Scalawag: A White Southerner's Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism

9: Some Shipmates Are More Equal than Others

9 Some Shipmates Are More Equal than Others U ncle Sam insisted that my quest for democracy in America would have to wait. He needed me in his “Power for Peace” military force to help spread “freedom” across the world. My fantasy that the navy would give me a billet somewhere like the South Pacific proved to be just that—a fantasy. In September 1957 I found myself at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in northern Illinois for boot camp, and after that I traveled across the road to Camp Barry for my duty station. My home for the next twenty months of 1958 and 1959 was the Recruit Evaluation Unit in Building 172. Entering the authoritarian world of the navy right on the heels of the liberating Encampment experience was jarring. The REU was a cross between a psychiatric clinic and a garbage disposal. Our job was to screen new naval recruits for boot camp and kick out those determined to be misfits of one sort or another. Occasionally, we also had “patients ” from among “ship’s company”—those already trained and serving on the base. Because Great Lakes naval base was such an enormous recruit training command, traffic at the REU was very heavy. Building 172 housed a barracks for a hundred or so recruits held over for evaluation and paper processing; a sick bay; a dental unit; and an office for psychiatrists, psychologists, and the hospital corpsmen who supported them. I was one of those corpsman. Vast numbers of new recruits, sometimes as many as eight hundred, arrived at Great Lakes every night. Many were desperately poor southerners who had never had any dental care or much medical attention either. So once in the Some Shipmates Are More Equal than Others 63 navy, they had to have many of their teeth extracted. The inpatient dental unit regularly held six or seven seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, tossing about on blood-soaked pillows and groaning with pain from swollen jaws from which half of their teeth had been pulled. Many of these teen recruits were also functionally if not totally illiterate. From what I saw, the two largest single categories of recruits we processed for discharge from the navy were homosexuals and epileptics. The policy regarding homosexuality then was apparently, “If we find out, you’re out of here.” It was much the same for the epileptics. My day job was as a research assistant for a frumpish, highly focused civilian psychologist by the name of John Plag. He was working on a gargantuan study that sought to identify the few best predictors of successful performance in recruit training by statistically distilling them from a three-hundred-item questionnaire. He had me administer the questionnaire to each night’s recruit receipts, ultimately to some twenty-two thousand aspiring sailors. Plag taught me a lot about research. My evening job was playing assistant coach to the base’s varsity basketball team, the Great Lakes Naval Center Bluejackets. With the pick of over fortyfive thousand sailors and marines on the base, we had an odd assortment of excellent college, high school, and playground players. In our more than seventy-five games that season, I was able to compete against top-notch multiracial talent all over the Midwest. At Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, I went head to head with K. C. Jones, later with the Boston Celtics. Several other All-Americans from the Big Ten and a couple of guys from the Harlem Globetrotters also played in that tournament. At the REU we corpsmen worked long hours, sometimes at a frenzied pace. Other times there was mind-numbing boredom from idleness. There were a lot of smart guys there for whom navy life was a real drag. The countless bureaucratic fetishes and orders that made no sense; the reduction of nearly all conversation to four letter words; the prevalence of drug, alcohol, and tobacco abuse; and the aggression and anger among so many sailors and marines on the base were among the things that gnawed at us. Despite all this, there was something enriching and comforting about the REU: the comradery with my “shipmates.” It was a little like the Encampment that way—except we were all male. There was Killian, a reserved and hand- 64 encountering a new world some black guy from Chicago; Jose, a sweet-tempered Mexican-American from El Paso; Cooley, a tall white...