Reunion

June, 2005.

I look around at the faces of my high-school classmates (I knew them forty – and some of them nearly fifty – years ago) and wonder:  What the hell am I doing here with all these old people?

They’re not just middle-aged, they’re old.  Just 15 years ago, at our 25^th reunion, we were in the prime of our lives.  Some of us had gotten fat, some had lost our hair, but mostly we looked like we always did and I had no trouble recognizing anyone.

This time around, there are maybe five or six I recognize immediately.  People who haven’t changed a bit, except for the weight factor.

Just like me.

To place the others, I have to read their name tags – and have to squint to do that, despite my glasses.  I grow old, I grow old.

Fifteen years ago we hadn’t needed name tags.

Only by comparison have I previously felt my age:  when my divorce clients are young enough to be my children or (increasingly nowadays) my grandchildren.  When I look at the intake sheet for a new client, tired, wrinkled, sagging and late-middle-aged, and realize that she’s a year or two younger than me.  When in conversation with another adult, I drop a comment about Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show or the Cuban Missile Crisis and draw a blank look.

When I remember that my daughter does not remember a world without VCRs or how excited I was when I bought my first computer for the office.

Otherwise, I’m still the brash, insecure kid I always was.  Damned if I’ll wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.  I don’t look any different to me, and my high-school classmates are not supposed to look any different, either.

But these people, these old people, lumpy and misshapen, bloated and bald, show me that I am wrong.

Baby Boomers aren’t supposed to age, only to mature.  We have been the most powerful collection of people since Ghengis Khan’s Golden Horde.  We changed the face of every city in the nation in the 1950’s with our demand for schools.  In the 1960’s, we changed the entire entertainment industry with our sheer numbers and purchasing power.

We also forced radical changes in the advertising industry, the publishing world and the food service industry.

We are responsible for McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Jack-in-the- Box.

Sorry.

(But our children and grandchildren have had more than ample revenge on us by not understanding that McDonald’s “secret sauce” is merely Thousand Island dressing, and that a properly prepared dish of frites is a miracle which doesn’t need half a bottle of catsup.)

We changed the nation’s political scene in the 1970’s and brought an end to the Vietnam War.

We ended Jim Crow and forced major concessions in the area of equal treatment for all minorities, although this is still a work in progress.

We can’t get old.  We can’t die.  We’re invincible.  And besides, the world needs us.

Probably awash in Chardonnay in Bricktown, Oklahoma City (Boy! – or, excuse me, Sheeeitt! – has Oklahoma come a long way since I lived here), I express my rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light thoughts to another Midwest City High School Bomber, Class of ‘65.

“You know,” says the Bomber, “you had a favorite saying in high school.  You used it all the time: ‘The world is not a kindergarten.’”

He was pretty close.  Actually, I still use the phrase, but it’s not mine; I only quote it.  It comes from a 1950’s television adaptation of Bud Schulberg’s “What Makes Sammy Run?”:

“‘Fair?’  What kind of a sissy word is ‘fair?’  This isn’t a kindergarten.  This is the world!”

So much for invincibility.  Nature reclaims.  But how unfair of him to turn my own words against me.

Coming Up Next:  A Leg Up

The King of Midwest City

Time and again I try,

Time and again I fail.

Noel Coward

1957 – 1962

In the ninth grade in 1961, I was chosen as one of a group of students to become “Junior Statesmen for a Day.”  Each Junior Statesman was paired with a local official and tagged along with the official on his official rounds.  A Midwest City councilman drew my name.

The City Council was a part-time advisory board, its members all holding full-time jobs in the private sector.  Midwest City, like Oklahoma City, its older stepbrother, had a “weak mayor” system of government, with pretty much all decisions being made by the city manager.  The council’s job was to either rubber-stamp the city manager’s policies and decisions, or to fire him and hire a new one.

So instead of tagging along with a “Statesman” going about his daily business, I only got to attend a council meeting for two hours in the evening, sitting at the raised table with my assigned councilman and listening mostly to applications for zoning variances.

The tenth or fifteenth agenda item came up, the applicant pleaded his case and the chairman asked if there were opposition statements, knowing full well why the distinguished gentleman was sitting in the front row with his large rolls of architectural paper.

“The Chair recognizes Mr. Atkinson,” said the Chair.  “Are you opposed to the application?”

W.P. “Bill” Atkinson, founder of the town, Sunday school teacher, breeder of Shetland ponies, future gubernatorial candidate and future founder and publisher of The Oklahoma Journal, nodded and strolled to the podium.

“Gentlemen, in 1948 the Finest Architects and City Planners in the World were commissioned to draw up a Master Plan for the City of Midwest City,” he began.  After 15 years of treating his city as a chess board, with himself moving the white pieces, Atkinson was unused to asking for permission.  He knew that if you moved your pieces just so, and secured your support in advance, you could afford to be humble.  Humble was, after all, your public image.

“You Gentlemen know that Midwest City has been honored by Many Organizations for its Design and for its Planning for the Future, which began as long ago as 1942, and which was memorialized by a Master Plan in 1948,” he continued.  “Throughout the years, the Master Plan has served as a Guideline for Development – and It Has Always Been Proven To Be Right.

“The Master Plan envisioned not only the Layout of the City Streets, but also determined where Commercial Development should go, for the Betterment and Convenience of the Citizens.”

He really talked like that, in capital letters, when he was on his soapbox.

“The Master Plan has proved itself to be An Exceedingly Good Plan.  It has anticipated Traffic Flow, Increased Housing, the Need for More Shopping and the Location of that Shopping.  If the City Council has ever been In Doubt, it has always turned to the Master Plan, and the Master Plan has always provided the Right Answer.”

I have to assume that nobody on the dais or in the audience was checking off how many times the phrase “Master Plan” was used that evening.  Midwest City was not a hotbed of authority-questioners.

“It has been my Great Pleasure and my Great Honor to champion the Master Plan on Many Occasions, and I do so again tonight because This Proposal” and here he unrolled his drawings, “is in Direct Opposition to the Master Plan.

“This property was planned to be, and has been zoned as, Office Space.  This Entire One-Mile Stretch of Road,” he traced the one-mile stretch with his forefinger, “has carefully delineated sections for residential…   retail…   office…”

My eyes glazed over.  Atkinson went on at length, but I stopped listening.  Why did he care, I wondered.  Why not put office space here and retail space there?  After all, they’re only two or three blocks apart.

But retail space, as I later learned, can command much higher rents than office space.  Atkinson didn’t own the parcel at issue, the parcel zoned for offices, the parcel whose owner was seeking to have rezoned for retail.  What Atkinson owned was the parcel down the street already zoned for retail.

Too much speculative retail construction in too close a proximity to existing retail buildings can cause the bugaboo of supply-and-demand to kick in:  too much supply = lower rents; lower rents = lower property values.

I suspect there was also a non-mathematical component to the equation: thwarting the Master Plan = Loss of control.

Not surprisingly, the application for a zoning variance was denied.

