DON'T GO (my history with the military)

DON”T GO
By Carl Kozlowski

When I was growing up, my grandma always used to ask me “Are you gonna be a soldier like your grandpa? Or your uncle?”

Even when I was little the question was loaded with a strange sense of fear.

I had never met my grandfather, her husband, because he was killed at the Battle of Normandy in 1944, a few months after my mom was born. And the concept of a grandpa was almost utterly foreign to me because my father’s dad had also died, a few years before I was born.

My grandma and mother rarely talked about the man who had been taken far too early from both their lives. They proudly posted photos of him, grandma hanging a smiling portrait of him in his uniform on the hallway wall of her house, my mom with a smaller picture of her dad holding her as a baby, unaware of the loss that would soon alter her life forever.

Their silence about him was probably a side effect of time wiping away a painful history. My grandma would occasionally speak with pride of what a good man he was, how he loved to read the paper every Sunday and that I must have gotten my love of the news from him. But aside from that and asking if I’d be a soldier too, I’d rarely hear anything about him from her, and nothing from my mom. Obviously she hadn’t known him either, so what was there to say?

Instead, Mom was raised by her mom’s brother, a man known to her and us as Uncle George. He was a tall, skinny man with a sly grin on his face at all times, an average Joe from small-town Pennsylvania who loved to drive to the desert or on cross-country trips between California, his adopted home, and his native state. He had a joyful laugh and a surprised way of saying “What the heck is that?!” whenever he was presented with information he didn’t know before, his voice filling any room he was in and as a kid I loved to keep surprising him with the things I learned in school or on the latest National Geographic special. Yet under the surface bluster, there was sadness. He had found some purpose as a de facto dad and grandfather, but yet no work he could call his own.

He didn’t seem to smile enough on his own. He packed his garage with the detritus of decades gone by, especially auto parts and clothes, but he also had a camper he’d stay in despite having plenty of room in my grandma’s house, locking himself away from the world, his radio always fuzzily carrying a ballgame. He said he liked to sleep out in the camper, because it made him feel like he had more space and could always “get up and go.”

While I didn’t really know what he kept in there because he never let me see inside, my grandma’s adjoining house was an always fascinating mishmash of ’50s-era furniture, old paintings, older magazines and an attic that remained filled and unexplored by us until the days after Uncle George died in 2004. My dad, who was a Polish Catholic so devout he nearly became a priest – and never let us forget it – wondered if Uncle George was devout “enough” after he passed away, or if he was a Catholic by name only.

He got his answer in cleaning out Uncle George’s drawers in my grandma’s house – and found literally hundreds of statues, rosaries and other Catholic artifacts buried in every corner of every drawer, attic corner and closet shelf in the house. My dad was so overwhelmed with the sheer scope of the collection that he seemed ready to call in the Vatican to cart everything off. But instead, he did the traditional thing for religious icons and tried to bury them in my grandma’s front yard under her rose bushes – as people stopped to stare at the enormous ditch he was creating just to throw in religious figures and pins. I can only imagine the bizarre terror the next owners felt the first time they flooded their gardens and 20 giant crucifixes came bobbing up through the mud.

And it was in that camper that my uncle kept his rifle from WWII.

He only took it out once, when I was about six, and he wouldn’t let me play with it even. He held it with a sense of sadness and reverence that I didn’t quite understand. I just wanted to play “Let’s Blow Shit Up.”

My uncle was especially mysterious about another item he kept from his time in the War – hidden deep in his garage, he had a giant Japanese sword that he had either plundered from a site during his tour of duty over there or managed to wrest from a soldier he’d killed. I vaguely remember him showing it to me, just once.
“Now that’s not for playing,” he said sadly. “Run along.” Then it disappeared again, seemingly forever.

Of course we’re told that all soldiers are heroes, but we also used to be forcefed images of GI Joe the perfect American soldier who never got hurt and never could die. There was a world of difference between the toys I had and the GI Joe cartoons I watched and the heroic John Wayne movies that were in reruns on Saturday afternoon TV, and the sad life of my uncle who injured his hip so badly that he never was able to work after 1950 and spent the next 54 years searching for purpose outside of his key role in raising my mother.

