My future looked great. I was no longer a communist threat, and I was sure the Colonel would find himself another ringer. I had been offered a job with an advertising agency as a trainee upon my discharge. They had given me my choice of their offices in New York City, Chicago or Los Angeles. It was a no-brainer. Like Minneapolis, those cities had winters. I had never been to the west coast, so Los Angeles seemed like a great place to get on with my life.
The Korean War had ended, and the Air Force didn’t need me anymore. My bags were packed, and I was getting my farewell haircut from Guitierrez, my barber, when the APs walked into his shop in downtown Nuevo Laredo.
“Nate” we’ve got a problem,” said one of the Air Policemen. “Or rather, you have a problem. You’ll have to come with us.”
Right away I figure it had to be a gag, their boss, the Provost Marshall, was a golfing buddy of mine. “Ok” I said, playing along with the game, “Can Guitierrez finish my haircut?”
“Why weren’t they smiling?” I thought to myself.
“Dave will ride with you, and I’ll follow in the Jeep” said the AP doing the talking. They must have figured me for a flight risk, because Dave was easily six foot four and over 200.
“So what’s going on?” I asked the big guy.
“Nate, you know as much as I do.” And that was it for conversation between town and the base.
The PM was waiting for us when we arrived at the Air Police office. Captain Mike Mercer, my golfing buddy, stuck out his hand. “I can’t tell you anything Nate. The CO’s people just told us to pick you up and take you over to the base hospital.
“Jesus” I thought, “They’re really milking this thing.”
Doctor Julius Donner headed up the medical staff at Laredo Air Force Base. I knew the guy but not very well. In fact, prior to my discharge physical, the only time I had been to the base Health Service was to have an impacted wisdom tooth pulled.
“It’s about your discharge physical Nate,” said Donner first thing as I walked into his office. “Your Wasserman tested positive. We can’t let you off the base.”
“Wait.” I said, thinking to myself, “If they are setting me up, this has to be a really bad joke.” The Wasserman is a test given to determine whether a person has a venereal disease, syphilis, to be specific.
“Is this some kind of a gag or what?” I said.
“I’m afraid it’s not;” he replied. “Air Force regulations specify that we can’t let you out, or even off this base, until you are treated and classified as disease-free”.
“Well there must be a mistake” I said, “There’s no way; it’s impossible.” At the same time my mind was rapidly running through all of the situations where I might possibly have contracted the disease.
“I know what you are thinking Nate. ‘Where? How? When?’ are the questions going through your head. Am I right?”
He was right. I remember watching those V.D. films in basic training. Syphilis is the worst. Before Penicillin, they had no cure for the disease. Christopher Columbus died of syphilis and so did a lot of other famous people including George Washington, Napoleon and Van Gogh. They say Howard Hughes died of syphilis as well as Al Capone. I could not visualize myself in that company.
Needless to say nobody plays games with syphilis. These medics were serious, and I was worried really worried. “How about my lady friend, Barbara Jo?” I wondered. “Had I infected her? Who gave it to me?” My mind was speeding in every direction.
Then suddenly I remembered that I was supposed to be discharged and leaving Texas for Minneapolis in three days. In fact, my parents had scheduled a trip to Europe, their first. They expected I would be home in time to be there for my brother and our six-year-old kid sister in their absence. I had to do something.
As if reading my mind Donner said, “You know Nate, there’s a new syphilis test some of the civilian doctors are using. It’s called the Quantitative Kahn. The army hasn’t bought off on it yet, but Mercy Hospital, here in Laredo, might be using the test. There has got to be a lot of plague-bearers across the border in those Mexican Cantinas. If you don’t mind the company of a couple of APs I can send you down there. I’ll give them a call; I’m sure they will do it for us. You have nothing to lose.”
Boy was my head swimming. “Who already knows about this thing?” I asked, fearing that the news could be all over the base.
“Nobody Nate… not yet, I hope… we don’t broadcast this stuff. Even the APs have no idea why you are here. Let me call Mercy and see if and when they can take your blood.”
The test at Mercy was easy and unlike the Wasserman which takes two or three days to determine results, the Kahn test took only a matter of minutes.
My results were negative. I was clean; the Air Force had screwed up. They were behind the times, “using yesterday’s diagnostics”, or so said the medics at the Laredo hospital.
