It’s Monday and it’s Memorial Day but there’s no parade to mark the event. I loved parades and one of my fondest memories of my father, Dan O’Brien, is him taking me and my brother Dan to downtown parades.
I have a photo of him posing with a nurse, pretending he was fainting into the back of an ambulance on Fifth Avenue in the Lower Hill when we were there to watch a parade. My father would do stuff like that, anything for a laugh.
Memorial Day does remind me of attending parades as a kid, and of serving in the U.S. Army for nearly two years as a young man. Like many of my friends, I wasn’t thrilled to be drafted into military service upon graduation from Pitt in 1964, but I was lucky.
Unlike some of my friends in our neighborhood these days, I didn’t go to Vietnam. I was an editor at the U.S. Army Hometown News Center in Kansas City, Missouri, and then an editor of the camp newspaper at Fort Greely, Alaska -- both ten-month stints – and I wrote press releases and newspaper stories about soldiers who went to Vietnam, some who re-enlisted so they could go to Vietnam.
We were told to make a big deal about soldiers who volunteered for Vietnam. It was aimed at encouraging other soldiers to do the same. In other words, we were to glamorize going to Vietnam. Promote re-enlistment, imagine that.
In Alaska, I met young officers who transferred to service in Vietnam. Second lieutenants were often killed leading their men into combat in places like the Mekong Delta. The news would come back to Fort Greely and it would become “Fort Griefly.”
I spent most of 1966 at Fort Greely, and it came to mind as I considered Memorial Day, 2020, when there would be no parades to salute the soldiers and sailors who served and often died for freedom in our country.
I was an E-4 or corporal and did nothing heroic. I had a choice as to whether I would be transferred from a cushy job in Kansas City to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, or to Fort Greely in Alaska. It would be a ten-month assignment either way, and I would get out three months early to go to graduate school at Pitt.
I chose Alaska. It sounded adventurous. Plus, there was a well known and formidable prison at Fort Leavenworth and I wanted to stay as far away from that as possible. One of my eighth-grade nuns at St. Stephen’s in Hazelwood had told my mother, “Someday your son will end up in Sing-Sing.”
That was a lock-down maximum-security penitentiary in Ossining, New York and I didn’t want that nun’s prediction to come true, even if at a different site.
I recall flying to Fairbanks, Alaska via Seattle, Washington. Fairbanks was 100 miles west of Fort Greely. I got off the plane in a driving snowstorm. You couldn’t see your boots on the ground. Oh my God, I thought, what did I get myself into? I threw up on the snow-covered tarmac upon de-planing.
We were driven by bus over a treacherous icy highway to Fort Greely. That was a thrill ride that makes the roller coasters at Kennywood seem tame by comparison.
I arrived at Fort Greely and spent one night in a dormitory building for the general populace of unmarried soldiers. I learned upon arrival that a soldier had shot and killed himself in that dorm the day before I arrived.
You didn’t have to be in Vietnam to die in the military.
That was a sobering situation; it has stayed with me for over 55 years.
The second day, I moved to permanent quarters in a small building about two miles from the main post. This building housed a television station, a radio station, and a newspaper.
I was sent there to be an assistant editor for the camp newspaper, about 12 pages per issue. Within a month, I was the editor, and editor shifted to TV camera-work duties. I expanded the newspaper to a 24-page issue.
I was never much of a soldier, but I put my talents to good use on behalf of informing and entertaining the troops, and some disgruntled wives. There were no single women permitted to reside on the post, so dating required some daring-do.
In addition to my work in assembling a weekly sheet, I started my own nightly TV sports news and commentary show, and sometimes I sat in for our two newscasters, John Dalton and Dan Edwards, on the radio. I imitated Porky Chedwick, a popular deejay in Pittsburgh who hailed from Munhall, with some pithy pitter-patter from “your Daddio of the Raddio.”
We wore a coat and tie for the TV gigs and often spoke of how lonely we were to be stationed in cold, frigid Alaska.
We each had our own bedroom in the building. There was an extra room no one was assigned. I took it over and kept it pin-neat for inspection purposes. I had it made. I slept in one disorderly room and kept my wine stash there, and locked the door when our officers did a monthly or surprise inspection.
