“I was surprised that he joined the military. I always thought of him as a free spirit,” choir director Ann Johnson would reflect years later. “I didn’t know if he would tolerate the imposed discipline, but his choice was a reflection of his incredible focus. Jim had a plan.”
So long as he held fast to that plan, the rigors of Fort Sill would be tolerable. He took advantage of the moments—however brief—that sustained his sense of self. The men he befriended were the gifted but underestimated boys of working-class backgrounds similar to his own, the few who shared his taste in music and a refusal to completely abandon their more unorthodox qualities.
On the nights when he wasn’t assigned fire duty and could sleep undisturbed, Jim pulled his pillow over his head, lowered the volume of his Walkman, and listened until he fell asleep to the Sex Pistols, the Plasmatics, the Pretenders, and Judas Priest’s latest release he’d found at the PX.
His exemplary performance in basic training qualified him for yet another test, a lengthy evaluation that seemed to him unfocused and pointless. He handed the completed exam to his superior and watched it disappear into the mysterious ether that he’d learned by then was the military.
And on commencement day, he discovered that his performance and test scores had also qualified him to be named the battery’s distinguished basic training graduate. His cumulative scores and rankings were the highest in the group, and his speed in the footrace had broken every record in platoon history.
The countdown he’d begun in August had, if not reached an end, grown noticeably shorter. Private E-2 Keenan packed his cassettes and his Walkman, eager for a brief holiday leave in Scottville, more than ready to depart Fort Sill, its battered fields, its groves of oak and hickory, the cramped bay, the stone pyramid in the Apache Indian Cemetery that marked Geronimo’s grave.
Snow fell upon the flat Kansas plains and the rows of buildings, their uninspired architecture repeating itself endlessly across the Fort Riley complex. It was home to more than ten thousand soldiers and their families, its barracks and schools and medical facilities extending across the fields. The fields, Jim knew, would be the setting of maneuvers and marches and mock battles.
He crossed the yard and climbed the stairs to the second floor and his room, a stately space compared with the bay at Fort Sill. Three bunks stood against one wall, separated from the sitting area by a divider down the room’s center. One of the bunks, Jim discovered, was assigned to Jeff Parks, a Fort Sill buddy and an avid Michael Jackson fan, his presence a welcome continuity. The three roommates pooled their pay for a small television and placed it beside a portable stereo on the table beneath the window. Their battered metal lockers were subject to inspection at a moment’s notice, but their private bathroom was a luxury after the pandemonium of a communal latrine.
Frequently, Jim was assigned fire guard duty or to keep watch over tractors and heavy equipment parked in the lot across the street from the barracks. More often, he and his battalion were dispatched to field exercise, bivouacking on the grounds and engaging in protracted and realistic battle. He packed the essentials he’d need during the long day and night: his compass and levels and coils of measuring rope. And more important, the Sterno kit to make more palatable the cans of beans and franks, the mysterious corn hash, and the paste-like chicken concoction that no amount of heat or salt and pepper could improve. He packed, too, the envelopes of laxative preparation necessary to counteract the fiber-free and binding C rations. At night, he lay in his bedroll on the hard Kansas ground, dreaming of the ice cream parlor back home and of the butter pecan and black cherry he’d enjoyed as if it would last forever.
Advanced Individual Training was no game in a sunny Ravenna meadow where the game was interrupted when the sun went down. It was a monthlong combat enactment, a day-and-night simulation of war.
No one was pushing the idea that actual war was a possibility. But it became immediately apparent to me that we were doing desert training. We weren’t that far out of Vietnam, and it seemed to me we’d pretty much screwed the pooch over there. So what were we doing? Didn’t we have our asses handed to us in the marshlands? Shouldn’t we be doing wetlands training so that didn’t happen again?
We were being prepared for desert warfare. Something was already up in 1983, but nobody tells you things like that.
