My father, who served three-and-a-half-years in the South Pacific (Cairns, New Guinea, the Philippines) as an Engineers Corps staff sergeant, hated the army so deeply and everlastingly that he declined a lifetime of insurance payments to which he was entitled. “I don’t want anything from them,” he told my mother, who by extension was also entitled to them, as he balked at filing the required forms. In 1945, he had docked in Seattle and took the train home to Brooklyn, suffering the effects of dysentery and Jungle rot; he scrapped his khakis, stored his Good Conduct Medal in his sock drawer, and resumed a marriage that had begun only weeks before his induction. It had been a long, long time.
Nor did the ensuing years and the arrival of offspring temper his recollections of General MacArthur’s retreat (which, he would have been pleased to know, were recently affirmed in Tears in the Darkness, by Norman and Norman, 2009), his vanity, and especially his arrogant appropriation of the Corps of Engineers to erect his ever-grander quarters. In the 1950s, given the afterglow of McCarthyism, he cautioned me not to repeat in school the things I may have overheard on the subject. One evening we stopped at a delicatessen in Oceanside and my father and a counterman recognized each other from the South Pacific— in the throes of reunion, they enthusiastically ragged MacArthur in terms that froze many a pastrami-on-rye midway between plate and mouth. Despite a few photos he sent home from furloughs in Melbourne, for which he posed with topless Aborigine women, he had no amusing anecdotes to pass on.
And yet he loved service comedies—the generic name for movies about life in the armed forces. He especially loved Sgt. Bilko, the peacetime master sergeant, stationed at mythical Fort Baxter, in Roseville, Kansas, and played hilariously by Phil Silvers on The Phil Silvers Show, from 1955 to 1959. Bilko and my father would have been close in age; they had served in the same theater of war and neither of them saw combat. That did not matter nearly as much as the fact that Bilko had only one objective: to bilk the army, specifically, the idiots in charge. If Bilko failed to personally gain much ground, neither did he lose any. When the series had still been on the drawing board, Silvers knew it couldn’t miss because my father and millions like him were members of what Silvers described (in This Laugh Is On Me, 1973) as a “made-to-measure audience”: not just veterans, but men presently in uniform, men slated to enlist or be drafted, and women who dated army men or “wished they hadn’t.”
Bilko spoke to a bigger community than he knew. Most Americans had connections to the armed forces, not least the millions of baby boomers who came of age in the war’s aftermath and remained fully cognizant of the ongoing intimidations of a military culture that could reel in, for two cautiously coiffed years, no less peaceable an ambassador of youth than Elvis Presley. The nation’s president had been promoted from Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, and if he presided over a combat free intermission between the American interventions in Korea and Vietnam, his very presence represented a vigilant red alert. In the Eisenhower era, summer camps routinely mimicked military tradition, complete with a wake-up recording of reveille (as applied to Fort Baxter, this triggers the first joke in Bilko’s pilot episode), uniform outfits, double-bunk barracks, lousy food, counselors who bounced a quarter on beds to see how tightly the sheets were tucked (hospital-style), and a climactic color war. The war in Korea had led to the firing of MacArthur; the war in Vietnam would lead to the end of the draft itself, taking with it a staple of American entertainment.
Service Comedies
by Gary Giddins
My father, who served three-and-a-half-years in the South Pacific (Cairns, New Guinea, the Philippines) as an Engineers Corps staff sergeant, hated the army so deeply and everlastingly that he declined a lifetime of insurance payments to which he was entitled. “I don’t want anything from them,” he told my mother, who by extension was also entitled to them, as he balked at filing the required forms. In 1945, he had docked in Seattle and took the train home to Brooklyn, suffering the effects of dysentery and Jungle rot; he scrapped his khakis, stored his Good Conduct Medal in his sock drawer, and resumed a marriage that had begun only weeks before his induction. It had been a long, long time.
Nor did the ensuing years and the arrival of offspring temper his recollections of General MacArthur’s retreat (which, he would have been pleased to know, were recently affirmed in Tears in the Darkness, by Norman and Norman, 2009), his vanity, and especially his arrogant appropriation of the Corps of Engineers to erect his ever-grander quarters. In the 1950s, given the afterglow of McCarthyism, he cautioned me not to repeat in school the things I may have overheard on the subject. One evening we stopped at a delicatessen in Oceanside and my father and a counterman recognized each other from the South Pacific— in the throes of reunion, they enthusiastically ragged MacArthur in terms that froze many a pastrami-on-rye midway between plate and mouth. Despite a few photos he sent home from furloughs in Melbourne, for which he posed with topless Aborigine women, he had no amusing anecdotes to pass on.
And yet he loved service comedies—the generic name for movies about life in the armed forces. He especially loved Sgt. Bilko, the peacetime master sergeant, stationed at mythical Fort Baxter, in Roseville, Kansas, and played hilariously by Phil Silvers on The Phil Silvers Show, from 1955 to 1959. Bilko and my father would have been close in age; they had served in the same theater of war and neither of them saw combat. That did not matter nearly as much as the fact that Bilko had only one objective: to bilk the army, specifically, the idiots in charge. If Bilko failed to personally gain much ground, neither did he lose any. When the series had still been on the drawing board, Silvers knew it couldn’t miss because my father and millions like him were members of what Silvers described (in This Laugh Is On Me, 1973) as a “made-to-measure audience”: not just veterans, but men presently in uniform, men slated to enlist or be drafted, and women who dated army men or “wished they hadn’t.”
Bilko spoke to a bigger community than he knew. Most Americans had connections to the armed forces, not least the millions of baby boomers who came of age in the war’s aftermath and remained fully cognizant of the ongoing intimidations of a military culture that could reel in, for two cautiously coiffed years, no less peaceable an ambassador of youth than Elvis Presley. The nation’s president had been promoted from Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, and if he presided over a combat free intermission between the American interventions in Korea and Vietnam, his very presence represented a vigilant red alert. In the Eisenhower era, summer camps routinely mimicked military tradition, complete with a wake-up recording of reveille (as applied to Fort Baxter, this triggers the first joke in Bilko’s pilot episode), uniform outfits, double-bunk barracks, lousy food, counselors who bounced a quarter on beds to see how tightly the sheets were tucked (hospital-style), and a climactic color war. The war in Korea had led to the firing of MacArthur; the war in Vietnam would lead to the end of the draft itself, taking with it a staple of American entertainment.