The U.S. Army – Day One, 1960

         I leave from the Port Authority building in New York City by bus to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where I’ll begin my two months of Army basic training.  I’m just shy of my twentieth birthday.  The Port Authority is like Grand Central Station where I was sent unwillingly to camp at age four.  This is different, a decision I have made.  And although there is a claustrophobic feeling of doors closing and choices made which cannot be changed, there is also the sense of adventure and maturity that is concomitant with actions taken by men.

         Almost everyone on the bus is an inductee from New York City.  The Jersey countryside, a dune-like succession of sandy low hills and chicken farms, rolls by until we arrive at Fort Dix, which is surrounded by barbed wire.  At the entrance to Fort Dix stands a tremendous statue of “The Infantryman,” the ultimate fighting machine I am about to become.

         We are herded into a huge building, formed into lines, and begin our transformation and processing from civilians into army troops, first swearing loyalty and fealty to the United States and then being given shockingly short, dare I say bald, army haircuts.  We put our civilian clothes into bags.  We are marched into line after line where we are inspected, questioned, sorted, and given a series of injections in both arms with air-powered guns.  We move down a lengthy counter where we declare our chest, waist, weight, height, and shoe sizes and are given shirts, pants, belts, underwear, shoes, and socks, more or less consistent with our size declarations.

         At the end of the counter we flow onto another line and approach a sergeant seated at a table filling out forms with the information necessary to issue each man his dog tags.  When I reach the table the sergeant finds my name and military identification number on a card and asks me my religion.  I’m not sure why, but I am just not able to answer him.  I don’t think it’s that I am afraid of anti-Semitism, or ashamed of being Jewish, quite the opposite, I am rather proud of being Jewish and eager to stand up to anti-Semites.  It is much more that I don’t really believe in religion and I’m sort of stunned and offended because I don’t think my religious beliefs are anyone’s business, especially in this context, I mean this is the United States Army is it not, and we were all equals right, brothers in arms.  I mean what does my religion matter?  It seems almost unpatriotic to make such a separatist declaration.

“What’s your religion?” the sergeant asks me again in a Southern drawl as I continue to stand there, in spite of my wish to answer him, quite mute, embarrassed, and dumb.

“What’s wrong with you, son” the peeved sergeant asks, “what’s your religion?”

And I just stare at him, unable to answer, unable to form the words, unable to fully understand what is going on with me.  Maybe I’ll say, “no preference, sir” but I can’t make up my mind and don’t really like that answer either.  So I just continue standing there, struggling with myself about these matters of personal and philosophical significance, as the sergeant grows more and more exasperated, and rightly so, thinking I’m a moron or something, and rightly so again.

“I said, ‘what‘s your religion, boy?'”  he says slowly, very slowly. And I just stare at him … frozen.

“Jesus H Christ,” he growls almost menacingly, “Who are your people, boy? “

People?  The word “people” startles me.  Who are “my People?”  Shit, I know that answer. People?   “Why the Hebrews, sir,” I say.

“Hebrew,” he repeats, and writes it down. “Next,” he says, and smiles.

I receive my dog tags two days later.  They read just that, “Hebrew.”  I still have them, of course.  I don’t imagine there are many other Hebrews in the U.S. Army, but the Hebrews are definitely my “people.” And were there ever to come a time to identify my scarred and unrecognizable mortal remains left on some desolate field of battle I think I would be far more comfortable buried as an ethnic American, dare I say tribal, Hebrew (for all that would matter) than I would be hypocritically declared a “religious” Jew.