Born Lucky. A Slightly Above Average Soldier's Life

By Ph.D. Bruce T. "Woody" Caine

The stories in this book are as real as memory and documentation can insure, but then, all such stories suffer from the impact of multiple retellings and time.

Included in this book are tales of adventures and misadventures, lucky breaks and near mishaps, rabid dogs, runaway horses and wild boars, surprise alerts and smashed gat

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bruce T. Caine, Ph.D.
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781649905130

Ph.D. Bruce T. "Woody" Caine

Bruce T. "Woody" Caine, Ph.D. A 1966 graduate of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, Woody received his Masters of Science and Doctor of Philosophy Degrees in Social Psychology and Organizational Behavior from the University of Florida in the mid 1970's. His academic career includes teaching a wide range of psychology, education and business management courses at a number of universities. Commissioned a Regular Army Infantry Officer in 1966, Colonel Caine served in Germany, Viet Nam and across the US in a variety of command and staff positions. He taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point, commanded two Reserve Officer Training Corps battalions, and served as the Inspector General for Fort Ord, CA and the 7th Infantry Division (Light). During his 26 years of active duty, Colonel Caine specialized in leadership education, strategic planning, training design, human resource management, and organizational effectiveness. He is the author of numerous professional articles and the creator of training workbooks and instructional videos. He received The William P. Clements Award as the Outstanding Military Educator for his service at the United States Military Academy. The father of two grown children, the grandfather of four, and step-father to two young adults, Woody's hobbies include cooking, weight training, bicycling, gardening, reading, and building military miniatures.

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Introduction

T

hank you for choosing to open this book. It is a series of stories that I have written down and edited over the past ten years (2011-2020) which cover the lead-up to and my 26-year career as a U.S. Army Infantry Officer. I would love to claim they are all absolutely accurate, reflecting events as they actually happened. But I can’t! These are personal memories, and as with all such memories, are the product in their current form of repeated re-callings and retellings, of reconfigurations based on later accumulated impressions and perceptions, and of the re-wiring of my brain as I have aged.

I can claim that much of what is contained herein is supported by documented evidence including letters saved by my parents and first wife, the many scrapbooks, photo albums, awards, plaques, home movies and videos that crowd the shelves and walls in my home office, plus the boxes and file drawers of memorabilia (nice name for the junk we collect) still to be fully appraised and either immortalized in a scrapbook or shredded.

This is not an autobiography in the classic sense, nor is it intended as a guide for others to follow. I’m not famous, extraordinary, audacious, grandly accomplished, or any of the other things that cause individuals to write about themselves or claim great wisdom in some aspect of life. I haven’t overcome some significant disaster, personal or organizational, nor some great mistake in how I have led my life.

I did not write these stories to justify the life I have led, the decisions I’ve made, or the opportunities I’ve ignored. I do not need to set the record straight or to drive a stake in the ground for future researcher to use as a marker. And while the lives of the rich and famous, the celebrity, the great leader, the winning coach, the creative genius, or the hero are worthy of study, what about the remarkable lives of the rest of us?

What I hope this book will be is a gift to my children, step-children, and grandchildren, a gift my parents and grandparents did not leave to me, because I was too busy being me to ask and listen and learn about their lives and the times they lived through. I deeply feel this loss.

My Dad was one of the bravest men I have ever known, an Eagle Scout and athlete who beat polio and kidney disease, successfully resisted pressures to behave unethically during World War Two, put three kids through college, commuted daily for many years at 4:00 am to allow us to grow up in the suburbs, set the example of community service, and saved my brother's life by smothering a fire.

My Mom was a woman of remarkable strength and depth of character. She was the stable anchor of our family. It was her ability to focus on what was truly important that insured her three children grew up safe and secure. She was my first coach and mentor, my first role model of compassionate leadership, and, I now realize, my inspiration as a story teller.

Sound familiar? It should, for we all know remarkable people who will never be immortalized in any public way. We should be drawn to these remarkable lives because, in the best of cases, they help us discover something about ourselves.

