i2 features

November 16, 2011 - Over the Edge

CS 3 3 3S

by Paul Strickland

Gerald had two left feet.

In Grade 8 he did manage to learn the jitterbug
from dancing lessons held in the basement gym during the
lunch hour on rainy or snowy days. In a German club he
learned the polka.

There were some popular fast dances — the Frug,
the Swim and the Freddie — that were almost free-form
and that Gerald could do after a fashion. However, most
girls didn’t want to dance with him because he sometimes
stepped on their toes during slow dances and his attempts
at conventional ballroom dancing. He often didn’t know
which way to move, and, as a shy person, he was mortified
by the kinds of mistakes he made on the dance floor.

Gerald’s high school was only five blocks away,
and the university he attended afterwards was only a half
block from his front door. He didn’t see the need to incur
debt to buy a car, purchase gas for it and buy the necessary
insurance. He didn’t get his driver’s licence until February
in his first year at university, and then only borrowed his
parents’ car for a couple of dates that didn’t go well. He
was too socially ignorant to realize that a vehicle of one’s
own was more than a means of transportation to go from
Point A to Point B: It was also a vehicle for social advan-
cement during those crucial years of late youth and young
adulthood that, once gone, can never be reclaimed.

Gerald’s inability to keep time with his feet not
only affected his social life, but proved a liability dur-
ing Military Science 101 and 102 — otherwise known as
Reserve Officer Training Corps (or ROTC, which some
less-than-impressed students pronounced ROT-sea). It was
compulsory for male students during the first two years of
university where he attended. Until winter weather inter-
fered, there was marching drill in uniform every Tuesday
and Thursday morning. Because he was very thin and had
a size 27 waist, it took until mid-October for his uniform to
arrive. He was marching in street clothes until then, wear-
ing a Mod-scene, Carnaby Street brown corduroy double-
breasted jacket that he thought might at least be a little
military-looking.

When the uniform arrived, it was still a little too
big for Gerald, and he had to use the last notch of his belt
to keep the trousers in place. That wasn’t his only prob-
lem. He couldn’t keep in step, no matter how hard he tried.
Too often he stopped a half step short, causing the young
men to his left and also the lines of soldiers in training be-
hind him to likewise stop a half-step short. The result was
what looked like a jagged crack through the middle of the
marching platoon. Sergeant Hudson of the ROTC program
wasn’t pleased, and neither was the platoon commander,
Sergeant Koizumi.

The previous summer had been the Summer of
Love, and the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band album had been released in August of that year.
A pacifist leftist group, the Peace in Vietnam Committee,
had been formed on campus, with a Quaker philosophy
professor as adviser, but as yet there was little militant
Marxism in evidence. Some friends of his joined with the
committee to conduct a mill-in at the offices of the dean
of arts and sciences, and they had been filmed by suspi-
ciously official-looking men who were thought to be FBI
agents, but there had been no violence. Gerald didn’t go to
the mill-in. He opposed compulsory ROTC and the draft,
but from an Ayn Rand, libertarian perspective, not from
any extreme leftist point of view. He didn’t enjoy the com-
pulsory military science course, but he was not deliber-
ately trying to interfere with the ROTC program. He just
couldn’t keep step.

Sergeant Hudson and Sergeant Koizumi didn’t
really suspect Gerald of trying to sabotage marching drill.
But something had to be done.

By early November Gerald found himself trans-
ferred to what was called Drill School, or remedial march-
ing-drill training. It was the military science equivalent of
Bonehead English. It was held in a little square park sur-

rounded by conifers near the Faculty of Education build-
ing. The officers in charge of drill school were firm but
patient with those who had little sense of timing with their
feet. Gerald improved slowly. Then the marching exercis-
es were discontinued for the season in late November be-
cause of increasingly snowy weather and cold winds from
the nearby high mountains.

ROTC also included a Wednesday morning
class on military history and organization in the Faculty of
Mines building, and also rifle assembly and practice ses-
sions one evening per week in the firing range located in
the basement of the old gym near the main library.

One time Major DesRochers, in charge of class-
room instruction for the ROTC program, asked Gerald and
his friends sitting in the middle row during the Wednesday
class, “Hey! When are you guys moving to Canada?!” and
then offered a mischievous grin.

The final exam for the first semester was an en-
tirely practical one in the firing range. It called for dis-
assembling an M-1 rifle in 30 seconds or reassembling one
in 60 seconds. The possible scores were 100 per cent for
successfully assembling or disassembling an M-1 rifle in
the allotted time, or 0 if the assigned task hadn’t been com-
pleted when the officer in charge called “Time!”

Gerald was one of the ROTC students asked to
reassemble an M-1 in the 60 seconds allowed. About mid-
way through this task, Gerald saw an essential spring fly
twenty-five feet across the back part of the firing range.
He had to stop and sprint across the room, retrieve the
disobedient spring and run back to his station to try to re-
sume the rifle-reassembly work. “Time!” was called be-
fore he was finished. He got a 0 in the exam and a D for
the fall semester of Military Science 101. His parents and
relatives, ignoring A’s in Latin, Honours English, German
and physical geography, said his performance during the
first semester was terrible because of the D in ROTC and
warned darkly that might lead to his being drafted for lack
of respect for the military.

Gerald and two of his friends spoke to the Board
of Governors in early March against compulsory ROTC.
The conservative chairman tried to get them to speak be-
fore the board meeting had been officially convened, but,
on the advice of the more liberal chancellor, they held off
and didn’t begin their speeches until after the meeting had
begun in earnest. They received back-page newspaper and
some TV coverage.

Marching drill resumed with the first hint of the
return of spring warmth. Gerald was eventually successful
in learning at least the basics of marching technique. He
was returned from Drill School to the regular drill unit and
in early May he marched with his unit in review before
the state’s governor during the official Governor’s Day pa-
rade. He received an A in the military history portion of the
Military Science 102 course, and aC in drill. The resulting
B was enough to pacify his parents and the relatives who,
at Christmas, had worried about his being drafted because
of the D he had earned during the first semester in ROTC.

Dancing had become more or less free form in
response to the ascendancy of the Counter-Culture, al-
though Gerald didn’t attend many university-sponsored
dances. Even though formal ballroom steps were, for the
moment, no longer called for in most circumstances, it was
clear that Gerald still seemed stiff and lacking in rhythm
when trying to dance.

Late in the summer, just before the start of
his second year at the university, the board of governors
convened a meeting with little advance notice. The deci-
sion reported from that meeting was that ROTC was to be
made voluntary except for a few classroom sessions during
the first week of September. These were set up to advise
incoming freshmen of their military obligations and the
many advantages of the ROTC program and of the tuition
assistance available for those who completed all four years
of military science and, on graduation, entered the Army
as infantry officers.