After the Tall Timber (26 page)

Kitchen trucks had set out for Syracuse an hour earlier. To avoid traveling on the Sabbath, an Orthodox Jewish chaplain had gone up the day before. Colonel Pellicio (commander of New York City’s Guard units, senior brigade commander during the March postal strike and in his civilian life a contractor) greeted some of his men (another chaplain, a law student, a resident in urology) and made a last-minute check of a long list of hospitals along the convoy’s route. “You know, these men drive these vehicles maybe three, four times a year,” he said. “In the rain it can be very dangerous.” Then, after the first units of jeeps and trucks had left, he set out in his military sedan (complete with a siren, which he did not use) into the rain on Lexington Avenue, across Central Park at Sixty-fifth Street, and onto the West Side Highway toward a “marshaling point” in Teterboro, New Jersey. The reason the colonel had chosen Teterboro, which is not on the most direct route to upstate New York, was to avoid “the traffic density on the New York Thruway” and to “give my men some experience” on a new convoy route to Camp Drum.

There were Guardsmen posted to wave directions at many intersections and at all bridges and toll booths on the way to New Jersey Route 17. The first units arrived on schedule, at 0734 hours, at the marshaling area—a parking lot across from the Teterboro Airport. But by 0816 hours, the colonel learned, two vehicles were already lost (one broke down, one was hit by a station wagon), and more would be lost, with maintenance problems, along the way. Vehicles continued for three hours, desultorily, to arrive at the marshaling area. Meanwhile, the men smoked, caught some sleep in the trucks, or ate sandwiches from the first of their several box lunches. Most were armed with M-1 rifles, while “key” men carried pistols, and one (like Colonel Pellicio himself, an older man and a veteran of World War II) wore a bayonet in a camouflaged sheath at his waist. A lot of the younger men wore mustaches. Maneuvers at Camp Drum, the colonel said, would consist mainly in borrowing a hundred or two hundred tanks, using them, and, at the end of the two weeks, returning them to the regular army. Last summer, a Guardsman had knocked himself unconscious falling off a tank the first day. “But our main concern is the safety of the men in these vehicles,” the colonel said. “Getting them up to camp is always the biggest problem.” The weather was clearing a bit, and two civilians drove up safely enough, at 0927 hours, to the Teterboro Airport. “Hey,” one of them said as they passed the marshaling area. “Will you look at them weekend soldiers.”

The National Guard is one of the oldest, most muddled and crisis-ridden lethal forces in our history. At present, it consists of 478,860 men (394,133 of them in the Army National Guard, 84,727 in the Air National Guard), 2,774 local armories, 68 Army Guard airfields, 90 Air Guard flying bases, an annual appropriation slightly in excess of one billion dollars (of which $972,364,000 is paid by the federal government, the rest by the states), several billion dollars’ worth of more or less obsolete federal military equipment, one of the oldest, most effective lobbies (the National Guard Association, founded in 1879) in Washington, and long, not altogether tamper-proof waiting lists—one at every Guard armory in each of the fifty states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. What training Guardsmen actually receive (six months of basic army training, a few drills each year, and two weeks of camp in each of six successive summers) is almost exclusively for war, but of the several hundred occasions on which Guardsmen have been called up since 1945, all but two have been local natural disasters or civil disturbances lasting about a week. National Guardsmen have otherwise remained at home and pursued their civilian careers. Since National Guardsmen are accountable, except in times of declared war or federalization for extreme emergency, not to the federal government but to the governors of their respective states, National Guard units are really State Guard units—a fragmented, fifty-two-part duplicate of the regular army reserve. They are also exempt from the draft.

