The Poet as a Young Man

My mother was a gardener, although technically she still is, as much as life in assisted living will allow. On fall days when the sun came down through the maple leaves like stained glass and the dirt side walks were carpeted with soft pine needles, the neighbors would fill the air with the delightful smell of marshmallow roasting bonfires at the edge of the street. That happened at every house but ours, where we obediently stuffed all the fallen vegetation into bags, and dragged them out to the compost pile, where, as my mother instructed us, they would be turned into dirt.
In the spring my parents would go to the hardware or garden supply store and return with bags of peat moss to build up the beach sand which constituted the dirt around our house. The old leaves would be spread on the flower beds, and one year when, for some inexplicable reason, the Memorial Day parade wound its way through the residential streets of town instead of down Maine St. (Yes it was spelled Maine and not Main: Our town boasted the widest Maine St. in the country. Originally laid out by the first settlers, it was called “Twelve Rod Road” referring to its width. Our father’s found that if the road were cleared back to that width, travelers would be out of range of the natives’ bows and arrows, but, again, I digress) When the parade had passed, my mother ordered me to go out into the street with a shovel and pick up the horse manure left behind. Not wishing to be the laughing stock of Longfellow School the next day, I refused, and so, she took the wheel barrow and did it herself.
Along with the lime, and fertilizer was always a bag of a product called “Bovung,” or dried cow manure. We had been around farms a bit, and so I was aware of manure piles, like the one that allegedly kept Shubel Merriman’s barn from toppling over, but I was fascinated by the fact that someone had come up with the idea of colorfully packaging colonic droppings of a ruminant. So intrigued was I that, at the age of 13, I composed a poem about it, which recently came to light in some old boxes.
And so, dear reader, I present to you for the first time in 50 years:
Ode to a Horse Bun
There you lie, regal horse bun,
Product of what some steed has done.
Some, for their gardens, for you will pay,
Mixture of oats, and grass, and hay.
Art some quadruped has wrought,
In colored ten pound bags is bought.
Shoveled from hill and vale and field,
Pasteurized, shredded, packaged and peeled.
Fertilizing, as any turd should,
Horse bun—you never had it so good!

