Wham!
Wham!
Stop, children, what's that sound?
Steven Stills, "For What It's Worth"
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the
wind.
Bob Dylan, "Blowing in the
Wind"
Rebelliousness was in the air. The "free speech" movement had invaded the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Stickers reading QUESTION AUTHORITY! were appearing on hotrod bumpers. Voluntary military enlistments were at low ebb. "Nuts to you!" "Who says so?" "Why should I?" "Get off my back!" "What right do you have to order me around?" "Kiss off!" The word was out: don't trust anyone over thirty. The old boys had their chance and wasted it. If we can't do much, we can at least stop them.
Ever since he could remember, authority had presented a problem to Michael. At the age of four he resented being told what to do by the Hofmeisters. He was sure these strangers were the wrong people to direct his life, but he never did find the right people. His career as a Boy Scout foundered when an ex-Marine scoutmaster took over the troop. Michael couldn't take the discipline. Without a father,
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and with a mother working early and late and barely keeping her family together, he did everything he thought he could get away with. As he saw it, the problem was not right and wrong, but sheer, raw power — over him.
Once he dropped out of high school, insubordination became a way of life. If he was told to do something, he would likely do the opposite. Paradoxically, he considered joining the Army "to prove himself," as he liked to think; actually it was to impress Anne. Ruth, who was painfully aware of his lack of discipline, suggested that before he enlisted he might try the National Guard and see whether military life appealed to him. It seemed like a sound idea, even if it did come from his mother. In January 1962 Michael, being seventeen years of age, signed with the Guard and was shortly whisked off to camp.
Military life provided Michael with a new stage for his act and a new audience for his jokes. He taxed his imagination thinking up ways to show he was in charge of himself, such as missing meetings, ignoring the salute, and mouthing off at Guard officers. Once he showed up at morning inspection with a toothbrush in his mouth. At that time six months of regular Army active duty were required of all Guardsmen, and Michael's superiors were happy to cut his orders to Fort Ord, near Monterey, California. All through boot training and later, when the troops engaged in simulated combat exercises, he continued his relentless and frantic clowning.
During war games at Fort Ord, Michael was named one of the "aggressors" who was supposed to try to capture a defending company camped on a hill. The defenders were waiting in foxholes, and the aggressors were ordered to crawl across a couple of miles of woods and open fields. After dark Michael stopped crawling and ran at a crouch. Flares were sent up, a searchlight was turned on, and it only made it easier for him; for now he could see where
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everybody was. He sneaked past the holes and approached the command post, which was down in a hole and built up with sandbags. Michael crawled on his belly to the entrance, holding his M-1 rifle, and spotted a guard outside the door. Near the front was an observation slit, and he planned to jam his bayonet through it and yell, "You are my prisoners!" Unfortunately he stuck his bayonet into a sandbag and roused the guard. But he got his weapon out before they captured him and announced, "You are my prisoners!" He had singlehandedly captured the colonel, the major, and everyone in the command post. Thus ended the war game.
During some National Guard exercises in the state of Washington he had a similar experience. This time he and some other troops were dropped off in a wood and were supposed to make their way back. Michael, however, climbed in the back of one of the trucks that had deployed them and rode back into camp. Once inside, he jumped out and sneaked through the brush until he found two foxholes and captured them both. He threw in a pinecone and said, "Hey, you guys, you're dead!" After that he walked over and X'd them with chalk in the prescribed manner. It turned out he had captured the commanders and the game was over. To cap it, during duty at Yakima firing range he created a stir by calling headquarters and advising the master sergeant in a muffled voice that "Senator Kennedy and a team of top brass" were on their way to inspect the camp.
Basic training was followed by assignment to an Army administration course. Before reporting for classes each day, the troops were mustered for parade and morning exercises. With a fellow conspirator Michael devised the practice of dropping from the second-floor window of the barracks to the ground and wandering into the PX for coffee and doughnuts. Later they would appear at roll call.
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This unauthorized walkout was discovered by a regular Army sergeant who had been a World War II hero. As punishment he ordered Michael and his partner to clean two unused barracks that were being readied for an incoming group of recruits. They accepted their reprimand with a show of humility; but when they examined the barracks and learned the magnitude of their task, they went into conference.
Instead of setting to work with pails and mobs, they put on arm bands that made them look like platoon sergeants and sauntered down to the main reception center where the new recruits were arriving. "All right," said Michael, "who's in charge here?"
He was sure he would find some egoistic, macho-type high school kid who would be eager to respond. And of course, one of them did speak up: "What is it, Sarge?"
