August 3

For me Aug. 3 is memorable not because it's the day the country may default but because it's the anniversary of the day I joined the Army. I didn't have to join. I joined because there was a draft and I was a lost soul. In fact, I was jobless, penniless, and living in a lean-to tree house I had built in Strawberry Canyon in Berkeley. I could have contacted my parents to bail me out but I was too proud to do so. This Navy brat joined the Army instead and, because I had a couple years of college, my recruiter stuck me into the Army Security Agency. So began the most influential consequential experiences of my life.

I came out of the Army with three new influences in my life:

• an interest in literature, including the possibility of writing it
• a fascination with the Pacific Northwest, having been captivated by Dick Crooks' stories of northern Idaho, eager to check it out (and my parents had moved to Oregon)
• a new marriage of alcohol and my social life, laying the foundation for a difficult divorce decades in the future

Clearly I would not have become who I am today without the Army. So Aug. 3 is a major anniversary. I joined in 1959. After a year at the Army Language School in Monterey, I was stationed in Germany, a Russian linguist with a Top Secret Codeword clearance, when the Berlin Wall went up.

Baumholder 1961, my Army novella, tells some of this story but not all of it. (Note link for free pdf). It's a story set on the day the wall starts going up, a buddy story, written against the surreal but true backdrop of the hell-hole called Baumholder.

52 years ago. A long time.