morning for reveille. Reveille is when every flight in the squadron has
to fall in, dressed, with their teeth brushed, in parade formation, and
they have roll call. We guinea pigs had standing permission to fall
out if we wanted or even just fuck off. Early morning, still dark out,
September/October, upstate New York? We did a lot of fucking off.
We would go on bivouac, where you go out for three days in tents
and camp. It rained one night and they immediately sent us back to
the barracks, because they didn't want to compromise their important virus-research unit.
I didn't consider flying for a moment. I had no high school diploma, so I wasn't going to be an officer or a pilot. I quickly discovered that officers were assholes anyway: the bosses and managers of
the operation. I definitely didn't identify with them. I might have
wanted the things they could buy with their salary but I certainly
didn't want to get them that way. I was strictly GI.
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I gravitated to the black airmen, some of whom were from around
my neighborhood in Harlem. Others came from the South Side of
Chicago or the Hough neighborhood in Cleveland. I had more in
common with them—jazz, R&B, stuff I could talk about. The white
kids were mostly farm kids from upstate New York, Ohio and points
west. No "bonding" with them.
At this level your flight commander was the same rank as you.
He too was going through basic training to get his one stripe. But if
they'd had some military experience, like the National Guard, they
were made flight commander. First among equals. Same deal as the
pope.
The flight commander had his own room to live in at the end of
the hall. Ours was a big black guy, called Don, with powerful shoulders who'd been a swimmer in high school in Chicago. He was half
full of shit but he did get to choose the squad leaders—the front-rank
marchers, who led each column and had a little bit of clout. Don
chose two black guys and me, because I was a cool guy.
A lot of basic training is sitting through classes, listening to lifeor-death lectures like how to behave in uniform. If you're in uniform you never push a baby carriage. If you're in uniform you never
carry an umbrella. If you're in uniform you always take off your hat
indoors. You have to salute this guy and that guy. And lectures on
military history: endless fucking battles, all of which we'd won.
Don would give me off a lot of classes. I'd been selected for a
more important mission. In the morning he'd hand me a list—my
orders for the day: "Go down to the BX [the Base Exchange] and
steal these records." Don was a shrewd tactician: being a big-city
kid, I was good at stealing. Being white, I was less likely to be scrutinized while browsing the racks. My skill put me in his good graces.
He'd let me hang in his room after the other guys had lights-out,
and listen to the records I'd stolen.
One day in the BX on a search-and-acquire mission, I spotted this
one-striper I could swear I'd met somewhere. Then it hit me: he was
from my neighborhood and I'd scored pot from him once. He was a
rank above me, almost a god: anyone with a stripe could order you
to do things and you had to obey. Here was a real dilemma: does
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the Uniform Code of Military Justice allow me to approach him or
not? Does it allow me to score pot from him or not? I needn't have
agonized. Apparently it allowed me to do both.
He was in a different barracks, exclusively for one-stripers. I went
to his room at a prearranged time just before lights-out. And I was
blown away. Not only does this dude have a 45 rpm record player,
playing a Stan Kenton record, he has a lit joint in the ashtray, casually left there between hits. Lit! Just sitting there!
I'd never seen that before in my life. A joint had to go around fast
so not a single milligram burned away. Forget ashtrays. You stood
on the stoop and zipped it around quick, a process called "one and
go" or "two and go." He was just letting it sit there and burn! What
a motherfucking classy guy! I bought a ten-dollar bag and some papers and that night I was the hit of Don's room.
Thus we skated through basic, serving our country by smoking
pot, stealing records and giving each other colds.
And they gave me a stripe for it.
Next it was off to Denver and "set school." Here you learned a
set: in my case the K-2 bombing and navigation system used in
the hot new B-47 Stratojet medium-range bomber. The B-47 was
a brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose earlier World War
II brainchild had been incinerating German and Japanese citizens by the hundreds of thousands from the air. (He was also the
model for George C. Scott's psychotic General "Buck" Turgidson
in Dr. Strangelove.) By now he commanded the Strategic Air Command and the B-47 was key to his new mission of incinerating Russian citizens from the air. By the millions this time. My kinda guy.
The B-47 was the first bomber in history that flew as fast as a
fighter. It was also a high-altitude aircraft. So the K-2 system—which
was analog—had a lot of navigational problems to solve in getting
a bomb to its target and releasing it in a timely manner. It had to
take into account factors like drift at subsonic speeds, ballistics, the
nature of the casing, how the bomb fell and a host of other variables.