We had our own kitchen if we wanted to cook or prepare something for ourselves. The cooks in the mess hall would give us fresh steaks and cans of corn and beans in exchange for dedicating songs for them over the camp radio station.
We operated a lot like Hawkeye did in that great TV series about an Army medical unit in Korea called “M.A.S.H.” Improvising as we went along.
Fort Greely had a power plant on the premises, built by Westinghouse, and was an anti-ballistic defensive unit to intercept ICBMS that might be fired from North Korea. Fort Greely was one of the coldest regions in Alaska and that’s why it was also utilized as the Army’s Cold Weather Testing Center. The mean temperature in winter would dip to minus 30 degrees quite often, and my inner thighs would turn blue as a warning that frostbite might be imminent. We called it Code Blue.
I shot an M-1 three times for expert ratings, the first and last times I ever shot a rifle, and our camp newspaper was named the best multilith newspaper in the Armed Forces. For that, my commanding officer was promoted from captain to major, and I remained an E-4. But I still had it made. Shooting a rifle for the record is not to be mistaken for having someone else shooting back at you in the jungles and swamps of Southeast Asia.
We didn’t do any of the training procedures we had done on a daily basis while in basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky. We had it made. The librarian and a clerk at the P.X. were two of my best friends and they looked after me. The library was my sanctuary, my safety net to maintain my sanity. I read lots of Hemingway and Jack London at the library.
If I had been an outdoorsman like Hemingway and London, I would have thought I had died and gone to heaven. Our post was surrounded by wildlife. There were moose, caribou, mountain goats, brown bears, white bears and Kodiak bears, wolverines, and fish jumping over each other in streams and rivers. Husbands and wives would go hunting and each would kill a bear. Buffalo would roam up to the door of our building and rummage through garbage cans.
I lost a lot of my respect for Buffalo Bill while I was there. Who couldn’t shoot and kill something the size of a buffalo, who did little running around our post; they usually just moseyed along?
Check out the size of that stuffed Kodiak bear behind Corporal Jim O’Brien at Fort Greely, Alaska.
One day, a Corporal Johnson and I decided to hitch-hike several hundred miles to Juneau. Bad idea. We never made it. A gold prospector picked us up and we went down a highway, shaking from the side in a rickety jeep. A middle-aged woman picked us up and we wondered why any sane woman would do that.
We spent considerable time walking along country roads, in the wilderness, with wolverines and the like lurking in nearby woods. We went down one stretch of road that was bordered on both sides by swamps, and mosquitoes the size of B-29 bombers. We had bug spray but the mosquitoes laughed at that and bugged us – at least in my case – to tears before we found safety on isolated roads.
Corporal Johnson and Corporal O’Brien judge a baking contest to celebrate futile attempt at hitch-hiking across Alaska.
We went to dog sled races; we met young women who were native to the region, and they all seemed to have brown teeth. I still have the photographs to prove it.
I was able to tag along with air pilots who had to get in so much flying time to remain licensed. These were single-engine prop planes. The pilots would maneuver them up and down the sides of mountains and over prairies, herding caribou and mountain goats along the way.
One day, I saw a red light flash on the dashboard. “What’s that?” I cried out the pilot sitting to my left. “The engine stalled,” he said. He didn’t exclaim it so I didn’t put an exclamation point at the end of the prior sentence. He was calm.
“Remember when your car used to stall out?” he asked me. “You just catch it in gear. I’ll spiral downward for a while, and we’ll catch it in gear.”
“And if that doesn’t work?”
“We can land this plane without any problem on a glacier,” he said, doing nothing to calm my nerves. Fortunately, he caught it in gear the same way I had gotten some of my boyhood “bombs” to re-ignite by coasting down a hill and catching it in gear.
My service time hardly rivaled the dangers encountered by my Steelers’ friend Rocky Bleier, who was wounded in several spots on his body in Vietnam. It was fun. Whenever I am at a church service or a veterans’ reunion and asked to stand if I was in the military service, I always do so with pride.
I did my time.
Jim O’Brien has authored a series of “Pittsburgh Proud” books that can help you pass all this idle time during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This article appeared in Jim O’Brien’s column for The Valley Mirror on May 28, 2020. It is reprinted here with his permission.