In 1953, I enlisted in the Naval Reserve in Pittsburgh. We weren’t at war, but we still had a draft, and I assumed at some point I would be drafted by the Army, and I would lose two years of pursuing my profession.
The enlistment was for eight years and required me to go to meetings once a week, go to boot camp, and be out at sea two weeks a year. I started reporting to the weekly meetings. My main memory is how much the uniform itched, and how hard it was for me to concentrate on how torpedoes work.
There was something very wrong with my enlistment, although it wasn’t until years later that I realized it. Someone at the recruiting office should have told me that this was not a good idea for me because I couldn’t possibly go to weekly meetings, since I knew I’d be traveling to pursue the acting profession.
Eventually, I got a letter notifying me I was now in the active status pool. I had no idea what that meant and didn’t even ask. I was extremely naïve. When I was around twenty-three, I received my draft notice from the Army. I reported and passed the physical. While I was waiting for the actual notice to be inducted, I realized I could still join a reserve unit, so I began to call around, but there were no openings. Then I called the Naval Reserve. They had no openings, either. I said, “I used to be with you people.” There was a silence at the other end of the phone. Finally, the man said, “Were you discharged?” I said, “No.” He said, “Then you’re still in the Naval Reserve.”
It had been around five years since I joined, so I had three more years of meetings, and then I’d be discharged. Up until then I might have gone to a meeting once a week for a couple of months. But when I was settled in New York, I went to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, joined a reserve unit, and reported every week for three years. It was only then that I came to understand that being in the active status pool meant that if there was a call-up of troops, I’d be on the front lines. I was playing Russian roulette without knowing it.
I went to boot camp where a drill instructor found it necessary to scream obscenities at us. Every year I would be out at sea for two weeks on a large warship, often off the coast of North Carolina, at Cape Hatteras.
I progressed from seaman recruit to seaman apprentice to seaman to quartermaster third class, which is another name for navigator. That’s really ironic, since I have an unusually poor sense of direction.
One extremely foggy night at sea, they assigned me the forward watch. From four a.m. to eight a.m., I was to stand at the very front of the ship for a possible visual sighting of another ship, which I guess our radar could miss. Having a very active imagination, within five minutes I spotted more than one large ship heading our way and alerted the bridge. Our large warship came to an abrupt stop and began to reverse engines. Soon they realized there was nothing out there and told me to go back to bed.
Once I picked up a microphone that allowed me to speak to the entire ship. There was a Jerry Lewis–type kid who was kind of my sidekick. I said on the ship’s PA system, “Foreman, that is Foreman, report to the top deck, on the double! That is Foreman!” The poor kid raced up to the top deck and arrived in a minute out of breath to see me standing there smiling at him. I still can’t believe I actually did that.
I enjoyed my three years in the Naval Reserve. The best moment was when an African American sailor and I listened on the radio to Floyd Patterson regaining his heavyweight championship by knocking out Ingmar Johansson. We leapt in the air and hugged each other.
The lesson of my enlistment as a teenager is that the military has to fully divulge what the deal is. Obviously, it wasn’t explained to me what would happen if I didn’t show up. Of course, this really becomes important during times of war when recruiters put such a stress on bonuses and opportunities and rarely mention possible death.
I know to this day wildly inappropriate things are going on in the military. There are stories about the Army asking some veterans for part of their enlistment bonus back. To get out of paying benefits, they sometimes claim psychological problems are caused by “prior personality disorder.” That’s not official policy, but it has been happening. The head of a veterans’ organization in Washington told me there are some twenty-five thousand cases of this. President Bush signed a bill to look into it.
There are also at this writing two hundred thousand homeless veterans in America. Support the troops? What exactly does that mean?
Many years later, I was on Larry King’s television show. He asked me if I had been in the military. I openly dodged the question. He waited a moment and asked me again. I openly ducked the question once more. Eventually, he asked again. This time I said, “I was in the Naval Reserve.” He then asked, “Why were you so reluctant to answer the question?” I said “Well… I wasn’t on our side.”