Zionism

I am an American, a Jew, and a Zionist. America is my country. I was born in America, have lived here all my life, and have no desire to live anywhere else. I was also born into the Jewish religion and feel comfortable in it. I went into detail about my religious beliefs in an older post, How and Why I believe in God.
Zionism for me is a concern for my relatives and co-religionists who live in Israel, not for shrines of any kind. Although a yearning for a return to Israel has existed in Jewish literature for 2000 years, modern Zionism began with Theodore Herzl in the late 19th Century as an antidote to anti-semitism which still exists in some parts of the world today. Herzl believed that Jews needed a country somewhere where they could go if necessary to escape persecution. The one place that could stimulate enthusiasm on the part of Jews was the ancestral Hebrew homeland between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea in what was then the Ottoman Empire and after World War I the British Mandate of Palestine.
Israel has now existed as a nation state for 60 years (3 generations) and the Jewish community there goes back long before that. That in itself is a justification for Israel's existence. The people there have no other nationality. It's their home.
It was the Arab League that invaded the country in 1948, not the Israelis who were living there already. From 1948 to 1967, the Arabs could have created a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but they didn't. Jordan and Egypt simply occupied and annexed the territories. It was the surrounding Arab countries more than Israel that created the Palestinians' present predicament. Israel offered the Palestinian Arabs a nation which included most of what they wanted under the Clinton/Barak plan, but Yasser Arafat rejected it and started the Intifada.
We can only hope that the present negotiations between Israel and the West Bank will succeed, and that it will demonstrate to the Gaza people the benefits of peace.