Ahead of the tank batteries, the 82 Charlie team crossed the rutted field in their weathered jeep, stopping to set up sextants and tripods and to install hubs alerting the batteries of their location and targets. The artillery squad fired, fired a second round into a barrage of rifle shots, then retreated into the turmoil of smoke and shouts and black boots trampling the brown grass. Dummy rounds and smoke grenades bursting on all sides, Jim and the other surveyors darted laterally among the troops, determining their coordinates and the likely locations of the enemy, the classroom geometry and algebra at last beginning to make sense.
Dusty and weary, Jim envisioned another two and a half years of charting stars and treetops, 30 more months of unquestioning obedience, of every trimmed hair in place and boots polished to an acceptable shine, of donning the costume of good soldier and perfecting his performance in the tragedy of imitation warfare. Two and a half years—an eternity before he’d spread across his desk a sheet of clean white drafting paper, his collection of pencils and drawing pens in a squat jar just within reach.
Despite its rigors, Fort Riley offered a freedom unimagined in Oklahoma. On Saturdays, Parks took his car from the adjoining lot and drove Jim to the Colonial in nearby Junction City, where they saw National Lampoon’s Vacation and Trading Places. The more lax barracks rules allowed Jim to add personal touches to his room: a hot air popcorn maker and an electric kettle in which he boiled water for soup and Earl Grey to enjoy from his own mug.
On the days they didn’t go to the field, the battalion gathered for lunch in the mess hall and then were allowed a few minutes in their rooms before beginning their afternoon duties. Jim and his roommates tuned their television to The Young and the Restless, propped the door open with a boot, and kept an ear cocked for the sergeant’s call to formation.
When they were summoned, they fell in and received their orders for later in the day. As soon as they were dismissed, they darted upstairs to continue their escape into the world of ill-timed pregnancies, returns of long-lost relatives, sudden amnesia, and the appearance of evil twins. The drama and emotion-torn relationships reminded Jim—however unrealistically—of the civilian world he’d left behind. “I didn’t give a fuck about that show,” he would later recall. “I couldn’t tell you what it was about. All I know is that it was all we had.”
And at bedtime, he triple-stacked Pink Floyd or REM on the stereo and fell asleep to A-side songs one night and B the next.
Late that spring, a letter arrived with the results of the test Jim had taken months before. Of the thousands of enlistees who’d completed the exam, Jim was among the few whose scores qualified them to attend West Point’s preparatory school, the first step toward admittance to the military academy.
He didn’t weigh his options or seek advice. Before he reached the end of the letter, he’d made his decision. Prep school would be the end of muddy fields, of tins of pale roast beef, of the isolation of Fort Riley life. He imagined classrooms and libraries, discussions over coffee with students as bright as and brighter than he, music and art and knowledge beyond firearm assembly and transit lines—and the leisure to discover them.
Nearly a month of accumulated leave meant PFC Keenan could pay an extended visit home before he must report to New Jersey as a cadet candidate. It meant a July amid acres of sweet corn and string beans and the flowers in Mike’s elaborate gardens, refreshing displays after the brown, parched expanse of Oklahoma and Kansas.
On Kjiirt’s days off from the grocery store, the pair returned to their spot at the lake, the cooling breezes a reprieve from the 90-degree heat, the tub
s of Blue Moon and Rocky Road at the ice cream parlor indeed inexhaustible. The two found they’d outgrown the adolescent dramas of Johnny’s and spent afternoons walking the trails at the state park and splashing in the shallow end of the lake there, speculating about what the future might hold. And in the evenings, Jim discovered the local girls a year older too, a year more mature, and ready to explore with him new levels of intimacy.
Jim downplayed his prep school offer and shared his plan with only Mike and Jan. Remote and provincial as the county seemed to him now, he believed few there would appreciate the magnitude of his achievement. He felt he owed them no explanation, and instead quietly focused his sights on the design he’d put in place the year before.