**

Born in Texas in 1907, five months before Oklahoma statehood, William P. Atkinson, aka W.P. “Bill” Atkinson (he would legally add “Bill” to his name by court decree and drop the quote marks during his first gubernatorial campaign in 1958) obtained degrees in business administration and journalism from Texas Christian University before moving to up-and-coming Oklahoma City, where he published a newspaper aimed at city churches and taught journalism at a local university.  Not doing all that well in the publishing business, he turned his hand to selling real estate, a career in which he had a distinct talent.

Real estate was to be his life’s work and, in the end, his only legacy.

From selling real estate, he branched into developing real estate for the rapidly expanding city.  According to his own accounts, he developed a flair for identifying the next direction for city growth, buying up property and building what we now refer to as “spec” houses – houses not built on contract with an owner but with the speculation that they would sell eventually.

Despite the recent Dust Bowl and the lingering Depression throughout the late 1930’s and early ‘40’s, upper-middle-class houses continued to be built and sold in Oklahoma City.  The Daily Oklahoman was full of ads for Atkinson’s new houses.  He became so successful, in fact, that he was invited to join the inner sanctum of the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce, and the Chamber virtually controlled city politics and growth, overshadowing the mayor, city manager and city council.

If the Chamber of Commerce controlled Oklahoma City, E.K. Gaylord controlled the Chamber of Commerce.  Second only to Gaylord was Chamber executive Stanley Draper, whose name would later be placed on many a city monument, including a reservoir east of Midwest City.  For decades, Gaylord and Draper managed to put their names on nearly every city project of any significance.  Atkinson, along with any successful businessman who hoped to have any influence in the city, became one of Gaylord’s “boys.”

And then war broke out in Europe.

Despite Charles Lindbergh and other isolationists, FDR and the military realized that it was only a matter of time until the United States would be dragged into the conflict.  Congress and the Pentagon began making plans for three new aircraft supply and repair depots  – one in the northeast part of the country, one in the mideast and one in the midwest.  Later information indicated that the “midwest” air depot might be located anywhere between Kansas City and Dallas.

With only this sketchy information in hand, Draper went to work, sending lobbyists and Chamber representatives to Washington, D.C., to secure as many defense contracts as possible for Oklahoma City, and to push for the “Midwest Air Depot” to be located in or near the city.

Draper also formed the Industries Foundation, Inc., with subscriptions from local businessmen, to acquire options for the purchase of land to donate to the Department of War as a location for the new aircraft base (and, of course, as an incentive for locating it near Oklahoma City.)  The Department had made it clear that it needed – among other requirements – nearly 1,000 acres of flat terrain, a power supply, water, a railroad line and a paved highway to the base from downtown Wherever.  It did not intend to pay for any of this.

The Industries Foundation chose two sites it felt would be ideal for the base and quietly acquired options to purchase land at each site.  Only two or three people in the city knew the locations of the sites that were being shown to representatives of the War Department, and they weren’t talking.  After all, if word got out, land speculators would descend en masse, possibly raising the eventual purchase price.

Although they didn’t miss “the big picture” of landing this industrial plum, Gaylord, Draper and the Chamber missed the little picture.  They wanted a major air base on the outskirts of Oklahoma City because of the perks it would bring to the city:  chiefly demand for housing and millions of shopping dollars pouring into city businesses each year.  It would also be good for the city’s image.

Bill Atkinson thought a bit smaller.  What if – just what if – this new military facility ten to twenty miles outside of town were almost self-contained?  What if housing and shopping were available immediately adjacent to the base?  Just because the Army Air Corps needed 1,000 acres for runways and mile-long buildings (and there would later be a building a mile long), why should military and civilian personnel have to drive all that way from the city to work or to the city to shop?

And why shouldn’t a savvy real estate developer dip his own bread into the federal gravy – as an afterthought to serving the public good, of course.

*

Atkinson was not alone.  Other developers began privately buying or optioning large tracts of land on the city’s outskirts, hoping to cash in on the boom.  Most of these centered their hopes west or northwest of the city.  Atkinson went southeast.

In later years, he would regale listeners with how simple it was.  “Gaylord’s newspapers actually published the War Department’s requirements,” he would chuckle.  “It had to be within ten miles of downtown, more than four miles from the nearest oil well and very close to a railroad line.”

So Atkinson took a simple compass and a map, drew a circle ten miles in radius from downtown, charted all of the oil wells and railroad lines and deduced the most likely spot.  “Anybody could have done it,” he would later say.  “I don’t know why they didn’t.”

*

The problem with Atkinson’s story was that neither of E.K. Gaylord’s two daily newspapers published these requirements, not in the specific issue cited often by Atkinson, nor in any other issue.  The closest the papers came was in reporting that the War Department was considering two locations near Oklahoma City, each within twenty miles of downtown.  No mention of oil wells.  No mention of railroads.

The difference between a ten-square-mile radius from Oklahoma City and a twenty-square-mile radius is enormous.  A ten-square-mile radius gives an area of 314 square miles, or just over 200,000 acres.  Subtract from these the city limits, rivers, creeks and developed areas, adjust for flat terrain, an available 1,000-acre parcel of land, oil wells and railroad lines and your choices become quite limited.

On the other hand, a twenty-square-mile radius gives an area of 1,256 square miles, or well over 800,000 acres.  Adjust for the same factors as above and your possible sites are multiplied exponentially.

Atkinson, therefore, did not get his triangulation coordinates from the newspaper.  He had to have received his knowledge from inside, probably from insider contacts in Washington, where he had been spending a great deal of time for the past year cultivating Oklahoma congressmen and War Department officials.  We’ll never really know for certain.  Until his dying day, he maintained that the basic information was published for all to read, and only he had moxie enough to unravel the puzzle.

For some reason, Atkinson’s story never rang true to me but many of those who worked most closely with him still swear they believe it.

**

Southeast 29^th Street has always been the dividing line between Tinker Air Force Base (formerly the Midwest Air Depot) and Midwest City.  Atkinson determined that the likely location for the depot was in the wheat fields along S.E. 29^th, about five miles from downtown Oklahoma City.  According to his account, he found the farmers on the south side of 29^th to be closed-mouthed and reluctant to discuss selling.  He concluded that the Industries Foundation had been there before him.

On the north side, however, landowners were quite willing to sell.  Atkinson bought parcels totaling 360 acres – half a square mile – but didn’t record the deeds just yet.  This half-section became the original townsite and remained the center of town for nearly 30 years.

The United States had still not entered the war when the announcement was made in February, 1941, that Oklahoma City would be the site of the Midwest Air Depot.  When Gaylord, Draper and the Industries Foundation discovered that an anonymous buyer had purchased a half-section of land just across the street from the new depot, they were not pleased, but they held their peace.

Whatever else Atkinson may have been, he was not without a gambler’s instinct, a gambler’s poker face and a gambler’s sang-froid.  It was possible – even probable – that the depot would close after the war, leaving hundreds of houses empty across the street to the north.  So, instead of a mere housing addition, Atkinson decided to build a town, complete with shopping (Atkinson Plaza, naturally), a city hall, library, schools, parks and churches – and houses too, of course.