You set in certain values at the beginning and fed in other values
along the way: where is your BRL (Bomb Release Locus), your AP
(Aimed Point) and your GR (Ground Range)? Then K-2 computed
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them and solved them so that the nuke would actually hit its target.
I loved this shit, partly because I got to use my brain for a change but
also because I found I loved data flow, the technology, the problem
solving. And the jargon. There was one great acronym associated
with the K-2: IRAN. Someone with a glimmer of humor must ve
come up with that. It stands for: Inspect and Repair As Necessary.
Plus all of it was about one of my favorite things—bombs.
I turned eighteen in May 1955, and having been in the service
eight or nine months, I got to pick where I would now be based.
Actually you got to pick three bases and they picked from those. I
tried to get as close to home as possible. I chose Plattsburgh, New
York, Columbus, Ohio, and some other SAC base in New England,
at any of which I would've been able to defend sacred American
freedoms like freedom of choice. Predictably they ignored all my
choices and sent me to Barksdale Air Force Base, across the Red
River from Shreveport, Louisiana, which, according to my friend
José, was "the fucking armpit of the fucking nation."
I didn't do much off-base socializing at first. The barracks life was
pretty cool. It was three people in the room, your own single beds,
and you could drink and smoke. If you had a Class A pass, you could
leave the base anytime you wanted. So there was a certain freedom.
I disappeared into my music, jazz and R&B. And before long I got to
put my master plan into action
.
Every base has an NCO club and an officers' club, but this was
the fifties Deep South and segregated. So there was an annex in the
club for black NCOs. Lesser mortals could also go there: one-, twoand three-stripers. That's where I began to hang out. They had "radar" hotdogs: the franks had cheese injected in the center and were
heated in some kind of radiation-powered oven—an early version
of a microwave. Who knows how much radiation we ingested with
our dogs? There was malt liquor and Carling's Black Label and a
jukebox and dances and other good stuff. There was me and a lot of
black guys from various squadrons. I saw another white guy in there
maybe twice. I was ostracized by the mainstream white culture in
the barracks as being one of them "crazy white nigger-lover guys
from New York City."
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Socializing with black airmen came very naturally to me. On the
Harlem streets I grew up on as a kid, we were cheek by jowl with
blacks and Latinos of all kinds: Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and we all got along pretty well. We had to. I heard plenty of
prejudicial and discriminatory remarks from guys on the corner and
on the stoops in my teenhood. But they never sat well with me, they
never took hold. When I heard "spades," I started using that more,
because it was softer than the prevailing slurs. The offhand racist remarks and attitudes didn't go with the way I felt. My mother wasn't
prejudiced either, so it wasn't in my background as it was for a lot of
guys. (Although she leaned toward anti-Semitism. She referred to
Jews as "Norwegians." The code between her and her sister, Agnes,
was: "Ag, couple of Norwegians on the bus.")
I once spent a night in jail just for being in a car with a black guy
driving. I had a black roommate named Connie who owned a little
car. Which was nice; a total reversal of what they'd expect down
there. Walters, a white guy from San Jose who lived across the hall,
and I needed a lift into town. We were going to a white bar and Connie was going to a black one.
So a black guy is driving in Louisiana in a little coupe with one
white guy sitting next to him and another white guy—me—in the
back. We're heading down Barksdale Boulevard toward Shreveport
and suddenly there are two local police cars with lights flashing.
They put us through the usual kind of verbal harassment. They
had to treat us a little bit differently, because we were airmen. They
knew they could harass us for one night and then our base would
get us out the next morning. But for a few hours they got to put us
through some Southern shit, full of the usual hatred and insults.
We wound up spending the night in jail, for no reason, except
DWB and DWBWWG (Driving While Black With White Guy).
They put Connie in one cell with the black guys, Walters and I in
an adjacent cell. Through the bars we could talk to and touch the
black guys. The window had no glass in it, because it's a real sultry
climate.
I had three joints in my sock and they hadn't searched us. So we
smoked pot all night, in 1955, blacks and whites together, in the
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Bossier City jail. Blew the fucking smoke out the fucking window.
That felt good!
There was a freedom to hanging with blacks that ran counter
to the structured life of the military. In one way it was part of my
training for a comedic career, picking up a looseness and directness
I wouldn't have had if I'd stuck with "my own kind." Plus the music
led to radio and a stint as a deejay, which in turn led to my becoming
a performer. In another way that rebelliousness ensured an impressive record of court-martials and near-court-martials.
