These images were taken from the 14 October 1957 issue of
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| These images were taken from the 14 October 1957 issue of | Life Magazine photo essay on Beast Barracks by Pierre Boulez. |
DANCING AND FIGHTING © by Ken Hruby
Somewhere between the inked paw print on our birth certificate that establishes our legitimacy and the orthotic molds that confirm our generic flaws, our feet define us. Baby boots are bronzed for posterity. Old sneakers are kept far beyond their usefulness out of fear that there will never be another quite as comfortable. Comfortable shoes are a major quest of middle-age. There was a time when it didn't matter, a time when I was young and pliable, when comfort was a luxury, when my feet suffered seemingly incessant indignities. As a practicing infantryman, feet ascended to the top of the scale of things that really mattered. The army gave us formal instructions on foot care; blister prevention and first aid, if prevention failed; identification and treatment of calluses, corns, warts and fungi of all sorts. We infantry small unit leaders were also taught to conduct a physical inspection of our troops' feet during the traditional ten minute rest break in each hour of long road marches. An ounce of prevention... A soldier disabled by a blister could be rendered incapable of accomplishing his real mission as an infantryman which was to "close with and destroy the enemy". And it was to that end that feet drew so much attention: killing.
We were trained in the most primal way to kill the enemy. Kill or be killed they told us. Survival motivation was at the base of the hierarchy of human needs. Because my own survival depended on how well I learned my lessons, techniques, and maneuvers, the basic combat training moves were embossed in my muscles - "deep learning", as Dr. Jonathan Shay describes it in Achilles in Vietnam, so that the drill could be conjured up, without misstep, decades after it was hammered home. Repetition was key. And, with the rest of my West Point class, I growled and grunted my way through the bayonet and unarmed combat pits and until I was hoarse and muscle-weary. Caked with sweat and sawdust and with well honed bayonets fixed to our rifles we ran through the prescribed course to charge, thrust, parry, lunge, recover, slash and lunge again at the sandbag surrogates. We shouted each other on convinced that we would be invincible on the battlefield when the call came to "fix bayonets". After I insulated myself from the brutality of the drill's ultimate intent, and transcended the pain, I found that it actually felt good to run the course and run it well; there was a very real physical beauty to the movements when the steps and the rhythm were done right. The steps were the key to a smooth execution; done right, the upper body followed the feet in a gracefully coordinated flow of motion; a brutal ballet, of sorts. If the footwork went wrong, nothing else worked. But there was another side to this coin that no one had prepared me for. I did not recall hearing any one say "dance or die."
As hard as it was to believe at the time, dance lessons were integrated into our training schedule as we struggled to shed our civilian skins and don the gray of new cadets. There was much to learn in the four years it would require to mold us into "officers and gentlemen" and the sage planners considered dancing an essential skill. Imported up the Hudson River from New York City, instructors from the Arthur Murray Dance Studio came to teach us fledgling leaders the fine art of ballroom dancing. The instructors were usually young, attractive women and, twenty years before the admission of women to the academy, my most vivid recollection is not how fine they looked but as to how good they smelled. With no choice in the matter, we men danced with each other during these lessons, taking turns, of course, at leading. Effective leaders must first learn to follow, we were told, but this put a new twist on that leadership axiom. Cullem Hall, where all this social honing took place, was the most formal of formal function halls. Our steps and turns, our skips and twirls were done under the stern stares of famous graduates and former dancers, all heroes for one reason or another, all frozen in bronze bas-reliefs hung salon style on every vertical surface of the hall. We paid attention. We learned our steps well. When our lessons in social graces and civility were completed for the day, we marched, double time, back to the barracks to change into the next uniform on the training schedule, perhaps fatigues, perhaps athletic gear, to assemble minutes later for one drill or another where the instructors smelled more like we did. As a class we learned, often in the same steamy afternoon, the vertical butt-stroke series and the tango, the high-port cross-over and the cha-cha-cha. Brutality and civility. We were expected to show equal finesse in both arenas.
