Fighting the Cold War

A Soldier's Memoir

John R. Galvin

• Editorial: The University Press of Kentucky
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813161020
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

When four-star general John Rogers Galvin retired from the US Army after forty-four years of distinguished service in 1992, the Washington Post hailed him as a man "without peer among living generals." In Fighting the Cold War: A Soldier's Memoir, the celebrated soldier, scholar, and statesman recounts his active participation in more than sixty years of international history—from the onset of World War II through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the post–Cold War era.

Galvin's illustrious tenure included the rare opportunity to lead two different Department of Defense unified commands: United States Southern Command in Panama from 1985 to 1987 and United States European Command from 1987 to 1992. In his memoir, he recounts fascinating behind-the-scenes anecdotes about his interactions with world leaders, describing encounters such as his experience of watching President José Napoleón Duarte argue eloquently against US intervention in El Salvador; a private conversation with Pope John Paul II in which the pontiff spoke to him about what it means to be a man of peace; and his discussion with General William Westmoreland about soldiers' conduct in the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia. In addition, Galvin recalls his complex negotiations with a number of often difficult foreign heads of state, including Manuel Noriega, Augusto Pinochet, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Ratko Mladi?.

As NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during the tumultuous five years that ended the Cold War, Galvin played a key role in shaping a new era. Fighting the Cold War illuminates his leadership and service as one of America's premier soldier-statesmen, revealing him to be not only a brilliant strategist and consummate diplomat but also a gifted historian and writer who taught and mentored generations of students.

PART 1

Pleasant Street

1

The Flashing Eyes

“Do you mind if I say hello?”

Jo Rogers. My father saw her for the first time in the New England autumn of the year 1926, down by the shore of Lake Quannapowitt in Wakefield, Massachusetts, on the eve of Thanksgiving, at the annual carnival. Drawn there by the lights, the music, and the lazy smoke from small wood fires, he and some friends joined the crowd of townsfolk and visitors, a thousand people maybe, filling the lakeside common from the bandstand at one end to Cubberley’s Boathouse and Dance Hall on the other. Jack was twenty-three. He walked among the hanging kerosene lanterns in the tented carnival stalls in a crush of people and a whirl of chatter, laughter, and dancing to tunes from Mike Sibelli’s Brass Band. It was what New Englanders call beautiful fall weather: the sky was clear, the wind light, the temperature above freezing.

In cracked and curled brown photos from that time, he is wearing a wool cap cocked back to show a heavy shock of black hair, parted almost but not quite in the middle. His light blue eyes were framed by doubled lashes so heavy that they looked mascaraed. His jaw was angular, and he had a slight, but noticeable, limp. Early in his life, the family doctor had advised Jack’s mother to wait a few years, let her son develop, and then see what the specialists would say. This she did, and in 1915, when he was twelve (and weighing sixty-five pounds), he was taken to Children’s Hospital in Boston for treatment. Diagnosed as infantile paralysis, the affliction had caused atrophy in his left calf and foot and also in his right shoulder. He underwent surgery to reroute the tendons of his foot so as to give him more mobility, but otherwise there was nothing that could be done.

My father’s case was interesting enough to cause an experience he would never forget. The surgeon who attended him decided to use him as an illustration in a lecture—an “in session,” it was called—to a group of other doctors. He arranged for my father to stand on a small table and remove his hospital robe, leaving him naked. The surgeon and the others then examined and compared the healthy and diseased areas. My father was mortified.

In 1922, weighing 145 pounds, my father played left tackle on his high school football team, beating out the team captain for the position. “Most plays only take three steps,” he said. “If it had to be more, there was a problem.”

Some forty years later, he said in one of his letters to me: “I found out today that Gen. Henry Knox affected a silk handkerchief to hide his hand that had been marred in an early hunting accident. Sort of reminded me of myself as a young man. I used to wear a cloth-made muscle strapped to the back of my leg so my trousers would fill out the same. I spent a lot of time shaping it before a mirror before I put on my football and baseball suits, too.”