Jim soon discovered that prep school, though it meant the end of C rations and night patrols, wasn’t without its difficulties. Shortly after arriving at Fort Monmouth, he reported in to Kjiirt. “Am I sore all over er what?” he wrote. “I am totally tired from intense push-ups and pull-ups. Our hours are 5:30 to 10 p.m. The food is OK if you get the time to taste it—they rush us so fast through the mess hall. There are girls everywhere, but the ‘Look But Don’t Touch’ rule is not in effect. You can’t even look. What would Devo do in a situation like this?”
The U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School was a complex of austere concrete buildings and parking areas, a stark, treeless tract belying New Jersey’s designation as the Garden State. Jim was heartened to learn that his relative freedom there would allow visits to nearby Eatontown and the ocean only five miles distant. And more tempting, a rail line at the western edge of the post offered connections that would take him all the way to Manhattan.
His room was an improvement over the quarters at Fort Sill and Fort Riley, carpeted and furnished with stylish wooden lockers and bed frames. He shared the double room with a country music lover given to chewing tobacco and spitting the dregs into a coffee cup. It was all Jim could do to put up with his albums, and his roommate felt the same about Jim’s Mötley Crüe and Sex Pistols. But in spite of their differences, the two found common ground in their mission to compete on the prep school wrestling team and their drive to succeed at the academy.
Half the 360 men and women in Jim’s class had entered USMAPS directly from high school. They were the exceptional athletes and team captains who required a taste of military life and an academic refresher before entering West Point as members of its lacrosse and cross country and football teams. The others were basic training graduates like Jim who would spend the next months in class preparing for the rigors of military school. And after working their way through algebra and trigonometry, after memorizing endless vocabulary lists, after more push-ups and pull-ups and track meets and wrestling matches, after learning the fundamentals of military science, only half would receive a West Point appointment.
For most of the cadet candidates, West Point was their one channeled aspiration, and they lived and breathed the USMAPS motto: Desire—Faith—Effort. They’d been winnowed from thousands of hopefuls and now jockeyed for one of the coveted 180 appointments. In their zeal, they exercised sometimes underhanded tactics to protect their own place in the hierarchy of contenders. They kept an ear trained on idle conversation, the innocent speculations about the wisdom of attending West Point, and might report to their higher-ups as little as an innocuous remark spoken over coffee.
Even in idle conversations, you had to be careful what you said, because anything you said might be construed as a lie and make it easier for others to get in. As a creative person, I had to be very careful of how I talked.
It wasn’t so much the administration watching you. Your best friend was your worst enemy. The Cadet Honor Code said we wouldn’t lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do. “Tolerate” is the part that gives everybody license to kick out their roommate.
Jim was careful to keep his true plans to himself, but his frustration with the blind loyalty and the snitching was clear in his letters to Kjiirt. “If I’m not discovered soon by EMI records and get taken away from this stuff to become a rock star,” he wrote, “I think I’m going to have to become a famous war hero.”
Jim dedicated himself to USMAPS cross country, track, and wrestling with the same focus he had in high school. His contribution, he knew, would bring the Black Knights to victory in meets with other East Coast institutions and their archrival, the Naval Academy Prep School.
He sprinted with the cross country team in distance training runs along Asbury Park’s beach and boardwalk, Coach Beal running alongside them. Jim and his teammates grew to expect Beal’s shout that opened each practice: “Gentlemen, double knots,” a reminder to discourage them from pausing to retie their shoelaces mid-run.
Beal possessed the self-assurance and natural grace of his East Coast heritage. Both USMAPS dean and cross country coach, Beal required every action in the classroom and on the course be completed with alacrity and dispatch. Beloved despite his gruff manner and exacting expectations, the practical and unbiased Beal was ever willing to support the lonely, the discouraged, the CC in need of an ally.
Often, he invited Jim and a few fortunate others to join him in conversation and challenging Socratic dialogue. He prefaced each session with the same request: “Allow me to pontificate just for a moment, if you will, gentlemen.” His rhetorical exchanges challenged the CCs to think beyond the obvious, and when they failed to uphold their end of an argument, he sternly accused them of suffering from diarrhea of the mouth or constipation of the brain.