A series of strange events Part 2

At the end of our specialty training, which gave us an MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) dabbling in secret, Keystone Cop-like operations, we were visited by a colorless man in a gray suit, who, one by one, took us into a closed room to tell us our fate. He introduced himself as Mr. somebody or other, which I came to feel afterwards wasn’t his real name to begin with.
As I sat down across from him, he informed me that I was going to be sent to Berlin Germany to the US Army Europe Security Detachment. I would not tell anyone that I was an MI officer, and that my orders would show me as being in the Quartermaster Corps. I responded to this by asking why not just send me as being infantry, since I already legitimately had the ribbons and badges that proclaimed me as such. Besides, if anyone asked why a grunt was going to a “spook” unit, I could just shrug my shoulders and say, “You know the army.” He agreed.
He then gave me a name, also fictitious, of someone in Virginia for my parents to contact in case of emergency because the Red Cross would not know my whereabouts. My name would not be on the register of the US Army. I was nobody. Furthermore, when I arrived in Frankfurt, I would be met by someone and not go to the replacement depot. I felt like Scrooge being told I would be visited by spirits.
We were cramped aboard a Trans Caribbean Airlines 707 headed to Germany when the career E-7 beside me asked where I was going. His question to my response was as I had predicted, “What are you doing going to a spook unit.” My pre-planned answer set everything right.
Upon landing in Frankfurt, we dragged our duffle bags down the corridor following signs pointing us to the replacement depot, when two young men in civilian clothes stepped forward, and said, “Captain Millar, please come with us.” The E-7’s jaw dropped, and we said good-bye.
Without introducing themselves, and obviously not enthusiastic about working on a Sunday, they took me outside to a van, and drove to a nondescript apartment building, where I was instructed to change into civilian clothes, and spend the rest of the day the way I wanted. I conned 5 DM, about $1.50, off them and walked around until 5 PM, when they collected me for a trip to the train station to board the 7 o’clock duty train for Berlin.
The duty train had been created by the agreements between the Soviet Union, England and the US at the end of the WWII, and was allowed to pass through East Germany unmolested by either the Russians or the East Germans. It was the only way, I found, that I would be allowed to leave West Berlin, unless I chose to fly.
While I was hanging out, waiting for the train to leave, along with a multitude of uniformed Americans, a somewhat scruffy but unremarkable young man approached me and asked if I spoke English. I told him I did. He began to regale me with the classic story I had heard from many deadbeat hippies when I was a student. “I’m going to school here and my father has just had a heart attack. I need five marks to get out to the airport.” Not wanting to give him anything, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a US quarter, guaranteed to not get him on the bus. “That’s all I have,” I said. In a flash, he grabbed it, held it up in front of me and palmed it. “I’ve gotten everything I need,” he said, “Believe me, you don’t know how much I dislike doing this.” And then he disappeared into the crowd.
Short a quarter I boarded the train and forgot about it.
Several months later, in Berlin, I was in the parking lot of the US Consulate, where our unit was stationed. As I was entering my duty car, this same person approached me with the same story. “I’m a student here, and my father’s just had a heart attack. I need $2 to get to Tempelhof Airport.” I stared at him a moment and replied, “That’s funny, in Frankfurt it was 5 marks to get to the airport.”
With that he blanched. “You know me,” he said. “I do, and if I see your ass around here again, I’m turning you over to the MPs.” Several weeks later I saw him again, headed straight for him, and when he saw me, he disappeared at a dead run.
I’ve often been told that you’re not paranoid if they really are following you, but when I returned to the States, living with my ex-wife and attending graduate school, the local police chief, to whom she had been recommended as a possible school crossing guard came to the trailer one night to talk to her. Caught up in his own importance, he told us how he had driven by, done a license plate check, and realizing that I was 26 years old, ascertained I was probably a veteran and contacted the Army’s counter-intelligence office in Portsmouth, NH. “I should have gone there first,” he said to my wife. “They not only had everything on him, they had a whole file on you.”
At that point I turned to him and said, “That’s really odd…… We weren’t married until after I was discharged.” His face revealed he had talked too much.
I’ve often wondered who that young man was. The coincidence of him hitting me up in two cities, particularly in an area of Berlin where tourists didn’t hang out, was pretty far fetched. That leads to question, then, of what was he doing? Several former intelligence people to whom I have related this story believe he was working for another of our agencies. And why me? I’ll probably never know.

