When I was drafted into the U.S. Army in the spring of 1961 at age 19, I, having grown up in Wyoming, had maybe laid eyes on a black person a half dozen times in my entire life, and certainly I’d never had occasion to speak with one with the exception of a couple of black kids from Rock Springs, Wyoming, who were also involved in the state’s competitive high school sports programs.
The Army sent me to Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri, for basic training. There I met a few black recruits and got to know and befriend some of them who were assigned to the Post’s baseball team as I was, plus a couple of barracks-mates. After basic training I was sent to “Advanced Infantry Training” in Ft. Gordon, Georgia, where I found some “gung-ho” blood in me and decided I wanted to join the “Special Forces Rangers”, and was soon scheduled to be transferred to Ft. Benning for that training.
One day at Ft. Gordon I walked over to the base PX alone, entered, and saw two uniformed young black men sitting together at a table enjoying a beer. I thought about grabbing a beer and sitting down at their table with them, since the three of us were the only visitors to the PX at the moment. But then I noticed their name tags, and that they both had the same last name as I did, plainly printed in black letters on a white background on their uniform shirts. I was shocked, to say the least, and I had no idea what to do. Obviously they had seen my very rare northern British Isles’ name as well, and they were staring at me, too, probably much like I was at them. I don’t know how long the staring contest went on, but I sensed that there was no animosity between us, yet I still was at a total loss about what to do next — like introduce myself? Go grab that beer and then introduce myself? I was embarrassed beyond words at my silent and staring behavior, and eventually I just turned around and walked out of the PX, shaken beyond sensibility, realizing somewhere in my distracted mental confusion that somewhere, sometime, the heritage of my related family must have included southern American slave owners.
From the personal shame of that moment, as I came to understand later, was what it was that caused my confusion of that accidental meeting and my thoughtless decision to walk away without so much as a hand-wave or even an acknowledgement of their presence. That feeling of embarrassment over a racial issue that should never have occurred has never left me, and, given my age today, never will. But, during the long span of my life, I have always honored and appreciated all the minorities who became intertwined with me during my lifetime and all of its adventures, and many of them (black, brown, yellow, and red) became very good and close friends, even though after my military days, back in Wyoming there weren’t many of any minority to choose from. But as I moved on in life and met minorities in more motley surroundings around the country, my cordiality, comfort with, and love for minorities has never waivered.
It turned out that I never went to Ft. Benning because the Korean War was winding down, essentially over, and my administrative talents and other white-collar abilities, even at nineteen, where I had already worked for a couple of years at a Wyoming bank during high school and after graduation, the Army decided I was more urgently needed in Korea to specialize in the interviewing and evaluating process of rotating all kinds of Army military personnel back to posts and bases in the United States, and that after a year-long tour in Korea, I could go back to Ft. Benning if I wanted to. I never went back.
But, far more importantly, at the headquarters company of the 4th Cavalry division in Korea, I met a balding black Army administrator who I thought of in those days as my personal “Uncle Remus”, a gentle man perhaps twice my age, who constantly smoked an old bent briar-root pipe. He would eloquently fill me with a plethora of valuable axioms of life that personally benefitted me throughout my personal and professional life for years later. Every evening after work he and I would meet at the bar for a welcome beer or two, or even three, and we would discuss the world-wide subject of human life and how to bear it. I knew him, and only remember him today, as “Smitty”.
To this day I think Smitty was, in many ways, the best friend I’ve ever had, even though I only knew him for that one long year in South Korea, just a couple of miles south of the North Korean border. Also to this day, I know he is the only man (or woman, I believe) until now who I ever told about my thankfully short, but awkward, meeting up with two black brothers who bore my own exact surname. Smitty was the guy who made me realize and reconcile in my mind that I simply was not yet mentally prepared in my young life to understand the momentous shock of that uniquely rare and strange experience. Smitty was right. Yet, still, I wish I had had the courageous wherewithal to get that beer, another round for them, and walk over to their table, introduce myself, and have a friendly conversation. ~llaw