He called it Midwest City.

*

Little more than a year later, Draper and the Chamber of Commerce recommended to the War Department that the name of the base be changed to “Tinker Field,” after Maj. Gen. Clarence Tinker, an Osage Indian from Oklahoma who was killed during the Battle of Midway.

Done and done.  The former Midwest Air Depot, just across the street from Midwest City, is today known as Tinker Air Force Base.

Payback, even in small doses, is so sweet.

**

Before leaving Washington, D.C., Atkinson secured the services of Stewart Mott, a senior land planning official in the Federal Housing Administration, to plan the new city.  Mott designed curved, mostly short streets and cul-de-sacs, with the few straight streets only a block or two long, which explains how I got lost so easily on my first day in Midwest City.  Streets in Oklahoma City were laid out on a grid:  north-south, east-west, twelve blocks to the mile.  You always knew where you were.

Mott’s theory was to make each neighborhood safe for children to play.  It was difficult for a car to reach a high speed in Midwest City neighborhoods, and it would be nearly two decades before the city’s first traffic fatality.

Ubiquitious Oklahoma water tower

Mott’s design for the initial townsite had the town’s main entrance, Mid America Boulevard, running between the east and west wings of Atkinson Plaza for about three blocks and then bumping into three nesting oval-shaped street patterns: a small egg supporting a large egg which, in turn, contained a medium-sized egg.  The first and smallest egg, surrounded by East and West Mid-America Boulevard, contained the city offices (fire department, police department, library, city hall and, of course, the municipal water tower).  Branching off from the smallest egg was the largest oval shape, formed by East and West Rickenbacker Drive.  Inside Rickenbacker but still branching from Mid-America was the middle-sized egg, formed by East and West Lockheed Drive.

And radiating from the three eggs were streets named alphabetically for aircraft manufacturers: East and West Aeronca, East and West Boeing, East and West Curtis, Douglas, Ercoupe, Fairchild and Grumann.

Although the boundaries of the town grew rapidly in the next twenty years, and would continue to grow steadily for another thirty, in the 1950’s and 1960’s the original townsite was still “downtown” to most people – particularly young teenagers.  It had most of the major shopping destinations, the original high school (later to become the first of two junior high schools) and it had the Skytrain Theater, scene of many a pubescent tryst and many a teenage prank.

*

Just as Oklahoma City, Guthrie and their surrounding wheat fields sprouted overnight from the hard prairie sod after the Run of ‘89, Midwest City sprouted from the still-young wheat fields after the location of the depot was announced.  But rather than being the result of a “Run,” Midwest City started one.

Every real estate agent, developer and entrepreneur for ten counties around descended on Southeast 29^th Street, only to find that the Industries Foundation had tied up all the land to the south and Atkinson either owned or had options on everything to the north.  Draper and his backers in the Industries Foundation donated their site to the federal government as an investment.  Atkinson intended to hang on to his.

The Department of War broke ground on the new air depot in mid-1941 and Atkinson did the same on his new city in mid-1942.  But between these two events, the country entered World War II and suddenly it seemed that everything was rationed: not just silk and rubber and gasoline and butter and sugar, but also housing starts.  In 1943, the Oklahoma City area was allotted 700 building permits.  They all went to Bill Atkinson.

While his map-and-compass story made for great re-telling over the years, Atkinson seems not to have talked for publication about the Miracle of the Building Permits.  He did, however, in a gesture of fellowship (or a tactical retreat), offer to share his permits with a group of other developers.  After all, there were plenty of profits to go around.  And, after all, he owned the land.

Atkinson’s dream was incorporated as a city in 1943, with a population of a mere 600.  By the end of the following year, it boasted nearly 1,500 homes, translating into a population of probably between 5,000 and 7,000.

At the end of the war, the Douglas Aircraft Company plant closed.  Douglas was another Stanley Draper plum, located at Tinker Field, and had once employed 24,000 workers.  But just as Atkinson had predicted, the air base did not close down nor did demand for housing slack off.

In fact, because of returning servicemen and the end of wartime rationing and restrictions, the boom was only beginning.  Three new housing developments were added in 1947, four in 1948, two in 1949, six in 1950 and a whopping nine in 1951 – including five projects in the Glenwood area where I spent the first several years of my Midwest City life.

Atkinson formed a variety of companies to service and profit from the rapid building, including (from the top down) development, construction, real estate, lumber, hardware and plumbing.  He developed a factory to construct what we now call “modular housing,” in which nearly all units – roof trusses, walls, trimmed-out windows and doors, entire sections of flooring – were pre-assembled at one location and trucked a few blocks to the construction site.  By late 1946 he was manufacturing two complete houses per day – and shooting for ten.

Then came the Korean War.  Then came the Cold War.  Then came the Vietnam War.  Traffic at Tinker hardly ever slowed, nor did the demand for adjacent housing and shopping.  Tinker’s personnel roster has risen and fallen slightly over the last half-century, but has usually hovered around 20,000 civilian employees and an equal number of military personnel.

In the 1970’s, the base’s Public Information Office claimed that the base employed one out of nine workers in the Greater Oklahoma City area and one out of thirty-five workers in the entire state.

*

Before a single foundation was poured, Atkinson was bragging that his $4 million development, expected to include schools, shops, parks and nearly 700 houses, would be a “model town.”  He made his prediction come true the easy way.

Just as he had worked his way up the ranks of the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce, Atkinson joined the National Association of Home Builders and became the organization’s president in 1951.  From 1948 to 1950, he was chairman of NAHB’s national contest to name “America’s Model City.”

In what would be W.P.’s third miracle in a decade, Midwest City won the contest.  The city still widely promotes this honor in its publications and on its web site, but for at least 40 years no attribution has been given.  The official line always goes something like this: “In 1951, Midwest City was honored as ‘America’s Model City.’”

*

No doubt about it, however, W.P. loved his city, nurtured and supported it and loved the role of paterfamilias.  He gave to every charity and civic project, joined many of the service clubs, offered Shetland pony rides to children on Sundays at his 160-acre parcel just north of town and allowed teenagers to hold dances in his barn.

As one usually gushing source noted with an atypical degree of candor, “as the city grew and town amenities became necessary, he helped finance community projects.  He provided lumber for the new library and land for the country club.  Of course every addition to the town became an incentive for people to move there, and every new house meant a bonus to W.P.  But no one could call him an absentee landlord.”

And when he wasn’t on his soapbox or in his business mode, he was a sort of “Uncle Bill,” friendly, jocular and eminently approachable.

On a whim one Saturday afternoon, my brother Rick and I rode our bicycles up the long driveway to his house, where we discovered Mr. and Mrs. Atkinson (I have to revert to the formal, here; I was only 12) sitting on the lawn in the shade.  They called us over, poured us lemonade and talked to us for a good half-hour, as if we were family.  I couldn’t know that in less than ten years, I would become an Atkinson employee.