My origin story is as follows. The second of three children conceived by Wilbur Huggins Caine (known as Woody) and Vivian Brorstrom Caine, I was a breech baby struggling to get delivered with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck on July 16, 1944. The prognosis was not good. I probably should have been delivered dead! Or so the tale was told over the years to come.

Clearly, my Mom and her doctor were not quitters and so I survived – full term, happy, healthy, none the worse for wear given my inter-uterine struggles. Since Vivian and Woody already had a girl, named Constance, three years my senior, they were pleased and proud to have a boy.

Over the years, as I have survived a number of close calls, I’ve come to view every day as a gift – time maybe I wasn’t supposed to have, but did. Simply, I was born lucky and have remained so. The life lesson is simple – do your best to learn from every experience. In particular, study your successes to gain the wisdom needed to honestly learn from your occasional mistakes. And share what you have learned.

I see myself as a slightly above average guy. I have been good at a number of things, achieved more than many in some areas, and less than others with more drive, ambition, skill, intelligence, political savvy, or wisdom in others. I’ve earned a reputation for enthusiasm, honesty, commitment, fairness, thoughtfulness, persistence, and even a degree of creativity. I was a good athlete, a dedicated soldier, and a capable military, academic, and volunteer leader. I am a good dad, step-dad, granddad, husband, teacher, mentor, friend, and citizen. Maybe that's enough.

I hope those who choose to read these stories will be energize to complete similar projects. You don’t like to write. Fine. Sit with a family member and a camcorder and tell stories. Pull out the photo albums and tell the tale of each set of pictures. Leave a legacy only you can create. And don’t pretend it's all true. Of course it's not. But like these stories, it will reveal some truths about you that are worth sharing.

Included in this book are tales of adventures and misadventures, lucky breaks and near mishaps, rabid dogs, runaway horses and wild boars, surprise alerts and smashed gates, real terrorists and missed flights, muddy canals and successful rescues, getting fired and finding talents. I enjoyed the journey and I hope you do too.

Where Did I Come From? — A Nature and Nurture Tale

I

n so many ways, every life is both unique and typical. We developmental psychologists (which I am) study the influences of genetic endowment (nature) and environmental factors (nurture) in the creation of each individual life and the dynamic interactions between and among these influences. We identify normative age-graded influences that are similar for all individuals in a particular age group like puberty (nature) and formal schooling (nurture). We also acknowledge the impact of normative history-graded influences, those events and circumstances shared by all or most members of a generation.

My stories, however, are mainly about non-normative life events, the people and events, occurrences and situations of my life that have shaped who I am and how I came to be me. Not that I haven’t been affected by those normative influences, but for me, they serve primarily as background to these stories.

An example may help. I was born in the summer of 1944 when the world was deeply engaged in war (history-graded). I am, therefore, among the last-born Traditionals. I am not a Baby Boomer, a post-war baby. My Mom was a bit older than most child-bearing women of her time, and my Dad was actually younger (non-normative). My sister has pyloric stenosis, an abnormality of the digestive system, but had survived it (non-normative). I, therefore, was their second child, eventually to be a middle child, which some researchers believe leads to certain personality and psycho-social patterns of behavior (normative age-graded). So much for foundations.

In the first two years of my life, my parents, Connie and I lived on the upper floor of my paternal grandmother's four-story Edwardian home in Belle Harbor, Far Rockaway, NY, on the south-east side of Long Island. This community sits on a peninsula bounded by the Atlantic Ocean and Jamaica Bay. The house was within easy walking distance of the ocean beach and had a wonderful front porch, hedges bordering small front and side yards, and a separate garage in the back on the side toward Jamaica Bay.

I’ve been told that my Mom took me, as an infant, into the ocean as early as late August 1944, and pictures confirm that I was crawling into the surf before my first birthday. I have been an ocean beach kid ever since, and still feel the primordial need to immerse myself annually (or more often if possible) in salt water with real waves. Clearly, non-normative life events compared to some of my peers who wonder why anyone would want to play in the ocean.

