Hawaii’s World
MARINE Brig. Gen Arnold Fields is both a base commander and a bass baritone with a Paul Robeson-like voice. He also is black. Marine Brig. Gen.
Arnold Fields’
success storyAll the above combine into an American success story that is a tribute to integration in the U.S. military services. Hawaii will honor them with a nine-day Military Appreciation "Week" from today through Saturday, May 22.
Fields' mother, whom he telephones every week, took him and his older sister and brother with her to pick cotton in South Carolina fields from the time he was 5. His father was a truck driver but the family had to stretch every dollar. Cotton brought two or three cents a pound. Even by the time he was 14 in 1960, Arnie could pick no more than 100 pounds a day.
All-black North District High School, 12 miles from his home in Early Branch, S.C., brought him in touch with Miss Earl, also black and a teacher of piano and English. She invited him into the choir. By his senior year, after his voice had changed, she told him there was a good chance he could qualify for a music scholarship at South Carolina State, also all-black, if he would learn two songs: "Autumn Leaves" and "The Holy City." She drove him 65 miles to audition.
He won a $150-per-semester scholarship but still had to borrow $3,000 over four years and pick watermelons during vacations. He had barely begun an intended career as a teacher in 1969 when "Greetings" from his Selective Service office told him to report for an Army physical exam and induction April 8.
A Marine recruiter persuaded him to instead join the Marines on April 7, take a deferred induction so he could complete his teaching for the term and then enter officer candidate school instead of boot camp.
The progression thus begun brought him a star in 1996 as the fifth black general in the Marine Corps.
En route his career has led him to a helicopter carrier in the Mediterranean at sea for 47 days before it made its first port call, to service on Okinawa and to a Bronze Star medal with a V for valor for leading his unit in clearing six paths through mine fields during Operation Desert Storm without a casualty.
I first met him when he spoke to the Sunrise Rotary Club of Honolulu, told his career story and closed by singing, unaccompanied, "No Man Is An Island."
It was a stunning moment. I hope his troops get to hear him, too.
On July 1, Fields, now 52, will leave the Marine base at Kaneohe, which he commands, report to the Pentagon, receive a promotion to major general and become director of training for the Marine Corps.
Ninety-seven percent of new Marines are high school graduates. The rest must have had the stick-to-itiveness to spend 12 years in school, diploma or not.
Never, Fields says, has he felt a sense of discrimination in the service because he is black.
In fact, the contrary is true. He feels others have gone out of their way "to help me do my best."
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.