He had enlisted in WWII and was sent to Japan. I’m not sure if he was on the firing line or how many people he killed, if any. I do know that he was part of the cleanup crew at Nagasaki after the US bombed them into the Stone Age with a nuke. He was sent in wearing only a gas mask over his uniform, and nearly 40 years later in the early ‘80s, the radiation he absorbed nearly killed him via internal tumors before a miracle killed them off and gave him a second chance at life for 20 more years.

But in knowing, even with no one willing to explain, that my Uncle George had been affected for more than just an injured hip by his time in battle, I always grew up with not only a sense of respect for soldiers but also a simmering loathing for those who send them to die.

What made him special to me and my siblings was that Uncle George was our de facto grandpa, since neither of our actual ones had survived to see us even be born. My dad’s father died a few years before our arrival, in 1967. But my mom’s dad died way before that, just after she was even born. He had died at the Battle of Normandy.

And so it was that I had this tradition to uphold when I was a kid, everyone expecting me to continue a family tradition of…well, of what I wasn’t sure. There was a world of difference between the adventure of war movies and the sad results of actual battle, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be part of it. But two or three other things entered into play that gave me a perspective that I suppose most young men don’t have.

First, my dad got a job as a doctor for a VA hospital because it was the best and easiest way to get re-trained as a doctor in English after emigrating here from Poland, helping veterans get the right physical therapy and prosthetics for their missing arms and legs. It was 1977, a couple years after the Vietnam War had ended, so he missed the brunt of the brutality visited upon the nation’s soldiers. He had been training in Chicago at another VA, and saw more horrors there, no doubt – horrors that also went unspoken. Instead, in Little Rock where I grew up, he dealt with the soldiers who came back from the “good” wars like WWII and Korea – wars which nonetheless shook men to their mental cores and just ripped them limb from limb.

At the same time, during his first two years on the job, we lived in a house on a row of 100-year-old homes that were set aside for doctors to rent if they chose to live on the hospital’s grounds. We were new to Little Rock, and my dad was so happy to finally be retrained in English and working again as a doctor after years of struggle that he just grabbed a rental house rather than spend another three months looking for our own place.

I couldn’t figure out at the time, in first and second grade, why even though I was welcome to go over to any of my classmates’ homes to play or for parties, no one else’s parents would let them come over to our house. Was it the fact that the house looked like the Addams Family lived there, or that it and the hospital were located atop a foreboding mountain just outside the city limits?
Or could it be they were scared of the mental patients who inevitably wandered onto our lawn from the main hospital grounds, in a daily real-life display of the Zombie Walk from “Night of the Living Dead”? Gee, I wonder. Hell, my mom even made us turn away from the window and we LIVED there! It seemed like a weekly occurrence that she’d have to tell us not to look outside during breakfast because someone was, and I quote, “watering the lawn” – and not using a pitcher to do so.

At least this kinda thing made life memorable. Our family would jaunt across the VA campus to the chapel building, where we attended Sunday Mass with the most colorful and boisterous congregation you could ever imagine. Joyous voices sang unto the Lord in incredibly off-key fashion. Sometimes the men in attendance – even when they were in the CHOIR! – burst into decidedly non-church songs as a joke on the priest and everyone in attendance. I’ll never forget the time I had to hear “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love Baby” by Barry White during a particularly exuberant Communion line.

Best of all was James Keever, a man whom I was told was manic but who also clearly suffered from the flipside of depression. He was “just” a mental patient and therefore it was OK for him to go outside a lot or to get a weekend pass to stay downtown. Yet almost every time he spent the weekend elsewhere, the poor guy would come back depressed and explaining that he’d lost or been robbed of all his disability money and still had three weeks to go til his next check.

I was only seven when I met him, but I was instantly curious: where did he go every time he headed downtown? And how did he always manage to have such shitty luck? Did he keep retracing his steps every time, going to the same dumpy pool halls and the YMCA, where he was easy to roll?