We moved into a sixth floor apartment in Forest Hill, Queens, NY, but continued to visit my paternal grandmother regularly to enjoy the beach until she died and the Far Rockaway house was sold. Pictures from that era indicate that I already was engaged in many of the activities that would fill my later life. I clearly loved the ocean and the beach, probably truly admired both my Dad and the life guards on their high stands, had a thing about toy guns and playing soldier, and as a middle child, probably not as socially skilled as I might have been. That last is a bit of conjecture since I have no memory or record other than the few pictures of what kind of a toddler I was.

My brother, Richard, was born on July 15, 1948, one day before my 4th birthday. Our apartment had two bedrooms. Connie and I shared one, Ricky slept in a crib in my parent's room. There was a small kitchen and a living room which housed our first television set. As age normative events, we children jointly suffered childhood diseases including chicken pox and the mumps. Being the lucky ones, we hosted neighbors’ kids to watch TV in the late afternoons.

With financial help from my maternal grandmother, Alma Brorstrom, or Mor-Mor (mother's mother in Swedish), my parents purchased a four bedroom house at 108 Meadow Street, Garden City, Nassau Country, NY, in late 1950 when I was in my 6th year. Mor-Mor came to live with us. She was a welcome partner, cook, baby sitter, and active linkage to the extended family on my mother's side. We had little to do with my Dad's siblings during my childhood, except occasionally seeing Dad's older brother, Stuart, and his children, but members of our Brorstrom/Peterson extended family were a much greater part of my childhood and adolescence.

After the sale of the Belle Harbor house, the ocean beach still called. My parents rented a beach bungalow at 9 Essex Walk in the Breezy Point summer community at the end of the Rockaway Peninsula for the summer of 1950, and after spending the next summer in Garden City, my parents purchased the bungalow in 1952. Breezy Point was the perfect place to spend our childhood summers, and the freedom this granted us had a significant influence on my personal development.

I know little of my Dad's childhood and adolescence except that he was the youngest of four boys, may have been picked on by one or more of his older brothers, was an Eagle Scout, a competitive swimmer, and lost a toe due to blood poisoning. That injury, it seems, kept him from gaining an appointment to the Military Academy at West Point. His later battle with polio may also have played a role in his rejection of an officer's direct commission in the Army Quartermaster Corps at the beginning of World War II. He was in a critical occupation further releasing him from active service in uniform.

It wasn’t until I was well into my thirties that he and I talked about his experiences during World War II, and the tough decisions he had to make to resist the pressures and, yes, physical threats made by businessmen and gangsters who expected him to divert meat and other commodities to their use, and cheat the government procurement system.

Dad worked his entire adult life in the New York City cold storage and meat processing industries. A public high school graduate, he was a remarkably skilled practical mathematician, able to calculate profit margins on thousands of pounds of meat in his head. He was an experienced judge of meat and of people, an internationally known buyer whose honesty and judgment were highly valued. I did not inherit his mathematical skills, but the example of his character and integrity are deeply ingrained.

My Dad was simply a regular guy who went to work each day and made a difference, took care of his family, and supported his children's aspirations. He was one of those true heroes who are rarely acknowledged for their incredible courage and fortitude, compassion and loving care, displayed daily and over time.

I know even less about my mother's early life, her status as a first generation American of Swedish origins, and of her relatives, although we did visit with those who lived in the New York area. From the stories I heard growing up, our Mom was a progressive, a woman a bit ahead of her time. She worked as an executive secretary in New York, and apparently ran with a fairly affluent crowd. One of her boyfriends before marrying my Dad was a polo player with his own string of horses. Mom, the equestrian, rode and clearly enjoyed a bit of glamor. She was a very attractive woman who, like professional women today, married rather late. But as a Mom in the 1950's and early 60's, she was the primary homemaker and set the tone for how we lived.

My Mom was a talker and a storyteller. She could and would tell a personal story to fit any occasion, some of which grew more elaborate over time. Like her, I’m not shy.

She also was an aspiring artist. She was the preserver of family traditions. In those ways, I am much like my Mom. My art is building military miniatures and organizing scrapbooks.

I attribute my lifelong commitment to learning, self-help and physical fitness to my parent's example. My long involvement with Boy Scouting is anchored in the dedication both my parents showed during my youth. They were both readers, not deep scholars, but lovers of the written word. They taught us many useful home repair skills, the safe use of tools, good health practices, and other essential good habits. This practical wisdom is a gift I still value.

