The rat-faced, middle-aged, scruffy little man driving a beat up old 1947 Ford sedan with four bald tires is a pain in the neck and puts my patience to the test.

Every Sunday morning when I am busy waiting on cash customers at the one-island, two-pump gas station where I work part time he pulls up to the air hose and demands that I replace the air his worn out tires lost during the week. He never buys gasoline.

After six weeks of this routine, I ask him, “What do I have to do to get some of your gasoline business?”

“Oh, I buy at the cut-rate station on the other side of town. They’re two cents cheaper than you.”

“Then why don’t you have them put air in your tires?”

“They don’t have no air.”

After this confrontation I am certain I will never see him again.

But next Sunday, just as I am busy waiting on regular customers, he pulls in and parks at the air hose.

I ignore him.

“Hey, you!” he shouts, “How about a little service!”

“Just a minute, sir. I’ll be right with you.”

I trot over and quickly put air in his four leaky tires.

Without a word of thanks, he pulls out of the station and drives about a half block down the street.

Suddenly, we are startled to hear four loud explosions followed by the clanging sound of steel wheel rims rolling on concrete pavement.

Patience has its limits.

My poor widowed mother is hysterical.

“Henry, please come quick! David looks dead!”

My hulking brother-in-law takes one look at me lying prostrate, fully clothed in an overcoat on my bed, unconscious eyes rolled back with only the whites showing.

Henry guffaws with the knowledge of an experienced heavy drinker. This is one time we are grateful to have this roughneck in the family.

“Don’t worry, ma, he’s just drunk.” Henry’s voice has a calming effect as he goes about his sobering up routine, commencing with a slap across my face, then a quart of black coffee and twenty push-ups.

How we get from Faribault, Minnesota, fifteen miles back home to Northfield driving on a narrow, twisting, black ice road in a 1939 Ford sedan is a miracle.

“Jesus, Dave, slow down!”

Ten miles an hour on slick ice with a coating of fresh snow in December’s zero degree weather is absolute hell.

At one A.M. the traffic is light, thank God. No room for another car.

The first attempt to navigate a left curve spins the car into two 360 degree pirouettes.

We have to pull off the asphalt onto the dirt shoulder for even a gentle turn to avoid going into another tailspin.

Over and over again. Mile after mile. A thirty-minute drive stretches into two hours of torture.

With three equally inebriated passengers giving incoherent instructions, we finally reach home port.

Somehow, each is dropped off at his or her front door.

Sheer will power overcomes the debilitating intoxication from too much sherry wine, and we finally pull into the driveway, stagger into the house, drag a lifeless body up the winding staircase and flop into bed― the same bed where we find my father’s body three years ago, leaving a young widow and six children. No wonder my mother is hysterical. How can she ever forgive me?

"Son, promise me you'll never frighten me like that again," she pleads.

"Cross my heart and hope to die," is my inappropriate response.

My shame and embarrassment are big-time. This miserable 20-year-old miscreant will never touch another drop of sherry wine.

Our country is the most racist and least racist country in the world. To me, racism is the ultimate cruelty. Until racism is eradicated, mankind will remain imprisoned by hate and claims of freedom a hypocritical hoax.

“In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden―the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain. . .” Fyodor Dostoevsky.

In an early 1960s experiment, Harvard researcher Stanley Milgram recruited college students to help “teach” slow “learners.” A white-coated “experimenter” instructed the students to deliver increasingly powerful electric shocks to a learner each time the learner made a mistake. In spite of believing the shocks were real, two-thirds delivered the highest level of shock labeled “danger-severe shock,” as they watched the learner writhe in (pretended) pain.

Could you or I be importuned into participating in this ugly “experiment” and administer electric shocks to slow learners and watch them writhing in what we perceive to be intense pain?

Could you or I attend a public hanging with our wives, children and a picnic lunch to witness the painful death as the trapdoor opens and the lethal rope knot snaps the neck of the victim of our primitive love of human torture? Could Dostoevsky’s demon inside us all let us relish the sight of hungry lions tearing apart and devouring the bodies of Christians in the Roman Coliseum, a monument to man’s inhumanity? Or stand by and do nothing as Nazi Germany slaughters six millions Jews?

The United States of American would be denied membership in the European Union, which does not admit any country that still practices the barbaric custom of capital punishment.

