When the Shit Hit the Fan

You'll never catch up to me, I'm at least half way through the book already. I thought it was going to be boring but, once I got into it, I couldn't put it down. I remember most of the events described, but not in this much detail. I probably viewed the whole scene with detachment at the time, seeing as how I didn't like the city in the first place and didn't plan on living in it after I got out of the army. Now it's like playing an old movie on DVD and catching all the subtleties that you missed the first time around. I am reminded of the punch line of an old joke: "There you sit all spick and span. Where were you when the shit hit the fan?"

Although the crisis had been building for years, it was in the summer of 1966 that the shit really hit the fan. I came home on leave in June, and the real trouble didn't start until July, so I just missed it. I probably wouldn't have been directly affected anyway because my parents had recently moved to Palos Park. I remember going to see their old house on 51st Street just before it was demolished to make a parking lot for Central Steel and Wire. The house was locked up, but I was able to see inside through the windows, and it looked kind of spooky without any furniture or anything in the rooms. The yard had been torn up, partly by my father when he dug up some of the plants to take with him to Palos, and partly by the neighbors, who my dad had told were welcome to any plants he had left behind. A kid I used to know happened by while I was there, and he told me that every house on the block had something from my dad's garden.

Back in Berlin, I didn't pay much attention to the news, being preoccupied with my own personal issues. I noticed that the Blacks in our outfit had gotten more arrogant while I was gone, several of them who I had counted as friends didn't seem to be as friendly as before. I attributed that to the fact that their numbers were increasing every day, and they would probably rather hang out with their own people. We always had Blacks in our outfit, but not very many of them until about the time I came back from leave. We had been understaffed for some time, and when replacements finally started to arrive, a lot of them were Black. I seem to remember there had been some kind of racial incident in Berlin while I was gone, something about a Black soldier allegedly raping a White girl. Then again, it might have been after I left for good, I don't remember.

We had a new section sergeant when I came back, that's more than a squad leader but less than a platoon sergeant. He was my direct superior, and he happened to be Black, but that was never an issue with either of us. There had been one other guy between me and the section sergeant, but he went home, and I was now him. The new sergeant had little experience with the mortars, having spent most of his career in rifle platoons, so I took him under my wing and helped him learn the ropes. I had a more cordial relationship with this guy than with any other sergeant in my three years of military service, and he confided, just before I left, that he considered me to be his friend.

When I got out in March of 1967, I heard that there had been some kind of racial ruckus in Marquette Park while I had been gone, but I had no idea of the extent of it until I read it in this book. I had a few friends in the old neighborhood who I visited with, and they didn't seem overly concerned about the incident but, I suppose tempers had cooled by then. The 60s was a turbulent time in our nation's history, but my own life was also pretty turbulent in those days, and I didn't have time to watch a lot of television. Now, half a century later, I am finally finding out what went down while my attention was directed elsewhere.