My Shining Hour in Uncle Sam's Army

Ploughing North America: My Shining Hour in Uncle Sam's Army

Hearing Japan's U.S. Ambassador Yamanouchi playing Jimi Hendrix's "The Star Spangled Banner" on youtube today brought back a vivid memory of my shining hour in my two-year military tour.

It was 1969, we were just back from Nam, and I had a cushy after-hours job in the post movie theatre running the projectors. This was Tripler Medical Center, allied with the 9th Infantry Division, Honolulu. Played music before the show, nothing on hand but cornball Dean Martin / Frank Sinatra. We were half way through Hendrix's star-spangled mayhem, when the lifers (officers and non-coms who'd signed up for a 20-year stretch) came running up the stairs to put out the fire. Film, after all, is highly flammable. (In those days movies came in reels and required a projectionist to coordinate them so the movie would play without breaks between the reels.) "Cut the shit," they fumed, and “start the goddamned movie.”

The next day I was called up before my Commanding Officer, Captain Childs, who was set to give me an Article 15. (This was an article providing the CO with non-judiciary power --i.e., no jury required--to administer punishment for infractions. Used to punish enlisted men without the bother of a court-martial.) First, he wanted me to know about it.

Capt. Childs: What the hell did you think you were doing last night, Specialist, playing that crap?

Spec 5* Pounds: It wasn't crap, sir. It was just rock 'n' roll. I thought people might get tired of Dean Martin crooning every night.

Capt. Childs: So instead of good music you gave us that jungle-bunny banshee mayhem?

Spec 5 Pounds: Yes, sir. All the soldiers on this base have been to Vietnam. Hendrix was using his guitar to recreate the sounds of a firefight.

Childs: What the hell is that supposed to mean?

Pounds:  The sounds of a firefight, sir. The high whistle of big shells overhead, the bombs bursting, It was a kind of tribute to Fort Henry, sir. You know, "the rockets red glare / the bombs bursting in air." And he did it all with his Stratocaster. 

Childs: Don't get fucking literary on me, Specialist. I know the goddamned song. You know what you're in?

Pounds: No, sir.

Childs: You're in deep shit. Deep shit. I'm thinking of giving you an Article 15. You know what that means?

Pounds: No, sir. (Of course I did know,  every enlisted man knew, I just wanted him to spell it out for me.)

Childs: I'm going to bust you back a grade in rank and reduce your paycheck.  I can do what I want to with your sorry ass. How do you like that?

Pounds: Not much, sir. It seems harsh for just playing music..

Childs: Are you smart-assing me?

Pounds: No, sir.

Childs: Dismissed!

This was hardly my first encounter with arbitrary authority or my first attempt to piss off its figure heads. These were skills I'd been honing since junior high school. 

To return to the present moment, I've been on FaceBook since my retirement three years ago, and it has surprised me to learn how many FB "groups" are ruled by such petty tyrants. The style they imitate is Donald Trump’s, but it's just the dominant corporate style. Corporations are not democratic, the CEO rules from on high like a Pharoah. Likewise the administrator of FB groups. You think s/he 's just a moderator till s/he blackballs you and you discover that the moderator is also the administrator. You can say nothing in your defense because you've been silenced, your identity erased. Kaput--you've been disappeared.

I've been blackballed twice in recent years. Last week an old friend, more confrontational and obnoxious than I and not much of a FaceBooker, had it happen to him for the first time. The Covid lockdown has caused many people to turn to FB for amusement who otherwise wouldn’t have stooped.  He wrote me, "I got censored on Neo-Nazi Facebook." I wrote him that I'd been blackballed twice, and he wrote back to call me "senpai." 

My first time was with a local-history group that found my waywardness hard to harness. Unaccustomed as I was to being disappeared, I was angry at the time, but it seems trivial now. The second time hit closer to home when I was exiled from Tokyo's largest poetry group. I wasn't expecting that, being a well published poet (which doesn't mean a good one but it counts for something), but with one fell swoop I lost all FB contact with my friends. This was the Drunk Poets group, and I'd had the temerity to argue with the CEO that he couldn't claim exclusive right to the name because drunk poets are part of a literary tradition thousands of years old. The CEO didn't like argument from the ranks. Poof!--I was vanished from their "community". Such FB groups perfectly replicate the corporate structure that now dominates North America. You all know the saying, "power corrupts, and absolute power . . . " Go ahead, finish it.

But these are divagations. I was talking about Ambassador Yamanouchi and the joy his Stratocaster performance of Hendrix gave me, reminding me of my finest hour as a clerk in Uncle Sam's army. I was ploughing North America but hardly knew it. I still am, only now I know it. 

Remus, blow your horn!

I'm ploughing on Sunday. 

Tum-ti-tum, ti tum-tum-tum!   

Water in the fields

The wind pours down.

Now here's the Ambassador himself blowing like Remus for the whole USA and beyond! First comes the plow, then the seed. What follows depends on the weather and the soil. Or to switch metaphors in mid-stream, it took a half century for the rings from the pebble I dropped in the pool in 1969 to spread around the world.  I know that’s not true, but it’s fun to think of it. Tum-ti-tum, ti tum-tum-tum!
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*Spec 5 or specialist fifth class was an E-5 pay grade, same as a three-stripe sergeant, but specialist was not a command rank. They didn't give anybody orders.