The Vietnam Reader (40 page)

You want to hear a gen-u-ine war story? I only understand Vietnam as though it were a story. It’s not like it happened to me.

I
GOT INTO
the Marines because the Army wouldn’t take me. I was seventeen, hanging out in the neighborhood in Brooklyn with nothing to do. I knew I had to go to court sooner or later for some shit I was into. The Army recruiter didn’t even want to look at me since they didn’t get involved with court problems or seventeen-year-olds. Forget the Navy and the Air Force. They had intelligence tests and I didn’t have any.

One of the big boys who remembered me as a kid on the streets found out I was having a hard time getting into the service. He put his arm around my shoulder and took me down to talk to the Marine recruiter.

This big Marine takes one look at me and says, “This guy’s a pussy. We don’t want you. Get out of here.” So I stand on a chair and get in his face and say, “Tell me about your big, bad Marine Corps.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m only seventeen.”

“Will your mother sign for you?”

“She ain’t around.”

The recruiter gave me ten dollars and said, “See that lady standing
right over there? Go give her the money and I’m sure she’ll sign for you.” I was in this big courthouse in Queens, huge, with columns and the whole bit. She was standing next to a candy counter where they sold newspapers and stuff. So I go over and say, “Hey, I’m trying to get into the Marines. Will you sign for me?” No problem. She must have been doing this for a living.

That weekend I was in the Marines. I had to leave a note for my mother: “Mom, I went to Parris Island. I’ll be back in a couple of months.” I had no idea what I was getting into.

I
WAS IN
Johns Hopkins Medical School at the time. As a prank, somebody cut one of the fingers off the cadaver I was working on and kept it. When I went to turn in the cadaver, I couldn’t account for the finger.

I knew who’d done it. So the next day, while he was doing a dissection on the leg, I took the arm off his cadaver and snuck it out. I put it in an ice chest and drove out to the Beltway around Baltimore. At a toll-booth, I stuck the frozen arm out the window and some money in the hand and left the toll attendant with the arm.

This got back to the president of the school, who was Dwight Eisenhower’s brother, Milton, a real fucking hawk. He told me to take a leave of absence to reconsider my commitment to medical school. I thought that was probably a good idea. I said, “Great.” A week later I had my draft notice. They turned me right in to the Board.

I
HAD WENT
down to the Draft Board originally just for the physical to get my classification and a draft card, the regular eighteen-year-old thing. This woman came in and said, “I want you to take this written test.” I was late coming in anyways, and they were putting me through a long song and dance. I figured, “Okay, I took the physical, I’m here, I’ll take their test, too. It ain’t no big thing.”

These guys I was taking the test with was just wild. The whole crew was making noise and they was throwing the pencils. Half of them was banged up high as kites. And I’m laughing, because the woman lieutenant
who was supposed to be running things couldn’t control the group.

“Well, I got something for you,” she says, and she walks out of the room. These big Marines come in the door, right? A major with about four sergeants.

They went around and collected all the test papers. The major says, “Seeing as you want to give the lieutenant such a hard way to go, all of y’all just passed the test. You will be leaving in two days … Or you could leave in thirty days if you come into the Marine Corps.”

We get up. “Oh, come on, you jiving.”

“No, I’m serious. Everyone of you just passed the test and y’all leaving. If you keep going through all these changes, we have the right to pull y all out of here right now and put you on the bus to boot camp.”

Everybody got kind of quiet. Wait a minute, where they coming from with this? I was talking to this guy next to me and he said, “Yeah, well, I could stand a little extra time before they grab my ass.”

About fifteen of us stood up and said we’ll go in the Marine Corps, get us a little extra time.

Going through the paperwork the guy was talking in terms of three years. Then all of a sudden he says, “You know, when you enlist, you go for four years.” That was when they told me that I was enlisting.

I was young, stupid, ignorant, along with all the other clowns. Man, we signed up for four years not thinking, “Hey, if I go in with the Army, I’ll be going in for two. Here I am signing up for four years just to get an extra thirty days before they take me.” Which I didn’t get thirty days anyway.

That’s not really the whole story. My brother had died that same year and I was ready to get out of the house because we had always shared the same room. All of a sudden, after eighteen years—
whoom—
he’s not there no more. My older brothers, they didn’t really live with us, so it was all right when they weren’t around. But the one who lived close with me, I was missing him too much. I was breaking ties with a lot of friends, because when I saw them coming down the
block, I was expecting to see my brother with them, popping up whistling to let me know he was there.

So it was good for me to leave home when I did. I didn’t think in terms of what I did to my mother. She had just lost one son, and here’s another one going off to some stupid war. Much later, after I thought about it, I had the chance to apologize. But she said she understood, that it was okay.

I
CAME
from San Jose, California. I grew up in the suburbs and went to public school. I lived on the last block of a new development surrounded on three sides by apricot orchards and vineyards.

The high school was typically middle class. There were very few blacks. We had warm weather and cars. Most of the kids’ dads were engineers at Lockheed or they worked at IBM. Most of my friends were preparing for a college degree.

From San Jose, people would go up to San Francisco for concerts. Smoking dope was just coming in at the time and psychedelic music. Some of the kids I knew were involved with that. They weren’t pioneers: They were the ones who joined, who wanted to be the first to do this or that—the trendy group.

Then I was conservative. I hadn’t experienced any inequality in the social system. Things looked pretty hunky-dory to me. Plus I had read all the war fiction. It never had a particular fascination for me, but it implanted this idea in my mind that war was a place for you to discover things.

I saw older people, World War II age, who weren’t in that war. When they were asked about it and what they were doing then, they had to say, “Oh, well, I was in college.” It was a major historical event that convulsed the world, and yet they missed it. I was the perfect age to participate in Vietnam and I didn’t want to miss it, good or bad. I wanted to be part of it, to understand what it was.

Why should I take the God damn SATs and go off to college? Everybody was going to San Jose State College right there in town. And who wants to do what everybody else does anyway?

I joined the Army at the end of my senior year in high school with
delayed induction. I would leave for basic training at the end of the summer when everybody else went away to college. I spent the last summer at home, playing a lot of basketball, riding around with my friends in an old ’54 Ford. Nobody’s picked up on their adult life.
American Graffiti.

AFTER
I
GRADUATED
from nursing school, I was looking to go somewhere and do something. Hospitals aren’t too gung-ho to hire you if you don’t have a master’s degree or experience of any kind. I checked into the Army. They were willing to guarantee me my choice of duty stations if I would enlist. Terrific, I’ll go to Hawaii.

While I was in basic training, I heard all these people just back from Nam talking about how exciting it was. Professionally, it was the chance of a lifetime. I have two brothers and I grew up in a neighborhood where I was the only girl my age. I used to play guns with the boys all the time. I figured I could manage in Vietnam.

I
CAME
from a town called Wilcox in the heart of one of the richest counties in the United States—at least that’s what they told me. Mine was an ideal childhood. Everything around me was “nice.” The schools were good. Everybody was responsible. There were no derelicts in town. Everybody lived in a “nice” house with a “nice” yard. I played Little League Baseball and lived the standard American experience.
Happy Days,
only without the Fonz. There was a part of town where there were a few hoody guys, but I always kept my distance. When I went to college, I was really an innocent coming from this background.