At that point we were all starting to go off in different directions to live our own lives, but we knew we would find some way to come together and get back in touch with our roots on a regular basis. And that’s when the annual Knife River trip started. As we’ve progressed together through life, we get together every spring when the smelt are running and head off into the wilderness for our own South Side version of a male bonding ritual. No women have ever been allowed. No women will ever be allowed. I haven’t been able to make it to all of them, but I have flown in from as far as Tampa, Florida, to get there.
At first we went to the Knife River near Duluth, but after a while that started to get too crowded, and we couldn’t misbehave enough. So we started going to a place called Lake Sullivan, and when that got overrun we went all the way up to McDougal Lake, north of Two Harbors, right near the Canadian border, in the middle of nowhere.
We go for three or four days, out into the wilderness. The original excuse was that we were going fishing. But one year about fourteen of us went up there with one set of waders, no net, and one license. That’s how serious we were about catching fish. It’s about letting loose. It’s roughing it. It’s Minnesotan.
It’s the kind of trip where every waking moment you have a beer in your hand. Over the years, we’ve progressed from sleeping on the ground to sleeping in tents. Now that we’re all fairly successful, we rent mobile homes, which as we get older is a lot better, because if the weather is bad, we can just sit comfortably in the mobile homes. We drive up there with generators and stereos and tons of fireworks. We string lights through the trees, and we shoot off all our fireworks and play our rock ’n’ roll until all hours of the night. And up there you can play it as loud as you want because it’s way out in the middle of the woods. There’s probably not another living soul around for ten miles. The only things we disturb are the deer and the bears.
We even had a sheriff walk into the camp one time. There we were, bodies strewn everywhere, in different stages of stupor. He looked around at the lights and all our stuff, and he said, “You guys call this camping?” And we said, “Hell, yeah! This is South Side camping!” And he just shook his head and left. He knew we weren’t harming anything.
So those are the South Siders. They’re lifelong friends. I know that no matter what I do in life, they’re there to bring me back to reality. They’re my reality check. They know me as Jim Janos, the kid down the block who grew up with them. And I’ll always be him. Of all the people in my life, they’re the proudest of what I’ve accomplished. But they keep me grounded. If you’d have told us back then that I’d end up the governor . . .
I always remember that power can corrupt, so that’s one of the reasons I’m thankful for the South Side Boys. They would never let me get too far out of line. They’ve done so much to keep me focused on who I am. I have them to thank for giving me such a solid base to push off into life from. It makes it a lot easier to put yourself out there when you know you’ve got lifelong friends at home that you can always come back to. I have them to thank for a lot of where I’ve gotten in life.
But in particular, I have Steve Nelson to thank for getting me into the navy. He became part of the South Siders at a much later age. He was from a different neighborhood, but he went to Roosevelt and became a South Sider. To this day he’s part of the core group. Steve’s parents, Harold and Helen, raised him to be perfect: please and thank you. He had impeccable manners. You never wanted to bring him to your house, because his behavior was so good that as soon as he left your parents would say to you, “How come you don’t act like Steve?” Because of that, he took the brunt of the Jerry and Jim Show. Steve was such a great guy, we decided that we just couldn’t let him go through life that perfect. It was our mission. We had to corrupt him.
So when I was about sixteen, I went into Shinder’s, the famous bookstore, and I bought two or three soft-core porn magazines. Those days, there was no other kind of pornography around. You couldn’t get what’s out there today. I got away with it because I always looked older than I was. Jerry and I put them in a plain brown envelope, and we typed up Steve’s name and address and a bunch of phony numbers up the side so it would look like a subscription. And we mailed it to him.
So Steve was sitting down to dinner with Harold and Helen the night this thing showed up in the mail. And of course they were curious to see what was inside this big package their son had gotten. So he ripped the top off and looked inside. They were sitting there watching him, so what could he do? He blurted out, “Oh, Jesus God, Mom and Dad . . . it’s pornography!”
Of course, Helen was outraged. She was ready to go to war with the postmaster general. She wanted to launch a full investigation into whoever was allowing pornographic materials to come in the mail to her sixteen-year-old son. But Harold took the stuff into his bedroom to look it over, and Steve followed. Harold was a great old guy. He just scratched his head and looked at Steve and said, “God damn it, how come I don’t get shit like this in the mail?”
Jerry and I knew this thing was going to arrive, so we had been going over there as much as we could, hoping to see what happened when it came. We got there that night, and Steve took us aside and whispered, “God, you’re not going to believe what the hell happened!” We played dumb, “What? What?” For twenty years we never told Steve we were the ones who did it. We were on one of our trips to the Knife River when Jerry and I finally decided we ought to fess up. Steve just swore at us, “You sons of bitches!” and laughed.
As kids, whenever we got Steve drunk, we’d bring him back home late at night. As soon as we got close to his house, we’d start laying on the horn, so we were sure to wake up his folks. We’d sling him over our shoulders and carry him to the door. And we’d ring the doorbell until Helen came down: “Harold! Harold! Steve’s been drinking again!”
