Lennie reminded me of the rules. He knew the game, a young black man raised in Youngstown and making his way around a world that sees him first by the color of his skin.
I was naïve to a state of obliviousness. Raised white and Protestant in a small northern town where the only diversity was in Christian denominations.
We were making our way to write stories about American sons serving the cause of democracy on ships in waters off the coast of North Vietnam.
All the waters flowed to the sea from Asia. We called the waters “Yankee Station.”
Our ride to the war would begin in Subic Bay, in the Philippines. The town of Olongapo offered cold beer and other attractions; I suggested to Lennie that we go get a beer or two before a month or more at sea.
He looked at me with that head-cocked smirk, blew cigarette smoke out of the side of his mouth, and said we couldn’t do that, and what was I thinking?
“We go in one of your places, I’m gonna get my [butt] kicked,” he said. “And if we go in one of my places, you gonna get your [butt] kicked.”
Those were the rules. He remembered them, and I never thought much about them.
Fast-forward a year or so, to riots in the street in another port town — Yokosuka, Japan. I’d volunteered for hard-hat shore patrol for the extra money and the change of pace. The first night, I realized at roll call that my knees were actually shaking.
The duty officer told the new guys that two weeks earlier, an officer died trying to hold his innards after a woman cut him open during a routine domestic call.
Watch your back, he said, and watch the back of your partner, too. If your partner comes back hurt, he told us, and your uniform is clean, we will make your uniform dirty for you.
All for one and one for all; them against us.
First call of the night, we come to a sliding stop in the middle of a street fight. I wondered if my legs would hold me, but I picked up a 130-pound Japanese man and threw him like a rag doll against a wall a good six feet away. The show stopped the fight.
I was left to get acquainted with a new me.
Weeks later, we get a call to what they called The Ghetto, and some other names. It was the area Lennie might have gone for a drink. The rule was that we did not patrol that area — didn’t even drive through unless we were called by a bar owner. And then, two units would respond instead of the usual one.
My senior partner was a week short of going home to retire, so we were the last unit on the scene. We made it 12 officers in the street, holding off at least 100 African American men, all of us in the uniform of the United States Navy.
One shore patrolman sat in the street with lacerations to the face, hit with a bottle as he tried to arrest a man for fighting.
It was chaos. It would have been worse if the Officer of the Day had not been a seasoned Marine who had the sense to order a withdrawal. Reinforcements arrived with a show of force. Others were injured, but no one died that night.
What’s the point of this story?
Pointlessness. The story is that nothing really changed over all these years.
Nothing except for one big difference that took place this past week.
In my story, participants were all white on one side, and all black on the other. Maybe events of the moment indicate growing numbers of young white and brown and yellow and red people are joining black people and risking getting their butts kicked, too, to begin to change the rules that Lennie knew.
There is no law and order if there is racism.
Maybe we’ve finally seen racism as another term for fascism and said, “Enough.”
Dean Minnich was a newsman. He served two terms as county commissioner and lives in Westminster. His email address is dminnichwestm@gmail.com.