The National Guard’s history—like its present composition and purpose, if any—is a kind of swamp. Nearly every state Guard unit has its own historian. The only attempt at an exhaustive history of the whole National Guard,
The Minute Man in Peace and War
, by Major General Jim Dan Hill, of Wisconsin (published in 1964 by the Stackpole Company, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania), consists largely of obscure grievances against politicians and journalists, from Stephen Crane and Richard Harding Davis to “a young political-science teacher in a Midwestern college,” whom the general cannot even bring himself to name, and irate defenses of the Guard against charges of draft-dodging, incompetence, redundancy, favoritism, strikebreaking, snobbery, unpreparedness, patronage, loafing, irresponsibility, boondoggle, cowardice, obsoleteness, and bungling—charges that have evidently been leveled against the Guard throughout its history. The general’s style is everywhere idiosyncratically partisan (“The Guard must have seemed Heaven-sent for the role of a whipping boy riding into the desert astride a dejected scapegoat”). Although his research is probably the best there is, a sentence in his preface may explain a lot: Concerning the bibliographical notes with which each chapter ends, the general writes, “Without exception, they are far from all-inclusive.”

The contemporary National Guard can trace its origins to the Organized Militia of the original thirteen colonies, who, in various units and capacities, defended their own homes, conducted raiding parties against the Indians, and fought the Revolutionary War in Washington’s Continental Army. After the Revolution, to avert the threat to democracy inherent in any professional “standing army” (and with some doubt that the country contained enough paupers to fill such an army), Jefferson hoped that every citizen might be trained to be a soldier, civilian in peace, prepared to defend his country in war. Baron von Steuben, who had been Inspector General of the Revolutionary forces, argued that this was unrealistic, “It would be as sensible and consistent to say every Citizen should be a Sailor.” Washington himself proposed a small, paid regular army to protect the country’s frontiers and also a larger civilian organized militia in each of the several states. In the end, the Constitution embodied all three ideas: an unorganized Enrolled Militia, consisting of all male citizens eligible for military service only in time of war; a small Regular Army of professional soldiers, accountable first and only to the President as Commander-in-Chief; and a state Organized Militia of citizen-soldiers, “reserving to the States, respectively, the Appointment of Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the Discipline prescribed by Congress.” It is this clause in the Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 16, commonly known as the Militia Clause) that leaves us, in a nuclear age, with a National Guard.

Since then, especially as the danger of Indians, state insurrections, or land invasions by way of Canada or Mexico becomes remote, there has been a continual dispute about what the Guard is meant to do—and it is possible that the Militia Clause, together with the later misnomer “National Guard,” has somehow maintained throughout our history an uneven, crazy, dangerous collection of state military forces whose purpose is undefinable and which it is impossible either to train for some national purpose or to disband. The misnomer “National Guard” itself dates from a trip Lafayette made to America in 1824. In honor of his visit, a group of New York City peacetime volunteers—young men who had drilled and caroused together quite a bit, designed and bought their own uniforms, elected their own officers, compared horses, paraded, and called themselves the Seventh Regiment—renamed themselves the “National Guards,” after the distinguished Paris corps commanded by Lafayette. In 1832, the regiment dropped the
s
. In 1862, the Volunteer Militia of all New York State adopted the name. The Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, who considered themselves the original citizen-soldiers of Lexington, resisted the change to the last, but in 1903 the National Guard became the federally recognized (and, for the first time, in part federally subsidized) collection of state militias which it is today.

The Guard’s post-Revolutionary appearances in American history include participation or evasion of some sort in all the country’s wars, including the Mexican, which all the New England states were reluctant to join, and the War of 1812, in which neither Massachusetts nor Connecticut cared to take part. The Guard had its greatest strength in those days, and until the time of the automobile, in the urban centers of the North and East—if only because these areas, being the nation’s most densely populated, could most easily muster units to drill and parade. In 1860, the governor of New York State alone could summon more units of infantry, cavalry, and artillery than the entire regular army of the United States. Since most recruiting in the Civil War was done by the states, it could be argued that most of the Union soldiers (all but the United States Army Regulars) and
all
the Confederate troops (led by Colonel Jefferson Davis, of the First Mississippi Rifles, as Commander-in-Chief) were organized militia, and that the War Between the States was largely a war between what might now be called units of the National Guard. But North and South had recourse, in the Civil War, to the draft, and it is more characteristic of the Guard’s subsequent anomalous role in our history that New York’s Seventh Regiment (the one for which the whole Guard, after all, was named) spent most of the Civil War at home and distinguished itself mainly by suppressing the bloody Draft Riots of 1863.

