On my first day aboard ship, confronted with the ominous sign, “MAN KILLER,” featuring a smiling “death’s head,” I abruptly realized that things were not as they first appeared. Although the sign simply warned of the possible sudden rotation of a gun turret, with disastrous consequences if you were too close, I was thrown into the shadowy, illusory, and often contradictory world of signs and symbols that pervaded Navy life.
It started long before that experience. For example, if I hadn’t been so obtuse, I would have realized early on that the “Ds” I received on my report card in high school had real significance, instead of just shrugging them off as arbitrary symbols given out randomly by a power structure that I didn’t care to cooperate with. After all, they were just letters of the alphabet. Who cared? Years later, when the captain of that first ship recommended me to attend the United States Naval Academy, those same “Ds” I had regarded so casually were the daggers in the heart of my rejected application. I learned, to my chagrin, that society, especially academia, does care about those “inconsequential” alphabetical letters. Instead, I had to do it the hard way – claw my way up the ranks and fight for a seat at Officer Candidate School. But even there, one had to excel for the right to wear a “white name tag,” which was the symbol of academic achievement. The implicit lesson was clear: “As” talk and “Ds” walk. It’s like what Mark Twain said about the difference between the right word and the wrong word: “It’s the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
We live in a world that is dominated by signs and symbols. Many of these we are aware of, as they affect our lives by law, tradition and convention. A sign, a symbol, a “yes”, a “no,” a wink, a “thumbs up,” or a nod can make all the difference in our lives. Others, more subtle, often have an impact or influence on us that we aren’t even aware of – determining our attitudes, our prejudices, often how we think. Just today, I noticed a young man with his baseball cap worn backwards – was this his way of telling “society” that he was a non-conformist? At my granddaughter’s William Carey softball game, two of the players wore their fanciful “rally” hats to encourage the team. Driving home, I noticed a “fish” sign on the bumper of the car in front of me – a sure sign that the occupants were Christians. Writing this, with one eye on the television, I’m seeing young Mexican American “cholos” in their symbolic “uniforms” of black pants and oversized white t-shirts. As far as that goes, my favorite t-shirt is one that I picked up in Israel years ago – depicting the “Coke” logo, possibly the most well-known symbol in the world, in Hebrew.
How many times each day do you “automatically” stop for a STOP sign while driving? This sign wasn’t even invented until 1923, and the theory was that the more corners a sign had, the more hazard a driver would recognize. During the recent COVID pandemic, our lives were dominated by COVID-related signs, warning us about the dangers of infection. The analogy wasn’t the same, but I thought of the “Plague Cross,” the red cross a foot long placed in the middle of the door of homes inhabited by victims of the medieval bubonic plague. One of the creepiest images of this period, to me, was that of the plague doctors wearing their bird-beaked hats and masks which supposedly gave them protection from the disease.
Speaking of hats, they are a good example of the power of symbolism at work. Take the so-called “dunce” hat, for example. You’ve probably heard of it, but hopefully, never had to wear one. The original “dunce” was the Scottish Catholic priest and theologian, John Dus Scotus (c1265-1308) whose scholastic philosophy was later seen in Protestant countries as being arcane and pedantic. As time passed, however, a “Duns” could mean an ignoramus – or, confusingly, someone who spent too much time studying. By the late 18th century, though, a dunce was no longer the bookish kid, but simply one assigned to sit in the corner and wear the pointy, conical-shaped hat for being unwilling to learn. Hats ending in sharp points were also worn by Spanish Catholics in ceremonies as a symbol of penitence, pointing toward heaven to draw attention away from the sinner who wore such unusual headgear. Luckily, the dunce cap was no longer assigned when I went through Lumberton High School.
We’ve all been assailed recently lately by the ongoing saga of the top-secret classified documents left by Presidents, past and present, in their garage and storerooms. Well, no less than Abraham Lincoln kept his secret papers in his stove pipe hat. Lincoln had a brilliant mind, but he was notoriously messy. As a young lawyer in Illinois, he worked to bring order to his paperwork chaos by storing his important papers in the lining of his hat, a type of wearable briefcase. A sad note of history: After President Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth on 14 April, 1865, and carried to a nearby home for medical aid, in the pandemonium, a single item was left behind in the theater’s presidential box, a memento to the slain president – his top hat.
One of my prize possessions is a Marine Corps drill instructor’s hat that was presented to me at a ceremony by the drill instructors (DI’s) when I left the First Recruit Training Battalion at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego, back in 1979. If you were ever in the Marine Corps, or were even around Marines, you know the exalted and esteemed position of drill instructors in the Marine Corps. If you are a “survivor” of Marine Corps boot camp, an experience you wouldn’t want to do again but wouldn’t take anything for, the DI’s hat is probably an awesome symbol to you as was your drill instructor him or herself.
Recently, we learned of the death of the actor, Louis Gossett, Jr. (1936-2024), the first African American to win an Academy Award in a Supporting Role for his work as the drill instructor in the 1982 film, “An Officer and a Gentleman” (With his memorable line: “May-o-naise!”). He was just acting, and genuine DIs don’t “act” – they are the real deal. Mr. Gossett did a great job on the screen, but he couldn’t use the “unique” words I heard in boot camp. Of course, the hat doesn’t make the man, but the DI’s hat is symbolic of the perseverance, hard work, and dedication it takes to become a Marine.