Jo was twenty-one. She kept her black hair short and bobbed. Her smile was accompanied by deep dimples and light blue eyes. Her sister always said she was an outrageous flirt. The flash of her eyes made you instantly aware if she glanced at you, even across a roomful of people. On this evening she moved with her companions along the line of tents, laughing, tossing her head, happy to be the center of attention, hardly looking at the games or at the wares for sale. Jack could not help watching her appear in the lighted gaps, then disappear into the dark again. At some point she looked directly at him for an instant and then turned away. That look stopped him, he once told me, as if he’d hit a wall, and I fully understood why. She and her group continued on into the crowd.

So the girl with the flashing eyes was Jo Rogers. He must have heard her voice before, because she was one of Wakefield’s telephone switchboard operators. He learned that she was dating Francis Bowman, a medical student at Harvard. “Jo and Bo,” they were called.

He also learned that she was an excellent ice skater who spent her free time on the lake whenever there was good ice. Skating was not for Jack, but he began to take walks along the lakeshore when Quannapowitt froze over. He still had not met her, and he didn’t see her again until sometime into the new year, 1927, but by then she knew of him through his assiduous cultivation of her girlfriends. (At the last second at the carnival, Jack had recognized one of her companions.) Finally, on a gusty and short afternoon, nearing a winter sunset, he spied her far out on the lake, alone, flying along, hands in the pockets of a heavy, high-collared knit sweater. She stayed far out, until at dusk she was among the last skaters. When she did come to shore, it was at a place he didn’t anticipate, near the looming ramshackle ice houses, but by the time she had changed from skates to boots, he was nearing the bench where she sat. He always remembered that he said, “Do you mind if I say hello?” She looked at him with that look, and after a pause that he remembered as about an hour long, she said, “Hello.”

They talked. He walked her home, and along the way, up Elm Street, he mentioned a current motion picture, The Big Parade, and eventually asked if he could take her to Boston to see it. She said yes, and thus gave him his chance to compete with Bo Bowman. When the day came, he waited for her at the railroad station, the Center Depot, about a mile from her house. As train time grew near, he became less and less convinced that she would hold to her promise. He counted all the reasons why she might not really want to spend the better part of a day with him—but then he saw her, far up on North Avenue, striding along, just in time to make the train.

Sometime later, when Jo told her mother, Elizabeth, that she needed to look up her birth certificate, her mother said, “First, I have a story to tell you.” The story was this: Elizabeth King had married a man whose name I know only as Logan. They were both Irish immigrants; they had three children. Then one day Logan disappeared. It turned out that Logan was already married to a woman back in Ireland. Some time later, Elizabeth married Thaddeus Rogers, also an Irish immigrant. They had two children. I can only imagine how Elizabeth told this story to her daughter Jo, her second child by Logan. This was at a time when no one ever spoke of such things. All I know is that my mother adamantly refused to believe that Logan ever existed and, with only one exception, never spoke his name, and never considered that her father was anyone but Tad Rogers. The one exception was when she told her husband-to-be, who said it had nothing to do with his love for her, and only told me about it many years later, when I came on some yellowed documents.

As Jo and Jack left Saint Joseph’s Church on their wedding day, Jack gave his last five dollars to Father Halloran and then drove his new bride back to Elm Square for the reception. He had a car; he had a rented apartment in town; and he had zero funds. As the reception was ending, he looked out the kitchen window and saw his brother Henry tying tin cans to his car—so he and Jo slipped out the front door and stole Henry’s car, drove the six miles to Wilmington, stopped and took photographs, and returned to their Wakefield apartment. That is the story of their honeymoon, and that is why my middle name is Rogers.

