My Life As A Warrior (Chapter One)

   As I may have said before, from the moment I emerged from my mother's womb hanging on to my twin sister's big toe for dear life, it became clear that I had not been born to be a warrior. I wasn’t even the passive aggressive type. In the cradle when my twin sister kicked me, I rarely kicked back. And when I did, I wasn't happy about it. I wasn't combative.

   In the fourth grade, at Coventry school when Reno Koepke, whose father was the manager of Mayfield Cemetery, viciously tackled me in a touch football game, I didn't fight back. I walked away and never played football in the schoolyard again. I didn't even blame anti Semitism.
   I just didn't do contact sports. I did try out for the track team, but was not anywhere fast enough.
   I occasionally got angry with my twin sister, and I remember chasing her around the dinner table with a sharp pencil and swinging out at her face. (I missed, Doctor Carson.) But I remember feeling very angry. Can't remember why, Doctor.
   So by the time I was ready to graduate from high school, I was perhaps the last person you might expect to volunteer to be inducted into US Army in the middle of World War II.
That was 1944. There was this ethos: War on. And for some inexplicable reason I signed on with the other guys, to be inducted the morning after graduation, it was the thing to do, to avoid being thought of as something less than a real man. I signed on. I was ready. I told every one who would listen. Particularly my girlfriend Rita Barnett, a nice Jewish SDT sorority girl. Her dad was manager of the shoe department at Sterling’s, a classy women's store downtown.

   At the time I really believed that I would be assigned to an officer training program on some college campus, since that is what happened to my good friends who went before me. Tom Schattenfield was at the University of Michigan, Larry Coben at the University of Kansas, and Bob Saslaw at Penn State. So I plowed forward.

   Reality struck when I got to Columbus after a tearful goodbye to my mother at Pennsylvania station at 55th and Carnegie. After a day of painful shots in the arms and all kinds of tests much like the SAT that I was sure I had aced, the minute the group of about 50 of us were assembled the captain called us to attention. I felt like top dog. Maybe an appointment to West Point, Dr. Carson.
But the mystique of any sort of academic future faded quickly as the captain barked:
   “We've had a new order from headquarters, the ASTP program has been cancelled."
I nearly wet my pants. He went on, “Private Weidenthal, you got the highest grade on the test. You are assigned to the 95th Infantry division at Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania.”

   At that memorable moment in my life, I had become a warrior, first class. Like it or not.
And although I squirmed a bit, I accepted reality and decided to go with the flow. None of the cheap psychotic tricks that some of the guys talked about, like the peanut butter on the toilet seat trick, or simply feigning insanity. Not for me. This neurotic kids from Cleveland Heights was playing it straight, Doctor.
   It turned out that the 95th had been training for combat for two years at Camp swift in Texas, and was assembling in Pennsylvania for the trip to the war zone and had been assigned to join General George Patton’s famed army for the march across Europe. It was not all fun and games. I saw it as historically significant, but personally dangerous.
Basic training for this kid from Cleveland was more than learning the “F word” as the adjective preceding every course of every meal.
   “Basic” had its memorable moments. Like the day someone shoved an M 1 rifle under my arm and ordered me to crawl in my belly through 50 yards of Pennsylvania mud while a fifty caliber machine gun mounted on a Jeep fired real bullets over our heads.
I remember being petrified, Doctor.
   We heard later that one terrified young man stood up and his body was torn apart by the the deadly bullets. They say the shooting ceased for awhile so they could remove his remaining body parts. I didn’t see it, but they say it happened, Dr. Carson.
   Or the day on mountain maneuvers in the Snake River Canyon of West Virginia, where I was assigned to carry tree pigeons in a cage on my back. They were geniuses. So smart, you could tie a note to their feet telling them where to go, and by God, they would make it. Of course my back was covered with more bird droppings in one day than the Ciivil War monument on Public Square gets in an entire summer. So much for basic training.
   Sometime during this period, my magnificent, caring mother, taking view of reality as only a mother can, came to Pennsylvania. She was on her way to New York on business and took me to dinner with some people she knew, including dear friend Leo Shore and his wife Shirley.

   Leo was a tough 32 year old Jewish business man who happened to be assigned to my unit. It was toward the end of the evening that she looked Leo in the eye, wagged her finger him and declared,
“You take care of my boy!”
Her words turned out to be more meaningful than we at that table in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1944, could ever imagine.