Bayonet drill and dance lessons, the last resort in combat and the first skirmish in the battle of the sexes, use the same choreographic notation to imprint their teaching points. The irony in the circularity in our movements from the muddiest bayonet pit to the most formal dance hall escaped us. We new cadets were too close to the events to look back at our foot prints with any objectivity. But like it or not, during that sultry eight week period of "beast barracks" of 1957, there was imprinted within us forever, the feet of a dancer and the hands of a fighter, more or less under control.
Now,over forty years after the fact, the extent to which this deep learning is burned into my fiber continues to astonish me. It also frightens me. Although I was trained as an infantryman to "close with and destroy the enemy" and went on to more specialized training at the Ranger and paratrooper schools where the "destruction" skills were honed to a fine edge, I never "closed with the enemy" in combat. My contact with the Vietnamese and North Korean enemy was relatively remote: they were peripheral movements and shadows; they were foot prints and trip wires; they were invisible snipers and ambushers, whose physical presence was implied but seldom actually evidenced save for its aftermath. There was no eye-to-eye contact. There were no bayonet thrusts, no hip throws, no hand chops, no lethal blows. My training was never put to the ultimate test. I never killed anyone that I was aware of, not that I ever wanted to. But I was capable of it. And I still am.
That is the part that frightens me. I had thought that the drills and the instincts would have grown dull with time, but they have not. They persist at some deep, subliminal level that can only be accessed when the wrong combination of levers is switched. I discovered the wrong combination about ten years ago, fully thirty years after I had left the hand-to-hand combat pits at Fort Benning and ten years after I had left the Army behind to explore gentler, right-brained activities as a sculptor. I was assisting a colleague in the renovation of a studio in an old warehouse. It was hot, dusty work with lots of heavy lifting. In the space directly below the new studio was a small business owned by Aldo, the local bantam rooster. His shortness, I suspect, was the source of much over- compensation: loud, street-wise, brash, a bully, and a bit of the thug. When the first board accidentally crashed to the floor, Aldo and his co-thug stormed up the stairs and demanded that we cease work. He was, after all, trying to run a business and we were frightening all of his customers away. Our efforts to be neighborly succeeded for most of the remainder of the day until, out of fatigue, I suspect, a beam got away from me and crashed to the floor, once again, directly over his office space.
The response was instantaneous. Three of them, this time, burst through the door and the confrontation was immediate. And he was in my face, literally, with accusations of deliberate destruction of his business, clinched fists and a red face. When apology was demanded and refused, he wanted to fight me, as if the code of the streets required either an apology or an ass-kicking. Testosterone hung heavy in the air. He got louder, redder and more profane. And he got closer and closer to my face, standing up there on his tip toes, a full head shorter then I, so that each stream of threats and curses was accompanied by a shower of spittle that invaded my sense of privacy.
The last fist fight I was in was just after World War II when I was in the second grade. We were living in my Dad's home town of Oxford, Iowa, waiting to join him in Japan where he had been posted as a part of the Army Occupation Forces. We were new to town and would be there only until we got our port call from the War Department - easy pickings for the local toughs. And Jerry Larmer had me in his sights. He was two years older, but had already been flunked twice, as it was called then. He still sucked his thumb in class. I was big for my age, so we were an even match when the fight came about at recess over some imaginary slight. It was a good fight, as fights go. We punched each other with jabs and hooks. We got down on the ground and rolled around, smacking each other in the face and ribs with a ferocity that was all fury and no finesse. Seven year old boys don't know about finesse. Letting gravity and inertia direct our course, we rolled and punched our way down from the swings, through the crowd of on-lookers, across the grass knoll and the sidewalk and ultimately down the bank into the drainage ditch across from Wendy Yenter's place. I was on top pounding on him as he lay there in the shallow water trying to fend off my blows when some grown-up pulled me off and sent us both to the teacher. Sweaty, breathless, and covered with dirt and grass stains, we were both scolded and sent home, but the word was already out in this small farming town that Jerry had had his butt kicked by Joe Hruby's younger boy. In the two months that we stayed in Oxford he never bothered me again. The last I heard, Jerry was stabbed to death in prison.
