Sgt. Bilko – Lee Duigon

If you were born after, say, 1990, it might strike you as very strange that once upon a time in America, every male, with only a few exceptions, had to serve in the army whether he wanted to or not. But it’s true. When I was a boy, every male over 18 had to register for the draft and pretty much everybody got sucked up. (Well, God told us through Samuel what a king would do to us, didn’t he? Too bad we didn’t listen.)

And so The Phil Silvers Show, also known as simply Sgt. Bilko, struck a universal chord back then that it doesn’t strike anymore… because we have no draft, thank God.

Sgt. Bilko (Silvers) was a smooth con man working in the motor pool and being a thorn in the side to his commanding officer, Col. Hall. Paul Ford was just great as the hapless colonel, perpetually bamboozled by the slippery sergeant.

This was an awfully funny show, although a military draft is not funny at all. God did warn us about increasing the size and power of the state (I Samuel Chapter 8)–but no, the people had to have a king like everybody else! The show ran from 1955 through 1959 and was very popular. Gee, I can hardly believe I was only 10 years old when Sgt. Bilko went off the air.

Seems like only yesterday…

When I was a boy, there were a lot of military service comedies on TV, along with World War II dramas. Most of us had fathers and/or uncles who’d been in World War II.

The Phil Silvers Show, starring Phil Silvers as the immortal slick-talking chiseler, Sgt. Bilko, was a huge hit in the 1950s. Then the 60s came along, and some of the same producers who made Sgt. Bilko came up with McHale’s Navy, starring front-rank movie actor Ernest Borgnine in the title role. The show ran from 1962-66.

Now that I come to think of it, The War was a gigantic presence in our lives, even though it ended four years before I was born. The history, images, stories, and legends of World War II shaped our lives. I wonder if that’s what made my generation such easy prey for Sixties radicals.

But I was too young to think of that in 1962. I watched McHale’s Navy every week and thought it was funny. Hogan’s Heroes came along when I was in high school, and for some reason I didn’t find that very funny at all.

The movies, the TV shows, the toys! Plus we had a peacetime draft: the government owned two years of your life and that was that. Unless you had a college student deferment, of course: kept a lot of us out of Viet Nam. We were up to our eyeballs in war, even though, between Korea and Viet Nam, we were at peace. If you want to call it peace when you’ve got the Cuban Missile Crisis and Khrushchev banging his shoe at the UN and saying, “We will bury you!”

He also said, “Your grandchildren will live under communism.”

Bernie Sanders surging in the polls…