by JJ Harrigan
I felt somewhat embarrassed when the nursing home woman said, “Thank you for your service,” as though I had earned a Purple Heart or had been named “Soldier of the Month” several times in a row. I never aspired to become soldier of the month. My main ambition was to get discharged, and most of my two years in the Army flowed together in a blur.
Except for that Thanksgiving dinner in the quiet years before Vietnam exploded.
At the time, I served as a highspeed radio operator for the 97th Signal Battalion in Stuttgart, Germany. Our role was to set up communications networks for the 7th Army whenever it conducted a field exercise. Although we possessed teletype machines and fax capabilities, we still depended on high speed radio operators who could send and receive the code at thirty words per minute. And that was the skill that started my Thanksgiving Day troubles.
You see, Morse Code can be very poetic.
Our radio transmitters were kept in shacks on the beds of two-and-a-half ton trucks that we parked in the company motor pool. This made for a very mobile operation. If the 7th Army HQ called a military alert at three in the morning, we could have our transmitters on the road by dawn, on our way to setting up the communications network for whatever war games the generals had devised. Once we reached our destination, our first task was to erect a 40-foot-high directional antenna, which, naturally, we called our 40-foot erection.
But most of the time the transmitters just sat out in the motor pool, and we radio operators just sat out there with them whiling away our boring afternoons. In the peacetime Army, you spend a lot of time whiling away boring afternoons.
It was in one of those moments that the muse of Morse Code poetry flowed into my fingers on that telegraph key. The rhythms were overpowering. I turned on the transmitter and typed out my sonnet for everyone within a radius of twenty or thirty miles (maybe even further if there was a skip wave.) To show you how poetic all of this was, let me capitalize for you the sound that gets the emphasis.
Dih dih DAH dih dih dih DAH
Dah dih DAH dih Dah di DAH
Dah dih DAH dah DAH dah dah dih dih DAH
Beautiful alliteration and a captivating rhythm in that phrase! It does not carry over very well into English, however, so there’s no point in translating it for you. Suffice it to say that the first two letters are F U.
Unfortunately, this gem was overheard by someone who had no sense of poetic beauty. And I knew I was in trouble a few days later when I got called to the company commander’s office. The captain threatened to demote me by a rank. But this is a meaningless threat when the only downward movement from private first class was to private. Instead, he gave me what the Army quaintly calls an Article 15. I later learned that this punitive action put me in the company of numerous celebrities I came to admire, including Willie Nelson and Steve McQueen.
At the time, however, Article 15 meant two weeks of extra guard duty, non-stop KP, and grubby tasks such as cleaning out smelly grease traps. Midway through, I brought my imaginary TS card to the chaplain, and he imaginatively punched it.
By Thanksgiving, however, this was all behind me. I walked with my friends to the mess hall where the Army did a good job of making my first Thanksgiving away from home tolerable. They did their best with turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. Just seeing that spread began to lift me out of my bout of self-pity.
Until the general showed up.
If there’s one thing an enlisted man resents, it is being looked down on or being patronized by Army officers. No one was more resented than the generals. We had all heard the stories of General Patton slapping one soldier, then going through a hospital ward whispering praise into the ears of wounded soldiers who might have been on their death beds.
As luck would have it, the general stopped by my table, and I did something that makes me cringe to this day. Imagine the general, who probably had memories of being in battle during WWII. And on the day he met me, he was trying to be magnanimous to his current troops by giving them a great Thanksgiving dinner. Those troops would no doubt be grateful. Instead, he came across me, who had never seen a day of combat and whose most purposeful activity was marking off days on the calendar until his discharge.
Of course, I did spring to my feet the instant he stopped by our table. Everyone at the table did. That’s what you do when a general stops by.
“As you were, boys,” he said, motioning for us to sit down.
“Boys?” No nineteen-year-old wants to be called a boy.
“How are you, son?” he said to me. And I was just as annoyed by his patronizing attitude as I was by being called son.
“I’m okay.” I mumbled, looking down at my plate.
This fatherly general didn’t even remind me that I was supposed to end my response with “sir.” He just followed up with another patronizing question.
“Is your dinner good, son?”
