On a cloudy afternoon in 1965, I moved into an apartment just outside of Baltimore with Les Gorman, a skinny and toothy second lieutenant I had met a few months earlier during officer basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia.
The crisp fall air brought a wonderful atmosphere of promise. My cousin Angie in Brooklyn had done a lot to set the stage with one of her girlfriends at New York University. The girl, whose name was Ida Bergstrom, was so favorably disposed after a year of hearing about me that when I met her, I was relaxed. I did not need to be extroverted to approach her. I could just be myself.
Ida was as much of an introvert as I was. Neither of us was adept at playing games. We both had been hurt in the past and saw in each other a sympathetic companion who would not even know how to cause pain. I felt so wholesome in her presence.
In Ida, I had stumbled across just the kind of girl I now realized I valued. As a student of psychology, she had a deep and sincere concern for human life and a desire to discover her own answers about it. Yet despite all the positive signs that Ida was different, I felt myself pulling back.
Something gnawed at me, but I could not pinpoint it.
I knew Ida had grown up in a world different from mine. Her family was steeped in reserved communications, conservative morals, and traditional religion. But it did not even occur to me that one day she might embrace all of that. I was so taken with the warm sense of shelter she provided that I did not filter out the possibility that she, like the others, might not be the person to spend my life with. Instead, I believed that because we were young, we could overcome the way her parents had raised her.
Ever analytical, I turned my concerns into a sequential process, ticking them off one by one. She was not the prettiest girl I had ever gotten close to, I’d learned that external attractiveness counted for nothing. Internal beauty was what mattered, and Ida’s was abundant. Ida was not the most talented girl I had ever met, but her thinking was clear and direct, and I respected her. She was someone of great stability and self-confidence who made me feel good about myself every time I was with her. She was the first girl I had ever been with who made me feel safe. I felt no need to protect myself from her in any way.
I saw my worries were phantoms. I started to sense there were no restraints, no faults, no shortcomings, no negative factors blocking the possibility of loving her. As soon as I let go of resistance, the love began to shine through. My devotion to Ida grew stronger each day, taking on new and deeper roots within me. A new Beatles song called “Michelle” ran endlessly through my head, with its poignant lyrics of repeatedly declared love.
That said, a cultural divide separated us. Immigrants from Scandinavia, Ida’s parents were steeped in the “Minnesota nice” way of life. On the plus side, it included reserved manners, gracious courtesy, and friendly politeness. On the minus side, it was truly—at its core—about keeping up appearances, and it could be exhausting pretending to be something no human actually was all the time.
When I walked in with Ida, I likely had three strikes against me. First, I grew up in liberal, anything-goes California, where people simply laughed at the somber attitudes of the Midwest. Second, I came from a family in show business, which went out of its way to ridicule the strictures of Midwest thinking in a public and articulate way. And third, I was a soldier, potentially a love-’em-and-leave-’em Lothario who could ship out at any time. If Garrison Keillor of A Prairie Home Companion was to be believed years later, the conservative inhabitants of the Upper Midwest had a dark outlook on life: When things were going well, they knew that if they just waited a bit, surely things would get worse.
We talked deeply and decided we were so much in love that we wanted to get married. Not right away, but in the future when I had finished with the army and grad school. The date was three and a half years away, yet we now were committed to each other and felt wonderful about it. Around Ida, my craving for process was fading into the background. I had found what I thought was my life partner, so I no longer needed to be methodical to try to find one.
At this point, almost 190,000 American troops were in Vietnam with more arriving every week. After five months of teaching me a specific skill, the army assigned me to a job in Manhattan for which I had absolutely zero preparation. I was to be the adjutant—the chief administrative officer of the Northeast region of the 77th Intelligence Corps Group.
As adjutant, I was the first person to know when the army was ordering someone in the 77th to go to Vietnam. A lieutenant at the Pentagon in Washington would call with the list of names and serial numbers; I would then relay them to my superiors and to the hapless soldiers’ commanding officers. It was not pleasant, since, for all I knew, I was communicating death sentences.
Oddly, I had been receiving such phone calls for months with only the vaguest notion my own name might be on that list. However, on a bright Tuesday in June, I headed into the office as usual and one of the names on the list was mine.
The alert quashed any further introspection I might have engaged in about Ida. During the next year, she was to be my lifeline to sanity, and I only had eyes for the love and tenderness she had to offer.
What I did not realize was that even after previous relationship failures, I had again lost focus about who a girl might really be. In my room in Baltimore long before we got engaged, and was pondering why this sweet young lady had not captured my heart, I used the methodical process of my recipe to analyze each objection to her that I might hold. One by one they fell away, and I ended up embracing her less for who she was than for having successfully made it through the labyrinth of my analysis.
Unfortunately, I had focused more on the process of evaluating Ida than on the vague sense of unrest I had detected within myself. The lack of any identifiable danger signs was a problem. It hid a mismatch between what my heart was saying and the conclusions from my logic. I was oblivious to any concern that a long-term relationship with her might have an unrewarding outcome. Instead, I put aside my doubts because I had completed a methodical analysis.
Long after Vietnam was over, those doubts would resurface. But right now, I was going to war and even if such thoughts had occurred to me, I would have squashed them. She was a rock, and I desperately sought to anchor myself to her.
In this, I was looking for a relationship to make the world safe for me to live in. The intrusion of the war was crude and life-threatening. The next eight months until my two-year commitment was over would force me to be even more extroverted than during a terrible night being chased by dogs at army training in Georgia, which I will discuss in the next chapter. Now, just as then, no recipe could protect me. But this relationship might.
In Vietnam, thoughts of Ida would be a safe emotional space to retreat into when the relentless pressure on me to be extroverted got to be too much. That space would allow me to be more comfortable with my introversion, rather than try to flee from it through a recipe. It was only a short-term solution, but I welcomed it.
Visit our Reading Essentials section to discover the best bookshelves, reading chairs, book lights for reading at night, and more!
Receive top book recommendations directly in your inbox.