The unconscious Texan was carried off on a stretcher, bleeding profusely, not to be seen again. Such was the U.S. Army in late 1945, adjusting to peacetime duty.
The racial prejudice shown Takeshita, and to all Japanese-Americans, was very common at that time. In 1942, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt interned about 110,000 Japanese-Americans living on or near the west coast, to prison-like camps in the desert, to thwart possible “treachery” on their part. This was one of the worst decisions of Roosevelt’s presidency. In 1988, President Reagan signed a congressionally authorized apology to all Japanese-Americans, and over $1.5 billion in reparations was paid to those so unjustly confined.
We had a platoon sergeant, named Hatridge, also from Texas, who embodied everything we’d ever heard about pugnacious noncommissioned officers. The slightest infraction of his rules caused Hatridge to inflict severe punishment on the miscreant. One freezing November night I was made to dig a goldfish pond just outside the company orderly room, where I could see Hatridge sitting contentedly, chewing tobacco by a hot stove, where he could keep an eye on me.
Digging the pond was a miserable process. The soil was half frozen, and full of rocks. I was sweating profusely, but my hands were cold as I had no gloves. Hatridge released me about midnight, but told me the next morning that the pond was “ugly,” so I had to fill it in. I’ve forgotten what I had done to have this punishment descend upon me, but I developed a certain respect for the sergeant, and felt proud when he told us, as we graduated from basic training, that we had all done well.
Writing about Sergeant Hatridge reminds me of another redoubtable sergeant encountered by my uncle, Renick Gregg, in 1916 along the Mexican border. The National Guard had been activated to pursue the Mexican insurgent leader, Pancho Villa, who in March 1916 had led a raid into Columbus, New Mexico, in which 17 U.S. citizens were killed. My uncle’s platoon had a sergeant known, more or less affectionately, as “Sergeant Whiskey.” My uncle, a tall man, stood in the rear row of his platoon when it lined up for roll call.
One day a new soldier joined the platoon and introduced himself as Ruby L. Joiner. A large and muscular man, Joiner stood next to my uncle and among other things said that he had played fullback at the University of Georgia. Sergeant Whiskey duly arrived to call the roll, and when he barked out “Ruby Joiner,” to the surprise of everyone, Joiner responded “Here” in a high falsetto.
This went on for several days until Joiner’s first Saturday in the platoon. On that day, Sergeant Whiskey appeared to be particularly badly hung over, and Joiner’s falsetto reply infuriated him. “Step out here, you son of a bitch, I want to see what you look like,” he snarled. Joiner silently parted the ranks in front of him, stepped forward, flattened Sergeant with a mighty uppercut, and returned to his place.
The sergeant arose and dismissed the platoon. The next day Joiner was promoted to corporal.
In early 2010, I was in southwestern Georgia, and told this story to several residents of the town of West Point. One of the men in my audience nodded and said, “With a name like Ruby, you had to be pretty tough, particularly in those days.” Apparently, Sergeant Whiskey had the same opinion.
At the end of our nine-week basic training, we were taken to an upstairs room where we could choose what we wanted to do as members of the Signal Corps. Various posters were on the wall, describing what life as a telephone repairman, a truck driver, a pole climber, a Teletype operator, or a cryptanalyst might involve.
I chose the final option, not because I wanted to be a cryptanalyst particularly, but because I didn’t want to take up any of the other offered options. In fact, I was not at all sure what a cryptanalyst did. The Signal Corps poster was not at all helpful to that end. It featured a big question mark.
For training, I was sent to Vint Hill Farms Station near Warrenton, Virginia. I found the ancient history of cryptography and secret writing to be quite fascinating. What became shockingly clear to me were the tremendous military advantages that had come to the United States and its British allies as a result of being able to read, from time to time, both German and Japanese secret communications during World War II.
We were drilled on the absolute necessity of not letting any foreign country have the slightest inkling that we were reading any other foreign country’s messages. Our instructors gave us a horror story from just after World War II, when technicians from a European country that made advanced cryptographic machines were brought to the United Staes and given a briefing on our use of their machines. Shortly thereafter, we lost our ability to “read several countries’ mail.” Both the value of intelligence, and the need to keep it secret became ingrained in my thinking.
After training, I was assigned to the Army Security Agency’s headquarters at Arlington Hall, just outside Washington. There I encountered two or three middle-aged women who had made wartime breakthroughs in our ability to read Japanese ciphers. They were treated reverentially by their co-workers, who knew how many thousands of American lives had been saved by their brilliant work.
Etymology was more interesting to me than cryptography, at which I was not particularly adept. The patterns and frequency of letters continue to interest me, particularly as I think back to how words came to have their meanings. And so I was discharged as a sergeant (T/4) in April l947 with no thought of ever returning to the world of codes and ciphers.
Incidentally, the life of our most famous traitor Benedict Arnold has always fascinated me. The best book I have read about him is Willard Randall’s Benedict Arnold, Patriot and Traitor. And it strikes me that the two opposing words “patriot” and “traitor,” which define Arnold’s life, have all the same letters except one; patriot has a “P” where traitor has an “R.” Two words so close in structure are diametrically different in meaning. And yet in life, the dividing line between the two words can become very faint, as Arnold’s life clearly shows.
My Army experience, short as it was, taught me a lot. At the intellectual level came the value and importance of intelligence, and the need to keep it secret. At the emotional and physical levels came the impact of intolerant parochialism and racial prejudice. Having a front tooth knocked out in retaliation for hitting a man with a snowball was a shattering experience (pun intended) that totally surprised me. And the prejudice shown to Takeshita as an individual was exemplified at the national level by the internment of so many Japanese-Americans by President Roosevelt.
The Army had not been racially integrated; in basic training we had no blacks in our company. We did have two Blackfeet Indians, with whom I played basketball. They were treated with aloofness, but were not shunned, as their athletic abilities won them respect.
In Washington, D.C., there was wonderful jazz, mostly in black parts of town. I was often the only white person in the audience, but I was always welcomed. On the bandstands, in small clubs, there were no racial barriers, and I was struck by the power of the music made by black and white men, sitting side by side. (Remember, this was 1946.)
These experiences demonstrated to me how prejudice is fueled by ignorance, but also how hostility fades and friendship can emerge through talk and a shared experience.
So, I’ve always had a powerful, good feeling about my army experience. I survived it, learned from it, and the fact that I had had tuberculosis no longer defined my early life. I felt that I had “caught up” with my contemporaries.
3
Fraternities and Philosophy at Williams
In September 1947, after a summer in California teaching horseback riding at a YMCA camp in the high Sierras, I entered Williams College a few months shy of my twentieth birthday. I was one of a relatively few men in my class who’d had military service.
Fraternities had a stranglehold on student life at Williams, which was then all male and 98 percent white. Before we had attended a single class, we were “rushed” by the sixteen or so fraternities on campus. About 90 percent of the class was pledged to a fraternity at the end of this process. The other 10 percent had suffered a bitter rejection, often