Boys Playing War In The Jungle In The Time Of Tin Soldiers And Nixon

War Boys
M.A. Schaffner
Welcome Rain Publishers LLC
2002

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Many novels, particularly thrillers, make it with their plot.  Jack Higgins comes to mind.  Others do it with characters.  Lots of those, but none better than James Gould Cozzens, except, perhaps, for George Eliot.

The merit in War Boys by M.A. Schaffner though is in its setting.  Not only the place in a geographical sense, but also the time and social circumstances.  The pictures drawn there more than make up for weaknesses in plot and character, which to be frank, may be more my failure as a close reader rather than those of the author.  I had to drop being English major because I thought of Moby Dick as a story about a bunch of guys who worked in the whaling industry.

What A Father

One well drawn character is the protagonist and viewpoint character Charles Barker, who is about 14 or so when the story begins.  His family has just moved and as he wakes up imagining his father getting ready to go to work, we meet another memorable character and learn much about the circumstances Charles finds himself in:

He didn't have to see his father leave to know that the old man had put on his service khakis, pressed sharp, with the new commander's oak leaves on the collar and the bright gold scrambled eggs on the shiny visor of his cover.  He'd have worn brown shoes you could see up girls' dresses with and a breastplate of fifteen or twenty silk ribbons from all his campaigns and achievements since 1944, including the one he had the most pride in, the maroon Good Conduct Medal that only enlisted men could earn, and that told everyone he met he'd worked his way up, step by step, form E-1 to O-5.  They'd see it and know that behind the open smile and easy, down-home manners of this slightly chunky, balding former Texas farm boy stood a man who knew more about the navy, than any officer who'd gotten his stripes straight from Annapolis or NROTC, including all the tricks and wiles of his sailors.

I tell you.  In my mind that passage alone is worth the price of admission.  And it gives us a picture of a boy with a very clear idea of what a man should be.  I'm reminded of some of the Cozzens characters who never could quite be the man that they thought their father was.

Navy Brats

The passage also tells us how Charles (and his friends we will later learn) is immersed in military culture purely from being a Navy brat.  As one of his friends puts it when trying to conceive of doing anything other than becoming a Naval officer.

I mean so what do I do now? I never really thought of anything else, man.  I hate to admit if, but I don't know dick about anything but this.  I mean, just what do civilians do, Charles? Just what the fuck is an accountant or an insurance executive?
.....I'll tell you what I do know, dude.  I know the name of every rank from E-one to O-six.  I can tell a squid's job from the color of his jersey stripes and those fucking cartoons on their sleeves.  I know carriers are named for battles, battleships for states, cruisers for cities .... fuck.  I know the price of a blow job in every port in the Western Pacific and how much you can save by paying in the local currency. -

I suppose I should mention the language is pretty rough.  It strikes me as quite realistic though.  I was a teenager during the same period and when you throw in that Charles and his friends spent time with marines and sailors a few years older then they were, I mean, what do you fucking expect?

Charles goes into military culture in a different way than his friends.  He is fascinated with military history and collects highly authentic tin soldiers, that he paints himself, and fights battles with using detailed rules.  He would probably have preferred sticking with that rather than the more dangerous play soldiering that Explorer Post 360 exposed him to.

In The Jungle

The plot centers on Explorer Post 360. And here is where the setting comes  becomes critical.  Commander Barker, has just been transferred to Subic Bay in the Philippines where he will supervise the construction of a new wing of the naval hospital.

There aircraft carriers docked looking like ghost gray cities rising from viridian sea into cobalt sky, while their white warplanes waited on the the adjacent airfield like a well-organized flock of nesting seabirds.

Explorers are kind of a post-Boy Scout experience that can be kind of specialized.  I remember briefly being part of an Explorer post that consisted of going to the headquarters of an insurance company in New York and listening to talks on business.  Explorer Post 360 was nothing like that.
It was definitely outdoors focused and had an ideal setting.

The hills occupied most of the base, and bore fifteen thousand acres of mostly uncut and unvisited rain forest, the last of its kind on the island of Luzon, protected from local citizens and all other enemies foreign and domestic by the U.S. Navy.

Charles also goes out for the wrestling team, which leads to something of an epic journey as middle class American high school kids in order to go to a wrestling match against other middle class American high school must journey by bus through the third world.

...they couldn't seem to travel more than a few miles without encountering a jam caused by anything from a broken-down jeepney to a carabao laboriously crossing the road to an encouraging chorus of car horns and shouting drivers.

When they finally reach the town they are headed for Charles notes lights on the wall.

Those aren't lights, dude,  That's the sun setting on the broken glass
It's to keep the Joe's out.

The dark part of the story centers on a mock Viet Cong Village which Marines had used for training.  The boys camp there and play war using flash lights.

Whoever gets caught in a beam is blown away.

Back To The Father

Charles is hesitant about his Explorer adventures and subtly tries to get his mother to forbid his participation, but his father ends up encouraging him.  When Explorer Post 360 participates in a recreation, under somewhat more benign conditions, of the Bataan Death March, his father encourages him going so far as to loan him his combat boots.

"But you wore those in Korea."
"Yeah, and there were a few nights when I'd have given anything to know that someday I'd be loaning them to my son." 

(This is one place where I would like to learn more about Commander Barker.  Given his job as an officer in medical administration, it seems that as an enlisted man he might have been one of the corpsmen who provided first aid to Marines in combat.  I have reasons to know that there is a heavy dose of the autobiographical in this novel and I can only hope that someday Michael Schaffner might write something like James Bradley's Flags of Our Fathers.)

The Core Story

Although I would not have wanted to lose any of the details that Shaffner dwells on, the movie version of his book will likely focus on the central part of the story as Explorer Post 360 gets for its "adult leadership" a young petty officer who is borderline psychotic and decides to carry the adventure and toughening aspects of the Explorer experience beyond anything the parents would have approved.

What the hell you little jerk-offs whining about? A little rain? Shit, man, hundreds of dudes die every week in 'Nam - thousands if you want to get technical and count slopes - and you're complaining? Shit.

Petty Officer Prahler tells the boys wild stories about his experience in Vietnam with the Navy SEALs and riverine naval operations, which seem altogether inconsistent with his current duties supervising a riding stable.

The most senior boy in the Post struggles to inject some sanity into their activities

..he heard him whisper to Prahler like a loyal XO whose captain had just steered a little closer to the iceberg.

To no avail:

..most of the boys had begun to show up primarily from morbid curiosity, wondering if their next outing would involve something like a quick march on short rations around the wrong end of a firing range in the middle of the next typhoon

The dramatic tension builds and one of the expeditions goes very, very badly.

The problem with War Boys as something of a dark boys adventure story is that Petty Officer Prahler enters on page 169 and the dramatic climax is on page 260.  The book is 325 pages making for rather a longish epilog if you think of it as being mostly about the misadventure in the jungle.

