(This column, which was one of my Sunday morning newspaper offerings, popped up on the original version of this webpage sometime or another. But since today, August 2nd 2023, is the 51st anniversary of my military induction I’ll trot it out again)
In August of 1972 I raised my hand with a roomful of other young fellows in downtown Dallas and recited the oath that delivered us into the United States Army. We were all draftees, I think, and hadn’t come up with the idea on our own.
Later that afternoon I settled into the first airplane seat I’d ever been in and clutched a paperback novel I’d just bought in the gift shop at Love Field airport. It was The Godfather, by Mario Puzo, which had been published a few years before and had just been made into a film that would later be widely considered one of the best motion pictures of all time.
Of course, I didn’t know how good the film was then, since I hadn’t seen it yet.
Truth be told, I didn’t know much, period. I had just turned twenty and had taken a sufficiently low stab at higher education to get myself drafted and in the cramped center seat of an airplane headed into the sunset.
When we landed in San Francisco we were herded into an olive drab (a color we would get used to) army bus and driven down to Fort Ord, given bowls of lukewarm soup by a disgruntled private in the late night, and taken to an old Beetle Bailey type barracks. When everybody else stretched out on narrow metal bunks (we’d get used to those, too) I found the only lighted room in the two-story wooden building, the latrine. Where I read the first pages of The Godfather before turning in and getting a few hours’ sleep before a squat fireplug of a drill sergeant, in the wee hours of the next morning, charged into the big room bellowing out a blood-curdling promise that he would personally make our lives a living hell for the next eight weeks.
As it turned out he generally delivered on that vow. Particularly, I recall, when prodding us through double-time marches in combat boots and full gear with our M-16 rifles held aloft in the surging, frigid (even in August), knee-high surf of the Pacific Ocean.
But what kept those weeks from being a total hell for me was, believe it or not, that paperback novel. In the precious few minutes of reading time I could fit in every day between physical training, classroom instruction, late night inspections, early morning inspections, long marches to firing ranges, and literally hundreds, probably thousands, of pushups I managed to get The Godfather read before graduation.
Then, when I was sent across Fort Ord to clerk-typist school with my duffle bag and a fresh set of orders and had more time on my hands to read, I made my way through something like two books from the base library a week until I completed that course and went home for Christmas leave before flying to Germany for my permanent posting.
Those books provided much more than entertainment. They offered other worlds to go to when I needed to distance myself from the one I was actually in.
Years later, when I became a writer and a teacher of people who wanted to be one, I reminded my students that we can only tell stories, hopefully to the best of our abilities to relate them. We can’t know what an individual reader needs that story to be in his or her current and unique situation. But if it’s a good yarn, well-structured and well-told, it might just serve a purpose we can never envision.
A paperback novel I bought long ago in an airport gift shop proved, for me, that a book, story, play, poem, or a song can sometimes work a kind of magic that goes beyond mere enjoyment or enlightenment. It can be a temporary escape pod. It can be therapy.
I reread The Godfather recently and discovered that though it is well-written and full of interesting characters and situations, it isn’t something that would rank as a pinnacle of great literature. But that’s okay. It was exactly what I needed it to be at the time.
Bon Voyage, young Ronnie Rozelle from Oakwood in your cramped seat on your first airplane ride back in 1972. You’ll survive boot camp.
That book you’re holding will be a big part of the reason.
Ron Rozelle Wordsmith 