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ship crossed the Pacific it made a stop in Okinawa, Japan, to unload soldiers who were assigned to serve there. I went out to the deck to wave goodbye to them, and as they stood on the dock they took their instruments and played the Dixieland song “When the Saints Go Marching In” especially for me. It must have pained them to play it because they all preferred jazz music, but it made me smile big. I discovered that day that the army was a place where you met people, found true friends, and soon had to say goodbye. I would not see Charlie again for four years.
    Gordon and I, however, were both headed to Seoul to work in the radio and television station together. They made us disembark in the middle of the night. We had to climb down army ropes hanging from the side of the ship in the pitch black. Then we got into little boats like the ones I had seen in pictures of Normandy from World War II. As we were climbing into the boats, I approached my commanding officer.
    “Why do we have to arrive in the dark when there is no one here who will shoot us?” I asked. After all, we were no longer at war with Korea.
    “Who said so?” said my officer.
    I hugged my duffel bag and snare drum and wondered what exactly I had signed up for.
    I knew only one other person who had ever served for the United States in Korea. His name was Sandy McMillan, and he was a counselor at Camp Greenkill, my YMCA camp. Sandy had shipped off for Korea while I was still in high school, and within a year he was dead. So I guess in the back of my head I knew that danger was always a possibility.
    The corporal in charge of our radio station was a somber, no-nonsense man named Mark Smith. He looked at my résumé the day I arrived.
    “Says here you are a TV cameraman?”
    “Yes,” I mumbled. “Correct.”
    “We have no TV station here yet,” he said.
    My father was right about the future of TV, but he was a little ahead of the army.
    “Says you are also a writer. What do you write?”
    “Jokes,” I said.
    “Jokes?” he asked.
    “You know, skits, little bits, funny things,” I said.
    “We don’t need jokes here,” he said seriously.
    “Okay. What do you need then?” I asked.
    “We need you to write serious material about the country of Korea. Radio documentaries,” he said.
    For the next twenty months I would try to write seriously about Korea for my radio station—the Armed Forces Korean Network.
    A typical day for me involved a combination of guard duty, meals, marching, and work at the radio station. Eventually I became the head of the six-station radio network, and I was in charge of picking the songs and the shows. I taught them how to do comedy shows. In between meals and work we sometimes had to go to classes and listen to presentations about things the army was introducing, such as new weapons, equipment, and strategy. I mastered taking apart a gun while blindfolded, a skill I had never imagined a stickball-playing kid from the Bronx would need. What I was very good at was shooting while resting on the ground. I had talent as a resting sniper, not a standing or kneeling one. So the army gave me a certain confidence and feeling of success.
    Sometimes on Sundays we would get the day off and go into the city of Seoul to buy cigarettes and stationery to write letters home. On the walk into town I would daydream and think of new radio shows we could put on the air. I came up with
Evenings with Elaine
, which would become one of our most popular shows. I found an American girl who was working at the officers’ club and convinced her to come down to the station and read letters written to the soldiers by their girlfriends back home. The show was a big hit until some officers discovered that the girl I hired was African American. They shut down the show immediately. When I asked why they said it was because they couldn’t have a black girl on their network.It was one of my first experiences of censorship, and I thought it was ridiculous