"I need a detail of twenty men with mops and buckets." They were quickly rounded up. Michael and his buddy then ordered the men into formation and paraded this hilarious Tom Sawyer brigade, with mops at the shoulder, up the main street of Fort Ord, past the PX, the bowling alley, and the military headquarters to the waiting barracks. The cleaning was accomplished in short order; and Michael then advised the men that because of the good deed they had performed for their country, they could take off the rest of the day and do as they wished — go bowling or get drunk at the PX. The decorated sergeant in due course inspected the barracks and found them serviceable, but never did learn who cleaned them.
In all his clashes with Army authority, the question of Michael's patriotism never came up. The Vietnam issue did not trouble him; he hardly knew what it was. Michael was never mad at anybody in particular; the bitterness that made him a rebel without a cause went much deeper. Behind the antics and the heavy drinking was a young
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man with a broken heart who kept saying to himself, "This world stinks. Life is baloney. Nothing turns out right. What am I doing here and why?"
Ozzie had moved out, Anne was lost forever, David was dead — now what? Depressed by such melancholy thoughts, Michael continued to cover up with comical and erratic behavior as he careened downhill. His active duty with the Army completed, he was sent home, and a year later he received a "general discharge with honorable conditions." That made him once again eligible for the draft, and within days he was summoned to appear before a Portland draft board.
In order to emphasize how unfit he was for further military service, Michael deliberately filled out the draft board's questionnaire with the wrong answers. Did he have dizzy spells? Yes. Upset stomach? Yes. Mental illness? Yes. A lieutenant in the medical corps called him in.
"What is all this?"
"I just don't think I'm fit to be a soldier. I've got the wrong attitude." Michael then described his antics in the National Guard and his hostility toward authority. The lieutenant began asking questions, and David's death was brought up. The lieutenant listened, and decided Michael should be given a year to get over the emotional stress caused by David's accidental death, after which he would again be called up.
Kent meanwhile had begun working in a Portland steel foundry, and Michael, now a free man, applied and was hired. He spent the next twelve months swinging sledge-hammers and hoisting one-hundred-pound weights for Esco Steel. For a nineteen-year-old just out of uniform and in superb condition, it was great stuff. The crash of metal, the giant cranes, the pouring of white-hot-steel, the pounding of drop forges, the hard hats, the ugly, grimy windows, the very gutsiness of the place appealed to him.
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These were not toy soldiers chanting "Onward Christian Soldiers" as they paraded past the post chapel; there were steelworkers, men with rough tongues and bulging muscles, the very foundation of America's work force. The pay was good and Michael reveled in the hard work. He learned to drink whiskey, worked the pinball machines, and lived on cheeseburgers and chili.
The first job to which Michael was assigned was knocking the slag off the chain links when they came out of the furnace. After he had built up some muscle they moved him to what was called the "dog house." Here he would pick up the heavy weights that were sitting on the molds where they poured the steel. After the steel was poured, he moved the mold swiftly to the next one and kept going. He lasted six months — longer than anyone his age, he says, except his brother. He was then transferred to the scrapyard, directing the man in the overhead crane. He would mix up train wheels and different kinds of scrap metal and put them in buckets. Then the crane with its giant magnet would lift them to the pouring place.
Michael was good at the work and enjoyed it. It gave him self-esteem and identity with the men, most of whom were black. It was nothing for each of them who worked in that heat to drink a six-pack of beer at a sitting and smoke a pack of cigarettes and tell a lot of dirty stories — that was the lifestyle. Michael could play a good game of pool and drink any of them under the table. Physically he was stronger than he had ever been in his life.
And yet it kept coming back, the bitterness and frustration, tensing his body each time he swung the hammer. Where is God? Wham! Where is my dad? Wham! Where is Anne? Wham! Where is David? Wham!
Later, the snowballing of disappointment would drive him to commit one of the major mistakes of his life. He began dating Jennifer, a girl he had known at Madison
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High School. She was sweet, she loved him, and her family consented, reluctantly, to the match. But Michael knew he was treading on perilous ground because he did not love her as he should. One night in early 1964, on impulse, he proposed marriage to her and she accepted. The wedding date was set, but as it approached he became sickeningly aware that he had made a mistake. He appeared at the ceremony late — and intoxicated. Two weeks later her moved out of their apartment, leaving Jennifer desolate. Her family did everything they could to salvage the marriage, but it proved hopeless. Efforts to secure an annulment failed, and six weeks later they were divorced.
"She was a very nice girl," Michael would later say. "I hurt her badly, and I hurt her family. It was totally my fault and I offer no excuse. But then, nothing I did at that time turned out right. Life had molded me into a walking calamity."
