A few months after I’d completed basic training at Ft. Ord (CA) to join the 28th Army Band at the same post the band c.o.—himself a bass player perhaps more interested in his civilian nightclubs gigs than doing the manic army thing (an army band being the musical equivalent of the MASH series)—“invited’ me to become the ‘unit armorer’ since the current armorer was getting out, to which I of course agreed, thinking of future promotions. The job of the ‘unit armorer’ is to tend to the ‘unit armory’, in our case a locked steel cage in one of the back rooms of the building containing a few dozen rifles and gas masks. There was no ammunition (a practice continued, by the way, in Vietnam, where we actually carried m-16s, though sans ammo, which was locked away and safely guarded by an alcoholic quartermaster whom nobody could ever find; I eventually got to keep two bandoliers with me ’cause I was riding shotgun so often on convoys to Saigon; not much of a threat there because I’d never fired an m-16—we trained in basic on m-14s—but there’s a great pic of killer keene looking like the empire’s storm trooper hanging around somewhere). (Reminding me of my first week in Vietnam pulling all night guard duty along a river beside the transition camp in which I was placed atop a bunker and shown the m-50 machine gun and the m-79 grenade launcher and other weapons under the assumption that this trombonist was somehow familiar with them and the firing switch for the claymores, which I could at least figure out, and ordered ‘If you see anybody, kill ‘em’; thus explaining my rather jaundiced view of all this ‘american soldiers are the best trained in the world’ rhetoric.) The unit armorer’s job consisted of counting the stuff every so often, and checking serial numbers and filling out a report. Big deal; other guys were mopping the floors, I was counting guns and gas masks.

But, in order to be authorized to count the guns and gas masks I had to go to school for two weeks in get this ‘Chemical, Biological, & Radiological Warfare’ (ala army-ese, ‘CBR’, I suppose today’s equivalent being WMD). Very bizarre, though I enjoyed the learning experience. There were about 25 guys from different units there, four or five of ‘em being lieutenants, the rest of us grunts, with a training cadre of two or three guys from the Chemical Corps. We were there equally as learners, so all the salutin’ nonsense was ignored from the outset, though there came to be, of course, a good-natured rivalry between us. I outlasted ‘em gas maskless in the gas house full of cs (focus on what to do, not on how you feel; besides, coming from a family of seven in which six of us smoked, it wasn’t that much worse than an after dinner discussion). I won the jam the needle on the end of a miniature metal toothpaste tube of saline into your thigh pretending you’re in a nerve gas attack and the needle is atropine race—slammed that bastard right in there, yelled bingo and manfully left it stickin’ there ’til they came to make sure. (Listen, if you’re gonna live in the insanity, you might as well be good at it.)

We learned about mustard gas (which a labmate and I had accidentally created in high school chemistry class, sending old mrs. marshall all a-twitter and earning me a D for the semester) and other chemical and biological agents and how to anticipate, recognize, and ‘defend’ against them. Then we learned about geiger counters and rads and atomic blasts and fallout and radiation sickness—geez we were havin’ fun! We learned to predict population casualties by blast zones and fallout patterns based on winds and blast height and such and we drew maps solving problems and laying it all out and I was good at it; so good, in fact, that the chem guys asked me if I was interested in transferring to their unit, which I seriously considered until I discovered that the tunnel rats in Vietnam came out of the chem corps and took a pass. This ability to predict death and destruction made me the hero of the grunts, too, given that I was tied for the score lead with the leading looey, losing finally by a crappy one point for having forgotten to put the letter n above the north arrow on the compass rose. ‘Twas fun, and we all went and had some beers and agreed that in spite of what we had learned, the real response to a CBR attack is to kiss your ass goodbye.

Which we’d already been taught to do in elementary school, under the rubric of ‘duck and cover’ drills, which meant falling to hands and knees under your desk and covering your head upon the teacher’s command, say, in the middle of a nice gentle read about Davey Crockett suddenly ‘duck and cover!!’ with books and shit flying everywhere as we scrambled on the verge of a panic to stick our asses up and our heads down. (Good prep, though, for band rehearsals on the deck in Vietnam when somebody yelled ‘incoming!’ and clarinets and trumpets and shit went clanking off chairs and cymbals went crashing down and stands went tumbling over as we all dove for the bunker.) Sometimes an air-raid siren went off in the city to demand duck and cover and that was the most frightening for this, say, eight-year-old huddled under that desk waiting, wondering about the coming explosion with the nervousness of a kid anticipating Dad’s discovery in a deadly game of hide and seek: the Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! And on hearing ‘all clear’ we would return to Davey Crockett as if nothing had happened, as if the terror were not real, left alone to a fearsome imagination.

Somewhere around junior high we were introduced to the ‘missile gap’—a nifty invention by Kennedy for his presidential campaign; the fuckin’ russians are still coming and now they have more peckers than we do. And sure ’nuff they showed up in that great event of terror known as the ‘cuban missile crisis’, egad, russian peckers at our door step and I soon had friends who had bomb shelters in their back yards. I was in 10th grade for the big pecker stand-off, though far more concerned about a smaller, more private missile, focused on copping feels and praying ‘lord don’t let me go out still a virgin’ (a prayer graciously answered by the way before it became necessary in Vietnam, which probably saved me a wad in the whorehouses there, though as a g.i. I wasn’t unfamiliar with them, thinking I might as well see what this whole business of war does to people, say 14 & 15 year old girls supporting their families; it wasn’t pretty, just humiliating).

