A Primer on Education and Survival in the New World

Should you ever wake up clueless and alone, after a night of indulging your baser instincts, in a foreign country, where no one speaks your language and, what’s more, doesn’t give a hoot about your condition, here is a primer on how to deal with this predicament.

The thing to do is to pick yourself up out of whatever gutter you find yourself and head for the nearest bar. Bartenders the world over have a knack for understanding folks with speech impediments due either to too much booze or lack of mastery of the local idiom. This road to recovery is called the “hair of the dog” cure. I have tested this therapy more than once over the years and found it not wanting. I only wish that I had been familiar with it when I first stumbled off the boat onto the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey; but I was a rookie, an innocent.

Looking back on my own experience, perhaps I should have taken the above route. It probably would have saved me from a lot of grief. But the phrase “hair of the dog” meant nothing to me at the time, so, alas, I took a different road, when I found myself without the faintest in a foreign country. I must warn you that before you try to emulate the path I chose: it is not for everybody. I joined that country’s military service. I figured being in an environment that was extremely structured as well as goal-oriented, would level the playing field a bit and afford me a chance to learn how to cope in this strange place called America. This army’s recruiting slogan was “Join the Army and See the World.” I didn’t join to see the world. I had seen it already and was trying to get away from it. But misconceptions prevail when you don’t understand what they’re saying to you. I thought the army would be a great place to learn English.

And in retrospect it was. Obviously, the first step in mastering English under those circumstances was an intimate acquaintance with military commands and your response to them. The drill sergeants corrected you promptly and loudly, if your pronunciation, elocution or execution of the command left something to be desired. The incentive to learn quickly was that you didn’t want to get their full attention too often, because their corrective steps invariably included push-ups or running in place with your rifle at port-arms or some other chicanery.

The second vocabulary group added to my repertoire early on was cuss words. I have become somewhat of a scholar of this subject over the years and I must say that Army drill sergeants have a vast and original supply of expletive-laden profanities at their disposal. The f-word became my favorite English adjective, verb and noun. It seemed to be used in odd and curious combinations with various prepositions and gerunds that mystified my mind. There was f-off, f-up, f-over, f-with, f-around, f-ing this and f-ing that. The combinations seemed endless and at first I was truly baffled. But no one could say that I was slow on the uptake. I always considered myself a quick study and soon mastered that chapter of my educational curriculum. I moved on to food, military gear, pieces of the uniform, components of the M-1 rifle, the chain of command, contents of your footlocker display drawer and sex, all fleshed out and made transparent to me by the f-word.

Necessity improved my pronunciation to acceptable levels, because you didn’t want to be ridiculed in front of your peers. It took me no time at all to figure out that “fuckinkraut” wasn’t one word and didn’t mean recruit. It took me roughly six months to get a handle on the rudiments of the English language, albeit with a very limited and, you might say, not salon-rife, vocabulary.

It may not come as a complete surprise to some of you, but most of the Army training cadre believed that all Germans made excellent soldiers. They didn’t elaborate, so I took their word for it. In any case, after about a month into basic training, they decided to make me acting corporal and a squad leader, which seemed a big mistake to me, because my nearly non-existent English made it very difficult for me to communicate with my squad. The Army believed in loud communication. You were not allowed to mumble. Commands had to be enunciated clearly and at the top of your voice. By then, I had command of maybe a hundred English words, most of which were accompanied by the f-word and are unfit for print. My drill sergeants didn’t care. They told me that I needed the practice. My fellow recruits thought it was hilarious. My struggles gave them some levity, which otherwise was in short supply during basic training.

The problem with learning a language from scratch in the enlisted ranks of the military is that you really never move out of the gutter and onto the next plateau. This became clear to me when I got to university some years later and was required to write endless essays on subjects that didn’t call for the f-word to explain my thoughts. My lack of language skills turned out to be a major handicap which held me back for some time and clearly highlighted my shortcomings. In fact, it was a disaster.

I had arrived at the University of Kansas in Lawrence in the last week of January 1964, after a two-day Greyhound ride from Philadelphia. It was bitter cold. The university sits on a hill about 300 feet above sea level, with nothing between it and the North Pole, it seemed, to hold back the icy winds that swept down over the wide open prairies. All my gear was still in transit on a US Army troop ship somewhere on the Pacific. Not that any of my stuff in my errant footlocker would have done me much good in Kansas. This was not the tropics. I did not own an overcoat or a pair of gloves. I was frozen and I was pretty much broke.

A classmate turned me on to a gig as a waiter at the Fire Pit, a steak house just off campus. I should never have taken a job as a server in a fancy restaurant. Here I was fresh out of the abattoir of Vietnam, where my job had been death and mayhem and now I was supposed to be polite and kowtow to some asshole whose steak wasn’t done just right. I had to restrain myself from shoving a steak-knife up their nose. The f-word returned from its exile and took center stage. I lasted three days before the owner suggested that I probably would be better suited for work in construction or some other outdoor job that required rigorous activity.

