A Ranger Born: A Memoir of Combat and Valor from Korea to Vietnam

Book by Black Robert W

A Ranger Young

All things have a beginning; mine was the fifteenth of June 1929. As soon as the United States learned of the event, it went into that cataclysmic period of despair known as the Great Depression.

I was the descendant of a long line of citizen warriors. On my mother's side, they came from Holland in the 1600s and settled in the area of Bergen County, New Jersey. Later they moved to New York City and intermarried with the Scots and the Welsh. My father's line was German. Coming through Philadelphia in 1713, they meandered through the Cumberland Valley, down the Shenandoah, and settled in the Yadkin River area of North Carolina. In the Revolutionary War, my ancestors fought the British and paid the price of freedom. One died in an infamous British prison called the Sugar House. Another was murdered by Loyalists when he came home from the Battle of Guilford Court House. In the Civil War, my great-grandfathers fought each other, the one from the North serving from Bull Run to Antietam. He was an engineer and while under fire laid a pontoon bridge across the Rappahannock River during the Battle of Fredericksburg. The one from the South was an infantryman and fought at the Battles of the Wilderness and Cold Harbor. Captured in 1865, he ended his military career as a prisoner of war. An uncle sailed around the world with Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet, and my father served in the navy in World War I and survived an attack on his ship by a German submarine. His ship, the USS Pocahontas, was homeported in New York, where he met my mother.

My mother was named Emma; she was my rock and I adored her. Brooklyn-born and raised in poverty, she was an angel who could curse like a trooper. Until age eight, I thought my name was "Ya goddamn dope!" but it was always followed by hugs and kisses.

I never heard my father say anything stronger than "cripes," but he was a hard and dangerous man. He was a crack shot, who as a boy kept fresh-killed meat on the family table. North Carolina relatives told us that when my father was in the third grade, he was badly beaten by a teacher. He went home, got a .22-caliber rifle, stood outside ringing the school bell with bullets, and called on the teacher to come out. The teacher went out a side window, and my father did not go back to school. He was quick with his temper and his fists. In later years I asked my uncle what my grandfather had been like. "Oh, he was a hard man," he responded, "knock ya flat as quick as look at ya." Perhaps it was inherited, as that description fit my father.

A college degree was rare in the early twentieth century. Sober, hardworking, and determined, my father had come far on a third-grade education and correspondence courses. His name was Frank Black. As the chief engineer of C. H. Masland's rug mill in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he felt mathematics was the only study worth pursuing. After dinner, his standard direction was "Get your nose in a book," meaning a thick book of fractions and equations. Years later, after his death at age eighty-five, I found that book in our family library. On a page therein scrawled in a childish hand was the inscription "Fuck you, Frank Black!" I hated math and became determined to live my life without it. Fortunately, my mother taught me to love other books. I would sneak away to enjoy Dumas and Sir Walter Scott. I doted on the gunfire and flashing swords of Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood and Scaramouche.

My father loved the outdoors. In 1932, when there were fourteen men lined up for every job and many farms were for sale, he used his grand salary of fifty dollars a week to buy a farm. It consisted of 146 acres, located between the two historic Pennsylvania towns of Carlisle and Gettysburg. We lived in a big stone house that dated from the early 1800s. We had a wooden house nearby for tenants and a large Pennsylvania bank barn, which had been built in 1854 by experienced carpenters. The frame was made of great logs held together by thick wooden pegs.

I grew up in a wonderful outdoor life of woods, streams, and mountains. My bond with my father was hunting together. I was shooting from the age of nine. I also had ample opportunity to visit the Gettysburg battlefield, where my parents and I were present in 1938 for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the battle. My father told me it would be the last gathering of Civil War veterans. It was hard to believe that those old men had ever been young. We watched as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) dedicated the peace light. The battlefield fascinated me, and I discussed it with those adults who would share time with a child.

We had a tenant house. One of the renters was a combat infantryman, a sergeant from World War I. He talked with me of battles and on occasion allowed me to wear the steel helmet he had brought home. I listened with rapt attention when my father or "Old Sarge" would talk of wartime experiences.