*

During my second stint at Atkinson’s paper, The Oklahoma Journal, I was the entertainment editor (and sole staff), and was showered with stacks of tickets to movies, the theater, ballet, orchestral and rock concerts.  Even in Oklahoma City, I couldn’t find time to review everything and gave away many of the tickets, particularly to an Atkinson grandson who worked in the paper’s composing room.  Before long, it became accepted that I would provide the kid with free tickets to any rock concert he wanted.  The teenage heir seemed to have his own little racket going on.

Eventually, I said no.  “I’ll have my grandfather make you,” he threatened.  “That’s fine, Joe.  You just go right ahead.  Your grandpa pays my salary, and he knows where to find me.”

Two days later, Joe was back.  “Mr. Dimick?  My grandfather says…uh, I mean, I want to apologize to you.  I was out of line.  I’m sorry.”

I was in no position to be losing a job at the time, so I wonder how much of my refusal was due to a leftover teenage, in-your-face, don’t-push-me attitude and how much to any real bravery.  At the time, however, I patted myself on the back for my moral courage, patted Joe on the back and said that, of course, there would be more tickets in the future – just not on demand.

**

Although Midwest City’s growth and progress – and Atkinson’s career – continued to be covered fairly impartially in the pages of The Daily Oklahoman, Atkinson himself was no longer in the inner circles of Oklahoma City politics.  He first alienated Stanley Draper and E.K. Gaylord by going behind their backs and personally profiting from Tinker Air Force Base, did it again during the annexation wars and yet again by thwarting plans to make the Midwest City post office only a branch the Oklahoma City post office.

But Atkinson still longed to play with the big boys.  So in 1957, the year I moved to Midwest City, with his town established, thriving and no longer in need of a micro-manager, he decided to run for governor.

Many years later, he called all work to a halt at The Oklahoma Journal for an employee pep rally at the Uptown Cafeteria, just across the street from The Journal and Atkinson’s unofficial headquarters for years.  “I want to tell you why The Journal is here,” he began, and gave most of the speech without his usual soap-box-style capital letters.

“I used to be one of E.K. Gaylord’s fair-haired boys,” he said.  This was a favorite phrase of his.  “I ran his errands, I did his bidding and I supported his politics.  I was a Mover and a Shaker in the Chamber of Commerce and Oklahoma City politics.”  Capital letters again.

“And then, I committed an unpardonable sin: I figured out where the new air base was going to be.  Personally, I think Midwest City has done pretty well.  We don’t want to be just another Oklahoma City neighborhood, do we?”  He was, of course, preaching to the converted, but he knew his audience.

“But Gaylord never forgave me for that.  And when I first ran for governor in 1958, he wouldn’t sell me any advertising in his newspaper.

“I actually went to him and begged.  I did everything but get down on my knees.  ‘Mr. Gaylord, please!  Let’s have an open race.  You don’t have to support me, but please let me at least buy advertising.’

“He absolutely refused, and I lost the race.  And it happened again four years later.  If Mr. Gaylord had allowed me a fair shot at advertising in his papers, I would have been elected.  That’s when I decided that central Oklahoma needs – deserves – a newspaper that will Tell Both Sides!

“That’s why we’re here today.  That’s why you are here.  That’s why The Journal is here.  To give the People of Oklahoma a source of all the news – not just what Mr. Gaylord wants to print.”

*

It was a stirring speech and much cheaper than paying a living wage to his staffers.  Atkinson told the same story, or variations of it, throughout the years.  He told it so often that it became part of Midwest City folklore.  One writer, nearly forty years later, noted that Gaylord “refused to accept any advertising from the Atkinson campaign.  With the state’s largest paper officially ignoring his candidacy, Atkinson bought lots of TV time, but viewers found him less appealing than the telegenic J. Howard Edmondson, who swept to victory.”

The problem with the story is that it isn’t true.  Gaylord became truly vindictive with his advertising policies after Atkinson’s Oklahoma Journal began publishing, but he did not refuse to sell political advertising to Atkinson, nor did his newspapers ignore Atkinson’s candidacy.

(For a while after the founding of Atkinson’s rival newspaper, Gaylord refused to accept advertising from any merchant who also bought ad space in The Journal.  When he discovered that some advertisers were having their Sunday inserts printed on Atkinson’s superior offset presses and then delivering them to The Oklahoman, he refused to distribute these “pre-prints” until Atkinson took him to court and won.)

*

Until recently amended, the Oklahoma Constitution prohibited a governor from succeeding himself.  Governor Raymond Gary, who would run again four years later, was saddled with charges of “machine politics” and several financial and voter scandals during his term and might not have won the Democratic primary in 1958, even had he been eligible to run.  A flock of career politicians and newcomers filed to succeed him.

The Daily Oklahoman quoted unnamed political sources as rating Atkinson “the man to beat” in the coming campaign and noted just ninety days before the primaries that “Atkinson is well out in front in organization and potential support.”  Early in the campaign, however, only one thing was certain:  whoever won the Democratic primary would be the next governor.

The campaign turned nasty early on and remained that way.  Since he was “the man to beat,” all of the candidates began sniping at Atkinson.  Several of them, including Edmondson, charged he was part of – and would continue – the policies and allegedly corrupt practices of the “Gary Machine.”  Atkinson countered that Edmondson, a 33-year-old district attorney from oil-rich Tulsa, was in the pocket of J. Paul Getty.  (A Gaylord editorial noted drily that “It is doubtful if [Getty even knows] there is an election in Oklahoma.”)

To everyone’s surprise, Atkinson came in second to Edmondson and his “prairie fire” campaign in the July primary, although by fewer than 1,000 votes.  Since there were eleven Democratic candidates, neither of the top two vote getters gained a majority.

Mud flew fast in the runoff race over the next three weeks – a race which The Daily Oklahoman termed the “dirtiest and crookedest campaign ever waged in Oklahoma.”  Edmondson made public the racially restrictive covenants contained in every Midwest City deed, revelations Atkinson never claimed were untrue, but which he decried as hitting “below the belt” and attempting to stir up racial divisions.  Atkinson hinted darkly at secrets he had uncovered about Edmondson but was too honorable to use in a political campaign.

Atkinson’s newspaper ads (and, despite his later claims, he ran more political advertisements in The Daily Oklahoman – including full-page ads – than did Edmondson) compared the two candidates in a variety of categories of experience and platforms.  The best was “School Experience.”

“W.P. Bill Atkinson: Has been a school teacher and helped build the state’s fourth largest school system in the city he founded.

“His Opponent: Was a student.”

But W.P. made two fatal mistakes which probably cost him the election.  Until these missteps, not only was The Daily Oklahoman’s news coverage of his campaign relatively fair and balanced, but even its editorials were fairly benign.

First, an Atkinson staff member forged an Edmondson campaign flyer, completely misstating Edmondson’s stand on a number of hot-button issues.  Atkinson was not only slow to distance himself from the charges, but instead of condemning the flyer and promising retribution on the overzealous staffer, he suggested that his opponent’s staff had cooked up the scheme to make him look bad.

The Daily Oklahoman had a field day, printing the forged handbill in its entirety, calling Atkinson’s tactics “a disgrace to the state of Oklahoma” and referring to the fake flyer as the “most dastardly act of the Atkinson campaign.”