Barksdale was an SAC base with a lot of real live B-47s, each one
of which was worth a fortune. In 1955 there was no nuclear triad
yet, no land-air-sea capability. They were just beginning to build
the submarines and they hadn't yet dug the silos. B-36s had been
phased out and the B-52s weren't yet being delivered. So B-47 medium bombers were it: our only deterrent against the demonic designs of the Evil Empire. I was one tiny but crucial part of the thin
line between America and Armageddon. Peace, as our psychopathic
commander used to say, was my profession.
You needed a SAC pass to walk the flight line, with your picture on it, and coded for whatever you were allowed access to. I'm
walking the flight line one day and an air policeman my age, if not
younger, is on duty. My SAC pass was under my field jacket so he
couldn't see it. He says, "Where's your SAC pass?" I said, "Fuck
you. I'm going to work," and kept walking. He draws his gun and
says, "Spread-eagle on the pavement," and I said, "Fuck you, you
cocksucker."
Then logic takes over: "Wait, I have it, here it is, leave me alone."
But it was too late. I'd said "Fuck you." I had defied authority. And
I got an Article 15, a punishment just short of a court-martial. They
can dock your pay and reduce you in rank. So I lost my stripe and
went back down to airman basic.
I earned the stripe back after a while, but now along came a military exercise which simulated "enemies" trying to breach the perimeter of the base. The game is you defend the bombers. They try to
get in and tag the bombers. The idea of Soviet troops getting as far
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much sense as Germans flying across the Atlantic on one tank of
gas. But this stupid schoolyard shit was taken very seriously.
It's night and just before Christmas. Even in Louisiana it's freezing on the flight line. There's a power unit going by one of the bombers, keeping it nice and warm inside. I'm stationed near it and I'm
full of alcohol so I figure I'll take a little nap. I put my gun—I refuse
to call it a rifle, it's a gun—next to the power unit, go into the plane
and crash. Some sector guy drives by checking on us, and sees my
fucking weapon. Abandoned! They haul me out and this time I'm
court-martialed for "deserting my post in a Unit Simulated Combat
Mission."
Military justice—an oxymoron if ever I heard one—saves time,
money and gets convictions. Forget about that stupid due process
stuff. The colonel who presided over my court-martial was the only
other man present: he's judge, jury, prosecutor, defense attorney. He
says: "We find you guilty." What "we," motherfucker?
But he decides to be lenient: "You have Christmas leave coming
up so I'm going to take it easy on you. I'm letting you off the brig.
But we're taking two-thirds of your pay for ninety days and you lose
your stripe."
My air force record on stripes was this: I got one stripe, lost one
stripe, got one stripe, got two stripes, lost one stripe, got two stripes,
lost one stripe, lost another stripe. I earned six stripes and lost four
stripes. By the time I got out I felt like a fucking zebra.
So now my rep was starting to be: "It's not just he's hanging out
with these boogies. He's a fuckup too." Then something
happened
that changed my life. I'm sitting in my room one night and a guy
named Mike Stanley from Mississippi comes by and says, "Hey,
George, know what I'm doing? I'm in a play. I play the boxer in
Golden Boy. There's this little theater group downtown called Venture Theater and they got other parts to fill. You'd be good at that,
you're a clowny guy." So I went down and got a part in one act as the
trainer and as the photographer in the next. With a different hat.
But the guy who was playing Tom Moody, the fighter's manager,
was Joe Monroe, morning disc jockey on KJOE, the most popular
station in town. Everybody listened to KJOE and everybody talked
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about it, because it played Top 40, when quick-format Top 40 was
brand new, the hot thing. What I didn't know was that Joe Monroe
was also a 50 percent owner of the station. So I said, "Joe, I wanna be
a disc jockey when I get out of the air force. I'd love to come down
and just watch your show someday." He said, "Anytime."
I go down to KJOE, and when he signs off he says, "Take these
texts, go into that studio with the glass wall and read them for me."
So with my New York accent, in the Deep South, I'm reading: "Hey,
Hackenpack Store is open seven days a week! Twenty-four hours a
day!" Then I read news about the Suez Canal crisis. He hires me on
the spot, sixty cents an hour to do the weekend sustaining newscast.
Soon I expanded. There was a one-hour show from twelve to
one, where they didn't do the formula—they just played Nice Music
at Noontime or whatever. I got that hour, twelve to one. The next
step was he decided to cut out the twelve-to-one slot: "That stuff's
bullshit, we're not doing that anymore." He went to a 6-9, 12-3, 3 - 6
daily format. I got the twelve-to-three slot, every day.
The air force was incredibly pleased that I'd finally found something constructive to do. I was downtown in a very visible position.
I was not spreading venereal disease or raping people. Excellent PR
for the USAF.
They gave me an off-base permit. Because I needed to be away