Boy was I relieved. “Please call Donner over at the base” I asked the dermatologist. “I am scheduled to leave the Air Force in three days. Let him know I’m OK.” He made the call.
Well, as happens, things were not quite OK, or so I found out the next day. As I mentioned earlier, the Air Force had not yet bought off on the Kahn. In other words I was a captive of out-of-date Army medicine. There was nothing they could do. As far as the Air Force was concerned I was a candidate for a treatment that could last weeks.
“Nate” Dr. Donner advised, “This is a delicate subject; anyone with whom you’ve had sexual contact within the last 90 days should also be tested ASAP!”
I thought of my girlfriend. Not for a minute did I think she could have infected me, or visa versa. We had been a couple for the last six months. This was a tough one. I was going to have to fill her in on what was happening and insist she have the Kahn test. Needless to say, it was not an easy conversation, however she handled it well, and we made arrangements for the following day with the people that had tested me at Mercy.
Her Kahn test came back negative, just like mine. I wasn’t at all surprised. However, relieved as I was, I still had to deal with ‘Uncle Sam’ who had me down as a syphilitic. And then… what about my discharge and my situation up in Minneapolis where my parents were expecting me by the end of the week? I was trapped in a Catch 22. Donner and the guys at the base Health Service could do nothing. So, sensitive as the subject was, I decided to take it upstairs to Colonel Anderson, my golf partner.
“I know all about your problem Nate” he said as soon as I entered his office. “It looks like you’re swimming in a bureaucratic swamp. Let me talk with your pal Hastings, our base legal guy. There must be an angle. You can’t be the first G.I. caught in a medical opinion conflict.”
I told him about Barbara Jo, that she too had tested clean.
Well my buddy Hastings went to work for me just as he had when I was dealing with the communist fiasco.
“Frankly speaking Nate,” said Hastings; “You’re getting to be a challenge for Air Force Regs (regulations). Would you consider signing a paper stating that you would absolve the Air Force of any responsibility or any continuing liability? Remember my counterpart up in the JAG office in Waco? He thinks he can pull it off. He doesn’t believe, however, that he can get the V.D. (venereal disease) diagnosis expunged from your records. That shouldn’t bother you, right? They already have you down as a commie sympathizer,” he just had to add with a chuckle.
That was it. I signed away all my rights, packed up my duffle and golf clubs and spent one last farewell evening with Barbara Jo. The drive up to Minneapolis was uneventful until my Plymouth hit a patch of ice and did a one-eighty into a snow bank somewhere in Iowa. “Something like that will never happen in California,” I assured myself.
The family was happy to see me. I helped them pack their bags, listened to an hour’s worth of foster parent instructions, and two days later they were in New York and on the boat. I had arrived home in time to watch the HUAC hearings on a black and white TV, and see Senator Joe McCarthy go down in flames.
This chapter should end at this point, however one day I had a phone call and subsequently a visit from a gentleman with the Minnesota Public Health Service. It seems that they had received notice from Washington that there was some question about my health. Would I be willing to take both a Wasserman as well as a Quantitative Kahn test at the VA hospital in St. Paul to determine whether I was carrying a venereal disease in my system?
“My God,” I thought. “I’m cursed. Will it ever end?”
Well it did. I tested negative in both studies which perfectly satisfied the Public Health people. As for the Air Force, I was resigned to the fact that the VD charge like the commie thing was never going to be purged from my records, even though several months after leaving the Air Force it was discovered that some G.I. working at the Laredo AF base Health Services had mislabeled a number of Wasserman samples in error prior to shipping out for Korea. My test was included. This I heard in a letter from my friend, Dr. Donner with apologies.
Several years later while attempting to get a copy of my discharge papers from the VA for insurance purposes, I was notified that all of my service records had burned up in 1973 in a fire at the Air Force archives in St. Louis. I guess I was back to being a disease-free American patriot.
FOOTNOTE:
There were no winners in the Korean War. We lost 50,000 American troops including a couple of my golfing buddies. Two decades later we sacrificed over 90,000 GIs in Vietnam in a losing effort to prop up a corrupt government under the guise of saving the world from communist domination. As I write this today, we are still fighting other people’s wars for reasons we will never be able to justify, let alone explain to future generations.