Interview with John Borling # VRV-A-L-2013-037.05 Interview # 05: April 23, 2014 Interviewer: Mark DePue COPYRIGHT The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955 Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge. DePue: Today is Wednesday, April 23, 2014. My name is Mark DePue, Director of Oral History with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Today, once again, I’m in Rockford, Illinois with General John Borling. Good morning, Sir. Borling: Good morning to you. Spring is almost here, although it was thirty-three degrees when I ran this morning. I went out in shorts and ended up with red legs and watching other people come bundling down the path, looking like it was midwinter again, although it looks to be a pleasant day. I hope so; I’m playing golf later this afternoon. DePue: I think it’s going to warm up nicely. Borling: I hope so. DePue: A little bit of frost in the morning. You’re speaking to a redleg, so I don’t mind hearing about red legs.1 Borling: You like red legs? All right, that’s good. 1 Members of the field artillery are referred to as "redlegs" because, during the American Civil War, they were distinguished by scarlet stripes down the legs of their uniform pants. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_Artillery_Branch_(United_States) John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.08 DePue: Absolutely, as an old field artillery guy. We’re here to talk about your experiences in the Air Force. Before we started today, you mentioned that you kind of wanted to work your way backwards, so I’m going to turn it over to you. Borling: Yeah. I’m so tired of talking about Air Force and POW stuff. Let’s start in 2014 and either go forward or go back, but kind of crank up today, all right? Is that fair with you? So you don’t have questions, so let me free associate a little bit. What I’m going to do is give you an orientation. I think it’s important for everyone to have an extant statement of what their meaning of life is. I don’t purport to suggest that mine should be yours or vice versa. I do suggest, however, that everyone needs to have this thought through. Drinking coffee is going to make me [froggy], so we’ll clear my throat a lot in the course of, and I’ll get some water if we need it. I’ve got a friend in California, a woman, who, when I asked, said, “Hey, that’s easy; my meaning of life is I want to travel and buy clothes.” Okay, I can accept that. If you want to have some fun in a tall building elevator some time, like eighty floor A on tower in Chicago, you get in the elevator, and you poke the button, and you turn to the guy next to you in the crowded elevator— everyone’s staring at the little TV machine up there—and you say, “Oh, by the way, what is your meaning of life?” And you watch the people panic. Or if you ask this question, which every college freshman and sophomore, at the student union asks them, you get this great puzzlement, this great invasion of space. I think, from a whole person standpoint, you are not there unless you can have some statement that is motivating to you, that is your purpose in life. So, my purpose in life is that I like to host and attend gay dinner parties and receptions, and saving the world and everything in between. Drives my wife crazy. Drives me crazy, because it’s an impossible dream; it’s a beacon in the night, but it is a beacon in the night that I march to. The beacon currently shines brightly on a distant hill called SOS America. We may have talked about this before. I want to start here, because it’s more encouraging to me and reinforcing of my own notions than anything you might put down in the archive here. If we really care about America, we have to care about renewing the various and many pillars that support this arch we call the American dream. One of those pillars that is a respected pillar, of course, is the military. It needs tuck pointing always, like all the other pillars: education, the churches, the sports, the whatever, the economy. SOS America contends that sometime between seventeen and twenty- six, every young man in America ought to give a year in the uniform military, 187 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.08 but do so within small units, shepherded by active duty company-grade officers and some real sergeants, keep that small unit loyalty. Allow the young men to serve in that unit, to the various Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Merchant Marine, Coast Guard entities, as well as have a bunch left over for civilian tasks, but all within the rubric of the military, so that the young man can say, “Hey,” at the end of that time, “I served.” Well, this was the guts of it. People can see it at www.sosamerica.org. I expect this to be consuming, along with my writing and speaking, for the next two years, barring health things. In the end when you’re…I’m seventy-four in March. I’m terribly cognizant that if either Myrna or I would fall off the edge or start to slide down the imperceptible slope—the nice thing about dementia is that you don’t know you’re there—then we would reorient priorities. But for the moment, we’re well, and we’re vital, and we’re given certain resources that we can devote to the pursuit of altruism or idealism, but without illusion, without illusion. It’s a terrible approximation. These lives in which we lead is a conglomerate of peoples within nations, always the fractures and the stresses occur. We’re looking at the Ukraine thing today, and the Ukrainian proverb that fire starts with sparks comes to mind. We end up fighting over ridiculous pieces of terrain, often not knowing why we’re there, challenged by -isms or -ologies or outright aggressions. The John Stuart Mill stuff comes to mind, with respect to, you’re free to do what you want to do in life, basically, Libertarian view, with a greater good to the greater number factoring in there. The greater writing, advanced by his wife, was that if you’re threatened, then you get to kill. You try to kill me, I kill you back first. Therein the genesis of the human condition, since the beginning of man. One guy picks up a stick; the other guy picks up a club, and now you’re going for it. So, for me, this SOS America gives us a common crucible of citizenship, not so much for purposes of warfare, but for purposes of service and purposes of self-esteem and purposes of national renewal.2 So you ought to know that’s where I’m going. DePue: We did talk quite a bit about SOS last time. Borling: Well, I want to talk about it some more, because it’s ever on my mind this morning. DePue: Absolutely. 2 See ALPL interview with John Borling, Vol. 1, transcript #03. 188 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.08 Borling: That and writing. In fact, it came to me on my run, down the Rock River here, right about there, and I kept it with me for the rest of the run. It wasn’t a long run this morning, about three and a half. The name of the book is going to be Top Heavy. I was working, not so much the subject matter of the book, but the construct of the book, starting off with the fact that we’re suffering from too much information overload. It’s almost like we’re staggering around, trying to assimilate that which is going on around us. We are top heavy as individuals; we are top heavy as a city, states and nations. So how do we analyze it, and what do we do about it? What I’m doing is telegraphing a punch that may never get thrown, but I’m attracted—with all the other things I’m working on in half form in writing, and my speaking work around the country—is that I think I’m going to try hard to develop this Top Heavy thing, and I’ve got a great Saturday to do it. I write quickly, sketch quickly. [Its] not unusual for me to rip off articles in a day in a half, thoughtful articles, which I’m filing away to be parts of chapters or lead-ins to chapters.