“There’s plenty of it.” This time I remembered to add, “sir.” I stressed the word “sir,” as enlisted people do to snub an officer, but do it in a way that the officer cannot retaliate.
My friends at the table began edging their chairs away from me.
“But is it good?” he persisted.
“Not as good as home.”
By now, my friends had all slid down to the other end of the table, and I was left alone to face this guy with a star on his shoulder. His warm smile disappeared.
I try to imagine today what was going through his mind at the time. He probably thought of those soldiers in that Christmas during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, freezing their asses off being bombarded by German artillery, and very short of all supplies, even food. No turkey dinner for them.
But at the time, my brain wasn’t yet developed enough to the point of considering the other guy’s point of view. Compounding it, this wasn’t just a guy. This was a general. If he’d been General Patton, he no doubt would have slapped me.
Instead, he shook his head and walked away, probably in search of another soldier who would be astute enough to express a little appreciation. Fortunately for me, my company commander was not at the general’s side. I shudder to think how he would have reacted to my passive aggression, coming as it did on the heels of the Article 15 he’d given me for experimenting with Morse Code poetry.
The guy who was there, however, was even worse. The sergeant who was the chief cook. He, not surprisingly, was incensed at a lowly PFC badmouthing his efforts to the commanding general. He got my name from the tag on my shirt, told me I would be hearing from him, and huffed off after the general.
With the general and the sergeant out of sight, my friends began moving back toward me again. They looked dumbfounded as they insisted that I was out of my mind.
Fortunately, the angry cook got preempted. At three o’clock the next morning, the entire battalion was called out for an unannounced field exercise that the 7th Army had concocted, oblivious to the likelihood that half the troops under their command would be hungover the morning after Thanksgiving. At least that’s the way it was in my squad. Somehow, two bottles of Jim Beam emerged from the bottom of a footlocker. And that was all we needed to drown our melancholy.
The purpose of an unannounced field exercise, no doubt, is training for real-life, unexpected emergencies. And I’m certain that the sneaky general knew about it the day before when he’d pestered us during our Thanksgiving Dinner and called us boys. He must have known that for us, this particular exercise was very unexpected.
What he couldn’t have known was how unprepared the captain would be. This was back in the day when vehicles used a lightweight oil during winter and a heavyweight oil during summer. We, however, had not yet received a shipment of the winter oil, and our trucks still had their summer oil. That should not have posed a problem for November, but a cold snap hit us that night, dropping temperatures well below freezing. When we stumbled in the dark to our trucks in the motor pool, half of them failed to start.
The captain was irate. He marched along the trucks all lined up in a row and used a piece of chalk to place a big X on the hood of each one whose engine had failed to start. He screamed at us. “If this had been an atomic attack, you guys I’ve X’d out would be dead now.”
TS, I thought. Take your card to the chaplain so he can punch it. I should have been more sympathetic, since I wasn’t the guy whose career was being destroyed for having neglected to get winter-weight oil to the motor pool. But it’s hard to be sympathetic to a guy who had just given you an Article 15 for exercising your free speech right to conduct Morse Code poetry.
The truck engines eventually started, and we headed out for our field exercise. We radio operators got our 40-foot erections up and working. The cook was too busy setting up his field kitchen to get even with me for bad-mouthing his Thanksgiving dinner. The captain was too occupied with a million and one details to seek out someone to blame for the motor oil fiasco that had probably sabotaged his career. And the general was doing whatever it was that generals do.
The nice thing about field exercises is that you are needed. You might not be soldier of the month, but the whole exercise would fizzle without we radio operators erecting our forty-foot antennae and passing messages back and forth between the company commander and the battalion commanders he reported to. Too bad the general didn’t pick that moment, when I was doing something useful, to stop by rather than the moment of the Thanksgiving dinner.
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JJ Harrigan never did become Soldier of the Month. However, his experiences as soldier, U.S. Foreign Service Officer, and university professor of Political Science provided background for the historical thrillers he writes today. Goodbye Bobby (2024) portrays a grieving widower who puts himself and his nine-year-old daughter at risk to assist an RFK attempt to end the War in Vietnam. Goodbye Cuba (2023) takes you back to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. He scribbles his tales of intrigue from his home on the banks of the St. Croix River, near St. Paul Minnesota, where he lives happily with his wife Sandy.
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