ROTC - 1958

 

They don’t do this sort of thing anymore.  It was a different age back then.  Picture yourself in the middle of the movie “Animal House” with John Belushi and that will set the scene.  I lived the reality that they documented in the film in 1978, twenty years later.

When I started out as a freshman, one of the things we had to take was ROTC.  This stands for Reserve Officer’s Training Corps and goes back to the days after the Civil War when the Union figured it needed to maintain a ready officer corps; you could always draft or buy the cannon fodder.  The best place to get recruits for the Army Reserves was the colleges, so the Federal government set up Land Grants in exchange for running an ROTC program.  The University of Arizona was a Land Grant College, with buildings including the ROTC building right in the center of the campus still standing, since 1871.  The Army gave us uniforms and toy guns, but they did not allow us to take them home with us.  We met twice a week for practice marching and attended a one-hour class each week on US Military history – men only.

I was good at this marching thing since I had been doing Cub and Boy Scout marching in parades for years.  I quickly became, first a squad leader, then a platoon leader.  This was not because of any innate talent, but because I liked it and no one else was willing to do these things, like march the other guys around.  I caught the eye of the leader of a platoon of “slicked out” cadets who were our UofA contingent of Pershing’s Rifles.  This group was a non-fraternal organization in the ROTC Corps nation-wide; every Land Grant campus had an elite Pershing’s Rifles Company.

This guy, Marty Link, recruited me into his group.  He was going to become Company Commander next year (his 4^th) and he could see me as one of his platoon leaders, as he was.  He dangled that we would be the ones carrying the flags out pre-game, at all the football games, would march in all sorts of parades, and would get the attention of co-eds who “put out” for uniforms.  That dangle proved not to be true in my case.  Anyway, I fell, hook, line, and sinker and switched into the Pershing’s Rifles group the second semester of my Freshman year. 

I was good at all this sort of stuff, not just the marching, but also organizing and motivating the troops.  My real-life Marty Link was just like the “Animal House” character, Doug Niedermeyer, the drill cadet Captain who gets beaned by a golf ball and rides a horse around the parade grounds.  And, yes, Marty rode a horse when he went megalomaniac but that would be getting ahead of my story. 

So I learned to spit shine my shoes to a reflective sheen; my uniform was almost as inspection ready as Nard’s date pants, my brass sparkled; and I pretty well ran the Pershing’s Rifles’ office, there in the ROTC building, all by the end of my Freshman year.  Second year, I was like the Exec Officer, although by the rules, you couldn’t be a cadet officer unless you had signed on for the 3^rd and 4^th year of ROTC. 

The first two years were mandatory, and all males had to participate at the UofA.  You could apply for continuation beyond the first two years and unless you were crippled, they would let you continue and those few idiots that did were to become the cadet officers that marched the companies around the drill field.  The ratio at that time was about 1 in 100 that signed on to do their 3^rd and 4^th year. 

When I came back in 1957 for my first crack at my sophomore year, I was the key guy in Marty Link’s conquest of the Military world.  We went through the year, accumulating a series of wonderful successes.

I had become the “First Sergeant” of the company, not only leading the marching tricks we could do, but designing them.  Tossing our rifles up in the air while marching around and catching them at the right moment, just before they hit the ground; spinning the rifles and then tossing them to each other in breathe-taking displays of practice and control, sort of like a male equivalent of a baton twirler.  We volunteered for and won prizes at parade after parade and finally wound up at the end of the year in the Cinco de Mayo parade in Nogales.

This scenario repeats in my life … …

After the performance, I talked the marchers into celebrating in a Nogales Cantina.  Not that it took convincing.  I was 21 and anyway, we were in Mexico: age limit 00.  We had no other obligations, this was the time to celebrate, get drunk; there was a bus to take us back at the right time. 

We all know about men who have "the voice."  These men are leaders when it comes to getting troops to storm the next hill, facing machine gun fire.  For whatever reason, I have that voice.

Marty went crazy on me.  “You are violating the chain of command!”  “End this party at once and everybody back in the bus.” 

We all got back in the bus; we had no other way to get back home.  But when we did, Marty Link wanted to court martial me.  Ideally, in his mind, he would have me strung up on the flag pole at “Old Main,” the old ROTC building.

He went immediately to the Commandant of the ROTC Corps and proposed that they throw me out of the Corps for my egregious behavior. 

When I went in to meet the ROTC Lieutenant Colonel, I quickly realized that this man was in the unenviable position of choosing between Joe Lifer and Joe Brains.  He felt caught between the two.  His military background told him that I was insubordinate and had not followed orders.  But he had seen this before and he was not impressed with the situation as a test case. 

“Peter,” he said “Do you want to go on to continue ROTC training?

“No,” I said, “I’m done with all this horse-shit.’

“OK,” says he, “then just let the ensuing crap pass you by."  And I did.

This was the best life-lesson I ever got in college.  When the Army Finance Corps dumped me, I sucked it up and developed a computer career.  When IBM  dumped me, I went into gig work and made twice the money.  And when I was flunking at the end of my Sophomore year at college, I took a deep breath and next year, switched majors to math, then aced the next three years.

Back to Marty.  In late May, end of the school term, I was summarily, defrocked of my rank.  We only had two weeks of school left.  It was a formal affair.  Marty asked permission from the Colonel to slice my epaulets off with his saber, but the Colonel had properly denied this request.

Nonetheless, He stripped me of my rank in a formal ceremony.  But it was one of those occasions where the troops gave me a hoop-hoop-hooray as it proceeded - they considered the punishment beyond the pale.