And The Times

Although it is clear from early on that the action takes place during the Vietnam War, it is only towards the end that there are references to events that anchor the chronology more firmly in time.  And here I must admit that this is not just a book review but in a way part of the high school memoir series that I have been working on for a year.

The Explorer Post 360 boys are much closer to the Vietnam War in a sense of pure geography and their interaction with men or sometimes boys not much older than them going to and coming back from Vietnam, but their peculiar circumstances insulate them from the way Americans back home are experiencing Vietnam.

The events leading up to and the adventures with Petty Officer Prahler absorb Charles's freshman year in high school.  The first easily datable event happens after that.

The collision of the destroyer USS Frank E. Evans with the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne off Vietnam had the destroyer cut in half.  The bow went down within five minutes resulting in the death of 74 men,  That was on 3 June 1969.  It made a profound impression on people at Subic Bay where the remaining part of the ship would be towed.

I entirely missed that and have no contemporaneous memory of that.  That is also true of the Stonewall riot that occurred a few blocks from my high school that same month.

We follow Charles into his Sophomore year, where he notes a story in the back of Stars and Stripes about 100,000 people attending a war protest in Washington in November 1969.  He thought at first it was a misprint.  Not long after the story of the My Lai massacre broke.  The boys Charles knew all had a lot of sympathy for that company of Army grunts who probably had good reason for killing all the adults in the village and it's not like you could leave the babies to fend for themselves.

In my high school, the war and peace movements were cheek by jowl. Xavier High School in Manhattan was a Jesuit High School, but it was also organized as a Junior ROTC regiment.  We wore uniforms and marched and received classroom instruction in military science.  A classmate who had a career as an Army officer told me that the classroom instruction was of high quality.  I was a senior in 1969-1970 and one of the blocks of instruction was Counter-Insurgency taught by an officer who had recently been in Vietnam.

Ah but the peace movement.  One of the most prominent peace activists at the time was Father Daniel Berrigan, a New York Province Jesuit on the run from the FBI.  Ironically, more than a few Xavier graduates chose the FBI as their career.  The young Jesuit scholastics and priests became embarrassed by teenagers in pseudo Army uniforms saluting them in the street.

Other Issues

Charles has his first romance and the girl raises doubts about the war.  Asking him if he would go, he says he didn't think he would know how not to.

Charles also reflects a lot on history.  I wonder if some mature reflections of the author were kind of backdated into the young lad.  When his family visits the site of MacArthur's last headquarters in 1942, he reflects on the situation then.

Pampered, underequipped, and wholly unready to fight, that garrison scarcely gave the Japanese a good workout before dying piteously on a forced march to prison camps.  Still, Charles thought, they'd done what they could.  In that way, it seemed to him, they set a more realistic standard of bravery than any hero he could imagine, including the general who had a abandoned them with a fatuous phrase.  Charles wanted to see a real memorial here - a bronze statue of a cavalryman eating his horse, or a cook trying to set the sights on a Springfield rifle.  It didn't seem right to boil it all down to MacArthur and "I shall return". It then occurred to Charles that most soldiers never did return from the wars, he enjoyed reading about and re-creating with games and toy soldiers.

The Shadow Of Vietnam

One of my classmates recently staged a play about our high school during that period.  He called it The Institute - Coming of age during the Vietnam War.

Cautioning him to not let the strange setting he finds himself in warp him, one of his teachers makes a fateful prediction

You're not a sailor or a marine, Charles,  The war will end before it gets to you.

That was true for Charles and also for my bunch of cadets who kept marching and learned about platoon tactics and counter-insurgency and the psychology of leadership (the mission and the men - officers eat last).  We almost all went to college and miraculously the war ended before we graduated.  Only it wasn't true because the war still got to us - in attitudes toward government and institutions and other changes in the culture.  That might have to be another post, though.

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I met Michael Schaffner at the Grand Review in Harrisburg, PA, my last Civil War Sesquicentennial event.  Black troops were excluded from the historic Grand Review in Washington.  So the City of Harrisburg compensated for that.  Michael Schaffner portrays one of the white officers in Company B of the 54th Mass based in Washington DC.  There will be a guest post from him on this site soon.

Michael Schaffner (second from left) as Harrisburg Grand Review 2015

Peter J Reilly CPA blogs on taxes for forbes.com which is not nearly as lucrative as doing tax work, but a lot more lucrative than this blog.  This piece meets the minimum content requirement to be part of my Xavier High School series.


Update

Michael Schaffner told me that his father was in fact a combat corpsman in Korea,  It is worth noting that War Boys is dedicated to Captain L.J. Schaffner, MSC, USN

Left Face - 1970 - The Xavier Class Lamented By Antonin Scalia - Part VI

"Education in Jesuit schools seeks to transform how youth look at themselves and other human beings, at social systems and societal structures, at the global community of humankind and the whole of natural creation. If truly successful, Jesuit education results ultimately in a radical transformation not only of the way in which people habitually think and act, but of the very way in which they live in the world, men and women of competence, conscience and compassion, seeking the greater good in terms of what can be done out of a faith commitment with justice to enhance the quality of peoples' lives, particularly among God's poor, oppressed and neglected."

Ignation Pedagogy - A Practical Approach - Introduced by Vincent Duminuco SJ - Secretary of Education- Society of Jesus - Headmaster Xavier High Scholl in 1970

To motivate young people to be better citizens.

Current Army JROTC Mission Statement

The war divided every significant class, group, and category of American

American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

Know where you stand and stand there.

Attributed to Father Daniel Berrigan SJ as shortest commencement speech ever - reportedly delivered at Xavier High School.  Likely apocryphal.

A Metaphor

When I think about the struggle that went on at Xavier High School in the final years of it being in the words of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia "a thoroughly military academy", I am reminded of the meta-story behind the Repairman Jack novels by F Paul Wilson, who, as it happens, is a Xavier graduate.

Two vast forces are in a long struggle and our planet is a minor trivial prize.  Much of what we see in history is an illusion as there is a Secret History of people supporting either the Ally or the Adversary.  It is not the eternal struggle between good and evil.  Rather it is the very long struggle between really awful and not so bad.

It is a little grandiose, but it is just an analogy and the notion that Xavier was something of a prize to both the Army and the Jesuits is not without foundation.

In 1968, Xavier's military status had been upgraded to "Institute", which apparently was quite a big deal.  It was probably one of the most visible Junior ROTC programs in the country as its students rather than being walled off in the country commuted to school in uniform earning them the moniker "Subway Commandoes" and played a role in the City's pageantry most notably the St. Patrick's Day Parade. Unlike the optional programs in public schools, like the one in Detroit where Ben Carson advanced to cadet colonel, we wore our uniforms every day and the entire school was part of the Regiment.