The day before Gaylord’s scathing editorial was published, Atkinson made his second serious blunder: he went on the attack against Gaylord, and his diatribe appeared in the same issue of The Daily Oklahoman as Gaylord’s first real editorial attack against him.

Charging that Gaylord was opposed to his campaign because he had fought against Oklahoma City’s annexation plans the year before¹, Atkinson told a gathering that “you are going to read in the morning paper that Mr. Gaylord does not like me one bit,” and predicted that if Edmonson won the election, Midwest City would be annexed to Oklahoma City.  “This campaign against me is the result of my telling Mr. Gaylord ‘No.’  Had I followed his dictates, I could have had his support.  It wasn’t worth the price.  I have never been one to knuckle under, not even to E.K. Gaylord.”

.

_____________________________________________________________

¹As Oklahoma City went on an annexation spree to try to absorb – or at least to surround – Tinker Air Force Base, the Chamber of Commerce adopted the motto “600,000 in ‘60,” which was printed on all of its publications and all of the city’s telephone books.  The City Council, the Chamber and its eminence grise, Stanley Draper, wanted control over all regional development and wanted to prevent housing development that might be in the way of future Tinker expansion.  Plus, there was a certain cachet to reaching the magic population figure of 600,000 and of being able to brag temporarily about being the largest city (by area) in the United States and the third largest in the world.

Through a quirk in Oklahoma law, a city could annex adjacent areas without a vote of the landowners.  So Oklahoma City began annexing in all directions, but particularly in the areas surrounding Tinker Air Force Base.  Midwest City retaliated by beginning an annexation plan of its own, which was fine with Atkinson, since he owned most of the annexed land.  Both sides, as well as several other surrounding cities, began annexing in a panic, either offensively or defensively, as in a game of Go.  In eight years, Oklahoma City’s area grew eightfold, to more than 640 square miles.

When a bill was proposed in the legislature to allow Oklahoma City to annex existing towns by a majority vote of the big city and the little town – virtually assuring a favorable vote – it was supported by Gaylord and Draper, but opposed by Atkinson, who successfully spoke against it in a joint session of the Oklahoma legislature.  Atkinson later claimed that Draper had warned him not to fight the annexation bill or he would never be elected governor.

____________________________________________________________

.

It might have seemed a gutsy move to Atkinson at the time, or maybe it was sheer desperation.  Either way, it cemented the enmity between Atkinson and Gaylord, which might have been patched up without serious compromise by either side, given different tactics by the candidate.

And it did not resonate with the voters.  Atkinson lost the Democratic runoff by a margin of more than two-to-one and Edmondson became governor.

**

Four years later, there were only six Democratic candidates seeking to replace Edmondson, including former Governor Gary.  After an initial overwhelming headstart by Atkinson, late polls had the two leading candidates, Atkinson and Gary, running so close that the only certainty Oklahoma Democrats had was the perennially comforting knowledge that the winner of the primary would be the next governor.

Atkinson had spent a year closeted with economists and political advisors and developed a detailed plan for the state’s finances which called for a raise in the state’s sales tax from two percent to three percent.  His plan was to convert state financing into a “pay as you go” structure, and to pour large amounts of money into improving schools, colleges, highways and mental health programs.

The Daily Oklahoman’s news pages were as fair to Atkinson as to all the other candidates, and provided him extensive space in which to tout his platforms.  And while Gary bought twice as many political ads in the paper, W.P.’s many full-page ads show that he was not barred from advertising this time around, either.

Unfortunately, one of the ads was a reprint of an endorsement editorial from the Tulsa World, without the customary label that it was “A Political Advertisement” or was “Paid for by…”  Instead, a large headline labeled it as “EDITORIAL.”

Gaylord held his guns until the day before the primary before announcing, in a genuine editorial, that the Atkinson ad had been placed when all of the paper’s senior officials were at a convention in New York and apologizing for its misleading nature.  He accused Atkinson of lying on his campaign expenditure filings of four years before and of exceeding by six times the legal expenditure limit in the current race.  Asserting that “Atkinson’s campaigns are always based on deceit,” the editorial concluded (in language that itself could have used a good editor) that “the citizens of Oklahoma need, above everything, an honorable man in the governor’s chair.  A deceitful man is not morally honest.”

Gaylord’s positions were usually nothing if not predictable, but he was not one to allow consistency to stand in the way of retribution against his enemies.  Where once he had been a formidable critic of Gary and of the scandals during his term of office, he was now practically effusive in his praise for the former governor.  Although Gary had made mistakes while in office, he wrote, “he readily admits them,” and “is in a position to give the state a progressive administration and avoid mistakes of the past.”

After Atkinson won the inevitable runoff by only 900 votes, Gaylord initiated full-scale war.  Where he had once been the state’s staunchest Democrat, he was now solidly behind the Republican candidate.  Where four years before he had editorialized in favor of a penny increase in the sales tax, he now referred to it continually as “a fifty percent increase,” and sliced up selected Atkinson statistics to demonstrate the faulty Atkinson math.

The race between Atkinson and Republican Henry Bellmon was sheer boredom compared with the war between Atkinson and Gaylord.  News stories and opinion pieces were heavily laced with tales and speculation about voter revolt, legislative revolt, Democratic defection and the like.  Bellmon’s speeches were printed in their entirety.  The Sunday front-page editorials became daily occurrences as the election neared.

Atkinson either couldn’t take the stress or couldn’t control his anger.  His speeches grew more shrill each day as he lashed out at Bellmon and Gaylord – and The Daily Oklahoman gave him plenty of space to injure himself.

Starting with a telegram to Gaylord in which he stated, reasonably enough, that “your personal animosity toward my candidacy is well known,” he descended into charges that Gaylord was trying “to divide and destroy the Democratic Party,” that Gaylord had left the party “because he couldn’t control it,” and that Bellmon was “dominated” by Gaylord.

“Do you want Gaylord to be governor of this state?” he asked in a campaign speech covered by United Press International, and printed by The Daily Oklahoman.  “Do you want Gaylord to write your highway program for you?  Do you want Gaylord to do your reapportioning…look after your welfare program…eliminate your county road money…do away with your homestead exemption?”

Atkinson forgot that the press always has the last word.  Or maybe he was just now learning.  The best last word, just days before the election, was written by The Daily Oklahoman’s political columnist:

Since the newspaper and its publisher will not have their names on the ballot, Atkinson is going to swamp them in the vote getting, but there is considerable debate about how well he is going to fare against Henry Bellmon.

Atkinson has devoted more of his time to running against the paper and publisher, and less to the Republican nominee, than any other candidate for governor.

If Bill Atkinson really wants to catch the people when they are mad at the newspaper, he should drift into a town with the poll takers some morning after the sports department got the score wrong for the local winning high school team.

Henry Bellmon became the first Republican governor of the State of Oklahoma by a margin of 55 to 45 percent.