What if all the slow learners in the Harvard “experiment” were African-Americans and all the participating recruits were white? Would the infliction of “danger-severe shock” be administered―not two-thirds of the time―but 100 percent of the time?

Is racism so deeply imbedded in all of us, so institutionalized, that when it’s crunch time our innate racism emerges?

I am enrolled in an adult history course at New Trier High School. The subject is African-American history. The instructor is young black man. We are discussing the Ku Klux Klan killings of three students lynched in Philadelphia, Mississippi on August 4, 1964. The instructor asks us if we are familiar with this murder. All of us are. He then asks us to write down the names of the three student victims. Most could not recall any names.

I write down the names of Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, but I cannot recall the name of the young black student. I dig as deeply as I can into my memory bank and come up blank. James Chaney. Why can’t I remember the name of the black student? Institutionalized racism on a small scale, but institutionalized racism nevertheless.

I decide to do a rigorous self-examination. In the process I turn to the three wisest men and greatest leaders―in my opinion―of the twentieth century―Mahatma Gandhi, Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King Jr. I watch the movie “Gandhi” with Ben Kingsley portraying this diminutive little man in the loin cloth woven from his own loom who brought the British Empire to its knees with nonviolence. Remember the horrible scene at the gates to the salt factory? I watch a documentary on South African apartheid and Archbishop Tutu’s conduct of reconciliation in a country tortured with racism and I listen to and read Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech delivered to more than 250,000 people (one-fifth white) in Washington, D.C. on August 23, 1963―the most moving and powerful plea for an end to racism I have ever heard. Please recall with me his final plea:

Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow
freedom ring―when we let it ring from every village and every
hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children―black and white men,
Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics―will be able to
Join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at
Last!”

One of the saddest days of my life occurred in a congregational meeting of the First United Congregational Church of Wilmette back in the early 1970s. In the absence of the congregation’s president, I, as vice president, presided over a meeting that would decide whether this all-white North Shore Chicago church known for its political and social liberalism would make a decision that would demonstrate decisively that we as Christians were willing to merge with an all-black Chicago inner city United Congregational church and share our spiritual and financial resources.

The Reverend Jim Kidd, our pastor, had laid out the merger plan with loving skill and care.This was the test of our Christianity. Martin Luther King had challenged us. Could we accept that challenge and do the right thing? Could this congregation that claimed to be followers of the man who delivered the Sermon on the Mount send a message of hope and inspiration to the whole world? Could we share our
bricks and mortar and financial wealth with a desperately poor, small black sister church?

The motion to effect the merger was made and seconded. I gave everyone a fair and full opportunity to express their views. Then I knew the answer.

Given the opportunity to act out their professed opposition to racism, the membership of the First Congregational Church of Wilmette failed the test, voted down the merger and clearly revealed it was not ready to discard its racism and reach out to the members of a sister congregation. I was devastated.

I left that church and its hypocritical membership and so did Jim Kidd. That’s the story.

We have a long road to travel before racism―overt and covert―is eradicated and Martin Luther King’s dream comes true.

The obnoxious stench of cigarette smoke assails my nostrils. The smoke-blowing young couple is blocking the sidewalk leading up to the Olive Garden restaurant entrance. I bypass them by stepping into the driveway, but my wife charges between them, forcing them to part like the Red Sea as she asserts her right to use a sidewalk designed for walkers, not smokers.

I can’t stand cigarette or cigar smoke.

I almost break into tears when I see a lovely young woman with a Virginia Slims dangling from her rosebud lips in the act of committing suicide—slow but almost guaranteed.My dearest sister died a slow and painful death from lung cancer at 60, because she never quit smoking.

And who is the stupid looking young guy with the silly grin clutching a cigarette in his left hand? Except for all the hair he looks familiar. I am jerked back to January 1944. This 22-year-old ensign is en route to his first duty assignment on Adak Island in the Aleutians. It’s me. Can you believe it? The guy who hates cigarettes? What is hell is he doing with a fag between his index and middle finger? A common sight for the twenty-six years I am a pack-and-a-half-a-day inhaler of nicotine and tar. Certainly as obnoxious as the young couple blocking the sidewalk to the Olive Garden on this balmy Friday evening on November 2, 2007.

Do you know that about 438,000 Americans die from smoking each year and that nationwide 21 percent of adults still smoke versus 13 percent in California?

Do you know that 300 million Chinese smoke cigarettes—more than the total U. S. population?