The Jesuits

And our new Headmaster would be a leading light in Jesuit secondary education designating Xavier a  a pilot school.  Father Duminuco gave the school speeches about his educational theory referring to education in a dynamic society as opposed to a static society.

Many of the younger Jesuits and quite possibly the headmaster himself thought that the military was inconsistent with Jesuit values. My friend Jerry Snee, a year behind me, whose uncle was a Jesuit brother told me that New York Province Jesuits who were not caught up in the  Xavier tradtition did not have an appreciation for the way the uniforms and the Army integrated with the rest of the education.

As anti-war sentiment and action increased young Jesuits, some of whom were under observation by the FBI (Ironically a not uncommon career for Xavier graduates) were embarassed by teenagers in pseudo Army uniforms saluting them in the street.  The idea of military masses struck some as obscene.

The Army

On the Army side, there was Major Smullen, who was a suberb officer and one of the best teachers on the faculty.  He would go onto a distinguished career retiring as a full colonel along with his boss Colin Powell, helping Powell with his autobiography and then serving as his chief of staff at the State Department.  As Bill Smullen, he is the director of National Security Studies t Syracuse University and the author of several books including Ways and Means of Managing Up, which I reviewed here.

Bill wrote me that in response to the anti-military pressure in the school, his tour at Xavier was extended by a year.  He indicated that among some Jesuits there was substantial support for the program. He was a little reticent about the nature of the opposition. After a second tour in Vietnam, Major Smullen would become the public relations officer at West Point.  The Vietnam War speeded up advancement in the Army, but my impression is that Smullen was young for a major, a sign that the Army recognized his value then.  So keeping him on an extra year is a sign that somebody thought Xavier was important to the JROTC program if not the defense of the United States of America.

The Students Especially This Student

Of course whatever conflicts the grownups running Xavier were having were pretty invisible to us and I'm sure my reconstruction is far from perfect.  Nonetheless, the conflict in the larger culture was becoming front and center to anybody who was paying attention.  And our teachers were requiring us to pay attention.  Mr. Moroney, 2-G's English teacher,  required us to get the Sunday New York Times and go through the magazine, the literary section and the week in review.  And some of our required reading such as Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn had a subversive tinge to it.

I along with some others spent a lot of time at Barnes and Nobles - THE Barnes and Nobles, not some suburban mall emporium with a built in Starbucks but the original store.  And then there was The Strand.

Sometime in the early seventies, there started to be this thing about not whether you were against the Vietnam War, but when you were against it.  There was a Barney Miller episode where somebody tried to make an impression by saying they were against it in 1968.  Dietrich, the intellectual of the group, countered with 1955.  Anyway for me it was early 1968 or late 1967.

I'm sure it was not early 1967 because I remember being confused when Martin Luther King came out against the war.  I always wanted the forces of good to be aligned and remember thinking that Martin Luther King being against the Vietnam War, where we were clearly the good guys, was as confusing as Robert E Lee, chief bad guy in the Civil War, being considered a national hero.

All that reading was bound to create trouble though.  I subscribed to Avant Garde , which seems like it should have a high collectible value nearly fifty years later, but doesn't because nobody threw them away.  I note that in the first issue January 1968 there is an article about American helicopter pilots randomly gunning down Vietnamese civilians. I actually don't remember that article making a big impression on me.  There is also an article the Kama Sutra, with line drawings that are pretty erotic.  That would probably have caught my 16-year-old attention more.

I can't recapture the intensity of feeling that was going on, but the bottom line was pretty simple. It was not a just war, we were not the good guys.

And as happens throughout American history an unpopular war will bring to the fore pacifist traditions that have always been there. As Christian Appy wrote in American Reckoning

This was no longer Tom Dooley's America. More than at any moment in history, Americans had come to believe their nation as capable of evil as any other.  National identity was no longer figured as a kind sailor "bouncing a brown bare-botton baby on his knee." It was more likely to be represented as a napalm-dropping American jet.  American exceptionalism was on its deathbed.

I really don't remember hearing about Dorothy Day even while at Xavier.  Her Catholic Worker had been a factor for decades and its address is within a mile of Xavier, but it didn't enter into our consciousness as far as I knew (I would learn about her at Holy Cross thanks to David O'Brien, a historian).  We did hear about a Jesuit from the New York Province who was influenced by her.

Feeling A Draft?

I don't think it is easy for anybody to be 16,  Like Holden Caufield you start having to face that there are a lot of phony bastards in the world.  But to be 16 in 1968 at a Catholic military school a few blocks north of Greenwich Village was probably extra confusing and I don't think it was just me.

There was the sexual revolution and then there was the just plain Revolution.  I remember our teachers talking about our "military obligation". It is amazing how quickly that concept had entrenched itself after only a quarter century of "peace time" draft.  As I recall it was six years.  Four years active duty could be followed by two years inactive reserve or two years active duty by four years active reserve. National Guard meant six months active and even longer in active reserve with the prospect of being called out to suppress civil unrest.  I have not gone back and researched whether that was real.  I'm just giving you my understanding.

By the time we were seniors, college no longer seemed like an escape.  It really was just a deferral as we knew that there were college graduates who thought they were avoiding the war in 1966 now in Vietnam.  By the time I was a freshman in college, it seemed like the war would never end.  When asked whether I wanted to go to Washington for the big demonstration to end the war right now in 1971, I said that I would go next year without at all being ironic, but I am getting ahead here.

The existence of the draft forced conscientious young men to consider whether the war was justified. This was compounded for me by the sense that the very small taste of the military that I was getting made me think that I was ill-suited for it.  The impression I have gotten from talking to Xavier graduates who did serve was that I may have been a little off there.  Apparently the chicken shit aspects of military life were actually at a higher level at Xavier than in the real military.  If I made it through basic training, there were probably military jobs I would have done OK at. That is neither here nor there, though.

Being anti-war and anti-establishment satisfied my impulses to challenge authority without getting me in any trouble.  One of the ironies of the period was the popularity of the Thoreau quote

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Lots of people were marching to the same different drummer.

Which Side Are You On?

I can't pick the moment when my attitude shifted, but there was one event regardless of how much we noticed it then that was probably most indicative of the great divide.  On May 17, 1968 a group of nine activists broke into the draft board office in Catonsville, MD.  They took 378 draft files and set them of fire with home-made napalm.

The activists were all Catholics.  Among them was a Jesuit from the New York Province - Father Daniel Berrigan.  Father Berrigan's relationship with his superiors in the order was somewhat fractious, but they never threw him out and he never quit.

Through all of this, Dan was fully conscious of being a Jesuit. He was aware it gave him an edge, but an edge that came from the Society's spiritual tradition, especially in the Exercises, and from the responses and respect he got from so many of his brethren. He knew he could be a burden at the institutional level, but that was inevitable. The great moment of course was Pedro Arrupe 's visit to him in Danbury prison. "He knew what nuclear destruc­tion was like ... from Nagasaki ."