My salvation arrived in the form of English for Foreign Students. Even though I was not classified as a foreign student, I was able to talk the professor teaching this course into letting me transfer to his group. All the students in that class were graduate students from abroad, mostly Taiwan. They spoke English worse than I did. To teach these foreign kids to get a handle on the King’s English, the professor used the writings of the ancient Greeks, like Homer, Aristotle and Xenophon, translated into English, of course. I loved it. I had spent six years in high school reading this stuff in the original. I wrote essays that were the envy of my classmates. I drew on my memory and quoted freely in Greek and I learned to love the English language and banish the f-word from sober speech.

One of the graduate students, a girl from Greece, stood up in class after I had quoted a passage from Homer’s Odyssey in the original and said: “I don’t understand a word you are saying, but the Greek, she sounds beautiful.” She had tears in her eyes. I thought I was pretty cool.

She told me about an outfit called People-to-People, which, among other things, arranged summer jobs for foreign students. This group was run by co-eds who wanted to broaden their horizons. I wasn’t a foreign student, but one of the girls there liked me anyway and promised to find me a job, if I taught her German. She wanted to visit Germany that summer. She was a large and healthy farm girl from around Salina, Kansas, and she had this slightly sour aroma of milk about her. I agreed to tutor her in the finer aspects of the German language and culture. I figured what the hell, it’s only two months and then she’ll be off to the fatherland. How bad could it be? She turned out to be extremely energetic and nearly wore me out, but she was true to her word and found me a summer job with a construction company in Gypsum, Kansas, which repaired grain elevators in small towns all over Kansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska.

This construction job turned out to be the final chapter in my education in and my understanding of how things worked in America. The day I arrived in Gypsum the skies opened and dumped more than 18 inches of rain on the area in the space of two days. The local creek broke its banks and the town found itself under about three feet of water. All basements were flooded, including the basement of Mr. Frisbie’s house, where I was billeted. All roads in and out of town were cut. The first thing I learned was that the people didn’t sit around and wait for the authorities to arrive to organize assistance, as would have been the case in Europe, but they went to work pumping out basements and clearing debris to allow the water to drain away. Everybody simply rolled up their sleeves and helped each other to rectify the mess nature had created. It was an eye opener for me. I liked it.

This deluge also gave me my first taste of snapping turtle, which popped up everywhere in the floodwaters. I shot them with Mr. Frisbie’s .22 and Mrs. Frisbie deep-fried the meat from their legs, neck and tail. It tasted great, a bit like young crow. The trick was to shoot them in the head, so that they’d float. If you shot them anywhere else, they’d dive to the bottom and you’d never find them. My skills came in handy.

I didn’t realize how dangerous work in those old wooden grain elevators could be. There always seemed to be some clown who had to have a smoke as he dumped his truckload of grain and a spark would ignite the grain dust and the place would blow up. I remember one occasion in Yoder, Kansas, which is down near Wichita, where a guy lit up and got blown off his tractor and through the boards of the wall. Other than a broken collarbone and scorched hair, he was OK. These were tough people. Welding jobs in the metal grain bins were the worst. If you weren't careful, the ensuing dust explosion, contained in the metal bin, would blow everything above it, including the welder, to kingdom come.

There was always work for our crew. We’d go in and repair the damage after some mishap. This usually meant climbing up in the rickety and damaged wooden tower that held the grain conveyor belts and trying to re-attach the wooden timbers that held the structure together. If you were lucky the old paternoster elevator still functioned and you could ride it to the top. They ran in a continuous loop and you had to jump off and on, a skill quickly acquired, if you didn’t want to crash to the ground below. I also learned how to weld and how to cut metal with a blowtorch. This was hot work. The temperature outside would reach 110 Fahrenheit and inside it’d be 20 to 30 degrees hotter. You drank a lot of water and after a day’s work you smelled pretty raunchy. But the money was good.

My work crew consisted of four guys. Two of them were my age. They had been shipmates in the U.S. Navy. One was a local boy, the other a very large Hawaiian named Todd Kakuakane. He easily stood 6’5” and weighed 285 pounds, none of it fat. Even though I was an ex-Army guy – and they never let me forget – these two ex-sailors took me under their wings. We understood each other. We were kindred spirits.

Saturday nights the three of us would go out to party. This was not an easy thing in those small mid-western towns. Many were dry or didn’t serve liquor by the drink. The beer was a pathetic 3.2%. But there usually were roadhouses outside the town limits, where you’d bring your own bottle and you could dance to live music. My new Hawaiian friend was the star wherever we showed up, at least with the ladies. The guys didn’t like him much and more times than not we got into brawls, but we tended to prevail. The three of us stuck together and had each other’s backs. We’d been in worse.

My Hawaiian mate would do what he called the Tahitian hula, a Polynesian version of the haka, the Maori war dance, in which every muscle of his huge body shook in rhythm to the music while he performed. He had unbelievable control. He could twitch his muscles all at once or in sequence or only some and not others. He was a sight to behold, particularly, when he stripped to his waist and got down into a squat to show the action of his massive gluteus maximus. The ladies went wild. The three of us did all right and never lacked for company. My education was complete.


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