Frankly, I thought that banging away on a typewriter as a Basic Military Journalist (71Q20) would be less hazardous than banging away with an M16-A1 at real or imagined targets in some Southeast Asian jungle. I was kinda, sorta, almost right.
Rich went through Basic at Ford Ord. he still has a problem with sand. Anyway, while his unit was quarateened, learning how to make beds; shit, shower and shave; and march, some twit with an Atlas complex--okay, a world-sized chip on his shoulders--having accosted my friend in the head, decided that Rich didn't like him because he was an Indian. "Could be," said Rich. "I'd never given it much thought. Well, maybe it was because he was part Apache and I was somewhere between a quarter and a half-Cherokee and Choctaw. We agreed to stay out of each other's way. Anyway, I think the CO of C33 believed that the Army had inducted a real-life Beetle Bailey--or, worse--Sad Sack. Really, I wasn't that bad. I was a 155-pound weakling with a bruised ego and no faith in anything." Maybe it was the five (5) candy bars Rich had started to eat every weekend, but he startled the man by graduating from Basic an E-2, with the highest number of merits in his platoon. "I even maxed the G3 test." He went on to add, "Five of us made the same egregious error. Our reward: KP, while the rest of the company retook whichever parts of the test it had failed."
It happens.
Anyway, we went through AIT at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. Harrison was home of the Defense Information School and the Army Finance Center. Great place, great people, great pizza! There were men and a woman: soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen. The woman happened to be a Marine. I understand that Agent Algore went there, too, but before my time--thank goodness, or I might have had to salute him. Anyway, Rich graduated, at the same time jumping two more ranks to E4.
After twenty weeks in the Army, he was a Spec Four. Yippie ki-a, ki-o. Then they compared the list of the new basic military journalists to bases that needed one. Rich got sucked up by a military tornado that dumped him in Kansas.
"I was used to the year-round greening of Los Angeles," he told me. "You see, I grew up in Mar Vista, just east of Santa Monica, and the skies were high and blue, except when gray with rainclouds or fog, or brown from smoldering hillsides, but everything appeared lush and green, full of life. Entering Ft. Riley by way of Ogden, Kansas, was heartburn. It was a dreary day, grim with lowering clouds scudding before a frigid wind. The moroseness of the military buildings and the glum personnel that I saw through the window of the bus (maybe it was a taxi, I don't recall which) matched the gloom of the fleshless woods."
His first week at HHC, 1st Infantry Division, proved memorable. A drunken fool from the Motor Pool threatened his life. Rich put it this way, "The fookin' eejit took exception to my E4 ass." From all accounts, two perfectly ordinary Iowa farmboys had seen combat in Vietnam. At any rate, as door gunners on a Huey, they had machinegunned water buffalo. After coming back, usually stoned, they managed to spend most of their free time waxing floors while on company restriction or finding novel ways to violate Article 15. Who knows how many times they had been reduced to the same lowest rank. One of them threatened to sever Rich's connection to this mortal coil.
"Okay, I admit it,"Rich allowed. "I exaggerated the danger. I mean, the guy was practically legless, so drunk was he. He and one of his cohorts, a fellow combat vet, comparatively, a reasonable, sober and intelligent fellow, entered the bay, where I was alone. For some reason, dumping my cot, on which I lay reading, proved both funny and irresistable After that, the sneering twit threatened to cut my E4 throat. He dared me to ask him to take his hand out of his pocket, where presumably he was clutching a knife of some kind." Instead, Rich tried to extricate himself by leaving the bay. His assailant followed him out into the main hall and over to the water fountain. There the fleering idiot, who had just menaced Rich's life, tried to pick a fistfight with him by taking a swing at hischin.
"I'd been hit harder by my 22-pound Anglo-Persion cat!" said Rich. "It annoyed her that I was asleep when she was awake. Once, finding me still asleep, supine in bed at three 0'clock in the morning, she jumped lightly onto the bed, slipped unnoticed onto my chest, and gave me a sound beating about the nose! I didn't mean to send her bouncing off my dresser."
As for his human assailant, Rich told the sot's friend, the more sober, reasonable, and intelligent fellow, that he had no intention of fighting anyone that night. "He knows that," his friend replied. "You better leave the barracks for a couple of hours," he suggested. Rich took him up on it.
After that night, Rich started to take smoking, drinking--and, possibly--going AWOL seriously. It hardly helped that he knew that his mother was at home, dying.
The above vignette, otherwise called a "slice of life," simply illustrates why it is that some, including myself, never call ourselves Vietnam vets. We experienced Vietnam vicariously, sometimes in the manner aforementioned. I knew a photojournalist, for example, who, while languishing in Saigon, became so frustrated that, in order to say that he had done something in the war, he procured an M16 and killed a tree... I know an ex-Marine who spent two tours making "crispy critters" of the VC. It seemed hardly to have affected him, but I doubt it. Too much is wrong with the way he behaves and with the manner in which he looks at people... Another man, an ex-Green Beret, had to play dead for 24 hours, wounded, bleeding into the muck of a ditch, after the VC ambushed the convoy he was with; a day, during which the enemy went about the business of killing anyone who moaned, groaned or in any other way showed signs of life. He spent six months in a VA hospital, but that was before John Kerry came home and lied about what our soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen, were doing over there. We still looked with awe at the man with the Silver Wings upon his chest... I've encountered a guy who claimed to have been a Navy medic on Seal Teams. Perhaps, but that hardly explained why he and his buddy had resorted to producing porno flicks.... Rich mentions soldiers who were willing to re-enlist and go back for another tour, just so that they could get out of Fort Riley. For them, and others, the Big Red One was the middle finger.
Which brings me to my point: I don't pretend to know what happened over there. I only know that real heros and real fools came back, of which, John "effing" Kerry belongs among the latter.
More later...