That was one of those little details I don't think I learned about until well after my time at Xavier.  Pedro Arupe elected 28th Superior General of the Society of Jesus in 1965 had been in the suburbs of Hiroshima when the atomic bomb fell.

I remember debating the destruction of draft records on the old gym "stairs" (kind of built-in concrete benches around the balcony). We played chess on my miniature magnetic set, a treasured gift from my brother, and talked about the issues of the day or the gossip of the school. One of the kids focused on it being a matter of destroying other peoples property.  My argument was that draft records only served a bad purpose.  I was opposed to the draft not only from an anit-war stand but also on kind of libertarian principles.  The other thing I mentioned was how I had read that draft records were used to persecute homosexuals.  That caused some insulting comments.

Loved That Jacket

I know that I was firmly on the anti-War side by late in my Sophomore year, because of one incident that really sticks in my mind.  One of my favorite articles of clothing in my entire life was my Xavier jacket.  I will never determine the mysterious circumstances under which it vanished some time in the 1990s.  It was pretty ragged by then but then but I kept wearing it somewhat to the chagrin of my family.  The jacket was not part of the uniform.  It was something that one wore when out and about in civilian clothes being true to your school.

The jacket was reversible.  One side was kind of silky light blue with Xavier on the back in maroon cursive.  I never wore that side out.  As I reflect on it, it would have been appropriate if I had belonged to a street gang called the Xaviers. The other side was maroon wool with XAVIER in block light blue letters on the back.  Wearing that jacket I felt like the iconic high school student ready to go have a malt with Archie and Veronica and Betty and Jughead.  Not somebody studying Greek and being taught infantry tactics.

Not being an athlete there would never be a varsity letter to have my mother sew on the jacket, but there was something. Practically over my heart there was sewed my special unit patch - Regimental Supply Corps.  Believe it or not but there is this thing called The Institute of Heraldry responsible for shit like this even for JROTC.  They didn't have the first team on this one.  On a field of gray, black and brown, there were crossed M-14s.  The M-14 was already obsolete and it never became venerable like the M-1 or the 1903 Springfield.  Regardless, I was unaccountably proud of my Supply Corps membership and I thought it was a nice touch.  Keep in mind that I was 16.

A Change In Speakers

I don't know why I was in Central Park that Saturday in late April.  I may have come specifically for that event or it may have been that I had been playing chess and was just following it up with one of my long hikes.  I remember a somewhat obnoxious veteran talking about how ridiculous it was in the Army and that they were required to watch The Gallant Men

One of my favorite show, as it happens, but that was neither here nor there. They hushed him up when the main speaker started.

Originally it was to have been Martin Luther King.  But he had been assassinated earlier in the month.  We had been sent home early due to concerns about civil unrest. Mayor Lindsay was credited with keeping things pretty well under control in New York.  Robert Kennedy's speech is also thought to have been helpful in keeping things calm in Indianapolis.

Things were not so good in many other cities.  According to wikipedia, dozens were killed and thousands injured.  Mayor Daley in Chicago to suppress looting issued a "shoot to kill" order to his PD. When asked about that Lindsay's response was "We don't shoot children in New York City".  Chicago PD would go on to earn some more glory in the upcoming summer.

The Ten Commandments

So the speech was given by Coretta Scott King and included  Martin Luther King's "Ten Commandments on Vietnam"

1.  Thou shalt not believe in a military victory.
2.  Thou shall not believe in a political victory.
3.  Thou shall not believe that they, the Vietnamese love us.
4.  Thou shall not believe that the Saigon government has the support of the people.
5.  Thou shall not believe that the majority of the South Vietnamese look upon the Vietcong as terrorists.
6.  Thou shalt not believe the figures of killed enemies or killed Americans.
7.  Thou shall not believe that the generals know best.
8.  Thou shalt not believe that the enemy's victory means communism.
9.  Thou shall not believe that the world supports the United States.
10. Thou shall not kill.

Yeah, I had to look a lot of this up, but I remember the tenth one like it was yesterday.

I became embarrassed by my patch - the crossed M-14s you know - and even folded my jacket to conceal it.

The Campaign

Senator Eugene McCarthy had challenged Johnson for the nomination in New Hampshire and it didn't take long till I was with him.  In spirit anyway. I think I may have gotten a bumper sticker not that we had a car or anything and definitely a button not that I could wear it on my uniform.  When Robert Kennedy jumped in, I did not switch.  Then there was George Wallace mucking things up with a third party. 1968 was the last time a third party won electoral votes.

On the morning of June 6th, my mother on waking me up told me somebody had been shot.  I knew about that Andy Warhol had just been shot by a radical feminist. But that wasn't it.  It was Robert Kennedy.

My mother made my summer job arrangements again so it was back to Estabrook and Company, but more of a real job rather than an office boy.  I joined the army of "runners" who were a necessary part of a securities system that was still paper based.  Although we were sometimes sent on special missions, the bulk of our duty was to deliver paper stock certificates in the morning and pick up paper checks in the afternoon.  I remember being impressed that NYSE broke the daily volume record set in 1968 - 16 milllion shares.  The back offices were buried in work.

I debated what was going on at the Democratic convention in Chicago with the other  "runners".  More riots as the "Establishment" selected Hubert Humphrey.  Of course, there was generally not a lot of actual running going on.  Most of the guys were pretty old, maybe even older than I am now.  I was designated a "fast man" for the rare occasions when something had to be delivered quickly.

One of the younger guys was a Black Panther, named Fred.  I wish I could recover my conversations with him which were very earnest, but I can't.  I had also landed a  year round every other Saturday job helping Tony Genaro on his bread truck.  On top of that none of the other runners were quite as money hungry as I, so I ended up with a sweet overtime gig.  After the highly trained professional who knew how to run a card punch machine had typed up the days trading, a box of cards had to be carried a couple of blocks to be fed into a reader that transmitted to the home office in Boston. So I got paid to just hang around listening to the clerks trying to get things in balance and reading.  Oh how the money was flowing.

At any rate, it seemed like everybody was pro-war or anti-war. And I was far from the only anti-war cadet that put on the uniform to start Junior year at the still thoroughly military academy on 16th street.

For 1966, the year we first donned uniforms the top pop song for the year had been Ballad of the Green Berets

In September 1968 as we started our third year many of us now corporals, People Got To Be Free was at the top of the charts.

I see now that this will not be the final installment.  There might even be two more.

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Peter J Reilly CPA has been neglecting his tax blog of late.