The National Guard really enters modern history, in anything like its current form and spirit, in the 1870s and 1880s, as a strikebreaking force. Regiments of organized militia had turned out as early as 1794 to crush the Whiskey Rebellion. Southern states, years before the Civil War, had maintained large militias for fear of slave revolts. New York’s Seventh Regiment had already killed twenty-two and wounded thirty-six in the Astor Place Riot of 1849 (over the relative merits of a proletarian production of
Macbeth
in the Bowery and a white-tie performance at the Opera House). Militias had been used to suppress industrial disorders in Missouri and Kansas, vigilante groups in California, striking miners in Colorado. But in 1877, with railroad strikes in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in Baltimore, Chicago, and St. Louis, and, more particularly, with the Pullman Strike and Haymarket Riot of 1886, the National Guard earned a reputation as a business-financed, elitist, repressively antilabor force; and throughout the Depression, until World War II, most unions still banned their members from taking any part in the Guard. It was in the 1880s that the grotesque, turreted redbrick armories were built for Guard cavalry. The Seventh Regiment built its own, the one at Park Avenue and Sixty-sixth, in 1880, and still owns it. Squadron A, an equally upper-class nineteenth-century unit, lost its armory, on Park Avenue and Ninety-fourth, a few years ago and regretfully disbanded, to become just the Squadron A Club, in rented, wood-paneled rooms at the Biltmore Hotel. Businessmen financed the Guard in those years, and wealthy young men joined it, to keep the immigrant laborers orderly, state by state.

A history of New York City’s Squadron A, NYNG (New York National Guard), includes several journals kept by young Guardsmen of the time. There are proud references to Squadron A as “all millionaires” and as being as exclusive as “any club in New York.” There are accounts of breaking a railroad strike in Buffalo in 1892, a trolley strike in Brooklyn in 1895, and a strike at the Croton Dam in 1900. The sort of enemy the Guardsmen thought they were protecting the state against is implied by references to encounters with Italian laborers as “the Italian Wars,” cheerful allusions to Central European workers’ abject fear of horses with men on them, and in a poem written for the unit as late as 1925:

There are also candid accounts of “promiscuous shooting at phantoms” in the Croton Strike (on the way to which the unit’s commander was thrown from his horse and broke his leg); pointless racing about, firing of blanks, and cries of “You’re dead!” at the Guard Manassas Maneuvers, in 1904; mothers perennially sending caviar and foie gras to their sons on duty; a Guardsman who, in one pistol drill, accidentally blew a hole in the ceiling and, in the next, blew a hole through the floor of the armory; endless showy parades through New York to accompany such visitors as the Duke of Veragua, the Infanta Eulalia, and the Chinese Viceroy, Li Hung Chang; constant explosions, during strike duty, of shells that had fallen from the belts of sleeping Guardsmen into their straw bedding; and accidents, fires, and equipment mix-ups on every maneuver of every kind through the years. In 1939, the year the squadron’s history was published, Squadron A of the New York National Guard was arguing passionately that the imminent World War II, despite tanks and other machines, would prove the absolute indispensability of cavalrymen on real horses for the national defense.

In years when there were no wars and there was no strike duty, Guard units tended to languish in their armories, and, even in rural areas, to become social clubs, like the Kiwanis or Elks. They liked to march and to rise in rank, but their preparedness for the two world wars, when they did break out, was problematical. Had it not been for the strength of its lobby in Washington, the Guard might, on several occasions, have been abolished altogether. In
The National Guard in Politics
, a study of “one of the most successful pressure groups in a system noted for the advantages that it gives pressure groups,” Martha Derthick, an associate professor of political science at Boston College, says that the major goals of the National Guard lobby in Washington have always been two: federal support of the Guard (regular army pay for Guard drills, federal military equipment, federal money for armories, federal recognition of Guard officers), along with freedom from federal control—that is, state appointment of officers, state control of units, state standards for training, and, in case of war, federal mobilization of state Guard units intact.