access to. I’m walking the flight line one day and an air policeman my age, if not younger, is on duty. My SAC pass was under my field jacket so he couldn’t see it. He says, “Where’s your SAC pass?” I said, “Fuck you. I’m going to work,” and kept walking. He draws his gun and says, “Spread-eagle on the pavement,” and I said, “Fuck you, you cocksucker.”

  Then logic takes over: “Wait, I have it, here it is, leave me alone.” But it was too late. I’d said “Fuck you.” I had defied authority. And I got an Article 15, a punishment just short of a court-martial. They can dock your pay and reduce you in rank. So I lost my stripe and went back down to airman basic.

  I earned the stripe back after a while, but now along came a military exercise which simulated “enemies” trying to breach the perimeter of the base. The game is you defend the bombers. They try to get in and tag the bombers. The idea of Soviet troops getting as far as Bossier City, Louisiana, and sabotaging our B-47s made about as much sense as Germans flying across the Atlantic on one tank of gas. But this stupid schoolyard shit was taken very seriously.

  It’s night and just before Christmas. Even in Louisiana it’s freezing on the flight line. There’s a power unit going by one of the bombers, keeping it nice and warm inside. I’m stationed near it and I’m full of alcohol so I figure I’ll take a little nap. I put my gun—I refuse to call it a rifle, it’s a gun—next to the power unit, go into the plane and crash. Some sector guy drives by checking on us, and sees my fucking weapon. Abandoned! They haul me out and this time I’m court-martialed for “deserting my post in a Unit Simulated Combat Mission.”

  Military justice—an oxymoron if ever I heard one—saves time, money and gets convictions. Forget about that stupid due process stuff. The colonel who presided over my court-martial was the only other man present: he’s judge, jury, prosecutor, defense attorney. He says: “We find you guilty.” What “we,” motherfucker?

  But he decides to be lenient: “You have Christmas leave coming up so I’m going to take it easy on you. I’m letting you off the brig. But we’re taking two-thirds of your pay for ninety days and you lose your stripe.”

  My air force record on stripes was this: I got one stripe, lost one stripe, got one stripe, got two stripes, lost one stripe, got two stripes, lost one stripe, lost another stripe. I earned six stripes and lost four stripes. By the time I got out I felt like a fucking zebra.

  So now my rep was starting to be: “It’s not just he’s hanging out with these boogies. He’s a fuckup too.” Then something happened that changed my life. I’m sitting in my room one night and a guy named Mike Stanley from Mississippi comes by and says, “Hey, George, know what I’m doing? I’m in a play. I play the boxer in Golden Boy. There’s this little theater group downtown called Venture Theater and they got other parts to fill. You’d be good at that, you’re a clowny guy.” So I went down and got a part in one act as the trainer and as the photographer in the next. With a different hat.

  But the guy who was playing Tom Moody, the fighter’s manager, was Joe Monroe, morning disc jockey on KJOE, the most popular station in town. Everybody listened to KJOE and everybody talked about it, because it played Top 40, when quick-format Top 40 was brand new, the hot thing. What I didn’t know was that Joe Monroe was also a 50 percent owner of the station. So I said, “Joe, I wanna be a disc jockey when I get out of the air force. I’d love to come down and just watch your show someday.” He said, “Anytime.”

  I go down to KJOE, and when he signs off he says, “Take these texts, go into that studio with the glass wall and read them for me.” So with my New York accent, in the Deep South, I’m reading: “Hey, Hackenpack Store is open seven days a week! Twenty-four hours a day!” Then I read news about the Suez Canal crisis. He hires me on the spot, sixty cents an hour to do the weekend sustaining newscast.

  Soon I expanded. There was a one-hour show from twelve to one, where they didn’t do the formula—they just played Nice Music at Noontime or whatever. I got that hour, twelve to one. The next step was he decided to cut out the twelve-to-one slot: “That stuff’s bullshit, we’re not doing that anymore.” He went to a 6–9, 12–3, 3–6 daily format. I got the twelve-to-three slot, every day.

  The air force was incredibly pleased that I’d finally found something constructive to do. I was downtown in a very visible position. I was not spreading venereal disease or raping people. Excellent Pr for the USAF.

  They gave me an off-base permit. Because I needed to be away from the base so much, they took me out of my career field as a 32130E K-systems mechanic and made me a dispatcher. Every other night at midnight I wrote up work orders for the next day. It took an hour some nights, some nights longer. But once I was done, I could leave. Tops I did three hours of work out of every forty-eight, lived in my room, kept my bunk area clean. That was all they demanded of me.

  I had one more court-martial—in England. We were there for ninety days, the whole wing, forty-five planes, every piece of equipment. What SAC often did to prove that they were worth their money was to mobilize an entire wing and fly it to a “forward position” like Morocco or England, which were only 1,500 or so miles from the godless Soviets instead of 3,500 miles away in Louisiana. So they’d save a few bucks on gas. While we were in England, the Dodgers, whom I’d loved all my life and had never won a World Series, beat the Yankees in the World Series. A friend and I listened to it on Armed Forces Radio. We were five hours later in England of course, but when the Dodgers won, we got royally hammered. I stagger back to the base and it’s the middle of the fucking night and I’m still celebrating. The barracks chief, the tag sergeant, starts raining on my parade, yelling, “Shut up, Carlin!” To which I replied with my standard “Go fuck yourself, cocksucker!”

  Gross insubordination. Grounds for my second court-martial.

  So that’s two court-martials, and four more Article 15s after the first one, in my air force career to date. A grand total of seven major disciplinary offenses. Pretty fucking impressive.

  And I still had a year to go. I’d signed on for four years of active duty. Then you automatically had to do four years more in the reserves. They had your ass for eight years. But they didn’t want mine.

  There were four ways to get out: dishonorable discharge, bad conduct discharge, honorable discharge and general discharge. I didn’t fit any of them.
They decided I was something called a 3916, which was like a no-fault divorce. A tacit acknowledgment that it wasn’t working out between you and the air force. You had to meet three criteria: One, you’d been out of your career field for two years or more. Two, you’d been reduced in rank more than two times. Three, you did not plan to reenlist. I fit the profile perfectly.

  The air force let me out after three years and one month, with all my pay allowances and all my GI rights. And they didn’t want me in the reserves. Basically they said: “You don’t mention you were here and we won’t either.” An early form of don’t ask, don’t tell.

  I absolutely beat the game. I was twenty, I had a year and a half of radio under my belt, I was clear of all obligations to the military. It was just a great feeling.

  So I do have this ambivalence. Obviously I’m against militaries, because of what militaries do. In many ways though, the air force was unmilitary-like. They dropped bombs on people, but … they had a golf course.

  I’d conquered the fucking system this whole squadron revolved around. I knew everything there was to know about the K-2 system: 1,600 pounds of equipment, 41 major components, 370 vacuum tubes and close to 20,000 separate parts. I’d learned how not to get in fights. I’d learned how to get just drunk enough to get home okay. I’d learned how to stay just within the confines of regulation.

  In a way, the air force was the father I never had. It was an all-male entity that took care of me, gave me a room of my own, fed me and helped get the childhood part of me finished. It brought me to a place where I could step off into my life and career and rejected me at just the right moment.