The Weekly Screed (#908)

“… in the service…”

By David Benjamin

“We were just doing our jobs, helping our country win the war.”

—Lt. Col. Richard Cole, one of the Doolittle Raiders

MADISON, Wis. — Sister Caritas had no idea she was creating a monster. 

One day in sixth grade, she threw down a gauntlet I could not resist. She had made a pile of mimeographed miniature book-report forms, with spaces for title, author and a one-sentence thumbnail. She announced that the pupil in our class at St. Mary’s School who read the most books in a month would get a prize.

I’ve long forgotten what the prize was — probably a holy card or a Virgin Mary scapular. Who cared? Here was a battle, in my war against the forces of ignorance and playground persecution, that I could win. I was a voracious reader and — although I didn’t realize this when I was ten — pathologically competitive. 

That day, I launched a raid on the Tomah Public Library and brought home enough books to gag a hippo. Holed up on my bunkbed under a 25-watt lightbulb, I read most of them that night and turned in a half-dozen book reports the next morning. Sister Caritas, slightly incredulous at first, got used to my daily blitzes. In the course of a month, I devoured the library’s entire collection of Landmark Books. I read every biography in the juvenile section, from Bob Hope and Frank Buck to Amelia Earhart and Francis of Assisi. I consumed nature books like a cougar gnawing on a dead elk — books about otters, beavers, birds, bears, fish, mushrooms and dogs. This included the entire fiction oeuvre of Jim Kjelgaard, Big Red, Irish Red. Snow Dog, Swamp Cat and a novel that decided me to become a wildlife cameraman when I grow up. I also plowed through the complete works of Clair Bee — Comeback Cagers, Hungry Hurler, Fence Buster — I mean, I owned Chip Hilton! The library had a whole row of Walt Disney True Life Adventures. Read ’em all, from The Living Desert to Prowlers of the Everglades. 

By the 27th of the month, I’d passed the hundred-book mark, leading my fiercest rival, Beatrice Dwyer, by at least fifty books. I’ve forgotten my final score just as I’ve forgotten what I won. I also recall almost nothing of what I read. But some of it, miraculously, stuck. One book that lingers still is Ted Lawson’s memoir of the first successful U.S. offensive in World War II, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, describing Col. Jimmy Doolittle’s remarkable bombing raid on Japan only four months after Pearl Harbor (which I read about in the Bantam Pathfinder edition of Day of Infamy by Walter Lord).

The raid’s technical aspects were captivating, especially the challenge of launching overweight B-25s from the bucking deck of a Hornet-class aircraft carrier with only 450 feet of takeoff space. The words of Spencer Tracy, who played Doolittle in the movie, suggest the difficulty of just getting those ruptured ducks into the sky: “You'll have to rev your motors until you think they're going to burn up. And then, when they reach the right pitch — and that’s a matter of sound and feel more than instruments — release your brakes and hunt for heaven.”

In Ted Lawson’s telling, the actual bombing mission was perfunctory, finished literally in thirty seconds. The aftermath, however, was vividly suspenseful. The bomber crews were strewn all over China, injured and disoriented. Hidden by Chinese villagers, Lawson lost a leg and shrank to a ghost of himself from hunger and illness. There’s a photo of Lawson before the raid, stern, handsome, stoic and grimly dutiful in a leather jacket. He reminded me — and this is why I guess I remember this book more than all the others — of all the adult males I saw daily in my hometown. These guys — gas station owners, bartenders, paperhangers and schoolteachers — had all been there.

Not flying over Tokyo, but in the war, or in the war before that, or the war that followed, in Korea. By strange happenstance, my dad was the only adult male I knew in Tomah, who hadn’t been “in the service.” The rest, men named Al, Kenny, Dick and Frank, and all my uncles, Joe, Lee, Herb and Hilly, had done their time. Going into the service was a rite of passage as certain and inescapable as first communion, high school math, the heartbreak of acne, and finding out about sex from the illustrations on the wall of the toilets at the fairgrounds.  

Irrevocably, every kid knew he would have to do his duty, to go into the service, to put his life on the line for a nation that he might love, might hate or might not care about one way or the other. Uncle Sam wanted me — he wanted every last shave-tailed one of us. I knew I wasn’t getting away from him.

Under that universal obligation, “service” to America didn’t make you special or heroic. You were bound to be a GI, not a “warrior” (a recent formulation). Nobody in politics gushed over your “sacrifice,” because, hell, it was everyone’s sacrifice. It was your duty. It was your job. It was part of growing up — or, for too many of us, the end of it. If you grew up from the Twenties to the Sixties, you were hip-deep in veterans who would have laughed — or spit — in your face if you’d called them heroes. The service wasn’t about being all you could be. It was about mustering in and getting back out, alive— without succumbing to the urge to beat up an officer. By the time he was 13, every kid knew, through a sort of cultural osmosis, what FTA stood for. 

In 1969, I was called before my draft board to articulate a moral and legal case  for my objection to fighting not just the war of the hour in Vietnam, but all wars in general, on principle. I won my case not, I suspect, on the merits of my argument but because this was a fairly lenient draft board who perceived that I was a sincere, somewhat overwrought kid whom they could not bring themselves to kill. They had sent plenty of kids off to their deaths by then and — now I know — they wished they didn’t have to. 

I did my service after that, not as a warrior, hero or even a GI. I spent my two Vietnam years pushing patients around a hospital in Boston where — because the Deaconess specialized in cancer — I got to see almost as much death, but the wasting kind, as I might have witnessed in Khe Sanh or A Shau. I even spilled a little blood, whenever the O.R. ran out of A-positive. 

What I did, of course, bestowed no glory. It was work, it was duty and I was glad to be done with it, but no more than my friends, classmates and peers who survived the inglorious meatgrinder in Southeast Asia were glad to be done with it.

All those boys who had to go — into the service — those in the generation of my grandfather drafted into the Great War, those of my dad’s era who were swept into World War II and Korea, and my own fellow cannon-fodder candidates, we all faced the same duty. Maybe we loved our country but maybe not all of us loved it enough to die for it. That sensible ambivalence is why Uncle Sam didn’t give us a choice — or why we had to go before a kangaroo court of combat veterans to beg for a choice. For most boys, for most of a century, the “service” was a job — unless you were rich or your father knew a Congressman — that you couldn’t get out of. It was duty, it was dirty, it was scary and you didn’t want to talk about it after it was finally — thank Jesus! — over with.

And all of us — GIs and their families, every neighborhood, every main street in every town, every grade school, high school, parish and congregation — we were all in it together. Nobody got off. Everybody, like it or not, shared. Today, we all know at least name etched on the black wall.

Last month, I read in the Times that Richard Cole, Jimmy Doolittle’s co-pilot, had died at the age of 103, almost 77 years to the day that he spent those thirty seconds over Tokyo, killing civilians and wishing he didn’t have to.