Chapter 9. The Cannibal Ambulance

Transportation was always a thing, juggling the vehicles and getting enough gasoline. For example, once when one Eighth Army Commanding General rotated back to the States, he ordered himself a huge parade in his honor. They used up so much gasoline that half our vehicles were grounded for a month to make up the deficit. But even in normal times getting a jeep was a problem. I don't mean for leisure use. I mean for work. When I would go to Seoul on a weekend off, I would take an army bus. Some guys made a big deal about being officers with their jeeps and drivers, but actually it was a pain trying to snag a grouchy private to spend his weekend off driving you around. Anyway, you could be more independent and inconspicuous on the bus.
But the bus didn't go to all the places where I had to go for work. I would gladly have bought a bicycle in the Vill, but officers couldn't ride bicycles in uniform. I guess it wouldn't have looked nice. So between sharing the jeep, mooching rides, catching the bus, and just using feet, I managed to get around most of the time.
One day Sergeant Duffy thought he found the answer to our problem when he drove up in front of the office in an ambulance. It was not quite army green, lacked markings of any kind, and leaned slightly to the left. It was beautiful in its simplicity, al least it seemed so in our eyes.
"Its nice. We can sure use it. But where'd you get it."
"From Squeaky, Sir."
"Squeaky?"
"Squeaky in the motor pool. He sold it to me for twenty dollars and thirty five cents."
"Sold it? Doesn't it belong to the Army?"
"Not really. You see Squeaky made it by cannibalizing parts from vehicles that were earmarked for the scrap heap anyway. It took him three months, but he's real smart, that Squeaky is. He can put anything together. If you give him the parts, I'll bet he could make an atomic bomb."
"Why twenty dollars and thirty five cents?"
"That was all I had in my pocket."
"Isn't that kind of cheap?"
"Well, old Squeaky doesn't have any use for it. He just likes to cannibalize things and put them together, and it didn't cost him anything."
"Something has to be wrong. This is too good to be true. There has to be something wrong."
I was just getting used to the idea of regular transportation, when along came Major Fratelli, the Division Surgeon, and we presented the ambulance to him, all bubbling with enthusiasm. Fratelli stared at it, churned the idea in his head, and said, "We have to get rid of it."
"Why? We need it for work, not for fun.
"But it's not authorized. Officially, it doesn't exist."
"So?"
"You can't have something that doesn't officially exist. That's the way it is in the Army. You have to get rid of it."
"It's not fair. Last Fall, Eighth Army burned up a month of our fuel supply just make a parade for the General. But Duffy here buys a vehicle with his own money which his friend made with his own ingenuity out of parts which were going to be thrown away anyway, and that's no good because it doesn't fit into the master plan. My grandfather came to America poor, went into the junk business and made a living out of it. That was the beginning of my family in America, my origins. That's free enterprise. What's the matter with the Army? Is it Communist?"
"It may not be fair or practical or laissez-faire, but if you guys don't get rid of that thing, we're going to get in trouble. So get rid of it. I don't care how or where. Just get rid of it."
Sergeant Duffy spent the next few days looking all over for a customer. Squeaky wouldn't take it back, let alone refund the twenty dollars and thirty five cents. Every sergeant in the Seventh Infantry Division was approached, but not one would touch the thing with a ten foot pole. I tried the Division Chaplain. Chaplains are notorious scroungers. They sometimes can get away with stuff that the rest of us can't because they're the only ones who can claim to listen to a higher authority than army manuals or whatever it is that constitutes military dos and don'ts. But even the holy men couldn't figure out what to do with it.
All seemed hopeless until Saturday night when Duffy, five days short of payday, took his last thirty five cents to the Vill to get drunk and forget about the "damn Ambulance." He passed through the gate, across the highway, over the railroad tracks, and down into the Vill, that is the honky tonk end of town near the gate that catered to the G.I.s. At the main street he turned right. All the Black bars were to the right, and the White ones were to the left. Even here there was segregation. Duffy wandered into his favorite haunt, Freddy's Detroit Bar.
"I only got thirty five cents. What you got that'll get me drunk for thirty five cents?"
"Oh, thirty five cents. That not lot a money. You not even change money to Korean. Cost me extra to change scrip. But I have for you something. Old woman in Vill make. Whole bottle cost thirty three cents, scrip. You still have two cents."
