War and Politics by Other Means: A Journalist's Memoir

Journalist

JOURNALIST I CAM E TO J 0 URN ALI S M by happenstance, a string of accidents , the most significant being shrapnel from a .30-caliber bullet taken in the face at the end of live ammunition field maneuvers at Hohenfelds, Germany, in October I955. I survived, although minus one eye, and thus unfit for further duty as an infantry line officer. Such casualties were not exceptional. The idea behind these maneuvers was to accustom the infantryman, as near as possible, to combat without killing him. The course was run for one mile over a pair of 50o-foot ridge lines by platoon-sized units, each soldier firing his rifle while the company's mortars and machine guns fired over and just ahead of the platoon's advance. The casualties usually happened when rounds fell short. My wound came after I had given orders to cease fire and clear weapons on the final ridge line. My radio operator failed to clear a round from his gun chamber and pulled the trigger. The .30-caliber round hit a rock at my feet and, instead of ricocheting, it splattered and came back up into my face. I spent the next two months in U.S. Army hospitals, two weeks of this in the critical ward of the hospital in Nuremberg, Germany, a medical halfway house between a recovery and a grave. Eventually I was shipped to New York for discharge. There the Army, in its peculiar way, assigned me to the U.S. Naval Hospital in St. Albans, Long Island, an easy subway commute to Broadway. Lucky to be alive and curious about what to do with the rest of my life, I took to Manhattan's wire-service and newspaper offices looking for a job. The inspiration for this search came from an eve34 JOURNALIST I 35 ning in the Munich officers' club, drinking and talking with the United Press and Associated Press correspondents stationed in that Bavarian capital. Neither the city nor the reporters were much reconstructed from the recent war. Ruddy veterans, the newsmen told stirring tales and had easy manners. It seemed to me theirs was an excellent, if not exemplary, way of life, not particularly harried, socially mobile, and certainly not routine. I was unable to conceive either of these gentlemen of the press behind a corporate desk, commuting to a suburban home and wife or relaxing over golf at a restrictive country club. They were unbound-men of the world and action. Journalism might be suspect as a respectable profession, but it was still a step above my previous occupation as a seaman on blue-water tramps and Alaska steamships out of Seattle. Two years of blue water and erratic shipmates were enough. Another piece of fortune at this critical juncture: the major in charge of the Army detachment at St. Albans was working, on the side, toward a master's degree in government at a nearby Long Island college. What he lacked in academic zeal he compensated with Army know-how. He made a deal with me. In exchange for papers I'd write on the Soviet Union and China, subjects I had studied as a student at the University of Washington, he would cover my leave from the hospital where I was supposed to remain bedded. I had to show up, pro forma, once a week. Otherwise I was footloose in New York. This lasted two months until discharge from the hospital and retirement as a first lieutenant of the Infantry. Manhattan, in those days, had eight daily newspapers and headquarters for three wire services. Armed with a college degree and a letter of commendation from the commanding general of the 9th Infantry Division, I knocked on all of their doors. The letter was a help and a mild embarrassment. I got it not for troop leadership but for an editorial written for the Division newspaper. International News Service, the Hearst wire, had a Manhattan office that could have been a stage set for The Front Page-editors in shirtsleeves and green eyeshades, a bare floor softened only by cigarette butts, the clatter of teletypes mixed with high decibel conversation . It smelled of unlaundered shirts. Tom Breslin, the editor 36 / JOURNALIST in charge of personnel, had a small office with a door that could be closed. I entered, by chance, about one hour after an INS staffer in Dallas, Texas, got fired...