In those days, that’s what you did. You drank. And it would generally lead you into trouble. Nothing serious, but you’d end up doing things you shouldn’t do. Back in those days, drunk driving wasn’t taken nearly as seriously as it is today. If the police caught you, they’d usually just take you home. I’m sure a lot of people died before it began to be taken as seriously as it should have been. But everyone was a lot more casual about that kind of thing in those days. You sowed your wild oats, and it was generally considered harmless. We packed a lot of fun into those years.
C H A P T E R 4
NAVY SEALS
“All right. Which of you pukes has got flappers?”
“Mother” Moy came out with a table and set down a first-aid kit. It was the second day of training. I had taken forty-five minutes to run an obstacle course that was supposed to have been run in ten, and I had four or five raw, flapping blisters on each hand.
Like an idiot, I raised my hand. “I do, Moy!”
“Come on up here, boy!”
I figured he was going to put Mercurochrome on them, so I stepped up.
“Hold your hands out.”
I put them out.
“Are you right-handed or left-handed?”
“Right-handed.”
He nodded. “Lemme see your right hand.”
I held it up. He grabbed every flap of skin and ripped them off, leaving my hand raw and throbbing. I had tears running down my face from the pain.
Do you know why he asked me whether I was right-handed or left-handed? Because when he was done, he said, “Now, you do the other hand.” So I had to stand in front of the class with Moy and pull my own flappers off. When I was done, he said, “You big dummy, now get back in line.”
Only six months earlier I’d been fresh out of high school, working for the highway department and partying with the South Side Guys. I was drifting along, not sure about what I wanted to do next.
I’d spent a lot of that summer of ’69 feeling angry and betrayed. I’d been trying to qualify for a swimming scholarship to the University of Northern Illinois. I was good enough at swimming, for sure, but I couldn’t ge
t past the academic requirements. I was a good student academically, but I’d been taking the really tough college-prep courses: advanced algebra, trig, physics, chemistry. I thought that’s what you did when you wanted to go to college.
I really did want to fulfill my parents’ dream that I go to college. I would have been the only one in the family besides my mom to do it. I had the brains, and I eventually learned how to apply myself. I wasn’t brilliant, but I was smart enough. Unfortunately, I was in classes with a bunch of geniuses on the fast track to becoming anesthesiologists and chemical engineers, the best of the best. Even so, I was doing OK. I was working really hard and making Bs and Cs. All my test scores were high enough to qualify for most programs.
But Northern Illinois expected you to be in the upper third of your class if you were an out-of-state student. I was only in the upper half, so I couldn’t get past their admissions board. I felt betrayed, because if I’d taken the easier, slide-by courses like gym help, I could have made it into the program. But because I’d challenged myself and taken the tough stuff, I couldn’t get in.
That’s when my brother, Jan, who had joined the Navy SEALs a few years earlier, came home on leave from Da Nang. He pulled me and Steve aside in the backyard and warned us, “Don’t join the service. Stay home. Go to college. Have fun. Don’t get involved in this war.”
By this time, it was unpopular to be part of the war. This was after the Tet offensive of 1968, a North Vietnamese military offensive that made even Walter Cronkite say that this war was now unwinnable. People were getting tired of seeing neighborhood kids coming home in boxes, dead from a war halfway around the world that nobody knew why we were fighting. We were told it was to stop communism, but now more people were forming other opinions, especially those in the schools and universities.
To truly understand the sixties, you had to have lived through the fifties, when every boy had short hair. Then all of a sudden, the Beatles came. It was like night and day. They created a rebellion of kids against parents that rose to a level that’s never been seen since and will probably never be equaled. All of a sudden, guys grew their hair long and started looking, at least to their parents’ generation, “like girls.” Amazingly, girls’ fashion changed the other way. Girls stopped wearing bras and makeup and went in for that “natural” look. The Beatles truly changed the world as we know it.
Marijuana was five dollars a bag. Back then, drugs were not a business; they were antiestablishment and provided escape. Young people switched from alcohol to hallucinogenic drugs. I smoked my first joint back in high school, but I was in the service and away from it all by the time the harder-core stuff became widely available.
There was such freedom in those days. A generation had turned its back on money and material things. All of a sudden, spirituality meant more than anything—it was all about friendship and brotherhood and sharing. The hit song that fall of ’69 was Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” Everybody shared whatever they had. Everybody hitchhiked wherever they wanted to go. People would take you in and let you sleep on the floor. It was an incredible time.
The sixties were phenomenal. I’m so lucky to have grown up in that time. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. We were the most rebellious generation of this century.
Steve was drifting, like me. He had enrolled in college, but he wasn’t really hip on it. It was September 11, 1969. He called me up out of the blue and said, “Jim, remember when we talked to Jan? I decided I want to do what he’s doing. I want to join the SEALs. I want to go in the navy.”
I said, “Steve, are you sure?”
Then he lowered the boom on me. He said, “And I want you to come with.”
My jaw hit the floor. “Didn’t you hear what Jan said? He told us not to do that!” We talked and argued back and forth.
Finally, he made me agree to go down to the recruiting office, and “just talk to ’em.”