The stuff looked murky and tasted like it was intended for an internal combustion engine rather than a human stomach, but it did the job so that one third of the way down the bottle, Duffy saw the world differently.
At that point, appeared one Suzy, princess of Freddy's Detroit Bar. At least, that's what they used to call her. Her father had been a hero, a giant Black soldier who was disintegrated by an artillery shell on some ridge during the Korean War shortly after Suzy's conception. Her mother was a young Korean business girl who was strangled in a room behind the Detroit Bar by a disgruntled American customer, leaving Suzy an orphan to be raised by Freddy (his real name was Kim Cho Lee) and his business girls. She knew no other life, no other place. She was condemned to this life by her inheritance and her environment. She had no other opportunity. Suzy, at fourteen years of age, was already a big girl, almost six feet tall, the image of her father, with only her mother's Korean eyes and straight black hair. She wore a tight sweater that accentuated her abundant muscles and fat as well as two huge pendulous breasts. Her micro-miniskirt exposed thighs that could have supported the Parthenon. Who's to say what is beautiful? To Duffy she was gorgeous, especially after a few snorts of Freddy's brew.
"Duffy, you buy me drink. We go hootchie. Do something."
"Suzy baby, you're welcome to share my bottle."
"You crazy? I no drink that shit! You no like me. You want poison me."
"But baby, I spent all my money. I only got two pennies left 'til next pay day."
"Duffy baby, you nice guy. But I no work for nothing. Five dollar all night. Two dollar one time. You no have two dollar, goodbye Suzy."
"But Suzy baby, I need you and I need you now, 'cause I'm really low. I got this problem and I'm really low."
"Duffy baby, I do free just for fun, I no eat. You got two dollar, we do something. No two dollar, we no do something."
"How about we do it tonight, and I pay you when I get my money on pay day."
"How I know you pay me?"
"I can give you collateral."
"What you mean?"
"I have an ambulance. That's what I spent my money on. I'll give you the ambulance to hold until pay day."
"You crazy? What I do with ambulance? I no doctor."
Freddy behind the bar was listening to this entire conversation, absorbing it, processing it in his head, and finally breaking in with, "Suzy, Sergeant Duffy good customer. I trust him. Sergeant, you bring ambulance now and take back when you get money. But, you do something now, pay later, like loan from bank. You pay interest. You do Suzy all night, ten dollar. You pay five dollar interest, so you pay fifteen dollar."
"Freddy, you're a crook."
"Freddy just good business man."
Duffy agreed. What else could he do? He ran back to the post, and drove the ambulance out the gate in a rush, claiming that he had an emergency patient that needed to get to the MASH right away, so that the guard neglected to note the lack of markings on the vehicle. He proceeded over to the Detroit Bar where the deal was concluded. By now it was almost the midnight curfew, but Duffy didn't go back to the post until long after the gate opened the next day. He spent the night with Suzy, enjoying the fruits of his bargain.
Duffy returned on pay day, fifteen dollars in hand.
"Freddy, you crook. Here's my money. Give me my wheels."
"What?"
"My wheels! The ambulance, you dumb slope!"
"Oh, ambulance. No have ambulance. Slicky boy come in night. Take ambulance. Sergeant, you keep fifteen dollar. My loss."
Duffy grabbed Freddy by the collar. What do you mean your loss, you honky slope crook? I paid twenty dollars and thirty five cents for that ambulance, and it's worth a lot more than that!"
"No be so mad, Sergeant. Freddy can fix problem. You say true, I owe you ambulance or twenty dollar and thirty five cent scrip. You owe me fifteen dollars won. So, I must count."
Freddy wrote in the air as though he were computing some complex mathematical formula. He appeared to make a mistake, slurping with his mouth, erasing in the air, and then writing again. Finally, the calculations were completed. "Twenty dollar, thirty five cent ambulance cost, take away fifteen dollar Suzy cost, leave five dollar, thirty five cent scrip. Cost me four dollar change fifteen dollar scrip to won. I give you one dollar, thirty five cent scrip. Then we O.K."
"Hell no, you cheat! It don't cost any four dollars to change fifteen dollars!"
"Police very careful now. Very dangerous to change money now. Freddy can go jail."
"By this time, Duffy was getting tired of the haggling, and two tough looking associates of Freddy sitting at a table in the corner were starting to appear edgey. So Duffy took the dollar and thirty five cents and left.
Some time later a freshly painted white ambulance appeared in Tongduchon. The rumor that floated around was that Freddy worked out a deal with a local clinic, the ambulance in exchange for two hundred dollars worth of V.D. checks on his girls.

