My View
Earlier this month, many of the nation's newspapers, TV and radio stations devoted considerable time and space to commemorating the 20th anniversary of the tearing down of one of the best-known symbols of the Cold War, that bitter and immensely costly ideological tug-of-war between the former Soviet Union and the United States that dragged on for nearly 50 years.
The Berlin Wall, or rather now its memory, has a special meaning to many Americans, especially men my age. I was a 22-year-old, just two months out of college and newly arrived in San Francisco, when headlines in the nation's newspapers announced that the Soviets had deliberately heightened tensions between the world's two super powers by hastily erecting a near-impenetrable barrier dividing East and West Berlin.
Days later, newly-elected President John F. Kennedy responded to the Soviet escalation by announcing a massive increase in the quota of young Americans eligible for the draft. That was in August of 1961.
Initially, neither event made much of an impact on me. Only a month earlier, I had arrived in San Francisco to seek my fortune as a poet, and by August already had met the West Coast luminary Kenneth Rexroth who, after reading a handful of my poems, invited me to join him and a few of his fellow poets in an upcoming public reading.
The idea of appearing on stage at a North Beach coffee houses with Rexroth and other of his colleagues and disciples scared the living daylights out of me. These folks were older, far more worldly, and legends, whereas I was just a literary puppy whose own feeble stabs at the art form never got anything more than a yawn from his proper English professors.
But as lady luck would have it, I was spared the ordeal when, early in September, a letter arrived in my Steiner Street mailbox informing me that not only was Uncle Sam sending along his warmest and most cordial greetings, he was also requesting my service in the United States Army.
It was an offer I couldn't refuse. The newlyweds I was living with urged me not to go. "Claim you're a conscientious objector," they said. But that's not what I was, and besides, once called to serve, I felt it my duty and obligation to report.
Anyway, all that was 48 years ago. Still, from time to time I wonder how things might have turned out had the Berlin Wall never been built. Would I have overcome my dread and taken the stage with Rexroth? Might I have joined the Freedom Riders and gone down to Mississippi, as a part of me wanted to do during that long-ago summer?
But of course none of that happened. Instead, on the afternoon of Dec. 11, 1961, I was boarding an airplane out of Syracuse, N.Y., bound for Fort Dix, N.J., after which came a two-year hitch at Fort Bragg, N.C., all of it compliments of the Berlin Wall and Uncle Sam.
Ironically, though I missed my stage debut with Rexroth, I did make it to down to Mississippi — only not with the Freedom Riders but, instead, with my military unit, the 503rd Military Police Battalion, the first unit of federal troops to arrive in Oxford during the bloody, early-morning hours immediately following James Meridith's enrollment at the previously all-white University of Mississippi.
The latter proved to be an event that would help bring down the wall of racial injustice that had stood largely unbroken in this country for more than 300 years — a wall, one might add, not entirely unlike that which would fall in Berlin some 27 years later.
Jim Munn, a regular Times' contributor, is the boys' track & field coach at Gloucester High School.