Looking back, what does matter is the sad reality that I never really knew my father or my mother, not in the deep and honest way I now wish I had. They set a strong example of honest effort and loyalty, modesty in the face of achievement, and quiet dignity in the face of adversity. I probably never told my parents that they were my first mentors and heroes.

To summarize this where did I come from tale, let me list all the stereotypical elements: I am a Yankee and a WASP (White, Anglo Swedish, Protestant), the male offspring of a middle class family of managerial status, the middle child of a traditional, intact family of six with three generations living together, the product of a safe, suburban environment, with an interest in things military and physical, oriented on learning and caring for others, and simply lucky to have been born and raised when, where, and by whom I was.

Growing Up in Garden City, New York

I

n 1950, my family moved to our new home, a two story, half-timbered, Tutor style stone fronted house at 108 Meadow Street. As I think back, the house had some interesting aspects that ideally suited our family. The front entry had what I now realize was an energy saving arrangement of an interior door and an exterior door bracketing a hall with its coat closet. The living room and dining room were large and separated by a hallway and the flight of stairs going up to the three bedrooms and two full baths on the second floor. There was a fourth bedroom and a bath with shower on the first floor, ideal for my grandmother, across from the kitchen, which was compact with space for a table and chairs, stove and refrigerator but no automatic dishwasher.

The upstairs included what now might be called an owners suite, a fairly large room with two closets, a full bath, and an alcove. My sister got the larger of the other two bedrooms, while my brother and I shared the smaller one, my Mom believing girls needed indoor space to play while boys were better off outside or in the basement.

There was a two-part basement featuring a utilities room and workbench, and a tiled game room. There also was a patio room at the back of the house with folding glass windows facing a large yard with 15-foot high hedges on the back and left side and a lower hedge on the right. We had an attached two car garage at the end of a stone driveway, but one side was always used for storage as we never had more than one car. There were nice trees and shrubs and a good size lawn to mow. Quite a change from our apartment in Forest Hills.

I attended Stewart Elementary School which was a little over a mile away, down Clinton Road from our home. I rode the school bus as did almost everyone in neighborhood. I have pictures of many of my long-term classmates in a scrapbook and I remember at least some of their first names. Since we progressed all the way through high school together, I’ve looked them up in my Senior Yearbook with its pink cover. Our appearance hadn’t changed anywhere as much during those 10 years of school as they have in the many decades since.

Many events shape our development and both opportunities and choices play a role, even in childhood and early adolescence. Let me share some examples.

Shortly after we moved to Garden City, we got our first pet, a female collie named Duchess. The block of Meadow Street beyond our house was empty fields, so our collie had room to run. One image is most vivid: Mom and Dad dancing in our living room with Connie and Ricky also a couple, and me dancing with Duchess, her paws on my shoulders.

But all too soon construction began on houses in that stretch of Meadow Street and Mom and Dad gave our collie away to a farm – or at least that is the story we were told and I hope it is true. I’ve had to put down and bury a number of pets over the years, so I have to believe my dancing partner lived a good life.

It snowed hard one week when the construction was still going on and the pits dug for basements just were too much of a draw as slopes for sledding since our neighborhood was flat. The pit we decided to use was the one that would become the foundation of Harry Brown's home, whose children I babysat for later on, who sold my parents their Pontiacs, and who also sold me two cars. Strong relationships with close neighbors were a feature of my early life. Ricky, being the more adventurous of our bunch, made the first run and promptly crashed into some of the construction materials, and suffered a facial injury. That ended our excursion into basement sledding and a lesson learned.

Other memories include going to a store in Hempstead with my dad to buy me a suit. I don’t clearly remember the occasion, but it may have been for my confirmation in the Lutheran Church. I remembered the name of the store, Robert Hall, and the fact that I had to get my suit from the husky section, or maybe the salesman had to mix and match a jacket and pants for me from two sets, given my early teen body composition. I think I was a bit embarrassed at not being normal, but I’ve come to discover that lots of boys suffered from the husky condition.

