Support Our Troops

The photo shows Glenn Miller setting up the Army Air Force Band at the Yale Bowl in July 1943.

Old River Mountain a slab of rock
that blue heaven's swept to paint on
and written there an ancient poem
green letters worked in moss.
---Li-Po

And 'tis my faith that every flowerEnjoys the air it breathes.

---William Wordsworth

It is good to know the truth, but it is better to speak of palm trees.

---Arabic Proverb

The photo shows Glenn Miller setting up the Army Air Force Band at the Yale Bowl in July 1943.
This really is an open letter to an old friend of mine. If he replies and permits me, I'll post it...and perhaps we may have a little forum. My friend is about my age, went to college with me, and even shared a dorm room for a time. We also shared an abiding love of jazz music---a devotion that has carried our friendship through thick and thin for 45 years. Over the past decade we have parted company politically, a much more extreme move on his part than mine. He has voted for Bush and supports the war effort, I guess, wherever it takes us. He has kept me abreast of conservative thought---and I am not going to make a wisecrack there, because he and I both know how daunting profound conservative philosophy can be. He suggested that if I would agree not to send him anything by Arianna Huffington, he would respond by not bothering me with Ann Coulter. He thought it might be better for the serenity of both of us if we stayed away from those women. We've kept that bargain...although since California deemed the brilliant Arnold Schwarzenegger what they needed for that state's salvation, Arianna has fallen rather more silent than she used to be---whereas Coulter is calling Helen Thomas an "old Arab." I'm not sure the deal is even anymore.

Anyway, on to the matter at hand: this is Glenn Miller's birthday (1901-1944) and I'm listening to old records. Miller's band was not a jazz band, and he emphasized that himself. He did not mean to belittle jazz by saying that. He just felt that what he needed to do was somewhat different...and he succeeded as did no one else, before or since. He fashioned a band, full of the very best musicians of the day, that could and did play extremely hot and swinging jazz arrangements, but mostly it was a music dancing in romantic moonlight. My friend and I know we don't keep Glenn Miller in the jazz section of our diverse collections, and we don't look to that band for brilliant soloists or breathtaking arranging breakthroughs. Tex Beneke won some jazz polls for his tenor sax, but his jaunty style really never got adventurous. Bobby Hackett, of course, was a jazz player, but his gentle health never allowed him to keep the kind of hours, company, and environment the music's shamans seem to require...and so necessarily his most popular work was playing his lush trumpet for Miller and Jackie Gleason. In fact, he played rhythm guitar for Miller, only switching to trumpet for solos on pieces like Serenade In Blue.

Glenn Miller had wonderful sidemen, who also turned up in bands after the war that played jazz. Zeke Zarchy, Johnny Best, Billy May, Al Klink, and Ernie Caceres were all capable of careers in jazz, but mostly accepted the security of recording studios to the grueling life on the road. Of Miller's arrangers, both Eddie Durham and Benny Carter were jazzmen but wrote very little for Glenn. Most of the work of cranking out the unbelievable volume of arrangements for this band was divided among Jerry Gray, Bill Finegan, and Billy May. All 3 had bands after the war, but only Finegan ventured occasionally into real jazz work. But all this was the civilian band...and as some of you know, Miller chose another path.

At the very height of his popularity in 1942, Glenn Miller enlisted in the United States Air Force, disbanded, and reported for duty. Maybe we should stop right here and consider what that meant. If you lived through that time, the very feel of what it was like is engrained in your soul. I'm sure that is true for you wherever you were, but Stateside it meant ongoing and constant sacrifice. Gasoline, food, rubber, everything was rationed. If you ran out, you had to wait...and that might mean standing in line all day for whatever commodity it was you needed. For Miller, giving up a wildly lucrative and necessary career to join the Service was not such a reach as it might seem today. The band was "necessary" because it sang songs of romance and hope that represented our optimism and morale. Many of us got our first glimpse of love to a Glenn Miller song. That even reached all the way down to me...in 1951, when I first heard his 10-year-old record of Moonlight Becomes You. Miller was assigned the Army Air Force Band in October 1942, and that meant Uncle Sam was serenading us and the guys in uniform too.

The Air Force Band had a full string section and rather more jazz artists as well. All the recordings that exist of it are from air checks as the band toured bases here at home. A couple of guys from the civilian band went with him, chiefly Jerry Gray to arrange, but mostly it was a new crew. Most significant were Mel Powell, arranging and playing piano, and Ray McKinley on drums. Chuck Gentry and Peanuts Hucko were in the reed section. Bernie Privin and Bobby Nichols played trumpets. It was a huge orchestra to carry around, but Miller wanted to do more---and kept petitioning his command to take it to the Front, in Europe. He kept up that pressure for a year, and finally in June 1944 the whole band shipped out to England. There are recordings of Miller broadcasting from Britain in German, relentlessly encouraging folks who could hear to have courage and listen to the sounds of freedom. As many of you know, in the fall of 1944 the plan was to move the band onto a tour of the continent...and Glenn was flying across the Channel to finalize plans when his plane apparently was shot down. He was lost.

Listening to this music today, and immersing myself in memories of my wartime childhood, I am realizing what supporting the troops meant to us in those days. We had paper drives. We worked on scrap drives. Everything that could be reused was. Bottles were returned to the milkman or the store, washed and filled up again. You even got a few pennies back for a deposit you had left. To a kid my age it was unthinkable to walk past a discarded bottle along the road. You hopped on down to the corner store and got yourself a Hershey bar for it. Scrap drives involved everything---newspapers, tin cans, old clothes..anything that could be fashioned into something to help out the war effort. It was recycling with a vengeance.

These days I can't drive anywhere without seeing the Support Our Troops magnets all over the SUVs in front of me. What are these people really doing to support the troops I wonder? I mean, besides the magnets. What are we being asked to do? I remember before the Gulf War, when Bush's father was president, the Saudis cut off our oil for a while and there was a big energy crunch. The President was up in Maine, tooling around the harbor in his cabin cruiser. A reporter asked him if he wanted to encourage the people to conserve oil. He laughed. He laughed! Today, to support the troops we're supposed to go shopping. We're supposed to buy more stuff. We're supposed to invest our savings in globalized corporations. Since everyone can watch us on TV all over the world now, everyone can see what terrible sacrifice we're going through over here. They see the full parking lots at Walmart and they feel our pain. Times have changed, eh buddy? And maybe the idea of Freedom has too. No more Glenn Millers. I wonder how much body armor could be made out of the metal in those Support Our Troops magnets.