Despite his campaign’s many tactical blunders, his own seeming inability to either frame an issue clearly or defuse a problem and his general tendency to shoot himself in the foot, Atkinson blamed his proposed sales-tax increase for his defeat.  At his election-night party at the Uptown Cafeteria, W.P. flipped a penny to one of his supporters and said, in all seriousness, “This is what beat me.”

Damascus

And I started jumpin’ up and down yellin’ “kill, kill,”

and he started jumpin’ up and down with me yellin’ “kill, kill,”

and we was both jumpin’ up and down yellin’ “kill, kill.”

A sergeant came over.  Pinned a medal on me.

Said “You’re our boy.”

Arlo Guthrie, “Alice’s Restaurant.”

.

I once had a stock comment for people who claim to have “reformed:”   “I’m sorry.  The leopard doesn’t change its spots, and I don’t believe in conversion on the road to Damascus.”

Except, as it turns out, I do.

I’ve been on that road.

**

While the rest of the nation has pretty much come to terms with the fact that the Vietnam War was a disaster and a mistake from the beginning, many Oklahomans still view it as a glorious and noble venture ending in an inglorious and ignoble betrayal on the order of Munich or Pottsdam.

The fact that Vietnam today is a prosperous, consumer-driven country, courted by politicians and trade representatives from the United States and the rest of the western world means nothing in the Midwest.  The fact that reconstruction in Vietnam was shorter, more generous (OK, less punitive) and more successful than our own Reconstruction Era means nothing. The fact that few have clamored to “escape” from Vietnam for more than twenty years is immaterial.  Oklahomans don’t let themselves be sidetracked by facts.

Our brave boys were killed by the thousands by Commies in black pajamas and that’s all we need to know.

When Lt. William “Rusty” Calley was indicted for playing a leading role in the unprovoked slaughter of 500 civilian women, old men and children at My Lai, Oklahoma City’s street corners were crammed with placard-waiving citizens urging drivers to “Free Calley” or to “Honk For Calley.”

*

It was little wonder then that the state was not only willing, but eager to invest its sons in the war biz during the 1960s and ‘70s.

Within the Selective Service System’s general guidelines, individual states were somewhat free to set their own policy and to interpret those guidelines narrowly or broadly.  Oklahoma’s Draft Board was ruthless.  While other states allowed deferments for students attending graduate school, the only grad school students in Oklahoma universities in 1969 were either ROTC kids (who, for the privilege of being allowed to attend grad school,  had to then spend six years in the military instead of two) or they were 4-F.

Or they were women, who were essentially 4-F since, not having penises, they couldn’t pass the physical.

Law school?  Nope: ‘Nam.  Med school?  Nope: ‘Nam.

*

I was graduated in May and married in June, 1969.  I was actually earning a living at journalism despite Mildred’s fears, was renting a nice three-bedroom house and was madly in love with my new wife.  But I couldn’t take an easy breath.

Uncle Sam wanted me and I knew it.

So I joined.  The choice seemed easy: I could spend two years carrying a rifle or three years punching a typewriter.  Enlistees, in exchange for the extra year, were guaranteed their choice of Military Occupation Specialty (or MOS: everything in the military has initials).

The Official Notice came only a couple of weeks later. Uncle Sam wanted me badly, but he also had a sense of humor.  I was to report on my twenty-second birthday.

My enlistment papers, however, gave me another month of freedom before I had to report.  Nevertheless, my wife never forgave me for enlisting.

Exactly what it was that I should have done was never made clear.  Only that what I had done was somehow wrong.

*

So fifty or more Oklahoma City boys gathered at the Induction Center to be processed and then to sit around and wait.  The Cowboy, Ronnie, Junior and I formed a mutual-support group, all of us scared shitless of the unknown.  Toward mid-afternoon came the first of many announcements to come in the following months pointing out to us just how helpless we were.

It seemed that some Army recruiters had been too successful or some local draft boards too ambitious.  The Army’s training capacity was full for the rest of the month.  A Specialist 4 called out the names of a dozen or so draftees and herded them into a separate group.  These kids had allowed themselves to be drafted either out of stupidity or because draftees only served two years instead of three, but they were certain of one thing: the Army was the only service that drafted recruits.

Wrong.

“There’s a bus outside gonna take you boys to the airport to ship out,” the specialist called, with only a slight note of amusement in his voice.  “Welcome to the Marines.”

Oh, Jesus!  Could it get any worse?

The rest of us were eventually bused to one of the ratty regional airlines and flown to Fort Polk, Louisiana, an Army training post whose sole maintenance since the end of the Korean War had been an occasional coat of fresh paint.

At Polk, we learned to march, to salute, to do the “low crawl” (important survival skill during the trench warfare of World War I, but of dubious utility fifty years later), to YELL IN CAPITAL LETTERS, to lie and scheme our way around the drill sergeants and to hate with a passion anything green.  The drill sergeants also made a passing attempt to teach us to shoot, but the target practices were so few and ammunition evidently so valuable that I couldn’t help wondering what was really the point.

I didn’t have anything against guns.  I grew up with them, first with a BB gun, a .22, a .410 shotgun, a 12-gauge, a .30-06.  I shot rabbits, squirrels, pigeons and pheasants – not to mention the occasional water tank.  The gun part of Army basic training didn’t bother me.  I really wanted that marksmanship medal, as a point of pride.

Well, we can’t always get what we want, but the guns would eventually give me what I needed.

**

The rest of basic training did bother me, from the group punishment and deliberate sleep deprivation (both prohibited by the Geneva Convention when dealing with prisoners of war, but not prohibited practices for a country to use on its own troops), to the attempts to turn us into bloodthirsty killers, to the drill sergeants who could barely speak the English language.

Our drill sergeant, a twenty-two-year-old Alabama kid with a sixth-grade education, was a particularly choice specimen, especially when trying to teach us to march.

“Now I step off on my right…” he would drawl lazily just before noticing his left foot out in front, “…As…you…were…[long, puzzled pause]…I step off on my left foot.”  Right, I thought.  We’re involved in a war and our guys are being trained by the likes of this moron.

They said you were right when you left.

YOU’RE RIGHT!

They said you were right when you left.

YOU’RE RIGHT.  YOUR LEFT.  YOUR RIGHT.

The CO was a young hot-shot captain filling out the last of his four-year enlistment.  I suspect he secretly longed to be referred to as “the old man,” as he tried to be simultaneously as tough as possible and an understanding father figure.

During our 900-mile Death March home from “bivouac” near the end of basic training, the CO was out in front of the marching troops, showing just how tough he was.  It took our company Sergeant Major, a career NCO and the real boss of the company, to set the CO straight.

“Sir, these mens have had it.  I say they ride home.”

“Top, if I can do it, these men can do it.”

“Sir, these mens are riding home.”

We rode the rest of the way home.

*

The CO made it a point, the first week of basic, to interview each of his men individually.  My interview was one of his shortest.

“Dimick, your test scores are pretty damned impressive.  But you haven’t applied to go to OCS.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You don’t want to be an officer?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

Are you shitting me, you dumb fuck?  You really have no idea why I would peel potatoes rather than have your job?

Or so I thought to myself.