We Didn't Start The Fire - 1970-The Xavier Class Lamented By Antonin Scalia - Part IV

My memoir of the final days of Xavier High School as, in the words of Antonin Scalia, "a thoroughly military academy" has expanded a bit thanks to one of my classmates making a contribution.  In terms of the narrative it fits in here.  We are in late 1967, early 1968.  Dave Posteraro, now an intellectual property attorney, was in the Classics Honors program, so we had all the same classes, except for modern language.  That naturally included Military Science mostly with Sergeant Daley that year.

Dave expands here on a an incident that I only brushed on in the last post.  I think it illustrates the way that growing anit-war sentiment was seeping into the school.
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I have no specific memory of the incident you recount concerning me but when I read what you had written I knew instinctively that it had to be true. How I specifically reacted to the Sergeant’s suggestion that an incendiary weapon would be good for “destroying a thatched hut” is lost to me. I would be interested, and I hope more amused than embarrassed, if you can share any detail. The truth of it, however, I don’t doubt.

Francine du Plexis Gray (didn’t see that coming, did you?) was born in Poland in 1930, raised in Paris, and with her mother escaped the Nazis and emigrated to the United States in 1940.  She married the painter Cleve Gray and worked as an editor and staff writer at the New Yorker under Robert Gottleib.  She was also my father’s patient.

In 1967, the same time Ms. Gray was working at the New Yorker, another young staff writer at that magazine published a series of articles about the attack on, and destruction of, a village in Vietnam by American forces. These articles were eventually published by Knopf as “The Village of Ben Suc”.  Ms. Gray had given a copy of the book to my father and I vividly remember when he brought it home. It was a small orange covered book, which he gave to me as I was the most voracious reader of his three sons (and son of Xavier). My father enjoyed talking politics and I can imagine that he and his patient had some conversation about Vietnam at the time. My Dad was (gasp) a Republican but to his credit he was a Javits Republican and initially supported the war.  He eventually became a strong opponent and when, several years later, it was my turn to be up for the draft, told me that if I wanted to go to Canada he would support me.  My number was 254 so we never had to make that decision.


Sometime in 1967, more than a year before the My Lai massacre, I had read about the atrocities of American aggression in Vietnam in “The Village of Ben Suc” and the book had shaped my thoughts on that the ethics (and efficacy) of incendiary bombs and thatched huts.


So a Nazi refugee with a periodontal condition gave a book to her dentist who in turn gave it to his son, a high school student at a military prep(ish) school in Manhattan, who was outraged by what he read and reacted (in some lost in memory way) to the suggestion by his military instructor about burning a thatched hut.

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So Dave has added another book to my Kindle backlog.  The destruction of Ben Suc was part of Operation Cedar Falls 

The aim of this massive search and destroy operation was to eradicate the so-called "Iron Triangle", an area located in close proximity to Saigon which had become a major stronghold of the communist National Liberation Front (NLF) or Viet Cong. The operation began on January 8, 1967, and ended on January 28, 1967.

The type of strategy that it represents is probably as old as war - denying the enemy his base of support.  Sherman practiced it in Georgia and Sheridan in the Shenandoah.  And they went on to use it against the Plains Indians.  When Sheridan visited with Germans during the Franco- Prussian war, he advised his host that in order to solve the problem of the Franc-tieurs, the Prussian troops needed to leave the people with only their eyes to cry with. Of course those of us with a classics background, will probably think of Cicero and "Carthago delenda est".

In case you didn't get the reference in the title here it is.

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 Peter J Reilly who hopes to become the Tom Sawyer of blogging greatly appreciates contributions.

Time For Sergeants - 1970 - The Xavier Class Lamented By Antonin Scalia- Part II -

The mission of the infantry is to close with the enemy by means of fire and maneuver to defeat or capture him, or to repel his assault by fire, close combat, and counterattack.

The Sergeants were the most colorful members of the Xavier High School faculty and this is where I will introduce them, but please bear with me as I also continue the narrative.

Where We Left Off

I left off my account of the Xavier Regiment in the late sixties toward the end of my Freshman year.  As I indicated that colorful as our role as subway commandos might have been, the military experience was pretty superficial.  I had my first intimations of issues about American involvement in Vietnam as Martin Luther King came out against the war, throwing confusion into a 15 year old mind that wanted the forces of good to be well aligned.

Not Super Mil

It was the spring of 1967 soon to become the Summer of Love.  Maintaining proper military appearance had become a tiresome chore that I knew I would never be good at.  A brief attempt at cross country ruled out athletics. I was in the Chess club starting to go to tournaments in one of the most competitive parts of the country without benefit of much in the way of instruction. Ultimately we would form a Catholic High School Chess League to have some hope of winning.  "Hi, my name is Ira.  I go to Abraham Lincoln High School" was usually a bad sign at the tournament table.

Budding Anti-Establishment

More significant to my character was a growing sense of irreverence and disrespect for authority.  Probably a natural part of being fifteen, but also being fed by the times.  And here we have a bit of a literary diversion.

Not Your Classic Prep School

One of the peculiarities of literature about teenagers is that it seems to disproportionately involve teenage boys who attend prep schools.  I think there are two reasons for this.  One is that is that novelist is not a typical career goal for working class kids, but more a choice for those who have been part of the elite for three or more generations. The other is that dramatically the prep school constitutes a sealed world with all the characters subject to the same environment.

At any rate Xavier was a prep school in the sense that we were almost all college bound a large number of us to the best Catholic colleges in the country, a few to the Ivy league, a couple to the service academics and the less academically gifted to the infamous AFC (Any Fucking College). And with the uniforms and the history had some of the other attributes of the classic prep school attended by the likes of Holden Caufield or featured in A Separate Peace.

The big difference though was that we did not live there, but commuted, many of us from a considerable distance.  As we arrived home in our uniforms we were likely sui generis. There was another Xavier student a few houses down from me.  As I noted Dave Gallagher had been my inspiration to go to Xavier, but I can think of no others in Fairview and but three in Cliffside, only one of whom Eddie Kulesza was in my year.  Kids who were closer in, like the ones who lived in Stuyvesant Town, the Irish ghetto, might have some overlap between their school and neighborhood friends, but not the likes of me.

Anti-Establishment

So we did not exist inside a prep school bubble but were home with our families and hanging with our neighborhood friends and that influence remained quite strong Freshman year as I was less integrated into Xavier than I would become.

And the seeds of anti-Establishment thinking were scattered on the fertile ground of the boy who had been developing problems with authority for a while.  I would get together with my grammar school buddies Bobby Einhorn and Denny Kondrat in Einhorn's cellar to listen to songs that they could not play on the radio like those of the Mothers of Invention.  My brother had acquainted me with songs of Irish rebellion, something unfamiliar to many of my associates and there were the folk songs.

1967 was the Summer of Love and Einhorn and Denny and I were planning to go to San Francisco the following summer.  Well, planning is probably too strong a word. The most memorable moment of that summer though was a sign of things to come.  My mother arranged for me to work at Estabrook & Company, a brokerage house that would ultimately be absorbed by Dean Witter.  My father spent his whole career there as a "senior order clerk" and there was just a bit of paternalism in the firm.