When I was a young teenager, my most frequent paying job during the school year was babysitting. When I look back at this activity, I realize that it really was a good rehearsal for parenthood, what I would call when wearing my Human Resource Management hat as a job preview. Lots of the time this job simply consisted of sitting watching TV or reading while listening for, and occasionally checking on, the sleeping kids. But there were times when action was required.

Except for the very few other guys who took on this supposed girl's job, I doubt most of my male peers ever changed a diaper, heated a bottle of formula, cleaned up a throw-up (other than their own), calmed a nightmare frightened child, arbitrated a dispute between siblings not in their own family, played a game by the neighbor kid's rules, enforced a bed time, or, most significantly, accepted responsibility for the safety of someone else's home and its tiny occupants.

Back in the gentle late 50's, there were no formal training programs or certification standards for babysitters as there are today. The job was strictly OJT, on-the-job training (and learning). Neighbors knew neighbors and their kids, and one's reputation in the neighborhood as a teen determined your employability. As a Boy Scout, later as an Eagle Scout, my reputation was solid.

To my good fortune, I never had to deal with a true emergency outside of my ability. I dried tears, put on band aids, even managed a temporary fix on a leaky toilet, but no disasters on my watch. My fee was $0.50 an hour, a reasonable wage given the average income for working class and middle, middle class families at the time. For comparison, gasoline was about $0.30 a gallon, and a movie ticket, usually a double feature with cartoon and newsreel, ran about $1.25 or less, and a full size candy bar was still only five cents.

Sixth grade was a remarkable year in many ways. Due, I imagine, to over-crowding at Stewart and other elementary schools, all the sixth grade classes were moved into a separate multi-story building across the street from the Junior High School. I had my first male teacher that year. Our classroom was on the top floor of this walk-up building, and my teacher always carried a large leather bag, like a doctor's case or a salesman's sample case. We soon discovered why it was so heavy. He carried a set of dumbbells to use for exercise during lunch break. Their use soon became the primary reward in our class, even though it was one of the girls who proved to be the strongest member of our collective. This was my introduction to a life-long avocation – strength training.

Another example. I have a memory of getting my first set of eyeglasses. I had long wondered why I liked to sit in the front of classrooms. From my Elementary School Progress Reports, I’ve discovered that I tended to be active in class, overly loud apparently, willing to ask questions and make comments, and even to lead discussions. So I guess I thought that was my reason for sitting up front. But at age 13 I had an eye exam and walked out of the optometrist's office wearing my new glasses to discover that trees had individual leaves at a distance and that building roof lines were straight. By the way, I still prefer to sit up front in meetings and conferences.

Reflecting on growing up in the 1950's and 60's I have to acknowledge the reality that Garden City was a very restricted community. It was a whites only town, surrounded by multi-racial communities like Hempstead and Mineola. It was an upper and upper middle class community economically, with many very large houses, two golf clubs, four train stations on the Long Island Railroad, no theaters, a university, a carefully regulated downtown, and a grand hotel with a long history. I remember visiting a classmate's home and being amazed that he had a separate play room that was larger than our living room, and a bedroom all to himself.

One final example of the early setting of life patterns. To earn spending money, my Dad drove me around the neighborhood on our way home from Monday evening Scout meetings to pick up piles of used newspapers. I would load up the trunk of our Pontiac sedan once a month, and we would drive to a paper recycling plant, get the loaded car weighed, drop off the papers, get reweighed, and I would collect my fee. Rick remembers doing this job too, and earning $0.20 per 100 pounds. While I’m proud of my early efforts to help the environment, I’m sure the wear and tear on my Dad's car and the cost of gas probably exceeded my cash returns.

I realize now, if I didn’t then, how lucky we were to grow up in a place like Garden City.

Experiences that Shape Us — Early Years of Scouting

I

joined the Cub Scouts in September 1952 at the age of eight and two months. Pack 7 was anchored at Stewart School, my elementary alma mater in Garden City, New York. My Dad had been a Boy Scout in his youth living in Far Rockaway, Queens. He and my Mom were both believers in Scouting.