“They showed us a movie about Officer’s Candidate School earlier this week, sir,” I said out loud.  “It said no matter where an officer was assigned, his first job was always to be ready to lead his men into combat.  I don’t want that kind of responsibility, sir.  I operate a typewriter.”

“You’re not going to give us trouble, here, are you, Dimick?”

Born just two years after the end of World War II and raised on war movies and war stories, I wasn’t then anti-war, only anti-Vietnam War and, in particular, anti-sending-Steve-to-the-Vietnam-War.  But at least I seemed to have learned something about discretion since standing in front of the night traffic court judge years before.

“No, sir,” I promised.  “I just want to serve my time and go home.”

“That’ll be all, Dimick.  Dismissed.”

For the most part, I kept my promise.

*

I certainly wasn’t alone in my resentment of being 1) in uniform, 2) in the Army, 3) in basic training, 4) at Fort Polk, Louisiana.  Of about 150 in our company, there were only four gung-ho guys who had seen too many John Wayne and Audie Murphy movies and who had dreams of parachuting behind enemy lines to blow up bridges, cut radio communications and Save the Western World for Democracy.

While the rest of us fell into our bunks at bedtime to read for a while or write a letter home, the gung-ho’s competed among themselves to see how many more push-ups each could do in addition to the two or three hundred we had already done that day.

I, on the other hand, found myself in the majority for the first time in my life.  While hanging around “at ease,” waiting (which is what soldiers do best) for the next silly stage in our training, someone would start the count under his breath: “One…two…three:”

“FUCK THE ARMY!” we would yell in unison.  We were a lot more enthusiastic in this call than in the ones the sergeants wanted us to learn.

Drill Sergeant:  “What is the purpose of the bayonet?”

“To kill!”

“I can’t hear you!”

“To Kill !!”

We never reached all capital letters, as we did in our own mantra.

Perhaps it was because Dimick was opening his mouth and moving his lips around, but making sure that no sound came out.

*

Graffiti reading “FTA” was everywhere.  This phrase was ubiquitous anywhere American troops were stationed, and the Army actually tried to preempt it in later years with an advertising campaign claiming the initials stood for “Fun, Travel and Adventure.”

Right.

*

Top (all sergeants major are referred to as “Top,” short for “Top Sergeant”) summoned us to the parade ground one afternoon to lecture us on the fact that the only enthusiasm we seemed to show was when shouting our own phrase.

“You mens don’t know what you sayin’,” he yelled.  “What this ‘Fuck da Army?’  Who da Army?  YOU da Army!  You mens want to fuck yourselfs?  Huh?”

“NO, TOP SERGEANT.”

“Then I don’t want to hear no more ‘Fuck da Army.’  Ya got me?”

“YES, TOP SERGEANT.”

Dismissed, we wandered off of the parade ground, most of us muttering “…and fuck you, too, Top.”

The next day, during a break, someone whispered “One, Two, Three…”

*

I was much too terrified to be disruptive until near the end of basic.  The Army must have found out by trial-and-error that you can use abject fear to keep raw recruits in line for six or seven weeks.  Eight weeks, tops.  Any longer than that and these chumps will have wised up.

On November 15, 1969, the New Mobilization Committee staged the largest anti-war rally to date in Washington, D.C.  More than 250,000 people converged on the capitol (significantly more, even, than had come to levitate the Pentagon two years earlier); similar giant rallies were held in other large cities across the country and those citizens not marching were urged to wear black armbands.

“DIMICK!”

It was the company lieutenant, a mean-eyed little fellow whom we saw but rarely, to our relief.  He’d been in as long as the Old Man (okay, I’ll cut the captain some slack and give him the nickname he wanted so badly – compared to his second-in-charge, he deserved it), but couldn’t make O-3 grade.  In a just world, he couldn’t have shined Top’s shoes and he knew it.  Even the Spec. 3’s and Spec. 4’s who kept the company moving had little use for him.

We were on some sort of mini-bivouac, way out in the boonies, learning to crawl underneath barbed wire and underneath the machine-gun rounds whizzing about two feet above the ground.  Very valuable skills fifty years earlier, but maybe just a little obsolete for Korea, the Dominican Republic or Vietnam?

“Sir?” I answered, snapping to attention in front of him.

“You gonna be wearing a black armband today?” he demanded.  Obviously, the captain had told him what a dangerous element I was.

“Ahhhh…no?”

I had no idea what he was talking about.  We weren’t allowed newspapers.  Had the moon landing, the end of the war and the resignation of the president all been squeezed into that week, we wouldn’t have known it.

“You joining those long-haired hippies in their anti-war protests, are you?” he pressed.

“No, sir,” and if I’d had a forelock, I’d have tugged it in subservience.  “I don’t know anything about it.  Right now I’m sort of…doing pushups?”

“Well, get over there and do some more.  And don’t stop until I tell you.”

And so I did.  And did some more.  And then some more.

*

Fragging, I thought.

A word invented during the Vietnam War.  Such a lovely lilt to it.  Fragging.  It has the well-deserved “f” sound at front, the harsh, gutteral “g” in the middle and the gerundive ending, hinting at time passing.

Fragging means casually tossing a fragmentation grenade into the tent of an unpopular officer or NCO while the bastard is sleeping.  The attack is blamed on the Viet Cong and nobody in the company disputes the official report.  Damned shame.  Captain Kurtz, he dead.

How the boy got back from Vietnam alive is more than I can fathom.  But he obviously wasn’t in a combat unit, else no one would have contradicted the story of a Viet Cong getting close enough to his tent to toss in a grenade.  I fragged him in my imagination and I picture him today selling appliances at Sears or Wal-Mart and wondering why he is still salaried, and not management.  Delightful.

*

We didn’t know this until the very end.  They don’t want to give trainees any sense of hope.  Hope brings questions, and we can’t have that.  But the secret to staying healthy and safe and sane lies in seven words: “I want to see the I.G.”

The sergeants and the officers try to beat you into submission with such phrases as “court martial” and “Article 15.”  But the I.G. trumps them every time – if the grunts only knew about it.

My military recruiter had promised me that I would be finished with basic training before Christmas, because the next class beginning at Defense Information School (DINFOS) in Indianapolis was due to start shortly after the New Year.  But our training company had started more than a week late because of a scheduling snafu.  (Or, rather, SNAFU.  It’s an acronym.)

But basic training wasn’t finished and wouldn’t be for another week.  We had hung around Fort Polk for more than a week in October before being assigned to a training company, which put us a week behind in finishing training.

Problem was, my class at Defense Information School was supposed to start before my basic training ended, and there was no room in the next class, which wouldn’t, at any rate, start for another eight weeks yet.

But, not too conveniently, the Inspector General himself appeared at Fort Polk, Louisiana.  Deus ex machina. I doubt that it was really the IG, but more likely, one of his helpers, like a department store Santa Claus.  No matter.  The NCOs were properly cowed.  They were required to ask if anyone wanted to speak to the IG.

“Oh, God, Dimick, not you!”

