MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH AMERICA by NORMAN PODHORETZ

Author:NORMAN PODHORETZ
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 2000-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

In this new perspective of mine that was being shaped by the army, America was turning from the abstraction it had been to me as a kid in Brooklyn, and then the ideological issue it had become in my arguments at Cambridge and elsewhere in Europe, into a concrete reality. I hated the army at first and basic training at Fort Dix in New Jersey during a very cold winter was almost more than I could bear. But I did bear it, and even became, to my own great surprise and even greater gratification, a pretty good soldier. And what surprised me as well was how much I liked my barracks mates wherever I went during my two years in the army. Never before, not even at Columbia, had I met so many different American types, and the easy relations I formed with them made me realize all over again that this was the only country in which I could feel fully at home.

I came to know all these types well, and I got a different kick out of every one of them. There were the midwesterners, one of whom would invariably be the first person to greet you with a cheery “Hi, there” whenever you were transferred to a new company, but to whom you never got any closer than that no matter how long you lived and worked together. * There were the southerners whose touchy sense of honor was familiar to me from the borrowed form it took among the transplanted Negroes with whom I had grown up in Brooklyn, and who were always ready to spring to a buddy’s defense with a broken beer bottle whenever a fight broke out in a bar. Some of my closest friends in the army were “rednecks” of this kind, one of whom once explained to me that I was popular among them because I “talked so good.”

* The only major exception I would ever encounter was the midwesterner I would marry a year after being discharged and to whom I am still married after more than forty years.

Then there were the rebels against army discipline, working-class kids from places like Pittsburgh and Detroit, who always seemed to have great senses of humor that I thought were peculiarly and uniquely American. In Kassel, Germany, one of these guys had posted a notice written in crayon on cardboard that was the first thing I saw upon entering the barracks to which I had just been assigned. Addressed in a delicious mélange of English and German to soldiers returning drunk from a pass and warning them against throwing up on the premises, it read, NIX BARFEN ZIE IN DER HALL.

At every opportunity, the author of this injunction, who shortly became another great friend of mine, went “ schatzi hunting,” as in his inimitable style he described looking for German girls to pick up, which he always found easier to do than getting them into bed with his plaintive pleas of “Wanten zie

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