Obama

I favor Barack Obama over all the candidates in either party. Although I think of myself as an Independant, I do tilt toward the Democrats. So I will confine my remarks to the Democratic primaries. I don't care for Edwards. He is the one Democrat who could turn me into a Republican. As for health care, he seems to be on a crusade against the people whom he perceives to be the bad guys. He has a simplistic plan for a complex problem. As for Hilary Clinton, she and Obama are not so different on policy. Maybe that's why they went after each other at yesterday's debate. What else was there to talk about? I think it really comes down to who would do a better job. Clinton claims that she is ready to start on day one because she hung around the White House in the past, and Obama is a relative newcomer. History does not support that. Richard Nixon and both George Bushes had ties to the White House before becoming president. John Kennedy and Bill Clinton were newcomers. Hilary Clinton might be OK, but I would like my president to be more than just OK. Obama is charismatic, interesting, and exciting. He listens to people who have an opposing point of view and can work with them. As for the war on terror, he wants to bring our troops home from Iraq, but has made it clear that he is ready to strike at anyone who tries to do harm to the American people. As for health care, his plan is flexible enough to really work. He has the ability to bring people together to solve problems which he has demonstrated during his time in the Senate.

Twins

I am enthusiastically happy to announce that my daughter-in-law gave birth to beautiful, healthy twins, a boy and a girl. So I now have 4 grandchildren. How blessed can one be.