I wanted to ask but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. Instead, I harbored giddy dreams of adventure where I’d follow him around like “Harriet the Spy” and come back with a full report that would explain it all each time he returned to the VA with a missing wallet and a punched eye socket.

I was always grateful that my parents allowed me to consider men like James my friends, for it surely provided a more colorful living experience than the upper-crust suburban upbringings of my private Catholic-school peers. Living in a century-old mansion on top of a mountain surrounded by mental patients provided me with a perspective on life that I couldn’t and wouldn’t ever trade with anybody. I was alone at times compared to my classmates in normal neighborhoods, but I had my imagination and got to know some of the more coherent patients and learned stories of adventure and far-flung exotic women at age 8 that no kid should probably hear ‘til they’re 18.


I’m not laughing at James Keever’s forgetfulness or being robbed when I say he was my best VA memory “of all.” No, I’m referring to one very special Sunday morning when he took his usual position as the out-loud reader of the scripture readings, stepped up to the podium, opened his missal to read, and….had his pants fall straight down around his ankles. Thank God his underwear didn’t fall with it or I might’ve been scarred for life too. But nope his undies stayed on, and were the focus of attention for the next five minutes as he decided to finish reading the Scripture he was assigned to read, and THEN bent over and hiked his pants up after proclaiming, “THIS is the Gospel of the Lord.”

Eventually though, time moved on and my folks decided to move into a supposedly regular neighborhood, which was filled with its own assortment of odd ducks and odder behavior that I’ll share with you yet another time.

What really turned my heart and gut away from wanting to do anything involving the military was my high school’s JROTC program. It was basically an early propaganda and indoctrination program to make high school age guys think being a soldier was the greatest thing imaginable, in the hopes of either getting us to sign up as cannon fodder when we turned 18 or to continue training as officers in a cushy college program. Training to be officers who never had to actually be in the heart of battle, risking their lives and taking the chance that their little girl and her eventual children would never get a chance to know them. No, at least in JROTC and ROTC, being an officer was the greatest thing in the world – you got to dress up and learn how to order other people into battle to risk their asses for you.

Bitter much? You might ask. Well, yeah, actually. I got conned into joining my JROTC program because our student body president – the funniest guy I’d ever known, a real-life Ferris Bueller named Ramon Escobar – came into my classroom one day to give a sales pitch on the program and said it taught him lots of things about leadership. I should have known he seemed totally different in that moment, and not in a way I thought was good. There was not one shred of his humor or humanity on display, just this robot with his face, standing in a uniform and telling us that only the best students can enter the program.

I wanted to join despite my ambivalence towards the military and its effects on its soldiers. I mainly wanted to fit in with the so-called “best” students, to make up for my years in the social wilderness while living on the VA grounds. I wanted to be cool like Ramon Escobar after a childhood as an oddball outsider who lived in the strangest neighborhood imaginable. And besides, “Top Gun” was the hottest movie going back then – and in 1986, before everyone knew he was a Scientologist douchebag, who didn’t want to be like Tom Cruise? And besides, it fit in solidly with my reputation as a diehard Young Republican.

My parents were supportive but not gung ho about my decision. Maybe they could tell that I, their oddball creative son, would fit into ROTC like the proverbial square peg in a round hole. My dad was proud to work with and treat our American soldiers, but having grown up in Communist Poland, he didn’t exactly have the redneck passion for all things military that the other JROTC guys were raised with.

So I signed up, despite the fact I have two left feet and no coordination and an almost dyslexic sense of direction. Every time we were taught a new march I royally fucked it up. Even worse, though, was my ability to get my uniform ready for inspection. No matter how hard I tried, I didn’t see this little loose thread or that tiny piece of yarn breaking loose from a medal. And I had never polished my own shoes before the inspection – I was 15, and I’d only worn dress shoes to funerals and weddings before and my dad had gone ahead and done them for me. So I rubbed the polish into my shoes the night before inspection, but was so stupid I didn’t’ wipe it back out to a shine. Instead I showed up for school in shoes cloudy with polish and had dozens of my fellow “soldiers” (FINGERS!) laugh at me and purposely scuff my shoes with their heels.