To be continued…

Next week:
B-bombs and blackouts
Missing the boat to Omaha Beach
“I Always Wanted to Kill A Jew”
Having lunch with Gen. Patton
Winning the air medal
The Battle of the Bulge
Losing best friends
My life as a muckraker

My Life With Guns (Revised and Updated)

   The first time I ever saw a gun was when Don Glaser fired a pistol into the ceiling in Mr.Tubaugh's ninth grade English glass at Roosevelt Jr. High in Cleveland Heights. Needless to say mayhem ensued. Naomi Garber, who was sitting next to Don, screamed hysterically,
   "I can't hear! I can't hear!"
   Don, who later in life went on to win the Nobel prize in physics, had no idea the pistol was loaded, trembled and dropped it to the floor. Mr. Tubaugh, a round faced little bald man, who looked for all the world like Oliver Hardy, seemed about to explode. Punky Bernstein, a street-smart trouble maker who owned the gun, looked perplexed.
   "It's only a starter pistol," he shouted.
   "It’s okay. Nothing to worry about.”
   But it wasn't okay. Mr.Tubaugh grabbed Bernstein by the collar and threw him out of class, calming Naomi as well as he could. Of course no one called the police, and the class was dismissed with no assignment for the next day.
   But I had learned a lifelong lesson. It was back then, just before WW II was about to tear the civilized world apart, that it I came to the rather simplistic conclusion that guns, real or fake, loaded or unloaded, had no place in the classroom. And creeps the likes of Punky Bernstein, needed to be watched by someone carefully. BUT, with all that, Punky popped into my young life early on. We were neighbors. He lived in the next apartment building over on Euclid Heights Blvd. near Coventry.    There was no avoiding him. One day, we heard several loud snapping sounds not far away.
   “That’s a gun!,” he shouted, with considerable assurance.
   “Let's go!"
   We raced toward Coventry and the noises. Punky was exuberant.
   "It's gunshots!" There was no doubt in his voice. He was excited. Frantic. I was breathless and confused. What we found was not nice. It was the Bird brothers, a nationally notorious gang of bank robbers. They had attempted to hold up the Central National Bank at Lancashire and Coventry.
The Heights police had caught them on the spot. It was a nasty scene. There had been a shoot out. Two of the four Birds were shot and lay bleeding in the street. An innocent woman waiting for a trolley had been killed in the crossfire. When the smoke cleared and I had time to think, I asked myself, "Why?!" This was crazy. Had the world gone crazy?
   Fast forward a few years to World War II. I was the innocent, chosen at 18 for the infantry to fight with General Patton in Europe. Plenty of guns and much ugliness. Enormous devastation and lots of questions. Occasionally in the silence of an evening or two, I paused to ask myself,
   "Why this craziness? Why?"
   On my first week as a police reporter at the Cleveland Press, after college, I learned of a terrible tragedy. A woman in East Cleveland had accidentally shot and severely wounded her baby boy. I pounced on the story with visions of a page one byline driving my passion. With the help of police I found this attractive, but terribly distraught middle class white mother. She of course, was beside herself in horror and guilt. The gun was somehow left on the bed loaded. It was there, she claimed, to protect herself and her eight month old son from her husband, a madman who had threatened to kill her. Somehow the baby, while crawling on the bed, gotten hold of the gun and it fired.
   “Why?!,” I wanted to ask. But this was not the time. I was too busy getting my first story, which did indeed appear across the top of the page the next day. Mixed feelings, of course. It was a victory for my budding career.
   That was sixty years ago. No time for philosophical thinking. Strange how the memory of my first page one byline sticks.
   I don't remember whether the little boy died, or whether that mother went to jail, but I have often wondered about this fetish with guns. And as I read with distress about infants being shot in their homes or in their car seats, teenagers dying in gang shoot-outs, there are more questions about this human inanity. And I ask why, hoping that someone is listening.
   Maybe I should ask my Texas friend, Mark, a retired motorcycle policeman and gun aficionado, who once shot himself in the foot while loading his rifle, proudly posting a picture of it on Facebook.
Okay Mark, why?
   Perhaps that monumental intellect Jeb Bush had the answer the other day when asked by a reporter about the massacre of students at that Oregon Community College. With only a short pause, he declared without further comment,
   "Stuff happens," and then went on to brag about how he cut taxes in Florida when he was governor.
I guess that's it Jeb.
   "Stuff happens".
Why Jeb, WHY?