2

Shadows on the Ceiling

“A downward spiral”

My first remembrance of my father was as a mountain. The best thing in the world for me was to climb into his bed and nestle my back against his broad back and just stay there, safe and happy. He was always the encourager and protector. When I got on the bad side of the fourth-grade bully, who condemned me to a life of bumps and pushes and threats, I turned to my father and asked him what to do. He said, “Just remember that you’re not made of ice cream.” I did that—and, miraculously, it worked. I discovered much later that he and the bully had had a conversation about leaving me alone.

For me, the Great Depression was a wonderful time to be a kid. I learned only later what it was all about. The men were home with nothing to do, and for a good part of the day you could hear the light clink and clang of horseshoes against the iron stakes, the ringers and the leaners, the muttering and measuring. From an open window, sporadic intonations emanated from the bulking Zenith radio with its tiny dial face, telling the never-ending story of the beloved Boston Red Sox: “One and two the count. Looks for the sign. Nods. Winds up. Looks over at first. Looks back. Pitch. High outside. Ball two. Two and two.” My grandmother would say, “Two and two, three and three, four and four—don’t any of you ever get tired of all those numbers?” My uncles, Willy and Jimmy and Greg, would be there, and my Dad, and my Grampa Rogers, and Mr. Hall from next door, and various men and older boys from down the street. If they weren’t playing horseshoes, they played an easygoing game of catch or they hit fly balls in the field behind the house, maneuvering in the knee-deep grass of the outfield. Before I was old enough for school they had taught me to bat left-handed (even though I am right-handed)—because, they said, with great conviction, “A lefty swing puts you one step toward first base.”

My father worked for a plasterer named Scott until he quit his apprenticeship and went out on his own, with no truck and practically no equipment beyond his white tool bag. At first he moved his planks and other equipment by wheelbarrow in several loads, usually at night so that people would not notice that he didn’t have a truck. Later the local bank loaned him enough money to buy a secondhand Dodge Brothers pickup truck. They would help him many times in the years to come, when it became hard to meet a payroll.

As time went on, I could see that the most important happenings in the world had to do with the arrival of the plasterers in the early morning to load the truck. Every day I begged to go with them. On most days, though, I had to stay home, causing my mother to search desperately for ways to keep me busy. She found one that gave her some comfort: she convinced me that my father needed a daily report on the doings of the neighborhood. She took writing paper and, with a ruler, divided each sheet into small blocks. My job was to sit at the windows and fill the blocks with sketches of everything that I saw happen. I soon found that my mother was right—there was much to be recorded—and on many days I filled sheet after sheet, chronicling with an increasing level of detail. My sketches took in the several neighborhood cats: one for each house, including ours (Lindy, born on the night Lindbergh landed in Paris). They and the many dogs proceeded on their choreographed daily tours, and I developed over time an abbreviated sketch of each of them that could be drawn with a few pencil scratches—real time-savers for a busy artist.

There was the scissor grinder with his three-wheeled pushcart that could be unfolded into a workbench with a stone grinding wheel. There were pick-and-shovel men who came to dig trenches in the street, neighbors tending their vegetable gardens, once even an autogiro, carefully preserved on my page like a prize butterfly. In the 1930s it was not only the milkman who had a horse and wagon, but the rag collector calling out his presence, the iceman, the grocer. Automobiles came by, but lots of people walked to the stores and to the railroad station and the trolley line, heading for the shoe factory, the knitting mill, the rattan furniture factory. Others pedaled their bicycles or pushed their baby carriages. Very few people walked just for exercise. There was enough necessary walking to take care of that.