Do you know that cigarettes and alcohol are by far the most deadly drugs consumed by humanoids and the most widely-traded commodity in the world? Not heroin, cocaine, meth or marijuana.

But I don’t quit smoking at 1:30 PM, Friday, December 31, 1963, because I fear the damage it is doing to my lungs and body. I quit because my wife gives me a choice when I asked her what she wants for Christmas.

“Either a mink coat or you quit smoking.”

Not a difficult decision. I can't afford to buy a mink coat.

But do I have the will power? When I try once before, I balloon to 210 pounds and go back on the filthy weed.

No turning back this time.

I use the tried and true method: I tell everyone I know that I have quit puffing the deadly coffin nails. How can I face them or myself if I every light up again?

Every half hour while awake, I fight off the desire. The craving ebbs. Only to repeat again in thirty minutes. Fight it off over and over again. After two weeks the craving subsides. Never again.

I bury the past of that ignorant young Navy ensign with the cigarette in his left hand.

I consider this the most important achievement of my life.
.

The title sums up my experiences in the U. S. Navy during and after World War II.

Like most of my World War II contemporaries, I went into the military service determined to utterly destroy our hated enemies, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan; but a rigid, anachronistic, embedded bureaucracy—the U. S. Navy—soon chilled that fire in my belly. Within weeks of going on active duty as an ensign assigned to temporary duty at the University of Minnesota, I was made painfully aware of the truism that there is a right way to fight a war, a wrong way and the Navy way.

The Navy is handcuffed by hide bound tradition that brooks no variation from set routines—a caste system that gives officers privileges that are denied to enlisted men and rampant racism that relegated African-Americans to menial chores and refused to put guns in their hands. A strange way to unite America in its war effort.
The highlight of my two months wait for a new Navy Supply Corps class to begin at Harvard’s Business School in Boston was a house party at the commanding officer’s private home where the wives of officers sat in one room playing bridge while their officer husbands joined host Captain Gates, swilled beer and watched a pornographic movie in a back room. A Navy cultural event that embarrassed the new officers and their innocent brides. Adding insult, the two junior officers, George Rossman and I, had to pick up the total tab on our $150- per-month pay.

Daily mandatory volleyball filled the time we waited to get down to business. No attention was paid to the world in flames during the most ghastly war in history. The war might as well have been fought on another planet.

At the Harvard Supply Corp School most of my classmates were professionals—accountants and attorneys whose average age was in the 30s. I was among the youngest, a 22-year-old college graduate. The training course had been condensed from eighteen months to four months without cutting out any irrelevant fat. Up at 0600 and out into the field for calisthenics for out-of-shape bodies not likely to see combat from behind desks.

As the Boston weather turned frigid, we did not deviate from the set routine. Up at 0600 and calisthenics. One-third of my class ended up in the infirmary with pneumonia. But still up for 0600 exercises regardless of below zero temperatures and frozen turf. Totally insane. Typically Navy. We were also given an intensive course in close order drills—extremely useless for supply and disbursing officers armed only with .45 caliber automatic pistols.

How in hell are we going to win a war with such knuckleheads running the show? I state emphatically and unequivocally that WW II was not won by generals and admirals or military tradition but by the raw courage of infantrymen, seamen and aircraft crews and the all-out conversion of our nation’s industries to military production. We overwhelmed our enemies with our manufacturing might, not with the leadership of numskull, bungling brass—as clearly documented in Ken Burns’ “The War.”

I requested duty aboard a cruiser in the Atlantic, so the Navy assigned me to Motor Torpedo Board Squadron Thirteen in the Aleutian Islands where a regular Navy officer, Lt. Commander James B. Denny of Bellflower, Texas, insisted I quarter with him as a staff officer and participate in anti-submarine night patrols on the ferocious Bering Sea in the middle of winter. The pounding of the 78-foot wooden boats caused piles among boat crewmen. Our feet were off he boats’ oak decks about seventy-five percent of the time. Nothing for me to do but hang on and avoid being swept overboard when the boat crashed into huge waves. Dressed with multiple layers of foul weather gear, we were soaked to the skin in ice water. After these insane all-night patrols (we never saw a Japanese submarine) the boat crews slept in, but I had to be in my office at 0800 for a full day’s work. Fortunately, this killer ordeal lasted only four months.

