HOW BIG NORM GOT TO OCS
The day in 1951 that Norm got his draft notice, he told his boss as he left for his physical at lunchtime, “Don’t worry, they won’t take me; I’m 4F.”
Norm’s yearbook from Port Richmond High School in 1944 said his objective after graduation was to enlist in the US Marines. Imagine his dismay when he failed the physical and was declared physically unfit (4F) because he was born with an umbilical hernia. It was a huge embarrassment for him to spend the war as a civilian, but he worked through it; the war ended, and life fell into a normal rhythm.
Fast forward to June 1951, the North Korean Army swept across the 38th parallel and attacked South Korea. The few US Marines stationed in South Korea were overwhelmed and driven down to the southernmost portion of the peninsula, where they formed up for a last stand. President Truman sent in the nearest reinforcements -- US Army soldiers serving in the occupation of Japan, and called for a resumption of the draft.
Norm was then working for Cunard Steamship Lines at their US headquarters at 25 Broadway in Manhattan (the building is still there, and the company's name is carved in the stone above the main entrance). The Army was shorthanded and desperate because the military had been mostly disbanded after WWII. To everyone’s surprise, the old umbilical hernia no longer mattered, and Uncle Sam pointed at Norm, saying, “I want you for the US Army.”
They sent him to Fort Dix in NJ for boot camp, and shit was suddenly getting very real, very fast. The war was going badly. The Army was running draftees through Basic Training and Advanced Infantry Training (AIT), then giving them a gun and shipping them off as riflemen to get their butts shot off in Korea.
Norm and his buddy decided they needed to devise a way to slow down this train, so they signed up to take the test for Officer Candidate School. They both passed the test and got accepted. But then Norm discovered a loophole: they couldn’t start the OCS training until they passed through an interim program called Leadership School. The catch was that you had to “volunteer” for Leadership School.
These two geniuses landed on the ultimate delaying tactic. They were accepted to OCS, so they couldn’t be sent to Korea. If they didn’t volunteer for Leadership School, they couldn’t be sent to OCS. Voila! They could spend the war at Fort Dix or hang around long enough for the tide to turn on the Korean Peninsula.
This pissed their bosses off to no end. But Army bureaucracy being what it was, there was nothing anyone could do — or so Norm thought. If you ever deal with petty bureaucrats, you’ll find they have all kinds of ways to make your life miserable if you piss them off, and this one was no different. Norm and his buddy were given new jobs: stoking coal furnaces in barracks buildings all across Fort Dix for twelve hours a day, seven days a week. It’s a testament to their determination that they lasted three weeks.
Norm went on to Leadership School and OCS at Fort Benning, Georgia. He told me more than once that graduating from OCS and becoming an Army Officer was the proudest individual accomplishment of his life.
He wore his graduation ring on the ring finger of his right hand every day until one summer afternoon on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire; he was hanging into the side of an aluminum rowboat, and when he kicked back away from the boat, the ring caught on the gunwale. It snapped in the center and pinched into the web of his finger. I was in the boat and saw it happen. The emergency room nurse cut the ring off with a wire cutter and lost a small piece. When Norm had it repaired, the jeweler made it into a pinky ring.