Chapter 8: The Assembly

As a preventive medicine officer, my job was, as you might guess, the prevention of disease, and the biggest disease problem among the troops was venereal disease, especially gonorrhea. It was an epidemic of monstrous proportions. The numbers were astronomical. They ran something like four hundred per cent, which means that, on the average, each soldier would have a bout of gonorrhea four times during his year in Korea. Considering that many of us never had gonorrhea at all and many cases were never reported, there were others who had it even more frequently. In fact there were some who had a continuous string of gonorrhea episodes, so that the times in between when they were free of the disease were few and short. There was also a lot of syphilis, but the numbers were not so huge. Also there was what we then called non-specific urethritis or NSU, lots of it. The numbers there would also have been astronomical if we would have counted, but we didn't. NSU gave a kind of watery discharge. We didn't know what caused it, and we didn't have a very good treatment for it. It wasn't an official venereal disease although we all knew it was, but if the government and the public had tuned in to it, they would have been on our tails. Then there would more gathering of meaningless data for silly reports, and life would be more difficult. So, we kept quiet and did the best we could with it.
You see, venereal disease was a social problem as well as a medical problem. The public back home was disturbed by reports of a venereal disease epidemic among our soldiers in the Far East. What disturbs the public, disturbs our elected government officials, and in turn disturbs the Army. But an army is a community in which the vast majority of people are young testosterone filled men. At least that's the way it was then and there. Those young men, far from their homes and families, were unleashed in a very poor country, poor after many years of occupation by Japan followed by the devastation of the Korean War which had ended only a decade earlier. I am told that since that time the Korean economy has changed dramatically, but then it was very poor. A soldier's salary might seem like a pittance to us, but there and then he was like a millionaire at a bargain sale.
Where there is extreme poverty, most people will make do, but some will succumb to whatever it takes to make a little more. And so, the thousands of prostitutes servicing Camp Casey probably altogether outnumbered the troops. The "business girls" made their contacts in the bars in the town. Each bar had its own group of business girls. They had some unofficial recognition by the local government and were supposedly checked regularly for V.D. at one of the four local clinics. Prostitution was officially illegal, but it was necessary for the local economy. There were also "street walkers" who freelanced on the streets. The most ragged and undisciplined of all were the "ridge runners" who came down from the hills to solicit along the fence. I am told that fornication often occurred through the fence between the barbed wires, even in winter, even with guards on guard duty.
One of my jobs was to visit the four local V.D. clinics in Tongduchon. Supposedly, every business girl was checked for V.D. twice a week. If that were really true those clinics would have been bursting at the seams, but generally they seemed pretty quiet. Occasionally, some colonel from Seoul (Eighth Army Headquarters) would come to visit us. They all wanted to visit the local V.D. clinics. I remember that at one particular clinic, each visitor would ask the same question, "How many girls do you examine each day?" Each time the Korean doctor in that clinic would scratch his head, look up at the ceiling, appear to be deep in thought, and come up with a number. Each time it was a different number. He just pulled the number out of the air.
Dr. Jose Mendez was one of our battalion surgeons. Dr. Mendez had come to the United States from Colombia to take his residency training in gynecology, but one year before completion of his program, he was drafted into the army. To have refused would have been to have abandoned the training time he already had put in and to have gone home without the prestige of completing an American residency. So this gynecologist found himself in Korea providing medical care to a battalion of a few hundred men with not one woman among them. Major Fratelli suggested I take him around to the V.D. clinics in the Vill. Maybe we could make use of his gynecologic knowledge? At the last minute on the afternoon we were to tour the clinics, Fratelli informed me that there was a change in the plan. There was going to be an assembly that afternoon in a movie theatre in Tongduchon. It was to be an assembly of the local business girls put on by the local officialdom, and Dr. Kim, the Korean district public health physician was going to speak there on the prevention of venereal disease. I was to be there as a courtesy to him. Anyway, I knew him. He was a nice guy, honest, and dedicated to his work. I had met him on a previous occasion early after my arrival in Korea when the Corps Surgeon, whose name I don't remember, and I paid him a courtesy call at his office in Ui Jong Bu, the district capitol. The Corps Surgeon accompanied me because Ui Jong Bu was also the location of Camp Red Cloud, the Corps Headquarters, and army courtesy demanded that the Corp Surgeon be included, or at least informed, when I was going on official business in his territory. Dr. Kim was a tall, aristocratic appearing, intellectual gentleman. He spoke a number of languages, Korean of course being his native tongue, Japanese from the occupation, German because that was the language of the medical school in Manchuria where he had studied, and English because of the American presence. The Corps Surgeon on the other hand embarrassed me tremendously by talking to Dr. Kim in the pidgin English which was the language of communication between the G.I.s and the bar girls. It was bizarre. Here were two doctors conversing. Dr. Kim's English was somewhat limited but grammatically correct. The Corps Surgeon added ee to the end of every noun that ended in a consonant and peppered his speech with words like hootchie instead of house and papa-san or mama-san instead of man or woman.
To understand the Corps Surgeon, you must first understand the Corps. The Corps is the level of command between the army, in our case the Eight Army which was the American Army in Korea, and the two divisions that sat between Seoul and the DMZ (the border with North Korea). As far as I could tell, know one knew what was actually the function of the Corps. In case of a war it probably did have a function, but in peace time it seemed like it was a receptacle for high ranking officers who somehow had risen in the ranks despite their incompetence and now had to be put somewhere. Another example of the Corps mentality was the Corps general who thought he could solve the venereal disease problem by putting out an order, "There will be no venereal disease." But I am digressing too much.
Getting back to the matter of the assembly, when Jose and I arrived, the assembly had already begun. The room was packed with prostitutes. It seemed like every harlot in town was there. They were a boisterous group, booing and cheering as the mood struck them. The mayor was the first speaker. I didn't understand what he was saying because it was in Korean, but it produced more boos than cheers. We found two seats in the back of the hall and sat down, waiting for Dr. Kim's talk, knowing that I would not understand a word of it.
On the stage, along with the mayor and Dr. Kim, sat the town chief of police, the district police commissioner, and a young U.S. Army intelligence officer. There were also a few empty chairs. When the town police chief saw me, he beckoned me to come up on the stage and sent down a police officer to escort Jose and me up to our seats. Until then, it had not dawned on me that we could not just sit unobtrusively in the back of the room. We were celebrities of sorts. After a few minutes the police chief came over to me and said, "You will give speech." I politely declined the offer, explaining that I was not prepared. The police chief walked back to his seat and then a few minutes later returned. "You will give speech. You will say I understand your condition. I want you be healthy. You go doctor all the time for check up." At that point I realized that my purpose there was to give a speech, to not give one would have been an insult, and I'd better think of something to say pretty quickly because I was the next speaker. The Korean officials received silence from the audience punctuated by occasional boos. A few police women walked up and down the aisles, putting a lid on things if the crowd got out of hand. At one point a firecracker was thrown into the aisle. Immediately after that one of the young ladies was hustled out of the hall by the police. When the young intelligence officer and I spoke, there were mostly cheers. I don't know if they really listened to or cared about what we said. They just liked Americans, especially the intelligence officer because he was good looking. He spoke about not unwittingly passing information gleaned over the pillow to people who might be enemy agents. I don't remember exactly what I said, but it was innocuous and not too different from the police chief's recommendation, "I understand your condition. I am concerned for your health. Make sure you have your regular check-ups." The last speaker was the district police commissioner. He spoke endlessly and sternly. I could not understand the words, but the tone was unmistakable as well as the silence from the audience, no boos, no cheers, just silence. Actually, Dr. Kim's talk on V.D. prevention was supposed to have been the last of the afternoon and what I had thought was my reason for being there, but by the time the police commissioner had finished there was no time for Dr. Kim.
Dr. Mendez went back to the men of his battalion and never saw a woman professionally during the rest of his tour. I saw Dr. Kim once more. He had sent me a note asking me to visit him in Ui Jong Bu, which I did. He said his position was in jeopardy because of some political problem and could I help him? I still don't know what I could have done for him. I mentioned it to Major Fratelli, but he said there was nothing he could do. Sure enough, a month later there was a new district public health physician in Ui Jong Bu. The new guy seemed pretty nice, easy to get along with, less cosmopolitan, less passionate about his work, apparently a better survivor.

