Memory isn't just a song from Cats

I spent two very enjoyable hours today with an old friend. Chuck was my roommate in a Jacksonville, Alabama, apartment while at Fort McClellan in 1967 immediately before two young Lieutenants were sent to Vietnam, I to the 1st Cavalry Division by way of Panama, and Chuck by a more direct path to the 25th Infantry Division.

Ft. McClellan was OCS (Officer Candidate School) and OTD (Officer Training Detachment) for the no-longer-existent Women’s Army Corps, and a pretty good assignment for a pair of young (barely legal) officers. “The Club” at McClellan allowed all of the young women assigned to OTD and OCS. That made the bar, which overlooked the pool, and had a fresh oyster-bar happy hour, one of the great watering holes of the western world. All I got from that was a phone number for Elizabeth (all I can remember after forty years) and in trouble back in Minnesota (for nothing but the number - the story of my life). Chuck got a wife of forty plus years and counting.

My friend is the same person. The quick smile, all the mannerisms immediately recognizable. We age, but we really don’t change, do we? We shared stories about weekend jaunts in Chuck’s MG to Panama City, poker games, and, well, other things. Some things happened differently than I remembered; some the same.

We did useful work while we were at it, of course, running training committees and ranges for the Advanced Individual Training (AIT) Infantry Brigade. I went off on TDY (that’s bureaucrat for “temporary duty”) to the Benning School for Boys and brought back “reaction shooting,” while Chuck became a bit of an expert with fragmentation hand grenades. Hugh did other things. Glen was hard to miss in his shiny new canary yellow on black 396 Chevelle Malibu SS 4speed.

We shared some of our Southeast Asia experiences, but that wasn’t most of our conversation. We weren’t avoiding it, we just had other things to talk about. We laughed at his answer to his wife’s question about Oliver Stone’s Platoon, “Did you really swear that much?” “No...More.”

After Vietnam Chuck finished college at Wisconsin, earned a PhD at California, Berkeley (where he was a right winger) then took a job with the DOE’s National Labs in Idaho Falls, Idaho (where he was a left winger). That reminds me a bit of daughter Courtney, a US Army Major who got her baccalaureate from Columbia University (yes, that Columbia). The place you occupy on the political spectrum is very much geography-dependent.

This meeting was Chuck’s doing, he found me on the web, and planned his bird watching expedition with a stop here. I thank him for that. Though we spent only a few short months together at McClellan, the affinity is greater than I would have expected these many years later. I hope we don’t now lose contact.

(This has been a month of contacts from and with friends and aquaintences in my past, from Vietnam to Iowa. There will be more here.)