When MTBRon 13 moved out of the Aleutians en route to the South Pacific, I stayed behind at Adak, loaded our gear onto a Liberty ship and flew down to Seattle where I would eventually be reunited with the boat crews after their several weeks’ voyage down the Alaska coast to the Bremerton, Washington, Navy base, where the boats were outfitted with radar, repaired and sent via San Francisco across the Pacific. I made the horrendous mistake of getting emergency leave papers while waiting in Seattle in order to meet my newly born son in Chicago.
I was in Chicago one day when I received a telegram from Denny ordering my immediate return to Seattle or face a court-martial.

Apparently, he decided at the last minute to use air transport to Seattle well ahead of the boats, found me missing, tracked me down and threatened me with severe punishment. I flew back pronto, then sat for several weeks with nothing to do waiting for the ship to arrive with the squadron’s supplies, which I loaded on a freight train to San Francisco. Just plain mean. Vindictive. Arbitrary and capricious—a typical regular Navy commanding officer overloaded with power and devoid of sensitivity.

The drunken captain of the Liberty ship on which I crossed the Pacific in 28 days to New Guinea was a sadist who got his kicks beating up a drunken, masochistic chief mate. Then Captain Johansen went too far and started beating the third mate, a former U. S. Navy enlisted man who was released from service because of battle wounds, got his merchant marine papers and went back to sea. The chief engineer, Orlando Cepeda, and I sent for the shore patrol, had Johansen arrested and hauled ashore to the brig. At a hearing the next day, the Navy solved the problem with typical insanity. They transferred the third mate to another ship and did nothing to punish Johansen who was obviously unfit to command. You and I would lock Johansen up for the duration and place the sober and capable second mate in command. Back unscathed as ship’s captain, Johansen resumed his abnormal life style.

Two of our PT boat captains abandoned their boats under fierce daily Japanese suicide plane attacks at Mindoro Island in late 1944 and early 1945. They were not punished for desertion under fire. They could have been shot and certainly should have been court-martialed for cowardice. Ironically, one of them wrote the official (revisionist) history of the squadron.

The captain of a PT boat tender, the U. S. S. Orestes, was one of the first to abandon ship after a Japanese suicide plane smashed into the Orestes and set it ablaze with its load of aviation gasoline and torpedoes ready to blow. He left superior officers lying wounded on deck. Our commanding officer, Lt. Commander N. Burt Davis, took a volunteer crew to the Orestes, put out the fire, rescued the wounded officers and crewmen, came ashore, found the ship’s captain and tore his face to shreds with his bare fists. Was the Orestes’ captain punished for abandoning the ship? Not by the Navy. A year later I saw the Orestes at Samar Island after it had been rebuilt. The same captain Muller at the helm. You won’t read any of this in official U. S. Navy history.

One of my storekeepers collected $1.20 from Lt. Commander Davis when he handed him two ears he cut off a dying Japanese pilot he found in the swamp—totally illegal and unacceptably brutal but authorized and encouraged by Davis.

Several years after the end of the war, Navy Intelligence filed charges against me for “subversive” activities in the San Francisco Bay Area. None of my activities were subversive or illegal, but they were not acceptable to the Navy, which still had me under its thumb. They caught me picketing a Safeway Store in all-black West Oakland that forced the supermarket to hire black checkout clerks. I also helped lead a campaign that persuaded Governor Warren to reject a Mississippi extradition order that would have sent an innocent black Oakland storekeeper to life in prison—an historical first.

After serving with honor and distinction during the war, I got a Kafkaesque hearing and a discharge “other than honorable.” The Navy would not allow me to simply resign my commission and save thousands of taxpayer dollars. It took me more than thirty years to have the discharge changed to “honorable.” I never gave up. My Navy correspondence file is four inches thick. The honorable discharge arrived one happy day in 1986, forty years after I went on inactive duty, forty years after the end of the war.

I entered the Navy with high hopes, worked my butt off and was rewarded with a bad discharge based on civil rights political activity after the end of the war. The General Accounting Office gave me a clean bill with only one exception. I overpaid a new officer who joined the squadron and illegally ripped off a notice of a pay advance from his orders, so I had no way of deducting the advance from his pay.

I hope the Army, Navy, Marines Corps and Coast Guard have instituted major reforms; but, based on my experience, I would not recommend the pursuit of a military career unless our country is attacked as it last was in World War II—certainly not since December 7, 1941.