My brother and sister were older, so they went to the higher-grade schools in Carlisle. I was dispatched to a one-room country schoolhouse where eight grades were taught in the same small room by the same teacher. The Depression had its grip on the nation and poverty was rampant.

This was a time when workingmen were told "Don't need ya." There was no unemployment compensation, and the pink slip in the final paycheck was a fearful thing. The adults called it "the crash" and "hard times." For many people it was a time of endless struggle, an era when idealism faced reality and died. My father said people were not interested in ideals, they wanted a job. He was not for Roosevelt; he said FDR would oppose an idea until it passed and then claim it as his own. That sounded very slick to me.

My loving mother sent me off to my first day in school wearing a white silk shirt and an outfit called "Little Lord Fauntleroy." I found my companions were farm boys who went barefoot spring, summer, and fall. Some wore Farmer Brown bib overalls without shirts. Many girls wore dresses made from the covering cloth of feed and flour sacks. The cloth was produced in simple prints to entice farm families to buy the product.

When they saw me, the country boys could hardly believe their good fortune. Now they had something more in their lives than endless arguments over whether a John Deere farm tractor was better than an Allis Chalmers. To most of these boys, tractors represented the ultimate wealth. The older boys were already manhandling plows in furrows behind teams of horses and had a personal reason for wanting tractors. This was rural Pennsylvania. The same families had lived here for generations and intermarried. My family were outlanders in this society, and in the first grade I was a "city slicker." Some of the older boys took me around the back of the school where two outhouses were located, one for girls and one for boys. I was invited to look through a knothole in the boys' two-holer and, when I did, a boy inside pissed in my face. I fought and was soundly whipped. When I got home, I got a whipping for my torn clothes. It did no good to complain of mistreatment by fellow students. The answer was "Fight back!" I quickly learned never to complain of mistreatment by a teacher. Parents and teachers had an inseparable union. Complain about a teacher and your parents would flay your backside. My eyesight was going. I could not read the writing on the blackboard from my seat. I was terrified. Any boy who wore glasses was looked down upon, teased, and tormented as "four eyes." I understood that once you got that nickname, you were branded. It lasted for life. I could not tell my parents that the world was becoming blurred.

I fought, was whipped, and fought again. I learned the hard way the importance of an attack philosophy. I also found if I took the blows, hung in there, and kept fighting, that I had more respect for myself. By the eighth grade I was King of the Hill. I kicked the ass of every boy in school that year and would not hesitate to give equal treatment to a mouthy girl.

Girls were strange. They could milk cows, churn butter, and even cut the lawn, but they could not fork hay or properly leap from the barn rafters into a straw mow. They were scared their dresses might lift, as though I cared. Not one in twenty of the girls owned cap pistols or a BB gun, yet they always wanted to play with us boys. They could never keep a secret no matter how dreadful the oath they swore. If we raided an apple orchard or put something on the railroad tracks, they would always tell. There was some rule that said girls had to stay clean. They had to sneak off to do everything, probably even to go to the toilet. Parents kept them under tight control. Older boys told me it had to do with something called "sex."

When I was a child, sex was never openly discussed by my parents. Once my mother and father had guests and the Virgin Islands were mentioned. Wanting to impress everyone, I piped up with "I know what a virgin is!" The adults were stricken dumb. Noticing that I had their undivided attention, I trumpeted, "Shirley . . . was a virgin until Harry . . . took her into the woods." I learned in a hurry to stay out of adult conversations.

This was subterfuge on the part of my parents. They knew about sex; they had to know about it. Any book my mother tried to keep from me had to contain "sex." One day I saw my mother reading a book called God's Little Acre. "Oh, this is so suggestive!" she would cry, but she could hardly wait to get to the next page.

A key element of education in a one-room country schoolhouse was corporal punishment. We were whipped for the slightest offense and sometimes were instructed to go into the woods beside the school and cut the switches we were beaten with. Any boy with self-respect carried a pocketknife, and lying that I did not have one was no help. There was always some girl who wanted t...