I gave in, “OK, but that’s all I’m doing. We’re just going to talk.” So we went down to the recruiting office that afternoon. We talked to them. And we left with navy ID cards.
They pump you up. They’re like car salesmen—it’s like walking onto a lot and seeing a ’64 GTO with three deuces and they tell you you can afford it! You’re eighteen years old—what kind of defense do you have against that? That’s their job! Their job is to be your best friend—until you enlist.
They even had what they called “the Buddy Program,” where they would guarantee that you could go to boot camp with a friend, just in case the reason you weren’t enlisting was that you didn’t want to be out there alone for the first time in your life. When they found out we were interested in joining the Navy SEALs, they zeroed in: “Don’t you want to be part of the most elite? The best of the best?”
I’d already had a taste of what it was like to be the best when I was into competitive swimming in high school. I was the first swimmer in the city of Minneapolis to ever break one minute in the hundred-yard butterfly. When I was a member of my high-school football team, we were undefeated. I always strove to do my best. So it was a challenge. Irresistible.
I had another reason for wanting to try for the SEALs: I had a dreadful fear of heights that I wanted to conquer. I knew the SEALs would force me to conquer that fear, and they did. You can’t afford to be afraid of heights when you’re fast-roping out of the hellhole of a helicopter. I ended up with thirty-four parachute jumps—you can’t be too afraid of heights and jump out of airplanes! To this day, when I have fears, I always go out to conquer them. The only way to get rid of fear is to look it in the face and conquer it. I believe what Franklin Roosevelt said, that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. I don’t like to be afraid.
My folks were pretty upset when I told them we’d enlisted. They really hoped I would have a college career. My mom was especially hurt by it; she’d always seen me as the Son Who Would Go To College. I had come so close—I had enrolled in state college, but after I enlisted I had to ask for my money back. What could they do? I was eighteen; I could make my own decisions. Plus, I think when you’re that age, sometimes you do things to hurt your parents a little. It’s just natural; it’s part of the whole separation process. And remember, this was 1969; it was the Era of Rebellion. So I think it was an act of rebellion in a way, to do what they didn’t want me to do.
The navy gives you up to 120 days before you have to leave. I worked for the highway department for another month, saving up all my money. Then I quit, partied as much as I could, and had as much fun as I could squeeze in, right up until the last day. I was determined to leave home stone-cold broke, because I knew I wouldn’t need any money where I was going.
We left on January 5, 1970. Ironically, the night after my inauguration, I had a dinner party at the governor’s mansion with a bunch of friends, and Steve was there. At one point he raised his glass and announced, “You guys probably won’t remember, but it was twenty-nine years to the day when Jim and I went off to the navy.” We drank a toast to the day.
It was colder than hell that morning in 1970 when Steve and I left. We had gotten together with our friends and their parents the night before for one last party. A lot of us ended up joining the service, but Steve and I were the first. My mom drove me to the Federal Building in downtown Minneapolis and dropped me off. It was the last she was to see of me for a long time.
We had to check in by 5 A.M. Even that early, war protesters were camped out in front of the building, marching up and down with signs reading, “Hell No, Don’t Go!” They rushed up to us, begging and pleading, “Don’t go! Go to Canada! Don’t join the service!”
We were sent down to navy boot camp in San Diego, and soon afterward we found ourselves standing in this hut in the middle of the night with some little shit yelling and screaming at us, when we could have been at home partying and chasing women. Instead, we were in for four years of this. That’s when I decided—jokingly—that I was going to kill Steve.
We were Company 014. T
hey shaved our heads and taught us how to fold our underwear.
In boot camp, part of your training is exposure to every facet of the navy. Different groups give you presentations. They teach you what an engineer does, what a signalman does, and so forth. Of course, Steve and I already knew what we wanted to do. We were there to be frogmen.
One day, we attended a presentation by the Navy SEAL Special Forces. There were three companies of us, about three hundred guys, at the presentation that day. All of a sudden, these guys walked in with spit-shined Cochrane jump boots and starched, tailored, skintight Marine greens—each of them with a look that said, You know I could kill you as soon as look at you. They started talking to us about being in the Navy SEALs Special Forces. They told us that you volunteered to try out, and if you made it through the training, you became one of them—the best the military had to offer. But they warned us it wouldn’t be easy and that we would be physically and mentally tested beyond imagination. They also told us that we could quit at any time if we weren’t good enough. They had my interest.
Then they showed us a film called The Men with Green Faces. In Vietnam, the SEALs were known as the Greenfaces, because they wore camouflage green and black on their faces and hands. The North Vietnamese feared the Greenfaces because they took jungle warfare into the NVA’s own backyard—fighting them on their own terms and using their own tactics against them. Anything the NVA ever did to the Greenfaces, they got back even worse. Now my interest was really piqued!
When the film was over and the lights came up, the guys showing the movie said, “OK. Anyone who wants to volunteer to take the screen test to become a SEAL, stay here. The rest of you, get the fuck out of here.” I saw guys running for the door. Regular navy “black shoes” wanted no part of this shit. Out of three hundred guys, forty or forty-five stayed. Steve and I were still in our seats.
I Ain't Got Time to Bleed Page 6
