It is peculiar or perhaps amusing to find that one memory prompts another one.  I am writing this on September 17 which is the day after the horrible tragedy at the Washington Naval Yard.  In this case, the memory that has been revived goes back to 1942.  If my mathematics are correct, which are not generally dependable these days, that is the better part of 70 years.
I first knew Ira Hudas at the Embry-Riddle Institute for Aeronautics. We were being trained to be aerial engineers.  Aerial engineers fly all day and try to fix the airplanes at night.
It was a great mystery to me how Ira Hudas had gotten as far as he did, given the discipline of the army institution.  Ira Hudas had been drafted in 1942 and he was a reluctant soldier to say the least.  How he ever made it through basic training is a mystery to me.  But once we arrived at Coral Gables to attend the Embry Institute, a school for aeronautics, Ira began to show his true colors.  The fact is that Ira did not ever want to be a soldier.  He was doing almost everything wrong, I should say everything deliberately wrong, to be released for discharge from army duty.  For example, when we lined up to march from our barracks to the school at Embry-Riddle, it was always Ira who was out of step.  Everyone knows that in the army the left foot is the first foot to be moved.  Deliberately, Ira always started on the right foot and had to be corrected.  Ira talked during class and had to be chided into being quiet.  When we were assigned to a second class, it was conducted during evening hours ending at around 11 PM.  It was at this point that Ira made a dangerous move to show how much he disliked the army.  For example, when the test props were supposed to be operating at full speed, Ira would drop his to the idle position.  Similarly, when the test props were supposed to be idling, Ira would operate his at full speed.  This was a very dangerous maneuver, particularly at twilight hours or in total blackness.
You may recall an incident that happened at Embry-Riddle wherein an instructor said that if you did not pay attention and walked into a moving propeller, it would make “hamburger meat out of you.”  For all of these 70 years, I have been thinking occasionally about having the human body turned into hamburger meat.  There is a redundancy here in that hamburger and meat are joined.  But in any case, I would not want to be turned into hamburger or hamburger meat or into sausage or whatever else.
I believe that Ira Hudas barely made it out of Embry-Riddle flight school, if at all.  My guess is that the instructors noticed that he was doing things deliberately wrong.  We graduated from the flight school at Embry-Riddle early in 1943 and I never heard of Ira Hudas again.  I suppose he got his discharge one way or another and disappeared into the mouths of Brooklyn, where he came from.
All of these questions arose this morning when Barry McCaffrey, a former general in the army, was interviewed.  Actually Barry McCaffrey is on retainer from one of the networks, probably MSNBC, to offer comments on military matters.  At that time, the news reports were that the shooter at the Naval Yard in Washington had been given a General Discharge from the U. S. Navy.  During the discussion, it turned out that General McCaffrey did not know, or seemed not to know, what the term general discharge amounted to.  General McCaffrey seemed to treat it as enlisted men’s ailments.  A general discharge is probably what Ira Hudas got.
In point of fact, a general discharge in the American Army falls between the honorable discharge, which most of us had, and the dishonorable discharge, which is usually given out when there is an offense committed such as robbery.  Somewhere in between is the so-called general discharge.  More than anything else, it means that this individual is not meant to succeed in the American Army.  I am not surprised that General McCaffrey did not know about general discharges because the ranks of officers are soldiers who want to get ahead and impress their superiors.
But this is not what happened to Ira Hudas.  He gently conned the army by stepping off on the wrong foot and similar acts that seemed to say that he had no future as a soldier.
I suspect that Ira was a smart fellow.  But that suspicion is not well-founded because I never had a conversation with Ira during the two or three months that we were at the Embry-Riddle School of Aeronautics.  But in this case, the fact of the matter is that a four-star general such as General McCaffrey could have consulted with me to learn what a general discharge means.
Well, so much for Ira Hudas.  I have no idea what ever happened to Ira.  I will guarantee you that he had no future as an American soldier.  The fact that Ira conned the American Army into giving him a general discharge does not reflect credit on either the army or Ira.
But here I am after 70 years recalling the likes of Ira Hudas.  Maybe he had something going for him that the rest of us did not.  We will have to see about that.
 
E. E. CARR
September 17, 2013
Essay 767
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Kevin’s commentary: Alas, Google the great oracle has turned up nothing about Mr. Hudas. I hope that means he’s still chugging along and flying under various radars. I actually find it a little bit impressive when someone can avoid being known to the collective consciousness of the internet. I guess I probably ruined that for ol’ Ezra.  Hopefully he doesn’t mind.
In other news I’m pretty on board with Ira’s methods except for the ones which recklessly endangered other enlisted men. Step out of march all you want, but don’t risk hamburgerizing someone. That’s just stupid.