This later confrontation with Aldo raised questions not yet thought of in the second grade. Killing someone was one of them. As the level of anger rose and as my rage at this uncivil behavior mounted, emotions that I thought long since dead welled up from some depth within me. I really wanted to fight this little twit to teach him some manners for, besides being a head shorter, he was twenty years my junior. I knew that if this outrageously overblown disagreement came to blows, I would act swiftly, without restraint. There was absolutely no doubt of the outcome. The two-by-four just inches from my hand would serve as weapon. The moves were racing through the back of my mind as the tension mounted. The steps were clear, and came back to me in a rush. My fingers itched at the ready. This is what surprised and scared me, although the fright came later when I looked back in wonder. I really, if only momentarily, wanted to kill him. And I cannot say how close I came to snapping. The execution of the moves would have been automatic on one level, and completely without rational thought. Pure response. Response to training completed three decades prior.
Self-control and civility ruled the day, fortunately. I suggested to Aldo that grown-ups did not solve their problems this way, that I was on the clock and he was wasting my time, so he should leave and cool off. In one of his few credible acts, he withdrew and I went on with my work. But I was shaken by the incident; not so much the incident itself, but my palpable response to it. How could a fifty-three year old man get sucked into such an emotional pit? If I could entertain even the thought of killing someone over such a trivial slight, what difference existed between me and some whacko gone berserk with an AK-47? Is my mild and even gentle manner, merely a facade that covers a repressed rage over some larger injustice? Where is the line, anyway? And just what amount of provocation would it take to launch me across it? And equally important, what refinement within me overrode the knee-jerk response?
My wars are behind me now, so far as I know. Other windmills remain, I am sure, but I now look to the muses and not to Mars for inspiration. With a memory that appears to have a finite capacity, details of those exotic combat experiences fade as years log on and more pressing demands vie for space. I never did and do not now hold romantic notions about going off to war; it was mostly dull and boring, with interminable periods of waiting and inactivity, accented by brief flashes of terror and frantic action. Combat, from my perspective, was a lot like baseball; execution belied the preparation.
There were over three million men and women in the armed forces who served in Vietnam. Because of the complexities of this particular war and this type of warfare, the "tooth to tail" ratio, the number of support troops required for each combat trooper in the field, was quite high. In relative terms, few of us, less than one tenth, were on patrol, on the ground, in the rivers and aloft; few of us were at the "cutting edge" , few of us "humped the boonies", but almost all of us were trained in the basics and all of those basics are burned into our muscles. While everyone's war was different, the basics, for the most part, were something we all shared; they were the common bond between draftees, enlistees and professionals.
This fundamental, "basic", training is strong stuff. It lasts a life-time. I was returned to "jump status" as a paratrooper fourteen years after I had finished basic qualifying airborne training. It was not the same body then that had been so finely tuned at age twenty-two, but when the "go" light flashed green at the exit door of the C123 troop transport and the jump master tapped me on the butt, I leaped into the slip stream without a second thought; the body knew exactly what to do and it responded perfectly. It must have been excellent training that motivated a sane person to jump from a perfectly good aircraft. When I attempted to translate the bizarre experience of dance lessons and bayonet drill into a sculptural installation for a recent sculpture show, the same intense training allowed me to waltz and stomp around my studio to get the steps right, with a broom stick alternating as partner and weapon. It did not take long before I had retraced the three-quarter step and twirl. The horizontal butt-stroke series took longer. I can only attribute that to more occasions for dancing than for fighting in the ensuing years since the steps were burned into my soul.