Standing in the open space with a view of New York harbor at 80 Pine Street among the desks where the reps sat, I heard one of them cry out in shock.  The Dow Jones news feed was telling us that tanks were on the streets in Newark - the beginning of six days of riots that would leave over 20 dead. Summer of Love, my ass.

The most subversive influence came by way of Einhorn.  Thanks to him I began listening to Jean Shepherd, of Christmas Story fame, who at the time was on the radio at night with monologues that you can get a taste of, but just a taste, from the voice-over in Christmas Story.  Shepherd developed a fairly fanatical devotion among slightly nerdy adolescents who would follow his odd commands.  The most well known was writing "Flick Lives !" on any available surface.  If caught or captured rather than name, rank and serial number the Flick scribbler was to say "You wouldn't understand".

A New Beginning

Good grades and the advice of my homeroom and (Latin) teacher Mr. Lux SJ (i.e. a scholastic) landed me in the classics honors program.  Homeroom 2-G.  No science,  Greek, Latin and German, Mr. Hands SJ taught us Greek marching us through Xenophon's Anabasis an interesting story for kids wearing uniforms - an army unable to accomplish its mission that must fight its way home.

One of the principles of Catholic secondary education in that era was that just about anybody could teach Latin or history and since you needed your coaches to teach something that might as well be it.  That principle did not apply to 2-G when it came to Latin.  We got John Scott (to distinguish from his brother Jim an English teacher) who was chair of the classics department.  We did get a coach for American history though and having a history teacher who was less interested in history than I was had me a bit stirred up.  We went through Turner's frontier theory and he asked if Turner had missed anything and brought up that he did not give enough consideration to the Indians (hey that was the term then). It was a little akin to the neo-abolitionism I stumbled on in the last post.

We also got top of the line when it came to English - Mr. Moroney a young guy but not one of the transients getting some other career underway.  He would teach at Xavier for something like 40 years, but we knew him when.  He was in his own way a subversive influence.  Catcher In The Rye and Huckleberry Finn.  And he required us to get the Sunday New York Times read the literary section the magazine and Russel Baker.  My father had introduced me to Art Buchwald.  Satire is another subversive force.

And that was the year that I formed lifetime friendships. Mike Oleske also in 2-G picked up on my Shepherd obsession - probably saw me writing Flick Lives! on a blackboard and introduced me to his fellow band member Tom Burns.  Later Tom Burns would add John Sabini to our Unclique. We had a lot of adventures outside the school and by the time we were juniors would also drink a bit too much together.

Back To The Military

Having Dave Gallagher two years ahead of me clued me into a few things.  One of the things he told me about was a special unit, that Freshmen were not eligible for that his friend Mike Lawson was in.  The Regimental Supply Corps.  The special units which made up the Third Battalion generally required something special.  The band required musical talent. The color guard and the precision drill team the X-Squad required superior military appearance.  The X-Squad further required a degree of insanity in my mind as people tossed around M-1s with fixed bayonets.

I don't want you to think that just anybody could get into the Regimental Supply Corps.  First of all, you had to have heard about it. It was not really all that visible.  And you had to pass a test.  And I passed.  I stood there in the arms room with outstretched arms while Dave's friend, Mike Lawson, now the commander of the Supply Corps (which also meant he was a Regimental Staff Officer - S-4) laid ten M-1s on my arms.  An unloaded M-1 weighs about 10 pounds.

I don't know what else attracted me to it, but the big incentive was that the Supply Corps did not march.  On review and parade days we showed up early and stayed late loading and unloading a truck on loan from the Army with band instruments and drill team rifles. We took turns staffing the arms room issuing drill weapons to the X-Squad and doing an inventory of everything even though most things never left the arms room.  Tom and Mike mercilessly mocked the Supply Corps, but I defended it fiercely.

The Supply Corps had zero overlap with the rest of my Xavier life.  I did not run into other Supply Corps guys in AP and honors classes.  They did not play chess.  The military model was something of a cross between Sgt Bilko and Hogan's Heroes.  We got a patch (crossed M14s, a rather odd choice, a weapon just gone obsolete, but never to be venerable) and could wear a Kelly Green cord on our left shoulders.  One of the few sartorial choices you had at Xavier was wearing a special unit cord on your left shoulder or an honor cord on your right shoulder (You could not wear both).  It was very rare for a member of the Supply Corps to be faced with that dilemma.  I always chose my unit over my academic standing.

We had two domains that were ideal for adolescents - windowless rooms with only one way out or in.  The arms room at the end of the long corridor from the 16th St entrance, which was something of a boy wonder room.  It is just a slight exaggeration to say that it could have outfitted the heavy weapons platoon of a WW II rife company a mortar, a bazooka, lots of M-1s, some M-1 carbines, BARs and M1911 .45s which were still the issue sidearm of the military,

The supply room where all the Army issue uniforms were.  Less interesting stuff but more room for goofing around.  The real joy of being part of the Supply Corps was its leadership, which finally brings us to one of the sergeants.

The Bodhisattva In The Basement

The supply room was the domain of Sergeant First Class McGowan.  As a matter of fact one of the nicknames for the Supply Corps was McGowan's Maggots. Unlike the other sergeants he did not teach and did not wear a uniform.  He exerted a calm benevolent influence tolerating a bit of mischief but never letting things get out of hand.  I wish I had could give you anecdotes but it was something ineffable.  We loved the guy.  Being in the Supply Corps was like having an extra uncle thanks to Sergeant McGowan.

You'll Shoot Your Foot Off

The main thing that made for more of a military school beginning as Sophomores was Military Science, a regular subject incorporated in our academic program.  As Sophomores and Juniors that is where we got to know the rest of the sergeants. For whatever it is worth one of my classmates, who was a career Army officer, wrote here that the instruction was of very high quality.  That was my own impression also without any real life experience to back it up.  As Xavier teachers the Sergeants were above average, which on reflection is not that surprising, given that the Army, whatever else it might be, is something of a learning organization and that it is likely that a focus in their careers had been teaching young men not much older than us.

Unlike other subjects where there would be one instructor for the year - Mr. Hands SJ for Greek, Mr. Moroney for English, etc - Military Science was divided into "blocks of instruction.  Now I imagine in Air Force JROTC they could spend lots of time on aerospace science and in Navy JROTC you could have lots on navigation and why ships float.  But this was Army with an infantry focus so after some tame Boy Scout stuff on uniforms and first aid and map reading, there was some hardcore stuff, although it is important to note that with one exception it was all classroom instruction.