A series of strange events Part 1

As my senior year of college began to come to its close and we could finally see what was outside in the world for us, those of us enrolled in Army ROTC were faced with the choice of what branch or specialty we wished to serve in, and where we might want to do that. Being somewhat naïve, we did not see the absurdity of asking for a place of duty assignment at a time when most were going pretty much directly to Vietnam. But I was told that, as one majoring in German, who had just returned from a year at a German university, if I were to request a commission in the Regular Army (RA) I would be guaranteed my choice of first duty assignment, and branch. It was recommended to me that I try for the military intelligence.
That all seemed exciting. I could see myself flying down the Autobahn in a new Porsche and being assigned secret duties, most of which, I was sure, would involve beautiful foreign women. After all, I had seen the James Bond movies. So, I did what they suggested, and what to my surprise, it was all granted, a military intelligence assignment in Germany. My friends were amazed and jealous. Most of them were going to places like Fort Lost in the Woods and Fort Puke as signal people or engineers. But I…..
Then the shoe dropped: all RA officers who were not in a combat arms, would be detailed to one of the three branches, and mine would be the infantry. Ah, but not to worry, I was still guaranteed my first duty assignment, and upon graduation was given vague orders to USAREUR.
But first I would have to travel to the Infantry School at Ft. Benning, aka the Benning School for Boys or the Trade School on the Chattahoochie, assigned to a company of 200 RA infantry types, half of whom were straight from airborne school, or obnoxious, gung-ho graduates of Texas A&M, or both. The West Pointers, I’m happy to say, were pretty low key about the whole thing.
So, whenever an instructor started his pitch with, “Gentlemen, if you don’t learn what I’m going to teach you today, you will die in Vietnam,” I knew that was my cue to drift off to someplace else, almost anyplace else.
To make a long story short, Germany did not happen, and I ended up as one of two German speaking lieutenants in an infantry battalion in Vietnam, while those of my class who went to Germany, could not utter a sentence in German if the entire group were put together to do it.
Finally after surviving a year in Vietnam, and deciding I really didn’t care for the Army all that much, I was sent to the Military Intelligence School at Fort Holabird, an enclosed are of Baltimore, near or in Dundalk, that consisted of boring, windowless buildings in an area the size of several blocks, close enough to a brewery, and there I embarked upon my training to learn all kinds of “special” things that I can’t talk about, and really don’t have any desire to do so. I had always wondered what “Top Secret” material consisted of, and found to my surprise, most of it was boring. One of the most exciting classes we attended was on the capabilities of the Soviet Navy. So secret was this lecture, that we were frisked for pencils and pens prior to entering the lecture hall. When the instructor mounted the podium to begin his talk, he informed us, in a most embarrassed voice, that the source of most of what he was going to say, came from a recent issue of Time magazine.
And so, because I have been told people who read blogs have short attention spans, I am going to end here and put the rest in a second part. You probably feel like the person who has been put in a round room and has been told to pee in the corner. My conscience is clear…. Until next time!

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This is the advertisement to be featured in the May addition of “The Harpswell Anchor.”

Time

I have been listening to some music from the late ’50s a time when I was first becoming interested in what was on the radio, and realizing that I was beginning to lose something in the process. Childhood and all the things I held dear about it were fast disappearing, and many of those I still clung to, I kept secret so I wouldn’t be ridiculed as “being a baby.” The wonders of Christmas, for example, I could only live vicariously through the eyes of my younger siblings. Junior High no longer held the fun of Valentine’s Day parties, or the local firemen giving us red, cellophane fire helmets for Fire Prevention Week. In their places we had a fossilized shop teacher, who admonished us that when we applied for jobs, we would all be ordered to demonstrate our ability to sweep floors, ignoring the fact that the entire class was bound for the college course. Other teachers began to threaten us with the “If you don’t pass this class, you’ll end up working in the shoe factory.” I eventually did that for a while, and despite the fact that the pay was abysmal, the work really wasn’t as unpleasant as some things I would later be faced with.
My grandmother was no longer able to pack up a lunch and walk my cousins and me down the road, across the low grounds to the shore, where we could splash in the icy, cold water of the Fore Shore, before coming back, gathering blueberries and wild strawberries as we came.
The toy soldiers and toy dump trucks became no longer cool, and even though I still wanted to play with them, I feared being seen doing so, so I didn’t.
Other friends were growing up at a faster rate, and were drifting off, becoming people I didn’t know any more.
I was also beginning to see the world through my parents’ eyes. I could see what they saw, memories of living on the edge of financial ruin in the depression, the uncertainty of even the next hour during the war, and I could not see in them the great optimism that was supposed to abound in the post-war time. Most of the people we knew had little money, and the only ones that did, were those few with dual incomes. The threat of a coming war with Russia lay heavy, not just that we lived in a Navy town with a big target painted on it, but my father had been called back to active duty during the Korean War, sent to Germany, and told stories or how close we were to another war in Central Europe.
I had vague dreams about what I would like to do, but didn’t know if they would come true. Childhood had been a reality, and not a bad one. I didn’t want to lose it, and didn’t want to lose the old folk, who were starting to go.
Those songs take me back to that time. I can still see the colors of the days, see the people and places that were so familiar to me, but it seems out of time, as if it had never happened. Is there a time when we will be able to go back and see the old places and the old friends again?
There are times in my past that are like that, and others that feel like yesterday. The smell of a passing diesel, the slap of certain helicopter blades, gritty sweat on a humid day that can bring my mind to Vietnam as if it were yesterday, even though it is 40 years in the past. Other years closer in time, also feel like they never happened. Time, or our memory of it, is a fluid thing, apparently, not running in a straight line.

