Dick Sutton (Unjust Justice) By Bob Drynan
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n recent years I have made efforts to re-establish contact with the men with whom I served in the Army between 1957 and 1960. In that, with the help of many others, I have been successful. But one lost connection has completely eluded me. For over forty years I have lived with a sense of dereliction about Dick Sutton. Life has many injustices. I believe that Dick Sutton’s story is one that would not occur in the Army today. It is encouraging that we have come so far in racial justice in the past sixty years, and it is only fair to state that the United States Army has led the way in effecting those changes. My connection with Dick began and ended in Germany, in the 318th ASA Battalion, based in Herzogenaurach, Germany. ASA stands for “Army Security Agency,” part of the Army Signal Corps and a military appendage of the NSA. Without describing in detail our mission, the group to which I was assigned was composed of German linguists. Our mission was intelligence related. Most of us were university graduates, or we had completed some advanced education and taken time out to fulfill our obligatory military service. We had two separate chains of command in the 318th, our operational commanders in the intelligence mission and a structure that provided all non-intelligence-related support. The cadre of the latter was not cleared for access to what we did in operations, but still had direct control over us when we were not engaged in operational activities, a strange and not very effective arrangement. Hopefully it has since been rectified. The support elements provided cooks, clerks, police, maintenance and motor pool services, among others. Dick was a private in the motor pool. He was Black. After all these years, I have difficulty recalling exactly how he looked, but impressions remain. About medium height, he was a handsome man. He had a medium build, athletic
physique . . . maybe like a tennis player might look. My most powerful impression of him was his bright wit and his intelligence. On the base we had a Service Club, an arrangement where we could go to play cards or get a snack. It arranged excursions and provided a venue for a German-American Club where we could meet with Germans and make friends. They held bridge and chess tournaments, and Dick learned to play bridge and chess at the club. He was the battalion chess champion and one of our best bridge players. He made friends with a group of us from the German Language Section and we went into town together occasionally. I remember one occasion when a group of us went on a Lakeside picnic, somewhere near Nürnberg. We played bridge on a blanket and drank beer until it was too dark to see the cards. Remember the late 1950s? The integration of the schools in Little Rock had occurred and James Meredith had been matriculated into the University of Mississippi by military force. The Black community in the United States was just beginning to assert its demands for equality of opportunity . . . for desegregation and acceptance. Being from rural Oregon, I had almost no contact with Black people until my first years of college, and then later in the Army. I accepted them pretty much on their own terms with very few preconceived ideas. We had Blacks on the University of Oregon track team where I competed. In the world of athletics, the criteria of acceptance were not based on equality, but on a hierarchy established by performance. The U.S. Army in many ways is a Southern institution. A few years in the Army, and most of us came out with a slight Southern accent that could not be associated with any specific region of the country, but had been acquired as part of military culture. A large share of our NCOs and officers hailed from Southern states. In other words, there was still a so-called redneck culture in the Army at that time. I don’t profess to know how Army culture worked in
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El Ojo del Lago / November 2020