He would go into a conversation, and you would soon realize that he was explaining to everybody that they had their heads up their asses and they needed to figure out how to pull them out. He didn’t care about your political or social background as long as you were focused on how you could be better.
He said he’d help people to a point, but if they weren’t helping themselves, it meant nothing. He’d go, “I have 10 percent for everybody. You need to do the other 90.”
Jim stood at inspection, his slim, athletic figure showing off the cut of his dress greens to perfection. Every seam was knife-blade sharp, his cuffs fell just so over his insteps, and the brass buttons down the front of his jacket shone. He looked the methodical military man living exactly the life he wished to live.
Even as he presented the outward image of a compliant and proper CC, he managed to maintain a degree of personal integrity. On his shirtfront, hidden beneath his black necktie, he attached three safety pins and an earring made from a razor blade.
The one time anybody found out about anything like that, they just laughed. They didn’t want to bring it up because they didn’t want to champion it.
We’d gone to West Point to watch Army play Notre Dame, and when we got there, I realized I’d forgotten my tie and my white shirt. The plebes I was rooming with didn’t have anything I could borrow. They have a whole different set of uniforms. I went, “Does anybody have safety pins?”
Somebody had a pair of scissors, so I cut the elastic waistband out of my sweatpants and safety-pinned my black socks to it so it went around my neck. Under my dress greens, I’m wearing my Why Be Normal shirt, and if anybody made me open up my jacket, there would be this foot going to the right across my tit.
Jim worked as hard as the others to become the model soldier, but he already considered himself an artist. And with the artist’s instinctive need to rearrange life’s tidy boundaries, he grew impatient with the cosseted life of comfortable bus rides to cross country invitationals and the warm, carpeted room at the end of the day. The others unquestioningly accepted their protected existence, an existence uncomplicated by the messy disorder of half-learned guitar riffs, in-progress poems, and paint-splattered studio floors.
He chose extracurricular activities that allowed him to create and to sing, attending at least one editorial meeting of a student newspaper, the Knight Crier, and caroling in Eatontown with the Glee Club at Christmastime.
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br /> Jim took his turn at all-night charge of quarters duty, fielding phone calls and announcing the next day’s shifts, taking advantage of the quiet and the office typewriter to work on poems and letters to Kjiirt. He’d been away long enough to regard Scottville as isolated and behind the times, a place where an evening’s entertainment might at best include creeping about a moonlit field engaging in the time-honored rural fun of cow tipping. “As you know, cows sleep standing up,” he wrote. “What you can do is push the fucker over and run, cuz when he hits he’s gonna wake up and chase; more fun.”
Life, he reminded his friend, was meant to be experienced firsthand rather than observed from within the boundaries of a quiet Midwestern town.
The escalator climbed from the Penn Station concourse and delivered Jim and his Fort Monmouth buddies into the bustle and chill of Midtown. They wandered the crowded avenues among purposeful secretaries and street sweepers and dancers hurrying off to auditions. They dodged bold bicycle couriers and black-clad punksters in spiky leather wristbands and carts high-piled with nude mannequins. They started at the shrill whistles of doormen beneath awnings of fine hotels and stepped into clouds of cologne escaping the revolving doors of Macy’s and paused to examine new cassettes in record shops. They roamed Times Square, its theater lobbies bright behind tall glass doors.
At last, they turned onto Sixth Avenue where the deco and neon of Radio City Music Hall rose against the darkening sky, the block-long marquee announcing the evening’s performance.
Kiss fans eager to experience the band’s New York stop on its Lick It Up tour snaked around the corner and partway down 50th Street. Jim and his friends took their places at the end of the line, tickets firmly in hand, their toes tingling. They stamped their black boots against the cold, watched the impatient crowd, watched yellow cabs pull up at the curb, watched as Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, and the rest of the Kiss entourage pushed past them toward the entrance, close enough to recognize, close enough almost to touch.
A Perfect Union of Contrary Things Page 7