Tribute To My Father

On Apirl 3, 2009, the Maine Health Care Association awarded its seventh annual Remember ME awards in the Hall of Flags in the State House in Augusta, ME to residents of assisted living homes in Maine, who have shown a lifetime of achievement. My father, William K. Millar, was one of this year's recipients. We drove him to Augusta for the ceremony, where he met, and shook hands with Governor Baldacci, and remarked that he "Was probably one of the only ones who could stand up to receive the award."
My father, a quiet man, usually the straight man for all our humor, has always reminded me of George Bailey in "It's A Wonderful Life." The opportunities he desired always seemed to be preempted by things beyond his control or his unwillingness to give up a principle. For that he is one of the richest men in town.
Below is the biography I was asked to write for his nomination. It is the biography of a person so typical of what Tom Brokaw calls, "the greatest generation."
"After graduating as president of his high school class, Mr. Millar had to pass up full tuition scholarships to both Bates and Middlebury Colleges to work to help his father support his mother and three younger siblings. After working for a year, he attended the University of New Hampshire.
In 1942, two weeks shy of his graduation, he was drafted, sent to Ft. Devens, MA and given a 24 pass to come back and graduate with his class where he had been a member of the track and cross country teams, Senior Skull, Inter-fraternity Council and President of Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity.
He applied for and was accepted into one of the first Officer Candidate School “90 day wonder classes” and was commissioned as a 2LT in the infantry. He was sent to Ft. Leonard Wood, MO where he acted as a cadre member in training the 97th Infantry Division. In 1944 he was sent to the European Theater and was assigned as a platoon leader in the 104th “Timberwolf” Division.
He was wounded in action on December 11, 1944 and evacuated for emergency surgery to a MASH. For this action he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for Valor and the Purple Heart. From the MASH he was returned to England for therapy, and was able to meet aunts and cousins, whom he had never seen before.
On his birthday, April 27, 1945, he rejoined his division for the liberation of Nordhausen Concentration Camp. It was this experience, which brought him to be one of the early members of the Maine Holocaust Commission. In working with this group, he traveled throughout the state speaking to high schools, colleges and universities.
In 1951, he was again called to active duty for the Korean conflict and was sent to Army Headquarters in Heidelberg, Germany.
After release from Active Duty, he became employed as an accountant at Bath Iron works, a position he held until he retired.
As a community member he was active in the First Parish Church, serving as a Sunday School teacher, superintendent of the Sunday School, deacon, treasurer and many other committees. When the vestry needed painting, he formed a group called the “Michaelangelo Society,” and urged prospective members to show up with paint brushes. Not a few were surprised to find out they had volunteered to paint the church, not join and art club.
On the state level he was the director of the UCC family camp at Pilgrim Lodge in Litchfield for three years.
He served the Town of Brunswick on the Property Tax Review Committee and taught bookkeeping for adult education.
He also served as the President of the Longfellow School PTA in Brunswick, broke tradition by being a “den mother” for his son’s Cub Scout Pack and was a referee for the Pee Wee Hockey program when it started.
He also served as a fundraiser during the building and development of Parkview Hospital.
In addition to all of these activities, he built his own summer home in Harpswell. At that time, there was no electricity, so he carried all the sand, cement and water for the foundation in 5 gallon pails and cut all the framing and paneling by hand.
He is currently a charter member of American Legion Post 171 in Harpswell along with his son and granddaughter, a captain serving in the Air Force. He was recently awarded a Silver Star by the state of Maine for his service and a second Bronze Star by the US Army for his Meritorious Service in WW II and during the Korean Conflict.
On April 27, 2009, William Millar will turn 90 years old."