Over the years, I noticed the significance, the symbolism, of hats in elite military units: My son, who was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, wore his maroon beret with elan; Army rangers wear sand-colored covers. Paratroopers in the French Army wear red berets; those in the French Foreign Legion’s elite Second Parachute Regiment (2e Regiment Etranger De Parachutistes – 2e REP) wear green berets. When I was a kid, I watched them doing practice jumps on the island of Corsica where the Legion was moved after President Charles De Gaulle almost disbanded the entire Legion after the failed putsch in Algeria (1961). He did disband the famed 1er REP which joined the coup in support of the “pied noirs” (black feet), the French settlers who were against Algerian independence. They came “that close” to jumping into Paris in support of the high-ranking Army officers who instigated the rebellion. You might remember what Rudyard Kipling wrote about the French Foreign Legion: “The legion of the lost and the cohorts of the damned.” I lived in Nice at the time and watched it all happen. What was that De Galle said about the cheese: “How can anyone govern a country with 246 varieties of cheese?” He underestimated – France has closer to 1,000 different kinds of cheese available for the home market.
In Italy, I noticed that two of the Italian Army’s elite units wore hats that were distinguished by feathers. I had always admired the red pom poms on the French sailor’s hat, but “feathers” on a soldier’s hat took some getting used to. Then again, I thought about the Native American warriors of our own history where certain feathers indicated bravery, leadership, etc., and it began to make sense. The Italian units, the “Bersaglieri,” and the “Cappello Alpini,” somehow survived Benito Mussolini’s ill-fated foray into Ethiopia in 1935 and Italy’s devastating losses in World War II.
The Bersaglieri, or “Sharpshooters” in Italian, are a unique unit of the Italian army who trace their roots back to the 19th century. When they are in the field, an elegant and flopping arrangement of black feather plumage adorns their hats. Their distinctive headdress quickly led them to be nicknamed the “Black Feathers, “Le Penne Nere” in Italian. The Alpini, on the other hand, only wear a single raven feather in their green campaign hats. Crack mountain troops, magicians on skis, the Alpini didn’t fare so well in the deserts of Ethiopia.
When ashore in Spain, we were always warned not to mess around with the “Guardia Civil,” the national police who answered only to the late dictator, Francisco Franco. It might have been an urban legend, but the word was that they could shoot you and get away with it, like “007” in the James Bond movies which had just come out. They were easy to spot as only they wore the “tricornio,” a black, tri-cornered plastic hat which made them look like Napoleon Bonaparte on a bad day.
You hear some today saying that society is too materialistic, that too much emphasis is placed on “things,” and that these things are symbols of our civilization’s decay and the fall of western civilization. This is not a new idea. You may recall the “Bonfire of the Vanities?” In the 1490s, Florence, Italy, was under the sway of Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican priest who believed that he was the voice of God. His followers were called “Piagnoni” (“Weepers”), gangs of young men, mostly middle class, who roamed the streets shouting abuse at the visibly impious: drunks, gamblers, women [?], etc. During Carnival on 7 February, 1497, the Piagnoni went door to door in Florence, demanding the surrender of “sinful” objects: women’s hats, dolls, playing cards, perfumes, musical instruments, certain books, etc. All these items, “symbols of decadence,” were piled up in the main city square and burned – the bonfire of the vanities.
So much for material symbols, let’s talk for a minute about gestures which are also symbolic, but more ephemeral. Of course, when I think of gestures, what immediately comes to my mind is the picture of my mama, standing in the kitchen window, waving goodbye to me as I left home at 17 for the Navy. It was my last time to see her. Many years later, when I retired from active duty, I taught history at Sumrall High School for almost six years before moving on to Pearl River Community College. At Sumrall, I also drove a school bus; in fact, I had the longest route available, the one the football coaches called the “Louisiana” route, because it went almost to the “Devil’s Backbone” beyond Baxterville. It took me a full two hours, door to door, to run it. Since that was thirty years ago, and hopefully, the statute of limitations has expired, I’ll confess: The only way I could get to school each morning by the opening bell was to take the governor off the engine of the bus. Sometimes we did exceed the 50-mph limit, but only on straightaways. Mea Culpa.
Driving that school bus, two poignant gestures come to mind. One day the edict came down from on high that students were throwing too much trash out of bus windows, and it had to stop. I duly informed my passengers and, frankly, I hadn’t had that problem. My biggest issue was a young man, a recent “graduate” of Columbia Training School, getting on the back seat of the bus, dropping his pants, and “mooning” passengers of following cars.
One afternoon, however, I noticed a little girl, a cute first grader, surreptitiously throw a piece of paper out her bus window. I didn’t say anything until she got off the bus, but then I said, “Don’t you remember what I said about throwing stuff out the window?” “Do you want to get us into trouble?” She looked at me, with big, sad, innocent eyes and said, “But Mr. Hornsby, I was only giving him my telephone number!” Who could argue with that?
My favorite bus story, however, involved a little boy, also a first grader, who was one of the first students to board my bus each morning. His mother would always be standing on the porch to make sure he made it to the bus safely. As he walked across the yard, without fail, he would stop, turn, place his hand on his heart, and then point that hand in the direction of his mother. She would then acknowledge the receipt of his “heart” by returning her hand and heart in the same manner. Satisfied, he would then smile and board the bus to start a new day. It wasn’t even my family, but I smiled, too, as I drove away.
Light a candle for me.
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Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