Sophomore year we mostly had Staff Sergeant Daley.  There were a couple of memorable moments. One was a story he told us about the dangers of blank ammunition, with which you could actually shoot yourself in the foot.  That particular lecture about the various types of rifle ammunition was particularly rich in Sergeant Daleyisms.  Another special type of round is that one that is used when a grenade launcher is attached to the rifle. If regular ammo is used by mistake the result is "Grenadier here, grenadier there, grenadier all over the place".  Then the most disturbing one was when he speculated that a possible use for incendiary rounds might be a thatched hut in which you suspect there might be enemy soldiers.  This sent Dave Posteraro, something of a sensitive kid over the top at the thought of burning down people's homes on suspicion.

We also had Sergeant Daley for the block of instruction on marksmanship in the basement rifle range with .22s fired at paper targets from the prone position (just like Boy Scouts). Sergeant Daley looked through a scope and corrected our aim.  We learned from him that in the Army, "cunt hair" is a unit of measure.

The Black Irish

So we have had McGowan and Daley, so you might think that McMillen and Carney would then allow for an Irish quarter, but not so much.  Sergeant First Class McMillen and Sergeant Major Carney were African-American.  When I think of a soldierly soldier, I think of SGM Carney, who had a pretty long career at Xavier, heading up the program once it became optional and did not rate an active duty officer anymore.  He was the one who made the "Black Irish" joke.

I could get into a rather complicated discussion of race, class and ethnicity, but I will save that for another post. Having a couple of impressive black men in authority over us could not have been such a bad thing.

There was this sometimes funny interaction between these kids who were being pushed in a liberal arts direction and the Sergeants, One class had a running gag on Sergeant McMilllen, somehow having convinced him that there was an extra kid in the class that never showed up.  One time when there was an exam in the Weapons block of instruction, somebody put the answers on the board thinly disguised as mathematical formulae.

Sergeant McMillen was from the deep South and we sometimes had trouble understanding him.  One time he was telling us a story about somebody who was a phony putting on a "facade".  He pronounced it "fak-a-dee" and it took us forever to figure out what he meant.

Any temptation to mock Sergeant McMillen was gone from me after one of our reviews.  As was the fate of the Supply Corps, I was involved in "policing up".  Sergeant McMillen had an errand for me of some sort and he said "You see that truck at 75 meters".  I looked at the truck and back at Sergeant McMillen with the Combat Infantryman's badge on his chest and something told me that if I were capable of pacing it off that truck would be within a couple of percentage points of 75 meters. There are at least two kinds of education.

Was That The Bell?

Master Sergeant Dower did not make quite as much an impression and more serves as an illustration of how mean teenagers can be.  Sergeant Dower I had heard was a highly expert marksman.  I think it was from him that we learned that the transition from the 1903 Springfield to the M-1 was not a total gain.  At any rate, all that time on the rifle range had not been good for his hearing.  What created the opportunity for mischief was that the clock in the military science class room was not on the central system but had a nob on the bottom.

When we came into the classroom, one of the kids would push the clock ahead a bit.  Then a few minutes before class was to end, somebody would signal to Sergeant Dower that the bell had rung. He would look at the clock and dismiss us.  It was pretty pointless as an extra few minutes of milling in the corridor was of no great moment, but you had to admire the evil genius behind it.

The Movies

As part of the block of instruction on squad tactics, we got to watch two movies - The Squad in Attack and The Squad in Defense.  Things were a bit nip and tuck in the Squad in Attack with one of the fire team leaders getting wounded but the generic enemy soldiers, vaguely German, were handily defeated.  The Squad in Defense was even more interesting.  You could tell that the enemy had seen "The Squad in Attack" as one fire team laid down covering fire as the other advanced in leap frog fashion, but when it came to what we had waiting for them - Holy Shit!.  If they had half the stuff blowing up and booby traps and what not that we had ready for them, the Squad in Attack would have not had had such a happy ending.

The Coming Storm

Through Sophomore and Junior year, Military Science did not seem to have much to do with what was happening in the world.  More like watching Combat only with more detail and a little hands on as we learned how to strip down the even then already obsolete M-1.

There was one incident in late 1967, that none of us would know anything about for a very long time, but it perhaps perfectly symbolizes the final chapter in the perfect correspondence between the Jesuits and the military. The "man for others" that the Jesuits hoped for and the officer who put the "mission and the men" over his own personal interest.

In 1967, for the first time, over 10,000 American s would die in Vietnam.  Among them was one Donald Cook Class of 1952.  Medal of Honor citations are marvelous pieces of prose summing up the essence of "above and beyond".  More often than not the events described take place over the course of hours, not so that of Donald Cook.

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while interned as a Prisoner of War by the Viet Cong in the Republic of Vietnam during the period 31 December 1964 to 8 December 1967. Despite the fact that by so doing he would bring about harsher treatment for himself, Colonel (then Captain) Cook established himself as the senior prisoner, even though in actuality he was not. Repeatedly assuming more than his share of responsibility for their health, Colonel Cook willingly and unselfishly put the interests of his comrades before that of his own well-being and, eventually, his life. Giving more needy men his medicine and drug allowance while constantly nursing them, he risked infection from contagious diseases while in a rapidly deteriorating state of health. This unselfish and exemplary conduct, coupled with his refusal to stray even the slightest from the Code of Conduct, earned him the deepest respect from not only his fellow prisoners, but his captors as well. Rather than negotiate for his own release or better treatment, he steadfastly frustrated attempts by the Viet Cong to break his indomitable spirit and passed this same resolve on to the men whose well-being he so closely associated himself. Knowing his refusals would prevent his release prior to the end of the war, and also knowing his chances for prolonged survival would be small in the event of continued refusal, he chose nevertheless to adhere to a Code of Conduct far above that which could be expected. His personal valor and exceptional spirit of loyalty in the face of almost certain death reflected the highest credit upon Colonel Cook, the Marine Corps, and the United States Naval Service.

Scalia, of course, mentioned Cook in his speech to the Regiment and was his contemporary at Xavier.  In the movie, which I hope will be made some day, one of the scenes will be Thanksgiving Day 1951, with the future Marine out on the field giving his all in the game with Fordham Prep while the future Supreme Court justice helps play a rousing version of the school song.  I'm thinking that Sergeant Major Carney, played by Morgan Freeman of course, would make an ideal narrator.

There are some that will view what was coming as a moral decline from the past, but I think there was a lot of idealism going on in what was coming.  1968 would be worse than 1967 on the ground in Vietnam and the antiwar movement would move from the fringe to the center as all the Sons of Xavier kept marching onto what remained to be seen,

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Peter J Reilly CPA hopes to finish this story soon as it is pulling him away from tax blogging, but it will take as long as it takes.