Add in the fact I didn’t know how to perfectly polish the gold metal on my belt buckle, and the man in charge – Sergeant Shaffer, a stout and sarcastic fiftysomething man with a voice like a duck call, who took pride in saying the Marine Corps was the “world’s biggest cult and it’s my duty now to induct you” – found me immediately in the crowd of desperate first-timers and singled me out for humiliation.

“Kozlowski! What the hell are you thinkin’? Did you polish that buckle with steel wool?”

“Um, no sir.”

“And these threads? And… And..” Everyone was snickering around me a second at a time, until the sergeant shot them 1000-yard stares that said “You’re next.”

But the damage was done to my fragile psyche and even more fragile personality and self-confidence. I was starting off my first grade of the year in ROTC with the full disciplinary load of two demerits. My name was posted on the board at the bottom of all my fellow soldier classmates as if I bore the scarlet letter on a wall of shame. I empathized with all the names on there – guys who tried but just couldn’t be perfectly robotic enough. I hated parent assembly nights, where we had to march into the gym and stand at attention for 45 minutes to an hour , while awards were handed out to the best robot cadets.

I despised this, all the more when a large cadet named Robert Gibson couldn’t take the strain on his knees anymore and one night passed out backwards, hitting his head on the floor before a crowd of 500 as his officer cadet lifted him back off the floor and made him stand again rather than showing him an inkling of mercy.

It couldn’t get worse, I thought. But then came the day that my mom scheduled an eye doctor’s appointment on the same day as our first marching class.

Now, this was back in the late ‘80s, when eye doctors were still using the equivalent of leeches by dropping in horrible eye drops into your socket anytime they wanted to test something. Your pupils would be dilated like a drug addict on a three-day binge for the next five hours, leaving you blind if you stepped in front of any thing brighter than a nightlight. And this was the day that I was subjected to my first marching class.

Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty. EVERY step, every move, every freeze, was off. I didn’t feel like I had two left feet, but rather 2000! And soon, the good sergeant was calling me off the blacktop to give me another display of abject humiliation in front of my peers.

“Kozlowski, what kind of student are you?” he barked.

“Um, A’s and B’s, sir.”

“Then why are you marching like a damn F student?”

I was afraid to tell him about the eye drops, not knowing if he’d tell me I was irresponsible in my timing for having had them that day. It was one of the few times in my life where I was really, truly stumped and lacking for words.

But at that moment, something clicked in me and I was determined to really show him up. My goal was that I would find SOME WAY to beat the point system, to overcome the negative demerits I’d racked up so far and get so many points totaled up that they’d HAVE to promote me anyway. Let’s say you needed 100 points for a promotion, and I was starting with -20.

I was determined to kick their ass on my terms.

For the next six weeks, I came in early every morning to work on my weapon. Yes, they gave everyone – even me – a weapon. Thank God it was decommissioned, but nonetheless, I had to oil it up, flip it around and smack it hard into my hands as I learned all my drills. Imagine getting a callous on your fingers when you’re learning to play guitar. Here you’re getting a callous on your entire hand.

I took remedial marching, asking older student “officers” to put me through my paces over and over again before and after school, and during lunch breaks as Shaffer stared from behind his sunglasses but never uttered a word of encouragement.

I scoured my uniform to make it perfect, learned how to polish my damn shoes, took remedial marching….but somehow I knew it wouldn’t be enough.

My ace in the hole was the clothing and canned-good drive.

For each canned good or piece of used clothing we brought in to the program for redistribution to the poor through the Salvation Army, l’d gain points towards promotion. I’ve always had an amazing knack to “sell” things, so I went crazy visiting door-to-door every single house in my neighborhood – my bright smile and cloying personality bringing home the goods from nearly every home I hit. .

I’m not kidding. I probably hit about 2000 homes over the course of a month, spending 6 to 8 hours a day on the weekends asking people if they would donate and arranging times to come pick up their unwanted crap. Sure, I could have spent my weekends playing pick-up games of basketball, watching MTV while downing Jolt Colas and Cheez Whiz, or learning to smoke like any other red-blooded American kid, but dammit, this actually meant something to me!