I still have my Dad's Handbook for Boys – the primary Boy Scout manual that served as a guide and lists his rank advancements on the inside cover. I wish I had his Eagle Badge but it must have been lost long before I joined Scouts, otherwise I bet he would have showed it to me (or my mother would have, she being very enthusiastic about such honors).

My Cub Scout den was formed of boys living in my immediate neighborhood (an area of six streets of middle class homes), all within walking distance of each other's houses. The core of this group stayed together through three years of Cub Scouts, earning Wolf, Bear and Lion badges with multiple Arrowheads and being awarded our Arrows of Light as WEBELOS (my first acronym) under the firm but caring hand of our Den Mother (my mom for at least two years) and an occasional Boy Scout Den Chief.

Our Den moved together into Boy Scouting, joining Troop 80, a relatively new troop hosted by a church across Clinton Road from our former school. We were all eleven years old and starting 6th grade that September of 1955. We were given our Tenderfoot Scout Badge once we had mastered the Scout Oath and Law, Motto and Slogan, some basic knots, flag history and flag folding among other fundamentals. We were only allowed to go on day hikes until we earned our Second Class Badge, which most of us did by early November.

My first overnight camping experience remains a vivid memory as the result of many retellings. The adult leaders (mostly our Dads) drove us to a wooded area in a rural part of Long Island where we set up camp. I pitched my pup tent (Army surplus) on the side of a hill thinking, I guess, that I would be out of the wind that blew across the hill top that Saturday afternoon. We practiced Scout skills like making trail signs, stalking each other, cutting firewood, and building a fire ring with stones.

To pass the First Class Scout fire-building and cooking requirements, we had to prepare and light a fire using no more than two matches, then cook our Hunter's Stew, a concoction of meat, potatoes and chopped vegetables wrapped in tin foil (actually aluminum, but that was our name for it) which was assembled at home prior to leaving for the trip.

After dinner and clean-up (which, since I hadn’t used any utensils but my fork, was very simple), we gathered for a Council Fire, sang songs, told ghost stories, sang more songs, and as the wind blew cold, crawled into our sleeping bags.

Sometime later that night it began to rain hard and water ran down the hill and into my sleeping bag. I clearly had picked a bad spot, but was too tired to move, so I curled up on the dry side and slept. When I woke to the early morning noises of my fellow campers, I discovered that half of my sleeping bag was frozen, but luckily my boots and coat were at least dry, even if very cold to the touch as I struggled into them.

Having been taught a few tricks by my Patrol Leader, I had some dry kindling and specially prepared swizzle sticks (pieces of wood carved to look like feathers) to start my breakfast fire. I soon had a good bed of coals and began mixing my pancake batter in my mess kit pot. Pouring the batter to fill my frying pan from edge to edge, the Scoutmaster came by and said:

Scout, did you put any butter or Crisco in that pan?

No Sir, I answered, I guess I should have but I didn’t bring any.

Do you have anything to flip that big pancake with? he asked with a grin.

Again I replied, No Sir, all I have is my fork, knife and spoon.

How are you going to keep it from burning?

I guess I’ll just scramble it with my fork

And I proceeded to do just that, as the Scoutmaster shook his head and walked away. It actually tasted OK, but it took lots of work to clean my frying pan. And I learned a couple of valuable lessons.

First, there is real merit in the Scout Motto Be Prepare, and, second, if you aren’t, prepared, apply my Scrambled Pancake Rule (SPR); find a way to make things work.

One of my boyhood heroes, Teddy Roosevelt, is said to have had a daily resolution that meets the SPR standard: Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. Call it innovation, creativity, adaptation, continuous improvement, making due, I’m an avid practitioner of the Scramble Pancake Rule.

By spring of 1956, I was a First Class Scout and Patrol Leader. My troop went to summer camp for two weeks each year at a Scout reservation near Wading River, Long Island, called Camp Wauwepex. The camp had three divisions - Indian, Frontier and Pioneer. Each division had multiple troop campsites, a dining hall, shower and bath facilities, a waterfront area on the lake with swimming and boating, and scout craft site. We camped in the Indian division, sleeping on Army cots in wall tents, two scouts to a tent, and ate family style in the dining hall.

The first big challenge on