And of course there were the trains. The railroad track was only a garden away, and every day the Boston-to-Portland express, the Flying Yankee, made its run north in the morning and south in the afternoon. Its passing was always accorded a prominent part of my checkerboard sketch. Close to our house the roadbed made a climbing turn to cut through the layers of rock and gravel next to Lake Quannapowitt. That’s where you could hear the heavy pant of the steam locomotive, laboring hard to keep up speed in the cut, and if you were near, you could see the gray smoke darken to black. Even in the daytime the flashing yellow flames in the open firebox would silhouette the shoveler swinging coal deep into the flames, the huffing now a throaty “hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo.” Later in the day, the special sound of the express was unmistakable out in the distance as the locomotive engineer was not driving anymore but driven, tilting into the downgrade, the great engine now serving as a brake against the thrust of the dozen cars behind it, all that steel running free, ringing, “langa-langa-langa-langa.” I was always the first to hear it—then off on the run through the hayfield to the fence. When it thundered past, pure white smoke streaming back across the roof of the cab, I was there, halfway up on the fence, exultant, waving a salute to Jerry Muffin, the engineer, who always lifted his cuffed gray glove off the iron sill of his open window just enough to acknowledge our connection: I the boy on the swaying fence, imagining that I was he, the boy at the throttle, serene, reining back that magnificent galloping monster.

The older I grew, the more I wanted to be accepted as part of the plastering team. Born in 1929, by the mid-1930s I was able to be of some little help on the job, and I gladly took on any and every task. I filled the drinking water bucket and jumped to ladle a portion whenever anyone asked—and even when they didn’t ask. I ran to get small items from the truck. I learned how to clean trowels, hawks, pointers, pails, straightedges, slickers, brushes, hods. I cleaned the rough floors of houses under construction, first scraping off the lumps of plaster, and I tried to do it as well as the grown men, no matter how long it took, always fearful that the other team members might decide they didn’t need me.

Plastering is pretty much a forgotten trade now. It is a tough, exacting mix of techniques that can create smooth white walls and ceilings and arches, but it bent and crippled the lives of many of the journeymen who worked the trade. The mortar that plasterers used was a mix of gypsum and sand, and it was heavy. Compared with drywall construction, plastering is more complex, requires much more skill, takes more time, and costs more—and it is very hard work. You had to be fast, besides being good at slinging mud, as they called it.

To work the ceiling and the upper part of a room, plasterers moved back and forth on a staging made of planks set on adjustable jacks. The planks were arranged so that the gaps between them were equal to the stride of the plasterers, who would be looking upward, not at the planks under their feet—so if a plank moved out of place, they could stumble and fall. If the planks were arranged side by side, leaving no gaps, the weight of the constantly moving workers and their table—called the board and stand, where the hod carrier dumped the plaster—would cause the planks to bend unevenly and trip the men. As it was, the planks of the staging flexed and shook as the men moved around, often walking backward. Before they used a new staging, the plasterers would walk it forward, backward, and crosswise, testing it out. When the upper part of a room was finished, the laborers dismantled the staging and moved it to the next room, while the plasterers continued with the bottom half.

Teams usually consisted of three men, each team having its own set of planks and jacks. Each wall and ceiling saw the team four times. Inside the building, a rough choreography unfolded. Scratch coat, brown coat, skim (or finish) coat. Long strokes overhead and up and down; straightening and smoothing with a darby and a slicker. You reserved your highest-level skills for the skim coat: a wet, white mix of lime and plaster of Paris and sometimes a retarder, to keep it from setting too quickly. You wet-brushed and troweled hard on the lime, working it as smooth as glass: no scratches, no “holidays” that let the brown coat show through. This was your last chance to correct the slightest irregularities that may have crept into the earlier coats.

Troweling, troweling, brushing; troweling again, brushing again. This was the dangerous time: if the lime got in your eyes, it would burn, and the damage could be permanent unless you got it out fast, splashing your eyes with water from the drinking pail, which sat in the corner with its steel ladle. Even the best journeymen caught an eyeful now and then. Plasterers were always looking along the white surfaces, their eyes only a few inches away from the ceilings and walls, ensuring that things were straight and level and plumb and smooth. Their cheeks and temples had deep bird’s-foot wrinkles. Their hands were cracked. Plasterers wore their white gloves sometimes, but not on the finish coat. Gloves are too clumsy; you don...