Memorial Day Reading - Donald Cook - Xavier Graduate With Greatest Military Distinction

So I've got two books I want to recommend for Memorial Day. I know it is probably too late for you to read them for this Memorial Day, but you can order them.  One of the books is one that I hunted down and the other is one that I picked up, kind of at random at a museum. We'll start with the one I hunted down

The First Marine Captured In Vietnam - A Biography of Donald G. Cook by Donald Price was hunted down by me because of a question that somebody asked me.  I had written about the three Medal of Honor recipients associated with the College of The Holy Cross (which is a pretty respectable number for a small college) and someone asked me but what about our high school.  Almost ten percent of my high school graduating class, Xavier High School in New York City had gone to Holy Cross, which was pretty much par for the course back in the day, when a straight sixteen years of Catholic education was not that uncommon.

Xavier High School was founded in 1847 and again back in the day had mandatory participation in Junior ROTC (It is optional now).  Commuting to high school in Manhattan in our uniforms, we were dubbed the "subway commandos".  At any rate, my answer was that there probably weren't any, since we would have known about them.  But what with the internet and all, I could look it up and it turned out that I was wrong.

Here is the citation for Donald Cook

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while interned as a Prisoner of War by the Viet Cong in the Republic of Vietnam during the period 31 December 1964 to 8 December 1967. Despite the fact that by so doing he would bring about harsher treatment for himself, Colonel (then Captain) Cook established himself as the senior prisoner, even though in actuality he was not. Repeatedly assuming more than his share of responsibility for their health, Colonel Cook willingly and unselfishly put the interests of his comrades before that of his own well-being and, eventually, his life. Giving more needy men his medicine and drug allowance while constantly nursing them, he risked infection from contagious diseases while in a rapidly deteriorating state of health. This unselfish and exemplary conduct, coupled with his refusal to stray even the slightest from the Code of Conduct, earned him the deepest respect from not only his fellow prisoners, but his captors as well. Rather than negotiate for his own release or better treatment, he steadfastly frustrated attempts by the Viet Cong to break his indomitable spirit and passed this same resolve on to the men whose well-being he so closely associated himself. Knowing his refusals would prevent his release prior to the end of the war, and also knowing his chances for prolonged survival would be small in the event of continued refusal, he chose nevertheless to adhere to a Code of Conduct far above that which could be expected. His personal valor and exceptional spirit of loyalty in the face of almost certain death reflected the highest credit upon Colonel Cook, the Marine Corps, and the United States Naval Service.

The medal was presented to his surviving spouse in 1980.  The school now has a display in his honor which I saw when I was back for my 45th reunion a few weeks ago.  It was not there in 1995 which was the last reunion I had made.

There was something eerie about realizing that while we were freshmen in 1966 learning to march and salute and shine our brass, have a straight gig line and shine those shoes (All things I sucked at by the way), Donald Cook was being held prisoner by the Viet Cong.  The military science faculty consisted  mostly of retired sergeants, but there was an active duty officer and an active duty sergeant both just back from Vietnam.

Price's biography is pretty complete, taking Cook from his early background and following the story through how things worked out of his family and the various places that he is memorialized.  There is also a lot of background on how things were for prisoners of the Viet Cong, a story probably less told than that of those, mostly pilots, held in North Vietnam.

The central part of the story is extremely grim and difficult to get through while also being inspiring as Cook encourages other prisoners and leads by example.  Price's main focus is on Cook as a Marine Corps officers under intensely trying circumstances.

The behaviour of the captors is neither demonized nor whitewashed,  Douglas Ramsey, a State Department employee, held captive by the VC for seven years got to know Cook pretty well and his reports were significant in the award of Cook's MOH.  Speaking about their captors after release, he said:

They ranged from sanity to something out of Marquis de Sade, I ran into some real jewels - some people I would invite today to my home for a drink; others I would invite behind a woodshed, and only one of us would return.

There was a good bit about Don Cook's experience at Xavier, but not quite as much as I had hoped.  The one faculty member that is mentioned as most inspiring is the moderately famous football coach Leo Paquin, who was still there in the late sixties when I was at Xavier. Colonel Price did think the Jesuit education played an important role in forming his character.

In retrospect, Don Cook’s citation echoes Xavier High School alma mater’s Jesuit creed: “Men and women for others

The stories illustrating Cook's character began to get to a point that just a bit of skepticism was creeping into me.  If this was a novel, you would think that the fact that Cook was 33 when he died was just going over the top.  (You have to have a certain education to get that reference, but to give you a hint, the novel would change his first name to Jesse or something like that).

There was one detail that only a Xavier graduate can fully appreciate,  Parallel to the academic division of the students into four classes divided into homerooms, the school was organized as a regiment meaning you were a member of a company in a battalion or a special unit and had a rank and position. Keeping your nose clean and getting decent grades would make you a staff sergeant and a squad leader when you were a Junior.

At the beginning  of Senior year all the higher positions were filled.  About a third of the class would become officers including the Colonel, which was a very a big deal.and a third would have the senior NCO positions like company first sergeants.

The other third, well, those were the kids who counted jug (the Jesuit term for detention) as an extra-curricular activity or struggled mightily with their grades.  In my class I heard there was a privates club.  Graduating from Xavier as a private was quite an achievement.  You had to walk a fine line to not get thrown out and not qualify for promotion even once.

Sorry for the TMI there, but here is the detail I found really intriguing.  As Colonel Price explains Cook had a really stellar career in the Marine Corps up to his capture.  And of course nothing tops the Medal of Honor, so Colonel Cook has the most distinguished real military record of any Xavier graduate. In a novel, he would have been the Colonel of the Class of 1952 or if you wanted to point to his future as a hard case prisoner, the novelist would make him part of the privates club.  The reality is that he graduated as Sergeant First Class which is about as mediocre as it is possible to be.

I could not resist asking the author about that odd detail.  He responded:

Yes SFC was not much at that time. Cook had a brash irreverent ability to be dismissive of authority. This helped him as a POW but not as a cadet at Xavier. He only respected the Ultimate Authority. I did not put this in his bio because this personality trait implied that he was a religious fanatic. He was not. He did not fall all over the altar.

Too many projects, too little time, so I have to hope that someone else will someday write a more expansive version of the adventures of Don Cook in his high school days,  The other intriguing detail in the bio that could use more expansion is this one.

He enjoyed life and had a girlfriend in Brooklyn but their relationship was not serious, possibly because her father was Tough Tony Anastasia, brother of Cosa Nostra chief Albert Anastasia

A novelist would really go to town with that.  I can't help but think that a Brooklyn kid in a tough prison would remember something that he heard from Tough Tony about how a prisoner is supposed to keep his mouth shut.

At any rate, this is a really great biography of a really great man.  Just the thing for Memorial Day, but if you are tied up at the barbecue you can read it later along with the book I will tell you about in my next post.

Peter J Reilly CPA  hopes to be the first tax blogger to give up his day job.  His failure to absorb the lessons of neatness and bearing imparted to him at Xavier High School would haunt him in his public accounting career where he was rated poorly by his partners in the category of executive presence.