“Well, sergeant,” I was finally able to say calmly, having reached the stage of seven-week-old, wised-up chump, “I have this enlistment contract which says I have to be in Indianapolis in three days.  If I don’t make it, I can’t get in the class.  And if I don’t get in the class, they’re going to have to turn me loose.  So, yes, I’d like to talk to the IG.”

“Dimick, it’s okay.  We’ll make sure you get there.  You don’t need to talk to the IG.  You don’t want to talk to the IG.  We’ll make it right.”

I was stupid to believe them, but they did make it right.  The next day, when the rest of my platoon was practicing for their big graduation parade, I was on a plane to Indianapolis, which was experiencing its coldest and wettest winter in seventeen years.

*

About nine months later, I was editing the post newspaper at the now-decommissioned Oakland Army Base when the orders came.  I was going to Vietnam.

**

Defense Information School at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, was a unique military training facility in that it was not run by any of the four branches of the armed forces, but by the Department of Defense.  Its faculty and its students consisted of equal parts Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps personnel.

It was also a plum assignment.  More like a real school than most advanced military training programs, its student slots and faculty slots eagerly sought and hard to nab.  It graduated print types who would later staff military newspapers on every U.S. base in the world, and broadcast types who would work for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service.  The top graduate in each class received a gold watch and his choice of locations for his next assignment.

If I had it to do over again, I’d have asked for France, but I didn’t know any better at the time.  I asked for San Francisco and got Oakland.  That’s like asking for Manhattan and getting Hoboken.

What they didn’t tell us at DINFOS was that, while they may have promised the top graduate the closest available slot to his requested posting, there was no guarantee as to how long it would last.

*

I reported to Oakland in April.  In September, my transfer orders arrived.

September.  My birth month.  The same month I had been ordered to report for the draft.  Uncle hadn’t lost his sense of humor.

After the panic and the tears and the anger subsided came the determination.  First, since I had always wanted to write, at least I could gather a lot of color and maybe turn it into a book or two.  Second, if the bastards were going to send me to some godforsaken jungle on the other side of the world, there was going to be something in it for me.  I’d keep my eyes and ears open.  There were opportunities in black market currency (or so I had read) and who knew what else.

Had this happened to either of my parents, they would have had an easy explanation.  Dwain would have said, “I could have been an officer and gone off to Washington.  Because I wouldn’t, they made an example out of me and sent me to war.”  Mildred would have said “They never liked me, anyway.”

Evidently, a lot of desk jockeys from the San Francisco Bay Area were scheduled to go to Vietnam at the same time.  Twenty or thirty of us were sent for three days to Fort Cronkite, a largely abandoned Army post on the Marin County headlands for “RVN [Republic of Vietnam] training.”

*

Marin County is a peninsula which forms the northern portion of the Golden Gate, the narrow, labial opening into San Francisco Bay.  The headlands command spectacular views of the Bay and the Pacific Ocean.  Much of the headlands were owned, but hardly used, by the Army.  The Pacific-facing portions are dotted with concrete pillboxes, or gun entrenchments, left over from the coastal defense during World War II.  Hikers can still clamber into the pillboxes and imagine what it must have been like squatting in the bunkers and waiting for the Japanese navy to appear on the horizon.

*

It generally doesn’t rain in the Bay Area between April and October.  The hillsides are lush green during the winter rainy season and dry and brown during the summer.  The Marin headlands were thus a perfectly logical location for a bunch of grown men to be playing Army, shooting blanks at each other through the knee-high dead October grass.

Blank cartridges are dangerous as hell.

“Uh, Sergeant?  We got another grass fire over here,” the mortician called.  It would have been caused either by the hot shell casings ejected from our rifles or from the fire blazing out of their muzzles.

“Well, stomp it out.”

“What?”

“I said STOMP IT OUT!”

“You want me to stomp it out?”

“Goddamn it!  Put the fuckin’ fire out!”

“You sure?”

“Jesus Christ!  Dimick, go help that dumbass put out that fire.”

“You want me to go help put out that fire?”

“What the hell is the matter with you men?  You gonna pull this shit in the ‘Nam?  Gitcher ass shot off.  Now, Go…Put…Out…The…Fucking…FIRE!!”

I strolled down the hill to help the mortician, who was half-heartedly tapping around the edges of the widening circle of fire with his combat boots.

“Uh…Sergeant?  It’s a little too big.  You might want to call for the trucks again?”

Which, of course, was the point all along.

Our training was suspended three times while we waited for the tanker trucks to come put out the grass fires.

The mortician and I (and why they needed morticians in Vietnam wholly escaped me, since the bodies were all brought back to Oakland Army Base for processing) used these breaks to good advantage.  We had to get up damned early on the Oakland side of the bay to get to Marin County by 7 a.m.  We lay down on our backs in the warm sun, used our helmets as pillows and napped.

Neither of us understood why non-combatant troops needed to know this shit, but both of us had learned that the Army is not a for-profit corporation, but an evolutionary dead end.  All Army policies and regulations are outmoded by at least a generation.  It’s an axiom that the generals always fight the last war.  The officer who promotes modern management techniques is himself not promoted, but shunned.  The GI who questions the logic of an Army policy is invited to shut up.  “Your shit sure is flaky, Dimick!”

So the smart enlisted man finds ways to use the Army’s inflexibility to his own advantage, a talent which I picked up in basic training, which freed me from having to go through the tear gas chamber and which landed me many a typewriter job while my barracks mates were mowing lawns and scrubbing pots.

*

RVN training wasn’t so bad, really, as long as you recognized the black humor in it and didn’t take it too seriously.  But the last exercise, at the end of the third day, forced me to take it seriously.

We had been firing M-1’s, rifles left over from World War II and the Korean War, just as we had during basic training.  M-16’s, the rifles issued to actual combat troops, were evidently too expensive and too dangerous to give to mere trainees.

But if we were going to Vietnam, we had to become familiar with the M-16.

And we had to learn to shoot people.

The M-16 is a light-weight (less than nine pounds) rifle firing 5.56 mm (.223 caliber) bullets, capable of operating in semi-automatic or fully automatic mode, firing bursts of up to 90 rounds per minute.  While not as popular, reliable, flexible or deadly as the Russian-developed AK-47, it is a nasty weapon, nevertheless.  With an M-16, all you have to do is point the barrel in the general direction of the person you’re trying to kill and then hold the trigger.  You’re sure to kill something.

Back in basic training, we had shot at bull’s-eye targets, the same as I had with my BB gun and .22 single-shot as a teenager.

In RVN training, however, human-shaped targets popped up suddenly from the tall grass.

I forced myself to try it once and then forced myself not to vomit.  I could hardly hear or see for the rushing in my ears and the film on my eyes.  I dropped the rifle, heard my name shouted in anger, picked it up again and loosed the rest of my live shells well over the heads of the paper people.

I don’t remember going home.

“I can’t do this,” were my first words to Cherylle.  “What am I going to do?”

I had just had my conversion on the road to Damascus.  The next day, I sought out the CCCO, the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, in downtown Oakland.

Three months later, I was out of the Army.  Three months after that, I was back in Oklahoma.

Coming Next:  The Godfather of the Model City