That’s not to say that my personal missile crisis ruled out any awareness of the big peckers in Cuba. We talked about that shit a lot during ‘luther league’ at church with the guidance and help of our pastors and wrote prayers and little liturgies. We gathered regionally and sang new songs (and, natch, popular folk songs asking where have all the flowers gone?) and wrote new creeds and had agape meals and talked about faith in Jesus under a doomsday umbrella (‘though missiles rain we will trust. . .’) and prayed for peace. (This, though, is not to suggest that all such gatherings were so spiritually sublime, with one regional gathering e.g. carrying the pathetically relevant theme ‘Witness A-Go-Go’—even as a teenager, Keene, ‘holy shit! Pole dancers for Jesus!’—and intense discussions about kissing on the first date, which never addressed the real concerns of my pals and I, i.e., how many times do you have to take her out before you get a feel?) And even without talking about it at church, the fallout of the nuclear nightmare was all around us in the culture anyway. But then word got out that we in America had developed the capacity to destroy the whole world some some 500 times over, and the russians could only do it 463 times and we were all relieved; I joined the army band and went to CBR School and the arms limitation talks began and there were people who thought that was a bad idea, then wanted to do the whole star wars thing and even now we live with the remnants of that insane policy called ‘mutually assured destruction.’

‘Course now we’re treated to thoughts of dirty bombs and rogue nations with leaders insane enough to use them (just like russia in the good old days); we the good guys maintain a stockpile of and continue to develop ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons and there was even consideration given to using them with the invasion of Iraq, you know, the ‘limited use’ of them.

A song I used to sing: strontium, strontium, strontium ninety, fallout will get you even underground. . . .

I don’t give much credence to American exceptionalism—that mindset that our national motives are somehow purer than everybody else’s—especially when it comes to military power, ’cause the old saw ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ is just as true for nations as for individuals. Back around the turn of the (current) century I read a paper authored by Cheney and Rumsfeld and that whole coven crowing about how good it was that the US was the sole super power because we’re moral and now we could stomp out evil the world over and their ignorant hubris scared the hell out of me and then they were elected and the nightmares about their holy war came true. Well, except for the nuclear thing. . .so far. (And that ain’t just irrational paranoia, ’cause I never believed my country capable of developing torture as an official policy; nor did I believe it capable of ‘pre-emptively’ invading another country, the experience of Vietnam notwithstanding. Toss in the fiery armageddon lunatics providing the theological input for these guys and there’s plenty of reason to be afraid.) The president is still shadowed wherever he goes by some guy carrying a metal briefcase with nuclear attack codes inside. I’ll feel significantly safer come January 20th.

‘Significantly safer’ being a relative term of course because there are still thousands of ‘em scattered around, in a kind of good news/bad news scenario, the good being that the total number of nukes worldwide has declined from a high of 69,000 in 1985 to a paltry 20,000 currently; the bad side of it being that we don’t know where a bunch of ‘em are and since the breakup of the Iron Curtain, a bunch of ‘em are in the hands of crazy, say, unstable governments. (Some interesting numbers and graphs here: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/index.html). And, oh yeah, there are still 20,000 of ‘em around; plenty of terror yet lingering about. But at least the numbers have been reduced.

And somebody had to do the work of reducing the number: somebody had to apply the political pressure to start the talks and keep them going; somebody had to get into negotiations with deadly enemies; somebody had to get those treaties through congress; and somebody had to put the practices in place working with other countries who themselves were living in the very same paranoia created by the nukes in the first place. Somebody worked behind closed doors, out of the limelight of strutting armies in pecker parades with a caravan of missile launchers rumbling by, raising deadly erections as they pass in review before the cheering crowds. While we thrilled in our pride and thumped our chests over our strength (often led by Keene in the front rank with the bones) and preened our might like the other nations of the world, all gathered to watch a pissin’ contest between 12-year-old boys, there were these hidden somebodies from all over the world, international hobbits working to beat swords into plowshares.

Which is where God is to be seen—in the hiddeness.

After all, the development and stockpiling of nuclear weapons is nothing but a sin, as well, guns and gas masks and chariots and swords and all the weapons of war. As good old warmaster and president Eisenhower (the good Ike) of ‘military-industrial complex’ fame also said, ‘Every dollar spent on a bullet for war is stolen from a child.’ Before God there is simply no justification for our murderous lust, argue what you might about national defense. War, as somebody said, is when the devil wins. War just ain’t the stuff of God, specially nuclear war; but there you go—we’re stuck to live under the dark shadow of the mushroom cloud; like 12-year olds discovering missiles of another sort we look at our nuclear erections and cry ‘help, help, this thing is out of control.’

And pray in the hope of Advent:
Stir up your power, O Lord, and come—incarnated in the hobbits who beat swords into plowshares.
Create in me the heart of Frodo.