My mom was cool enough to back me up on this insane enterprise, helping me pick up all the goods in our station wagon and then to seal the stuff up in trash bags and letting me stack them in our garage until the day came for me to metaphorically shove it all up Sergeant Shaffer’s ass. I think she and my dad always wanted me to learn for myself that the military isn’t just a cool club to be a part of, but a sometimes necessary evil designed to break the individual will into a common spirit. Like Sgt. Shaffer said, it was a cult, and he was out to make us as miserable a poor fuck as he was.

And so I finally did, lowering the station wagon’s midsection to create one giant, stuffed-to-the-brim storage space stretching from the front seat to the back door and jamming in as many bags as I could. Then we drove it over to Catholic High, found Sergeant Shaffer smoking a stogie outside with his shit-eating grin (can you feel how much I hated this guy by now??!) and parked it right where we could kick some car exhaust up in his face.

As I popped open the back seat and took out the first bag, he slyly mocked my efforts: “Oh, so you brought a few goodies in for the poor, Kozlowski?”

I marched silently past him and dumped the bags inside. Then I came back for more. My mom sat in front, wearing sunglasses. You couldn’t beat her level of coolness that day.

Two more bags, stuffed to the brim, in hand and I was marching past that old bastard again. This time he just exhaled some smoke and coolly appraised my take.

Back again, and again, and again, bag after bag after bag, until Shaffer finally wasn’t smoking at all. He was just staring, and starting to look worried. It was one of the proudest moments of my life. (Hey, I was 15 then, and lived in Little Rock, what else did I have to be proud of?!)

Finally I gave my mom the all-clear to roll out and she thankfully didn’t call me over to kiss her goodbye and ruin the moment. I could stand tall as a man, savoring my triumph of good over evil.

I knew I had staved off my once-inevitable execution and garnered by promotion.

Maybe you can sit back and laugh at me, saying “Hey dumbass! That’s what Shaffer WANTED you to do! He made you work harder than you ever would have otherwise just to stay part of the military-industrial complex!”

But I know what was in my heart, and my soul, and my gut. I did that for every schlumpy guy who couldn’t get their uniform perfect, every klutz who couldn’t march right, and every cadet who couldn’t take standing at attention for an hour on end at some stupid performance night and wound up passing out and banging their head on the school’s gym floor (Hats off to you, Robert Gibson!)

I had not given Shaffer the pleasure of marking me as a loser.

And by the end of that year, I had been promoted two more times, making it 3 out of 4 quarters. I was assigned a position of relevance for the following fall, where I’d be in charge of others.

And therein was my real goal, and my real revenge.

For all that summer, I savored walking in the first day of school with my uniform folded up (in total regulation style of course!), marching up to Shaffer and handing it off to him, telling him that I was no longer interested in being part of his organization.

And come the first day of school, I did it. Just seeing that look on his face as he realized he’d been had was worth all the endless effort. I know I didn’t stop anything really, or shut the program down. In fact, I was just severely disappointed to learn on Wikipedia that school JROTC programs for teenagers nearly doubled in number back in 1992, just four years after I waged my crusade.

As the saying goes, someone would eventually do their dirty work. But this time it wasn’t gonna be me.

I suppose I could look back and realize I learned a few things from the whole escapade. I could say I took pride in my uniform, or the chicks were hotter for ROTC guys and came running, but none of that is true – at least in my case. Maybe they saw me march. I could have said I learned character, but I think I learned more by standing up to Sgt. Shaffer and refusing to be stepped on by him or anyone else in the program.

Two years after I graduated, the Gulf War started. I reflexively didn’t trust its motivations or President Bush’s claim that “this will not stand.” And as I was now 20 and eligible should a draft ever occur, my grandma was filled with worry as she asked that question again from my childhood: “Are you gonna be a soldier, like your grandpa and uncle?”

I didn’t know what to say. But now that the chips were down and was at least a vague possibility on the horizon of my life, she answered for me.

“Don’t go, Carl. Don’t go.”