Chapter 7. Passover

Winter ended and Spring began. The snow melted and the hills were just beginning to bring out their green color. Passover in the Spring, like Rosh Hashonoh and Yom Kippur in the Fall, were strange times in Korea for me, a dipping back into reality, that is to say my reality, not the U.S. Army and Korean reality to which I had become accustomed. For months I had been living in an American outpost, not the America that I had lived in since birth, but a strange far away military America with different customs, a different language, and a different way of dress. Outside my American island, I was surrounded by a basically friendly but strange people who looked, acted, ate, and dressed differently than I, and spoke a language which I for the most part could not share with them. Yet, on a Sunday afternoon in Seoul when I would wander through a park or ancient palace or museum, I would see Korean families on their Sunday outing or picnicking on the grass. I felt a kinship, a certain warmth. They reminded me more of home than Camp Casey, my safe but sterile outpost.
Anyway, on the Jewish holidays, in the middle of this foreign land, out would appear Jews, not just American Jewish soldiers, but people who were there for one reason or another, old people, young people, women, children, families. Some were there temporarily on business. Some might have been permanent, maybe the remnants of people who had fled there to escape the Holocaust. I don't really know where they all came from. There was one Korean man who came to services on all the Jewish holidays. He wore his yarmulke (skull cap) and tallis (prayer shawl), davened (prayed), and obviously knew what he was doing. Then there were the Korean observers, young men and women, who would stand in the back, a different group each time. I guess we were interesting, perhaps exotic, to them. It reminded me of the time back home when I went with a friend to midnight mass on Christmas Eve just to see what it was like. Watching someone else's religious services can be fun.
There were two Jewish rabbi chaplains in the Army in Korea, one stationed at Camp Red Cloud in Ui Jong Bu, the other somewhere further south. But the holidays were celebrated at Yongson Compound, the main army post in Seoul. That compound had been the headquarters for the Japanese army when they ruled Korea. It was a rather nice looking place. Some of the old buildings had a kind of elegance, for an army post. There were big old trees. All in all it was a rather nice place.
The seder was held in a soldiers' mess hall (dining hall in regular English). Where soldiers of the Imperial Japanese army had eaten for many years and later our American soldiers had eaten, we now were eating matzoh (unleavened bread) and saying brukhas (blessings) over the four cups of wine. One of the children asked the Manishtana (four questions). There were moror (bitter horse radish) and kharoses (a sweet mixture of apples, nuts, and wine). There were greens, salt water, and hard boiled eggs. After dinner, the men raced through the prayers until we got to the songs. We all sang together, the soldiers, the business men away from home, the obviously Jewish Korean man, the Korean observers, the Jews who just lived there for whatever reason, the men, the women, the children, the old people, we all sang together. The next morning we reassembled in the chapel for services. That afternoon I pretty much just hung around. I ran into Fishberg and some other guys sitting under a tree talking about all sorts of things, like what we planned to do when we would go home. Fishberg was going to go back to New York. He was already accepted into an internal medicine residency at some hospital back there. Lieutenant Pepper, the food service officer, was undecided about whether to go to graduate school to study archaeology or go into his father's restaurant business. I wonder what he actually ended up doing, maybe something else altogether. Passover happened to fall on a weekend that year, so the next day was Sunday and we had an extra day in Seoul. As the sun was dipping low in the sky, our conversation turned to what we would do that evening. By the time it had fallen below the horizon, we had decided on the Green Door in Yong Dong Po rather than the Ranch. When night had come and the stars twinkled in a cloudless black sky, the spell had already been broken. We were off in a taxi, like mice in Cinderella's pumpkin, dashing to our usual entertainment.

