There are a lot of military schools from the past like Onarga that are no longer operating. Why? Less need for war personnel? It is true that the Second World War was fought by huge armies of individual soldiers with far less fire power than today's smaller, professional army that has technologically much more fire power. But I think there is another reason. See the structure? The regimental parade? Onarga was full of special boys like myself, but worse, who frankly did not get along at home, even boys from rich, military families in South America. Here you get yelled at, slapped in the face, made to stand at attention until you nearly dropped, made to parade in the cold of winter, made to keep away from the town girls our age, made to study in the day and in study hall at night, and get slapped around, as I did, one of their best students, if you misbehaved, like passing notes back and forth with your friends to have some fun, for God's sake!

Yet I loved the parades and the drill. I was on the drill team and rifle team. The point was to drill perfectly in shouldering your rifle, do present arms, I still hear the shouted command, and so on. Be proud to be a little soldier. I got medals for almost everything, and would have got a lot more had I stayed longer. I felt proud at age thirteen to be elected president of my class. One year they awarded me out of the whole school the American Legion Medal of Honor. It was for outstanding character. You never knew who would get what awards. You wanted also the guardian cord. Had I stayed another year I would have gotten it.

My nemesis was Cadet Major Stauffer. How I hated that boy. He was in the senior class my last year. During the year he had had several of us boys severely paddled bare-assed with a wooden paddle ten times. My God! that hurt, and was totally unfair since we had not done what he accused and convicted us of. He got his due punishment.

Picture this as the final parade of the year with all the parents there and the top class graduating. There are three companies of cadets, speeches and medals, the band is playing marches. It's a nostalgic time. Stauffer is graduating! He is the cadet major, the highest cadet rank. He is to shine at parade in front of all his "troops," with saber in hand. Only he can't hold his saber. He fell two weeks earlier from trying to cross the gymnasium metal struts high up, hand over hand. One of the boys did it and dared him. I was there watching. Lordy! His hands slipped and he fell to the wooded basketball court floor. Broke his right arm and his foot, I believe. Two casts. He was hardly fit to lead the whole cadet corps in the graduation day parade in front of the towns people and all those proud families. He couldn't walk! The next in command had to do it for us while Stauffer sat and watched, cadet major in name only. What comes around goes around. I always wondered if he survived being in the Korean War. I was too young to go myself, being two grades lower. Besides, I became a pacifist and did alternative service, working two and one half years in a hospital. After, military school I didn't want to kill anybody. Neither did I want to be ordered around. The time in history of great generals was over. Battles were now won by technology and not brave men or inspiring leaders who knew how to motivate their warriors to fight. Major Stauffer would have been a disaster in real war. In real life the bad guys do get punished. That's for sure!

In these pictures I am around fourteen in my new uniform, having transfered from a charity school in upper state New York, Greer School, Hope Farm, where I was for six years from age six onward. The new school is Onarga Military School in Illinois, now vanished.

In both pictures I am outside on the terrance of 35 Water St. where we can see the East River and across to the other side. Snow in New York City at Christmas time, brass buttons on my military coat. My mother likes uniforms and wanted a school with better academic teaching, and that they could still afford. Probably the large sales of The Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, which first came out in original edition in 1946, was bringing in more money to pay for my schooling. I felt so dependent then. They had to buy the uniforms as well as pay for the living there. And they had to give me an allowance.

Some say I look sad in the lower picture, and should I not look sad? I am home only for two weeks once a year. I am in a brutal school where the older boys beat up on you or otherwise try and terrorize you. My new sexuality has no loving, playful outlet. There are no girls around since it is an all boys school. Mostly school planners have tried to put a boy's boarding school next to a girls boarding school, but no such luck here! We are not allowed to date the town girls, though we have to march into town every Sunday to attend church services at a church of our choice.

Sometimes there are fights with the town boys. We take the large wooden curtain rods from our room doorways and go out after ten o'clock curfew as a gang of us to encounter the town boys. I do this once or twice with the military boys but nothing comes of it. Our two gangs are good at threatening each other but don't seem to have heart enough for an all-out fight with weapons.

My father looks so proud of me in the upper picture. I can't look him straight in the eye. I don't know it yet, but I have deep feelings of being betrayed by him. My mother rules the roost. It is she who sends me to boarding school and talks about it, who talks about how they are artists and not parents. Now looking, I kind of think my father loves me and would like to see me around, take me to visit his Jewish brothers, sisters and their children in Brooklyn, but my mother is against it. There is an incurable rage against other family members in them. They do not tell me about my father's father, brother and sister living in Brooklyn. They don't care if I never see or know about my Jewish grandfather who mostly only speaks Yiddish. My father speaks Yiddish. He grew up with it as his first language until learning English.

He looks at me. What must he be thinking? He doesn't tell me he was brutalized and beaten up as a kid, or that his mother died horribly when he was sixteen. His boy is fourteen here and growing up and he shares nothing about his own boyhood at those same ages. I could have learned from him! I could have appreciated him, and him me.

He looks at me. I don't tell him I have been beaten up at Greer school and now at military school. I don't tell him I am lonely and don't feel cared for by anybody. I can't fall into his arms there, and crying, ask him to protect me, protect me from my mother who has insisted that I go to horrible, alienating boarding schools. I can't tell the truth about myself. He looks at me and I want to cry, all the unsaid things pushing at my throat like so many lost souls trying to get up through the cellar door.

It is horrible, yet I smile. We both smile, the two males that are so far apart. I am maybe smarter than both of them but I can't show it. I can't show them my learning, my understanding of philosophy and literature, of the kids around me, of history. Too competitive here. Not enough openness to learning, and sharing.

There's snow in New York City. Come! Christmas to celebrate!