Memories of the Military
Posted on 08. Dec, 2009 by Janet Lawrence in Uncategorized
Guisintanner sits outside of Wayside Boulevard Senior Center. Photo credit Janet Lawrence
By Janet Lawrence
Gus Guisintanner remembers the sand sprinkled on the Savoy Ballroom’s floors, so feet could slide more easily to the rhythm of live performances by Jackie Wilson or Lou Rawls.
“That’s what I really liked, the sanding on the floor. Shuffling and carrying on,” Guisintanner, now 75, said at the Wayside Boulevard Senior Center in East New York.
Guisintanner and two fellow United States Army veterans were playing spades in the senior center recently, and reminiscing about the small things they missed—and didn’t miss—while they were in the service.
Guisintanner said nights out dancing in Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom was what he missed while he was overseas from 1951 to 1955.
He said he saw horrible things during the war – he later was treated for post-traumatic stress syndrome – and the only thing that got him through the day in Korea was to think of swing dancing with women at the Savoy.
“A lot of them were scared to dance with me because I was like wild,” he said. “They don’t hold on too tight, they gonna fall.”
Seated across from Guisintanner, Winfred Inman, 68, glanced at his cards and talked about spending three years on a base in South Carolina during the Vietnam War. An only child, he said he missed his mother’s home cooking.
“I missed chow,” he said and threw his cards down on the table. “You don’t get nothing good in the service.”
The kitchen seemed to produce only cold food, he recalled.
“They didn’t have no hot food in there,” he said. “You get stuff you never even heard of.”
One particular dish he hoped to forget from his Army days was ground beef mixed with flour served on toast.
“We called that S.O.S.,” Inman said and laughed. The acronym concealed an expletive that illustrated the food’s quality in frank terms.
So far from home, Inman missed the comforts of ice cream.
“I loved butter pecan. And I still love it,” he said.
Hes Keenan, 56, laid his cards on the table and shook his head at his fellow veterans.
He was drafted into the Vietnam War on the last draft in 1972 and sent to Cam Rahn Bay, South Vietnam. And during the year and a half he was stationed there, he said, he didn’t miss a thing from home.
“What did I miss about America? At the time, nothing,” he said, perched on the edge of a folding chair. “I was glad to get away.”
Keenan said there were no jobs in the United States when he was drafted and racial tensions in the country were high.
Keenan, who is African-American, said, “There were riots then, this was ’72.”
Instead, he was nostalgic for his days overseas. “People overseas treated you better than people in the United States.”
He said he particularly missed one thing from Vietnam. He missed using recreational drugs. “Smoking weed. Getting high. Everybody did something over there.”
At this, the three men chuckled and got on with their game.
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