Chapter 6. Dr. Fishberg

As preventive medicine officer, I started out spending my mornings seeing the soldiers of the Division Headquarters Battalion on sick call. These soldiers were the clerks and other people who kept the paper work flowing. In the afternoon I would go back to the Division Surgeon's office to push and generate more paper. But after a few months, I was free to push paper all day long because another doctor came to take over the clinic. He was pleasant, conscientious, did his work, and got along well with everyone, but after a very short time he was rewarded for his diligence by being sent to a desolate outpost near the DMZ (demilitarized zone). The reason was that he was replaced by Dr. Fishberg who was brought down from that very same desolate outpost to the relative comfort of the Division Headquarters at Camp Casey. It's not that Camp Casey was some luxury resort, or even had the amenities of a place like Yongson Compound in Seoul, but we did have running water and flushing toilets. The place was bigger, so there were simply more people around. If you went off the post, you did not have to worry about stepping on a land mine, and for whatever it was worth there was a town across the road.
So why did fate so reward Fishberg and punish that other guy? Fishberg did not get along with the Army. There was the Army way and there was the Fishberg way. They were like oil and water. Up there in the small posts near the DMZ it was the real army, really military. At least at Camp Casey in the evening when work was over you could find a place somewhere to shut it off. But up there it was togetherness all the time, a small group of officers who worked, ate, and drank together in a small space. Dinner was served when the colonel sat down to eat. Dinner conversation was about military things which did not hold any interest for Fishberg. Fishberg was a New Yorker. He grew up in a suburb on Long Island, a town with one of those funny eastern names like Long Neck Nook or something. His fellow officers were mostly from small towns in Texas or Alabama or places like that. To them, northern cities, particularly New York, were centers of disorder, immorality, and filth, not their America. Fishberg's liberal ideas at the dinner table did not set well with them. At times he would utter socialist or communist slogans, even though he did not himself accept those ideas, just to get a reaction. After dinner all would retire into the bar for an evening of drinking and singing along with certain records on the jukebox which the group had accepted as their songs, the same songs over and over again. They could put away glass after glass, but more than one and Fishberg found the room twirling around him in a circle. And those songs, he didn't even like them in the beginning, but evening after evening, he just couldn't take them any more. They kept pounding into his head as the room would twirl. Eventually he would wear ear plugs after dinner and drink only soft drinks. This really offended the group. Not drinking with them (and drinking meant alcohol, not soft drinks) meant being unsociable. He was rejecting them. Eventually he would lock himself in his room after dinner.
When the big build up occurred in Vietnam, some of the really gung-ho young soldiers were volunteering to transfer to Vietnam so they could get in on the action. Maybe for an infantryman stuck in a little outpost near the DMZ anything might seem an improvement. Anyway, a physical exam was required before transferring out. That's where Fishberg would get involved. Along with the exam would be a lecture that usually went something like, "Are you crazy? You can get killed over there! That means dead! Nothing! The end! They'll bring the pieces of meat back in a bag and deliver them to your mother and father!" That significantly cut into the transfer rate while Fishberg was there and certainly did not add to his endearment. He continued the same counseling when he was with us at Camp Casey. Personally, I had a different philosophy on the subject. I figured every screwball who volunteered to go there saved someone who did not want to go there, and every time Fishberg dissuaded a voluntary transfer, some other poor soul was forced to go instead.
The final straw came when Fishberg's battalion went on field maneuvers. Fishberg got into an argument with the colonel. I don't remember what it was about, but Fishberg went back to the medical platoon and ordered them to fold up the tents and return to the post. It all happened very quickly, and they were on the road before the colonel or any of the other officers knew what was going on. Fishberg's sergeant had an inkling something unusual was happening, but reasoned in is mind, "What the Hell!" This was an opportunity to escape to a slightly higher level of civilization without any blame to himself. "After all, I'm just following orders."
Needless to say, the colonel and his officers were infuriated, this time, rightly so. There is a certain amount of danger to field maneuvers. The chance of accidents and other screw ups is high. It was really criminal to leave those guys out there without medical back up, no matter what the argument was about. By rights, Fishberg could have been court marshalled. In some other country's army, he could have been put to the wall and shot. But, fortunately, although it often doesn't seem that way, American values really do reach into our army. So instead of execution, Fishberg was banished up the civilization chain to the relative comfort of Camp Casey and that other poor doctor was pulled down to Fishberg's old outpost.